The many myths of America

 David Sherman

Swift Removal

New Orleans: The judge’s ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by unhoused people who were subject to the sweep. In legal filings, they argued that state troopers violated their constitutional rights by illegally searching, seizing and destroying their property, disposing of their prized possessions and “forcibly herding” them away.

According to the lawsuit, a legal observer overheard state troopers saying “the governor wants you to move because of the Taylor Swift concert.”

 Targeting children

According to the website of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the online extortion of children and teenagers who are coerced into sending sexually explicit images has seen “a huge increase.” The same is true for what the F.B.I. calls “financial sextortion,” which involves predators threatening to release the sexually explicit images unless they receive payment.

From October 2021 to March 2023, more than 13,000 instances of financial sextortion of minors were reported to the F.B.I. and Homeland Security Investigations, involving at least 12,600 victims, most of them boys.

Officials have ramped up their efforts to crack down on sextortion schemes, which overwhelmingly target minors. From January 2021 to July 2023, at least 20 teenagers killed themselves after being caught in such a scam, according to the F.B.I.

 National lobotomy

“Our national press pretends that they are dealing with men and women of principle, offering carefully thought-out solutions to our nation’s problems, rather than groveling servants of billionaires who finance their campaigns; and that the voters these candidates try to persuade in the primaries are well-informed and well-meaning Americans and not people who by and large get their information from Fox TV and hate radio. “Lobotomized by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage” is how a friend describes a neighbor of his. In other words, someone unreachable by anyone who doesn’t believe that Obama is a Muslim or a Communist, that Planned Parenthood dismembers living children and sells their body parts for cash, and that Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden had a pet dinosaur.”

NY Review of Books archive

Fascism a seig heil away

Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which … can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from America

U.S. War Department 1945

The wealthy and the hungry 

When analyzing poverty as the number of persons who fall below 50 per cent of a country’s median income, the United States has far and away the highest overall poverty rate in a group of 26 developed nations. Furthermore, the distance of the poor from the overall median income is extreme in the U.S.  At the same time the United States is arguably the wealthiest nation in the world.

This paradox is revealed in additional analyses that have examined how well children and adults from the lower, middle, and upper ends of the income scale do. Not surprisingly, the United States has the highest standards of living at the middle and upper ends of the income distribution scale, yet for children at the lower end, their standards of living fall behind most other industrialized nations.

Nordic countries and the Netherlands have the lowest child poverty, while Japan, the United States and some of the southern and eastern European states have among the highest. The child poverty rate ranges from 5 per cent in Iceland to 25 per cent in Romania. Canada ranks in the middle, at 13 per cent.

Low income is linked to poor child outcomes. In a society committed to prioritizing children’s best interests, the child poverty rate would be lower than the overall poverty rate. Although child poverty is higher than the overall rate of poverty on average among industrialized countries1, 10 countries (about a third of the total) including Australia, Japan and Germany have lower child poverty than broader population poverty. Canada is not among them. Canada ranks 18th of 35 industrialized nations – a middle position – in the size of the gap between child poverty and population poverty (13.3 per cent

in contrast to 11.4 per cent). Quebec is one of only two Canadian provinces where the child poverty rate is slightly lower than that of the broader provincial population – in Manitoba children fare slightly better than the general population, and Ontario comes close.

 Honesty doesn't play

Obviously, politics is not a profession that rewards, much less fetishizes, honesty. Journalists know this, and, in failing to hold presidents accountable for their dishonesty, the American press has reflected a larger ambivalence about doing so among the American people. Historically, Americans have tended to accept presidential lies as the cost of doing business. In 2017, C‑Span asked 91 presidential scholars to rank past chief executives for their effectiveness, a measure that included “moral authority.” What was striking about the result was that dishonesty did not appear to matter. Compulsive liars Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson both made it into the top 10. Relative truth-tellers Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter came in 12th and 26th, respectively, the latter just barely above the White House’s most egregious (pre-Trump) liar, Richard Nixon, who took the number 28 spot on the list. In presidential rankings based on public polling, the big liars largely thrive, albeit due to ongoing political arguments rather than careful historical consideration. In a 2011 Gallup poll, for instance, Reagan was number one and Bill Clinton was number three, with “Honest Abe” Lincoln squeaking into second place.

The Nation

It's just a shot away, shot away, shot away

Since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, more than 338,000 students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence at school.

In 2022 alone, there were 46 school shootings, the highest number since Columbine.

Each day, 12 children die from gun violence in America, with another 32 shot and injured.

Guns are the leading cause of death among U.S. children and teens, with one out of 10 gun deaths being age 19 or younger.

Firearm deaths occur at a rate more than five times higher than drownings among children and teens. An estimated 4.6 million American children live in homes where at least one gun is kept loaded and unlocked

Black youth are four times more likely to be killed with guns than their white peers.

In 2024, there were at least 178 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 52 deaths and 120 injuries nationally.

A study examining Texas Department of Public Safety data from 2012 to 2018 found that: The homicide arrest rate for undocumented immigrants was 1.9 per 100,000, compared to 4.8 per 100,000 for U.S.-born citizens.

Undocumented immigrants had the lowest homicide arrest rates throughout the entire study period, averaging less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens.