Friday

Obama’s Eulogy for John Lewis


James wrote to the believers, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.”

It is a great honor to be back in Ebenezer Baptist Church, in the pulpit of its greatest pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to pay my respects to perhaps his finest disciple — an American whose faith was tested again and again to produce a man of pure joy and unbreakable perseverance — John Robert Lewis.

To those who have spoken to Presidents Bush and Clinton, Madam Speaker, Reverend Warnock, Reverend King, John’s family, friends, his beloved staff, Mayor Bottoms — I’ve come here today because I, like so many Americans, owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom.

Now, this country is a constant work in progress. We were born with instructions: to form a more perfect union. Explicit in those words is the idea that we are imperfect; that what gives each new generation purpose is to take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further than anyone might have thought possible.

John Lewis — the first of the Freedom Riders, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, youngest speaker at the March on Washington, leader of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Member of Congress representing the people of this state and this district for 33 years, mentor to young people, including me at the time, until his final day on this Earth — he not only embraced that responsibility, but he made it his life’s work.


Which isn’t bad for a boy from Troy. John was born into modest means — that means he was poor — in the heart of the Jim Crow South to parents who picked somebody else’s cotton. Apparently, he didn’t take to farm work — on days when he was supposed to help his brothers and sisters with their labor, he’d hide under the porch and make a break for the school bus when it showed up. His mother, Willie Mae Lewis, nurtured that curiosity in this shy, serious child. “Once you learn something,” she told her son, “once you get something inside your head, no one can take it away from you.”

As a boy, John listened through the door after bedtime as his father’s friends complained about the Klan. One Sunday as a teenager, he heard Dr. King preach on the radio. As a college student in Tennessee, he signed up for Jim Lawson’s workshops on the tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience. John Lewis was getting something inside his head, an idea he couldn’t shake that took hold of him — that nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience were the means to change laws, but also change hearts, and change minds, and change nations, and change the world.

So he helped organize the Nashville campaign in 1960. He and other young men and women sat at a segregated lunch counter, well-dressed, straight-backed, refusing to let a milkshake poured on their heads, or a cigarette extinguished on their backs, or a foot aimed at their ribs, refused to let that dent their dignity and their sense of purpose. And after a few months, the Nashville campaign achieved the first successful desegregation of public facilities in any major city in the South.

John got a taste of jail for the first, second, third … well, several times. But he also got a taste of victory. And it consumed him with righteous purpose. And he took the battle deeper into the South.

That same year, just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of interstate bus facilities was unconstitutional, John and Bernard Lafayette bought two tickets, climbed aboard a Greyhound, sat up front, and refused to move. This was months before the first official Freedom Rides. He was doing a test. The trip was unsanctioned. Few knew what they were up to. And at every stop, through the night, apparently the angry driver stormed out of the bus and into the bus station. And John and Bernard had no idea what he might come back with or who he might come back with. Nobody was there to protect them. There were no camera crews to record events. You know, sometimes, we read about this and kind of take it for granted. Or at least we act as if it was inevitable. Imagine the courage of two people Malia’s age, younger than my oldest daughter, on their own, to challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression.

John was only twenty years old. But he pushed all twenty of those years to the center of the table, betting everything, all of it, that his example could challenge centuries of convention, and generations of brutal violence, and countless daily indignities suffered by African Americans.

Like John the Baptist preparing the way, like those Old Testament prophets speaking truth to kings, John Lewis did not hesitate — he kept on getting on board buses and sitting at lunch counters, got his mug shot taken again and again, marched again and again on a mission to change America.

Spoke to a quarter million people at the March on Washington when he was just 23.

Helped organize the Freedom Summer in Mississippi when he was just 24.

At the ripe old age of 25, John was asked to lead the march from Selma to Montgomery. He was warned that Governor Wallace had ordered troopers to use violence. But he and Hosea Williams and others led them across that bridge anyway. And we’ve all seen the film and the footage and the photographs, and President Clinton mentioned the trench coat, the knapsack, the book to read, the apple to eat, the toothbrush — apparently jails weren’t big on such creature comforts. And you look at those pictures and John looks so young and he’s small in stature. Looking every bit that shy, serious child that his mother had raised and yet, he is full of purpose. God’s put perseverance in him.

And we know what happened to the marchers that day. Their bones were cracked by billy clubs, their eyes and lungs choked with tear gas. As they knelt to pray, which made their heads even easier targets, and John was struck in the skull. And he thought he was going to die, surrounded by the sight of young Americans gagging, and bleeding, and trampled, victims in their own country of state-sponsored violence.

And the thing is, I imagine initially that day, the troopers thought that they had won the battle. You can imagine the conversations they had afterwards. You can imagine them saying, “Yeah, we showed them.” They figured they’d turned the protesters back over the bridge; that they’d kept, that they’d preserved a system that denied the basic humanity of their fellow citizens. Except this time, there were some cameras there. This time, the world saw what happened, bore witness to Black Americans who were asking for nothing more than to be treated like other Americans. Who were not asking for special treatment, just the equal treatment promised to them a century before, and almost another century before that.

When John woke up, and checked himself out of the hospital, he would make sure the world saw a movement that was, in the words of Scripture, “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” They returned to Brown Chapel, a battered prophet, bandages around his head, and he said more marchers will come now. And the people came. And the troopers parted. And the marchers reached Montgomery. And their words reached the White House — and Lyndon Johnson, son of the South, said “We shall overcome,” and the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.

The life of John Lewis was, in so many ways, exceptional. It vindicated the faith in our founding, redeemed that faith; that most American of ideas; that idea that any of us ordinary people without rank or wealth or title or fame can somehow point out the imperfections of this nation, and come together, and challenge the status quo, and decide that it is in our power to remake this country that we love until it more closely aligns with our highest ideals. What a radical ideal. What a revolutionary notion. This idea that any of us, ordinary people, a young kid from Troy can stand up to the powers and principalities and say no this isn’t right, this isn’t true, this isn’t just. We can do better. On the battlefield of justice, Americans like John, Americans like the Reverends Lowery and C.T. Vivian, two other patriots that we lost this year, liberated all of us that many Americans came to take for granted.

America was built by people like them. America was built by John Lewises. He as much as anyone in our history brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideals. And someday, when we do finish that long journey toward freedom; when we do form a more perfect union — whether it’s years from now, or decades, or even if it takes another two centuries — John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.

And yet, as exceptional as John was, here’s the thing: John never believed that what he did was more than any citizen of this country can do. I mentioned in the statement the day John passed, the thing about John was just how gentle and humble he was. And despite this storied, remarkable career, he treated everyone with kindness and respect because it was innate to him — this idea that any of us can do what he did if we are willing to persevere.

He believed that in all of us, there exists the capacity for great courage, that in all of us there is a longing to do what’s right, that in all of us there is a willingness to love all people, and to extend to them their God-given rights to dignity and respect. So many of us lose that sense. It’s taught out of us. We start feeling as if, in fact, that we can’t afford to extend kindness or decency to other people. That we’re better off if we are above other people and looking down on them, and so often that’s encouraged in our culture. But John always saw the best in us. And he never gave up, and never stopped speaking out because he saw the best in us. He believed in us even when we didn’t believe in ourselves. As a Congressman, he didn’t rest; he kept getting himself arrested. As an old man, he didn’t sit out any fight; he sat in, all night long, on the floor of the United States Capitol. I know his staff was stressed.

But the testing of his faith produced perseverance. He knew that the march is not yet over, that the race is not yet won, that we have not yet reached that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character. He knew from his own life that progress is fragile; that we have to be vigilant against the darker currents of this country’s history, of our own history, with their whirlpools of violence and hatred and despair that can always rise again.

Bull Connor may be gone. But today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans. George Wallace may be gone. But we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot. But even as we sit here, there are those in power are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting — by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the Postal Service in the run-up to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don’t get sick.

Now, I know this is a celebration of John’s life. There are some who might say we shouldn’t dwell on such things. But that’s why I’m talking about it. John Lewis devoted his time on this Earth fighting the very attacks on democracy and what’s best in America that we are seeing circulate right now.

He knew that every single one of us has a God-given power. And that the fate of this democracy depends on how we use it; that democracy isn’t automatic, it has to be nurtured, it has to be tended to, we have to work at it, it’s hard. And so he knew it depends on whether we summon a measure, just a measure, of John’s moral courage to question what’s right and what’s wrong and call things as they are. He said that as long as he had breath in his body, he would do everything he could to preserve this democracy. That as long as we have breath in our bodies, we have to continue his cause. If we want our children to grow up in a democracy — not just with elections, but a true democracy, a representative democracy, a big-hearted, tolerant, vibrant, inclusive America of perpetual self-creation — then we are going to have to be more like John. We don’t have to do all the things he had to do because he did them for us. But we have got to do something. As the Lord instructed Paul, “Do not be afraid, go on speaking; do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.” Just everybody’s just got to come out and vote. We’ve got all those people in the city but we can’t do nothing.

Like John, we have got to keep getting into that good trouble. He knew that nonviolent protest is patriotic; a way to raise public awareness, put a spotlight on injustice, and make the powers that be uncomfortable.

Like John, we don’t have to choose between protest and politics, it is not an either-or situation, it is a both-and situation. We have to engage in protests where that is effective but we also have to translate our passion and our causes into laws and institutional practices. That’s why John ran for Congress thirty-four years ago.

Like John, we have got to fight even harder for the most powerful tool we have, which is the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act is one of the crowning achievements of our democracy. It’s why John crossed that bridge. It’s why he spilled his blood. And by the way, it was the result of Democratic and Republican efforts. President Bush, who spoke here earlier, and his father, both signed its renewal when they were in office. President Clinton didn’t have to because it was the law when he arrived so instead he made a law that made it easier for people to register to vote.

But once the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, some state legislatures unleashed a flood of laws designed specifically to make voting harder, especially, by the way, state legislatures where there is a lot of minority turnout and population growth. That’s not necessarily a mystery or an accident. It was an attack on what John fought for. It was an attack on our democratic freedoms. And we should treat it as such.

If politicians want to honor John, and I’m so grateful for the legacy of work of all the Congressional leaders who are here, but there’s a better way than a statement calling him a hero. You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for. And by the way, naming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that is a fine tribute. But John wouldn’t want us to stop there, trying to get back to where we already were. Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better.

By making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates who’ve earned their second chance.

By adding polling places, and expanding early voting, and making Election Day a national holiday, so if you are someone who is working in a factory, or you are a single mom who has got to go to her job and doesn’t get time off, you can still cast your ballot.

By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C. and in Puerto Rico. They are Americans.

By ending some of the partisan gerrymandering — so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around.

And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.

And yet, even if we do all this — even if every bogus voter suppression law was struck off the books today — we have got to be honest with ourselves that too many of us choose not to exercise the franchise; that too many of our citizens believe their vote won’t make a difference, or they buy into the cynicism that, by the way, is the central strategy of voter suppression, to make you discouraged, to stop believing in your own power.

So we are also going to have to remember what John said: “If you don’t do everything you can to change things, then they will remain the same. You only pass this way once. You have to give it all you have.” As long as young people are protesting in the streets, hoping real change takes hold, I’m hopeful but we cannot casually abandon them at the ballot box. Not when few elections have been as urgent, on so many levels, as this one. We cannot treat voting as an errand to run if we have some time. We have to treat it as the most important action we can take on behalf of democracy.

Like John, we have to give it all we have.

I was proud that John Lewis was a friend of mine. I met him when I was in law school. He came to speak and I went up and I said, “Mr. Lewis, you are one of my heroes. What inspired me more than anything as a young man was to see what you and Reverend Lawson and Bob Moses and Diane Nash and others did.” And he got that kind of — aw shucks, thank you very much.

The next time I saw him, I had been elected to the United States Senate. And I told him, “John, I am here because of you.” On Inauguration Day in 2008, 2009, he was one of the first people that I greeted and hugged on that stand. I told him, “This is your day too.”

He was a good and kind and gentle man. And he believed in us — even when we don’t believe in ourselves. It’s fitting that the last time John and I shared a public forum was on Zoom. I am pretty sure that neither he nor I set up the Zoom call because we didn’t know how to work it. It was a virtual town hall with a gathering of young activists who had been helping to lead this summer’s demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. And afterwards, I spoke to John privately, and he could not have been prouder to see this new generation of activists standing up for freedom and equality; a new generation that was intent on voting and protecting the right to vote; in some cases, a new generation running for political office.

I told him, all those young people, John — of every race and every religion, from every background and gender and sexual orientation — John, those are your children. They learned from your example, even if they didn’t always know it. They had understood, through him, what American citizenship requires, even if they had only heard about his courage through the history books.

“By the thousands, faceless, anonymous, relentless young people, Black and white … have taken our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

Dr. King said that in the 1960s. And it came true again this summer.

We see it outside our windows, in big cities and rural towns, in men and women, young and old, straight Americans and LGBTQ Americans, Blacks who long for equal treatment and whites who can no longer accept freedom for themselves while witnessing the subjugation of their fellow Americans. We see it in everybody doing the hard work of overcoming complacency, of overcoming our own fears and our own prejudices, our own hatreds. You see it in people trying to be better, truer versions of ourselves.

And that’s what John Lewis teaches us. That’s where real courage comes from. Not from turning on each other, but by turning towards one another. Not by sowing hatred and division, but by spreading love and truth. Not by avoiding our responsibilities to create a better America and a better world, but by embracing those responsibilities with joy and perseverance and discovering that in our beloved community, we do not walk alone.

What a gift John Lewis was. We are all so lucky to have had him walk with us for a while, and show us the way.

God bless you all. God bless America. God bless this gentle soul who pulled it closer to its promise.

Noam Chomsky on Trump’s Troop Surge to Democratic Cities & Whether He’ll Leave Office If He Loses



Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Barely 100 days before the presidential election in November, this week President Trump announced he’s sending a “surge” of federal officers into large Democrat-run cities, like Chicago. This comes after Trump first sent federal agents to Portland, Oregon, where the camouflage-clad paramilitary agents attacked antiracist protesters, even snatched activists off the streets in unmarked vans. On Wednesday night, when federal forces fired tear gas at protesters in Portland once again, among those hit was Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, who also serves as Portland’s police commissioner.

The response to Trump’s outrageous and likely unconstitutional deployment of federal agents has been resoundingly critical. Oregon Governor Kate Brown denounced the, quote, “secret police abducting people,” and the Oregon attorney general has now sued several of the federal agencies involved. In the streets, a contingent of women has grown nightly, protecting protesters by forming a “wall of moms.” Oregon Senator Ron Wyden described the federal agents as “essentially fascist,” and warned, quote, “If the line is not drawn in the sand right now, America may be staring down the barrel of martial law in the middle of a presidential election.”

Well, for more on this and much more, we spend the rest of the hour with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years.

He spoke with Democracy Now!'s Nermeen Shaikh and I on Thursday. We reached him at his home in Tucson, Arizona, where he's sheltering in place with his wife, Valeria. I began by asking Professor Chomsky to respond to the surge of federal agents Trump is promising to unleash on the country.

NOAM CHOMSKY: President Trump is desperate. His entire attention is this one issue on his mind: That’s the election. He has to cover up for the fact that he’s personally responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans. It’s impossible to conceal that much longer. Just compare the United States with Europe or even Canada. It’s becoming a pariah state, to the point where Americans aren’t even permitted to travel to Europe. Europe won’t accept them.

His chances of victory depend on his doing something dramatic. He was trying very hard to set up military confrontations. You mentioned martial law. It’s moving towards martial law. He might even be able to try to cancel the elections. There’s no telling what he would do. He’s completely desperate. This is like the actions of some tin-pot dictator in a neo-colony somewhere, small country that has a military coup every couple of years. There’s no historical precedent for anything like this in a functioning democratic society. If he could send Blackshirts out in the streets, he’d be happy to do that.

Exactly how this will eventuate is very hard to say. The courts are unlikely to do anything. We may even get to a point where the military command has to decide which side they’re on. The man is desperate. He’s psychotic. He is in extreme danger of losing his position in the White House. He’ll do anything he can to prevent it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Professor Chomsky, I mean, you’ve just said — echoed the concerns of Senator Ron Wyden that we may be headed — the U.S. may be headed towards the imposition of martial law. You’ve just called Trump a psychotic, previously having referred to him as a sociopath, and pointed to the differences between — the massive differences between Biden and Trump, when we had you on earlier this year, saying about Biden that he’s pretty empty, you can push him one way or another. And you’ve also said that this is the most crucial election in human history, literally. Now, in a Fox News interview just on Sunday, Trump refused to commit to accepting the outcome of the 2020 election.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not a good loser. I don’t like to lose. I don’t lose too often. I don’t like to lose.

CHRIS WALLACE: But are you gracious?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You don’t know until you see. It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do.

CHRIS WALLACE: Are you suggesting that you might not accept the results of the election?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I have to see. Look, Hillary Clinton asked me the same thing.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you comment on that and what your concerns are, in the event — I mean, you’ve just said that, in fact, the elections somehow could be canceled. Could you talk about under what conditions Trump might be able to do that? And in the event that they’re not canceled, what are your concerns, depending on the outcome of the vote, what Trump might do?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there are various maneuvers that theoretically they might undertake. One might be to try to throw the election to the — to refuse to accept the vote, to make sure that the Republican governors don’t authorize their own electors. This is routine and automatic, but technically they could refuse. Could throw it into the House, where there’s enough Republicans in the House to essentially turn the election into the kind of farce that you find, as I said, in some tin-pot dictatorship. That’s one possibility. Another possibility is he might just try to call out the military to impose martial law.

And the point is, he cannot lose. First of all, he’s psychologically incapable of losing. Secondly, if he loses, if he leaves the White House, he may be facing serious legal problems. Now he has immunity, but there’s a whole swamp around him. He’s tried to keep it from being investigated. He fired all the inspectors general when they were beginning to investigate it. The federal attorney for the Southern District of New York — that’s Wall Street and so on, the most important — started looking into it. Fired him, replaced him with a flack from the private equity industry. There’s nothing he would not do to try to maintain office, virtually nothing you can think of.

This is a major crisis. There’s been one or other form of parliamentary democracy for 350 years in England, and 250 years here, and nothing like this has happened before. We’re dealing with a figure who’s out of the political spectrum for functioning democracies. And he has a political party behind him which by now has just turned into cowardly sycophants. They’re terrified to cross His Imperial Majesty. He’s got a popular base of heavily armed, angry white supremacist militias. There’s no telling what he would do. I think the country, by November, may be a different country — and a different world, given U.S. power.

But that’s kind of the immediate issue. The reason why this is the most important election in history has nothing to do with this. Four more years of Trump’s climate policies and nuclear policies might simply doom the human species, literally. We don’t have a lot of time to deal with the environmental crisis. It’s very serious. Every prediction that’s been made by scientists has been too conservative. Each time it comes out worse.

I won’t run through the details, but it’s a major catastrophe looming. We have some time to deal with it. Four more years of Trump might well take us to irreversible tipping points. At the very least, it will make it much harder to confront this growing crisis. There’s no stopping the polar ice caps from — ice sheets from melting, the Amazon forest from being destroyed. Large parts of the world might become simply unlivable. We’re talking about potential sea rises of maybe one or two feet by the end of the century, much more later. This is all totally catastrophic. You can’t conceive of how human society can survive in an organized way.

At the same time, Trump is dedicated to destroying the arms control regime. Last August, he terminated the Reagan-Gorbachev INF Treaty, which helped control the potential for nuclear war growing from a European conflict. Now he’s dismantled the Open Skies Treaty, goes back to Eisenhower. That’s gone. He’s imposed frivolous demands to try to delay negotiations on the New START treaty, which the Russians have been pleading for for a long time. This is due for renewal in a few months. May already be too late to renegotiate it, the last of the arms control treaties. He’s now threatening to carry out nuclear weapons tests, tests that would undermine the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, almost 30 years. The United States never ratified it, but it’s lived up to it.

All of this opens the door wider for other countries to react the same way. The arms industry is, of course, euphoric. They’re getting huge new contracts to develop major weapons to destroy all of us. This encourages others to do the same. So there are new contracts down the road for hopeless means to try to defend ourselves against the monstrosities that we’re helping to construct. This is Trump, racing towards this, apparently enjoying it. You can’t describe it in normal — the term you used, “sociopath,” is perfectly accurate. Whether this can be contained within the constitutional structures of the United States, we don’t know.

I mean, something similar to this happened in the United Kingdom a couple of months ago. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, prorogated the Parliament, closed the Parliament, so that he could ram through his version of Brexit. This was regarded by British legal experts as the worst crisis in 350 years. Well, in Britain, the Supreme Court nullified it. That’s unlikely to happen here.

I might say that there’s another country that’s trying to mimic the United States, Brazil, with another ridiculous dictator, Jair Bolsonaro, who’s trying to be a clone of Trump. He was being investigated by — he and his family, involved in all kind of sordid criminal activities, came under investigation. He fired the investigators. But that was blocked by the courts in Brazil. Not here. When Trump fired them all, purged the executive, nothing from the courts, nothing from the Republicans in Congress. Brazil at least has a thin barrier to another military dictatorship. The United States is in worse shape. This is pretty serious. There’s been nothing like it. There’s no precedents that have any real relevance.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Professor Chomsky, you’ve mentioned again now the lack of safeguards there are in the U.S. to the possible imposition of martial law. But even in other countries around the world where martial law has been declared, it requires minimally the compliance of those who are in charge of the military. Do you see those in the U.S. going along with Trump in the event that he chooses to attempt to declare martial law?

NOAM CHOMSKY: As I say, there’s no precedent for this in any minimally functioning democracy. There are countries, many of them, where the military has taken over, often with U.S. support or even initiative, because we wanted to overthrow the civilian government. Nothing like this has happened since — aside from the fascist regimes, interwar regimes, totally different conditions, there’s just no precedent.

There was, as you may recall, a couple of weeks ago, press reports with headlines about how Trump is expanding his purge of the executive, which has almost been cleansed of any controls or dissident voices. He’s extending this to trying to purge the military. Well, there were speculations at the time that the purge of the military might be preparation for a plan to try to bring the military in to carry out something which would amount to a military coup.

The military so far has been refusing, pulled out the 82nd Airborne from Washington after Trump wanted it in there. They’ve been rejecting the proposals from the White House for more force and violence. That’s why he’s resorting to forces outside the official military in his current campaign to set up violent confrontations in Democratic-run cities, the plan right now. What the military would do, we don’t know.

If you look for precedents in Third World dictatorships, it would depend on how those at the colonel level react, people close in contract with troops. But we have no precedent for anything like this. There’s nothing like it. This is a unique situation in modern history, in the modern history of the democratic — more or less democratic societies.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT professor emeritus Noam Chomsky, linguist, author, activist. When we come back, I ask him about President Trump bragging about acing a cognitive test for dementia. All that and more, in a minute.