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We fought two world wars in the 20th Century in defence of liberal values in this country. Then, after 9/11, we fought a series of engagements that attempted to impose those same values in other peoples countries. Now, the handle is turning again and even that recent aberration appears a long time ago. A new strategic epoch seems to indicate that we no longer need to go looking for a fight. Conflict will come to us.

The front line is no longer a nameless hillside in Afghanistan but the firewalls inside the computer systems of the power grid or what masquerades as news on social media. The digital revolution and globalisation have, in combination, dramatically increased the vulnerability of Western societies to severe disruption. We no longer have to speculate what a rupture of the distribution systems of the major supermarkets would look like. The creation of a black market in loo rolls at the start of the pandemic was a darkly comic moment but showed just how quickly the normal conventions of an apparently ordered society can unravel. And that wasnt even the result of a break in supply, but simply human frailty; what if the same systems were subject to a sophisticated and concerted cyber-attack?

Ever mindful that it might have to pick up the pieces, Lloyds Insurance conducted a recent study into the implications of a successful cyber-attack on 50 suppliers of the power grid covering the north east of America. It concluded that 93 million people would be without power immediately and for up to two weeks. During that time, and in the biting cold of a New York winter or the suffocating heat of a Washington summer, the immediate consequences of a blackout would be compounded by the secondary effects of opportunist crime and civil unrest, both of which would test the competence of government.

This is not an abstract, hypothetical threat the massive attack against Estonia in 2007 and the 2017 NotPetya malware attack against a variety of Western companies reveal cyber operations as a weapon of choice in contemporary conflict. And its not just the bad guys who are at it. The Stuxnet attack on the Iranian nuclear programme set the standard for cyber intervention and seemed to leave a trail back to America and Israel.

At the same time, Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election by disinformation and fake news and even the faintly risible Iranian attempt to encourage Scottish separatism using the same methods during the 2014 referendum are a matter of public record. Cyber and information operations are being directed against this country on a daily basis in a form of conflict that is pervasive, insidious, ambivalent and rarely attributable. The attack on the Skripal family in Salisbury breathtaking in both its audacity and incompetence showed that chemical attack could also be part of contemporary conflict. What if, on the back of Covid-19, biological weapons became part of this sinister equation too?

Hittite texts written beyond 1000 BC speak of infiltrating people infected with deadly, communicable disease into rival communities in what is probably the first historical reference to biological warfare. The grotesque idea of using disease as an instrument in conflict has come and gone over the subsequent millennia and it was only in 1990 that Gruinard Island, off the west coast of Scotland, was declared safe after it had been used for experiments with weaponised anthrax in 1942. Today, an objective observer might see a Covid-19 death toll that will eventually run into millions, global economic dislocation and debt levels of individual nations that equate to multiples of GDP. These are conditions only normally associated with large scale conflict and is it entirely irrational for nation states, terrorist groups or even criminal organisations to ponder cause and effect?

In 2011, Dutch virologists working at the Erasmus Centre in Rotterdam caused a mutation of the H5N1 (bird flu) virus. Around the same time, research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was working on grafting the H5N1 spike gene on to H1N1 swine flu virus. The mortality rate of bird flu is higher than 50 per cent and an animated academic debate ensued about whether both pieces of research should be published or whether the risk of rogue scientists replicating the work was too great. In the event, the research was published in Science and Nature respectively and is now available in the public domain.

So, bad stuff is out there, but the problem has always been in weaponising it in a way that creates mass dissemination, as the failed attempts of the Aum Shinriyko millenialist cult to use anthrax in Tokyo in the 1990s illustrated. Unfortunately, advances in genetic engineering and delivery techniques mean this challenge becomes ever more soluble and a determined programme could probably overcome the technical hurdles. If it did, a biological weapon would have a number of advantages over other forms of anonymised attack: even miniscule quantities can be lethal; symptoms can have delayed onset; and, subsequent waves of infection can manifest beyond the original attack site. The effect would be pervasive, insidious, ambivalent and perhaps unattributable exactly the fingerprints of contemporary conflict.

Lets go one step further and explore the very boundaries of rational action. Is it inconceivable that a state actor lets call it China for the sake of argument might contemplate a form of biological self-immolation? If it was confident in the ability of its large and compliant population to absorb an epidemic, its ubiquitous security and surveillance apparatus to impose control and with the advantage of foreknowledge, might it seek strategic advantage in creating a pandemic in the certain knowledge that strategic competitors would suffer far more?

It probably is inconceivable but not in the conspiracy-obsessed social media echo chambers that pass for news reportage among the more fevered parts of the American alt-right community. And so this article turns full circle: a piece of thin analysis and opinion feeds a conspiracy debate and adds to the dead weight of fake news that bends our sense of reality. Or, alternatively stated, this is what future conflict might look like.

The implications are profound and beg questions such as: what is now the point of nuclear weapons; how do we deter these forms of attack; and is a defence doctrine built around expeditionary operations and platforms like the Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carriers remotely relevant to the future?

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After Covid-19, what is the future of conflict? Part 1 - TheArticle

A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound, wrote Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, in his 1862 classic Fathers and Sons.

But for some pictures, Turgenev might be undershooting the mark. Select snapshots are worthy of hours of reflection; others deserve volumes written about them. One recent photo sums up not just Americas politics in 2020, but its culture over the past decade.

On March 4, a photographer caught Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz wearing a gas mask on the floor of the House of Representatives. In the photo, Gaetz is sitting alone, wearing the mask while scrolling through his phone.

Gaetz later tweeted a photo of himself wearing the gas mask while consulting with a staff member.

At the time, only 130 cases of COVID-19 had been identified in the United States, with 11 Americans having died from the virus.

Despite the warnings of the devastation the coronavirus could cause, Gaetz thought it was hilarious to mock people who were trying to sound the alarm about the virus by wearing a full-face gas mask. After all, this was back before Donald Trump was a wartime president, when he was still downplaying the threat from COVID-19, dismissing the concerns of experts, and insisting that it would all go away on its own. As Gaetzs constituents panicked over the arrival of the deadly virus, their elected representative decided to carry Trumps water by ridiculing the people who were trying to warn the public of the looming danger.

But, as we would soon find out, if idiocy were currency, Jeff Bezos would be Gaetzs butler.

Within days, Gaetzs first constituent died of the disease. Around the same time, Gaetz announced that he had been in contact with an attendee at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference and would be self-quarantining for 14 days.

Gaetz said his gas mask stunt was sincere. Thats difficult to believe. Had he been sincere he would have worn a surgical mask and gloves, not a contraption designed for chemical warfare. And his outlandish behavior over the years suggests that theres no reason to grant him the benefit of the doubt. After all, this is the same guy who invited a holocaust-denying white supremacist alt-right troll to the State of the Union speech. The same guy who attempted to blackmail a witness before Congress in order to try to protect Trump.

And Gaetz is the guy who orchestrated a stunt during a presidential impeachment trial that compromised national security. Remember last October when Gaetz and his fellow Republicans staged a sit-in at a secure hearing facility demanding Republicans be allowed to take part in the hearing even when nearly 1-in-4 House Republicans were actually members of the Intelligence, Oversight or Foreign Affairs committeesall of which were allowed to take part in the impeachment inquiries?

But Gaetz isnt the whole story here. In virus-speak, he is merely a symptom of how we got to a place in American politics where trolling has overtaken expertise and self-promotion has eclipsed competence.

People of the future who look back to the photo will see a political era when acting as a loathsome, self-aggrandizing grifter was the quickest way to earn credibility within ones party. An era when no problems were addressed until they had spiralled out of control and seriousness and expertise were viewed with suspicion and contempt.

You can think of this era as Americas Golden Age of Anti-Knowledge. And soon it will have cost upwards of 100,000 Americans their lives.

To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in the virus. But the virus is interested in you.

Whatever happens nextwith the pandemic, with Trumpism, with Americawe will always have that photo to remind us of exactly what this time in our lives was like: A time when toadies like Matt Gaetz tried to ignore mass death with sarcasm. A time where we picked the leader of the free world not because we believed he could manage the ship of state in crisis, but because he seemed very forceful when he fired Meat Loaf that one time on his reality show.

News moves quickly these days, with each days ridiculous headlines supplanted by tomorrows even more absurd ones.

But Gaetzs gas mask photo should stay with us for a very long time, an artifact reminding America how one man gleefully lowered himself to match the moment.

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A Picture Is Worth 100,000 Lives - The Bulwark

Some people say it doesnt even exist that its meaningless, or even a term of abuse. But from the 2008 financial crisis to the vote for Brexit in 2016, from the rise of the alt-right to the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no way of properly grasping our world without thinking about how neoliberalism informs our politics and economy.

But what is it? Broadly speaking, neoliberalism can be defined as the raft of policies and overarching political ethos that enabled governments in the late-1970s to turn away from state-directed economic planning, towards an economic model that extended competitive markets into every sphere of human activity and initiated the reign of finance capital (the kind dreamed up in the City of London and Wall Street) by removing constraints on capital mobility.

Importantly, neoliberalism is not merely a policy agenda but also a moral framework that teaches individuals to conceive of themselves not as, say, wage earners but rather as risk-taking entrepreneurs who should expect to shoulder the financial risks of their participation in higher education, the credit system and deregulated labour markets.

First implemented as an economic programme in the UK and the United States by the Thatcher government and the Reagan administration, its principles continued to underwrite the third way politics of New Labour and Clintonite Democrats. Although centre-left politicians reject the applicability of the term to their politics, a wealth of scholarship produced by economists, sociologists and historians demonstrates how third-way politicians advanced the neoliberal project.

So, where does the ideology stand today? Some are calling time on the neoliberal age. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Paul Mason declared that the exigencies of the crisis would mean that, in short order, the UKs political class would soon consist entirely of either enthusiastic or reluctant socialists progressive state intervention was inevitably back on the agenda. However, claims of this sort should be treated with caution, not least because similar predictions were made following the financial crisis, and after the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump as US president. And those predictions turned out to be seriously awry.

For instance, at the height of the financial crisis, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz announced, Neoliberalism is dead. Yet it soon became abundantly clear that this was premature. It is true that the crisis seemed to pose a serious threat to the veneration of markets, as governments were forced to bail out the financial sector. But, as scholars such as Philip Mirowski have shown, neoliberals have long understood that their project requires state intervention to create and maintain markets. Rather than thinking of the crisis-fighting of governments in 2008 as a repudiation of market-friendly policy, its more useful to think of it as an extreme instance of pro-business government intervention that aimed to maintain the long-term primacy of the market.

On the face of it, the vote for Brexit and the election of Trump appeared to more plausibly represent a break with neoliberalism. But that diagnosis arose from a failure to understand how neoliberalism can adaptively recombine with elements of other ideologies.

While the Brexiteers may loathe the European Union (an institution that neoliberal intellectuals have long disagreed about) they remain committed to the core of neoliberal ideology. For example, the Australian points-based immigration system so beloved by the Brexiteers is perfectly congruent with the neoliberals view of human beings as bundles of assets (of greater or lesser value). The post-Brexit immigrants educational background, work experience and connections are redefined as forms of capital that may or may not be worth investing in (by letting them in) in order to secure a future return on that investment for the national economy. Points-based immigration systems, in other words, do not represent a straightforward shift away from neoliberal, free-market orthodoxy towards rightwing protectionism.

If neither the crises of 2008 nor 2016 signalled the end of neoliberalism, what about Covid-19? Today, as in 2008, politicians such as Rishi Sunak have been forced to implement policies that seem to contradict their adherence to market supremacy, but the intention is again to do so in order to swiftly return to normal and wean the public off their addiction to state support. The governments frustrated desire to curtail the furlough scheme, and the clear opposition to implementing a universal basic income, indicate a commitment to maintaining the core of neoliberal welfare policy. This means opposing generous, non-means-tested payments, which neoliberals view as detrimental to fostering entrepreneurial activity and disciplining the workforce.

More disturbingly, in the context of pandemic and the climate crisis, the persistence of the neoliberal view of individuals as human capital raises the possibility of governments treating populations of low value as disposable. Increased state intervention to protect incomes is welcome, but could be used by governments to implement a kind of economic triage, with populations deemed not worth bailing out excluded from state support. As Michel Feher has shown, there are milder precedents for this in welfare reforms carried out by mainstream political parties in Ireland and Portugal, which reduced benefits for younger cohorts in order to encourage emigration and, in the case of Portugal, to swap young, relatively poor Portuguese for wealthier retirees from abroad. In a context of ballooning national debt, where migrant populations are being treated as vectors of disease, its not difficult to see how an exclusionary neoliberal politics that supports investment in certain populations and disinvestment in others could gain traction.

All of this is not to deny that the Covid-19 crisis poses a real threat to neoliberal orthodoxy. Physical distancing and enforced quarantine have disrupted the labour market, potentially shifting the balance of power between labour and capital in favour of workers. The increase in wildcat strikes and the emergence of mutual aid groups are certainly encouraging. And the furlough scheme has temporarily revealed the artificiality of government spending constraints. But given the persistence and adaptability of neoliberal ideology over the past 10 years, any sober assessment of the current situation needs to be attuned to the possibility of its survival (or successful mutation), as well as its possible demise.

Alex Doherty is the host of the Politics Theory Other podcast

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Has the coronavirus crisis killed neoliberalism? Don't bet on it - The Guardian

Georgia is leading a national conversation today about white men with guns.

A few weeks ago, the Michigan branch of Vanilla Isis carried rifles into the state capitol and screamed hell past lines of state troopers. And we asked ourselves, if they were black men with guns, how quickly would they have been arrested, or shot?

Last week, we watched video footage of three white men confront and shoot to death a black jogger in south Georgia footage that the Glynn County prosecutor had been sitting on for more than two months. And we asked ourselves, if they were black men with guns, how quickly would they have been arrested, or shot?

Wittingly or not, I think were linking these scenes together in our minds. The news cycle juxtaposes these images in front of us. We can bear only so much hypocrisy.

We are seeing our elected leaders ignore terrorism, though people resist calling it that because white men with guns dont just shape our policies, they also shape our language about who is and is not considered violent or threatening. And I think were finally tiring of it.

Under any other conditions, a man with a rifle screaming demands of you is an act of intimidation. In my view, it is a terroristic threat and a crime. And they know it. Its a dare.

I had a chat with Jerry Henry, the executive director of Georgia Carry, about the capitol protests last week. Georgia Carry is amid a fairly important and frankly interesting legal battle with Governor Brian Kemp over gun permits. If you moved to Georgia, you cant get a Georgia drivers license right now with all the tag offices closed. Hell, theyre handing drivers licenses to 20,000 people without a road test. The governor has been able to suspend enforcement of some laws, like one outlawing the wearing of a mask in public. But if you want a new gun permit with the county courthouses closed, youre out of luck.

For gun rights activists, this is infuriating. But Henrys crew doesnt participate in public gun demonstrations, and certainly not at the capitol, he said. A protest can make you look real good or look real bad, Henry said. The liberal press will pick out the worst people there or no one will show up.

So, to be clear, armed protesters at state capitols in Michigan, Texas and elsewhere dont have much of anything to do with gun rights. But I dont think the white supremacist messages were seeing with those armed protests are incidental.

If they were black men with guns, how quickly would they have been arrested, or shot? Well, probably pretty quickly, because thousands of black people are not having long chat room sessions fantasizing about armed insurrection after a confrontation with state police, as they are on the Fascist Forge board right now.

Heres some context people might be missing.

The 2017 racist alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., fundamentally screwed up the white supremacist movement in America, believe it or not. Heather Heyers murder and the images of running street battles turned the world decidedly against the alt-right. Activists like those behind Unicorn Riot infiltrated and exposed racists Discord channels, making clandestine recruiting all but impossible. They began outing the foot soldiers identities through social media, like Trent East, a deputy sheriff and National Guardsman in Haralson County who lost his job last year after activists spotted his online racism. The increased attention cost them their jobs, personal relationships and community standing. (This, by the way, is why the far-right loathes Antifa and propagandizes against it as much as it does: its an effective intelligence-gathering group).

White nationalist leaders and publications got sued and de-platformed, and financial supporters abandoned anything tinged with racial hatred. People like Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopolous were cut off from being able to raise money easily from the public. Two of the largest formal groups the Traditionalist Worker Party and the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement no longer exist as functional organizations today.

That doesnt mean things are getting better. Theyre just getting weirder, and perhaps if the El Paso shooting is any indication, more violent.

As a Southern Poverty Law Centers surveillance report notes, the white supremacist movement has fractured, and the conversation in the quiet places has changed.

The movements followers are breaking into two major strategic camps: so-called accelerationists who wholeheartedly embrace violence as a political tool and mainstreamers (or the dissident right, as they often call themselves) who are attempting, with a degree of success, to bend the mainstream political right toward white nationalist ideas.

Consider how both views play out in Georgia. Last year, Chester Doles, who has a lengthy history of white supremacist organizing, staged a rally in Dahlonega. Shortly after that, he launched American Patriots USA. This group has made four political endorsements across the state. Amazingly, one of them is in DeKalb County that of Hubert Owens, the Republican challenger to State Rep. Darshun Kendrick. Owens has allegedly accepted this endorsement perhaps because as a relatively recent transplant to Georgia, he doesnt know any better.

God bless Mr. Owens for his service and dedication he showed his country. And now he is in another war. Let's help him out Wwe need a representative like him!

Posted by American Patriots U.S.A onSaturday, April 4, 2020

This post was not available on Huberts Facebook page as of Wednesday, May 13. Reached by phone, Hubert said he was unaware of this endorsement and hadnt removed anything from his Facebook page.

Im not even in the state of Georgia right now, he said. He ended the conversation with, Im in D.C. Ive got to get back to work.

On the other side of the coin, the FBI arrested three Georgia men in January, who are charged with conspiracy to commit murder and participation in a criminal gang. They, and other members of The Base are accused of, plotting to murder a Bartow County couple they believed were Antifa members and training for a race war on a range just south of Rome.

Theres a lot of push and pull between these views among white supremacists. Mainstream white supremacists want to carry their message in a suit and tie into schools and churches and legislation. Accelerationists want someone, somewhere, to kick off the boogaloo, or the long-awaited apocalyptic race war that will reset America. And they want to recruit fighters.

But every time theyve tried to stage a major public demonstration like the neo-Nazis tried in Newnan two years ago, or Chester Doles tried in Dahlonega last year, theyre met fifty-fold with anti-fascist local protesters and cameras ready for a repeat of Charlottesville. They look weak, because they are weak. Theyre completely outnumbered and despised.

And then the pandemic locked everyone down.

The guys with guns wearing Hawaiian shirts under their camo and giving the Pepe the Frog OK sign arent out here because theyre protesting the pandemic. Thats incidental.

Theyre out here because we cant counterprotest in force.

Theyre piggy-backing off the pandemic protests in exactly the same way that black bloc anarchists use the relative anonymity of anti-police brutality street protests to flip over cop cars. Its an opportunity presenting itself, a means to an end. The end, for the alt-right guys, is visibility without the opposition making them look small. They know theyre running a risk of getting COVID-19, but if the rest of us start confronting them as before, our greater numbers would actually create an exponentially greater risk of infection.

Its an elegant game theory put to disturbing use.

While weak, theyre hoping for a galvanizing Ruby Ridge confrontation of some sort to rekindle public support. The best thing that could happen to them, in their view, is a violent confrontation with authority preferably liberal authority that sparks massive armed conflict. Its a fantasy. But it shapes how we react. State leaders across the country are denying them their Waco moment.

George Chidi is a political columnist and public policy advocate.

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George on Georgia: Why We're Not Just Arresting White Guys With Guns - Decaturish.com

By Michael Rosenthal

The power of a story is immeasurable, but in a time when we isolate ourselves and hunker down to protect our loved ones from COVID-19, I am writing my truth about how this coronavirus might just save our country and our planet. This is the fourth year of Donald J. Trump's presidency, and our country and our planet may not survive a second term. This could be the plague to save the U.S.A. and the Earth.

Trump won the election, although he did not win the popular vote, because his populist message was heard by the forgotten and frustrated white Americans in the cities, suburbs, and rural America who felt the economy wasn't working for them. Trump won the election because he was able to give white America an enemy they could visualize, Latino immigrants coming across our border with Mexico. His call for a wall and the demonizing of undocumented workers played to the fears of white Americans of increased violence, drugs, and unemployment. This hate and fear of non-whites was always draped in the red, white, and blue of our flag.

This call to arms to stop illegal aliens from crossing our southern border was also couched in language understood by white supremacists, who feared that the demographics showed that within a generation whites would be a minority in the United States of America. The fear of being in the minority went to the primal fear of white supremacists; they feared that the systematic subjugation of blacks, latinos, and native Americans during the past 125 years would happen to them before the 21st century was over. Our society and criminal justice system claims to be unbiased, but the actions of police, our government, and our penal system tell another story. There are not any white people I know who fear for their life when going out for a jog, while unarmed like Ahmaud Arbery, or who are fearful when they are stopped by the police while behind the wheel because of the color of their skin.

Colin Kaepernick, quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, rightfully and peacefully protested injustice to people of color who looked like him by the police by taking a knee during the national anthem. Those whites who said Blue Lives or All Lives Matter were missing the point; black lives should matter, too. That "too" makes all the difference in the world. Instead of addressing injustice, President Trump wrapped himself in the flag and questioned the patriotism of anyone who kneeled during the anthem. The president then proceeded to strong-arm the 32 white owners of NFL teams who blackballed Kaepernick from the league, and who dropped any support or concerns of their players due to a threat on their bottom line. Even during this isolation it was amazing to me how it was the players who stepped up to protect the lost wages of stadium employees often before the actions of the billionaire owners or the professional leagues.

The sway that the alt-right has with our president should be of concern to all Americans. These all-white rallies with citizens either in paramilitary gear including body armor and assault rifles, or draped in the flag and their MAGA gear should have all Americans afraid for our country. These rallies to "liberate" citizens from state governments, put the lives of police, first responders, and the medical profession in greater danger of exposure to the virus, and often the police are even physically threatened. Those same Americans who bemoaned Blue Lives Matter when Kaepernick took a knee are now showing their true colors. These same police who forcibly and violently take down unarmed blacks whom they think have weapons fail to make arrests of armed white men who physically confront them while packing serious heat.

These paramilitary protests are also a dangerous foreshadowing that these "good people" who are flexing their muscle now in armed peaceful protests in front of the state houses, will revolt to keep another president from taking office if and when Trump loses the 2020 election. These armed peaceful protests by "good people" threaten to provoke the first violent transfer of power in our country's history.

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There are many reasons why Trump has been a danger to our nation as well as the future of our planet, and this pandemic has exposed his failures as President, the flaws in our society, and the resiliency of our planet. Therefore the coronavirus might just be the plague that saves this country and the world.

Trump's failures as a leader have been apparent from the start of this pandemic. Looking at the differences between the responses of South Korea and the United States to this crisis is a good place to illustrate his deficiencies as a leader. Both South Korea and the United States had their first reported case of COVID-19 in their country on the same date in January. As of early May, South Korea has had fewer than 300 deaths compared to the greater than 80,000 deaths here in the United States. South Korea learned from their experiences with SARS, Mers, and H1N1, and treated news of the outbreak in China with a sense of urgency. Within two weeks South Korea had developed a test for coronavirus and had begun a massive effort to test their population, and trace the path of the virus, isolating those with positive tests and quarantining those who had contact with people who tested positive.

President Trump on the other hand is a science denier, and failed to approach this outbreak with a sense of urgency. His administration did not follow the playbook developed from the Obama administration response to H1N1 and ebola. In addition he dismantled the part of the White House security council responsible to respond to an infectious epidemic. Unlike South Korea, it took the United States two months to develop a test, as they even eschewed tests developed by the World Health Organization. During February and most of March the president downplayed the threat of the virus, failed to stockpile personal protective equipment, or use the war powers act to get the full weight of the U.S. government behind efforts to stop this invisible enemy. He would rather lie to the American people than tell us the truth.

Failure to understand the scope and severity of this pandemic is one of his flaws as a leader, as are failure to listen to experts, reliance on inexperienced cronies, and promoting unfounded and potentially dangerous coronavirus treatments; but how can we follow any leader who fails to ever take responsibility for his actions? These are the same leadership qualities he displayed in avoiding serving in our military during the Vietnam War. During this crisis he has blamed President Obama, China, the governors of various states, and the media for his failings. He doesn't want to be a leader, instead he has said he has acted as a cheerleader. He won't even lead by example by wearing a mask.

The coronavirus pandemic has made it clear: the future of the United States depends on making Trump a one term president in November.

Michael Rosenthal writes from Williston, Vt. The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of the Brattleboro Reformer.

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Michael Rosenthal: The COVID-19 pandemic just might be an antidote for the 'plague' of Trump - Brattleboro Reformer