Raya Dunayevskaya cult is for the lesser-evil.

https://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/mhieditorial/editorial-trumpism-democrats-and-how-to-vote-from-the-left.html

Truly one of Eric’s worst. And it should encourage us to stop and think carefully about Eric Blanc's other “discoveries” when it comes to Russian and European revolutionary movements.

Almost redeeming themselves after their support for Sanders.

https://www.socialistalternative.org/2020/10/28/why-the-left-shouldnt-support-joe-biden/

I can think of no other scholar who has written more about Lenin’s electoral strategy than August Nimtz, an ex-SWPer who has taught at the University of Minnesota for many years. I got in touch with him a while back when I first ran into the argument that Lenin was an advocate of “lesser evil” politics because he approved of a bloc with the Cadets in the second round of the Duma elections. It might have been prompted by Kasama Project’s Mike Ely reference to this tactic or somebody else trying to justify voting for a Democrat. The most recent use of Lenin’s articles was in Eric Blanc’s article in Socialist Worker newspaper advocating a vote for Sanders and now for Biden. August sent me a copy of his “Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905” that I highly recommend. Unfortunately, the paperback is out of print and the Kindle or hardcover is pretty expensive. Contact me privately if you’d like a copy, as long as you promise not to share it with anybody else.

This is the relevant section:

“SPLITTING THE VOTE” AND THE “BLACK HUNDRED DANGER”: THE LESSER OF EVILS CONUNDRUM

In his pamphlet Lenin addressed for the first time an issue that has bedeviled many a working-class party in multiparty elections—the “danger of splitting the vote.” Marx and Engels first raised the issue in their Address. In calling for the proletariat to put forward its own candidates in elections, even though “there is no prospect whatever of their being elected . . . they must not allow themselves to be bribed by such arguments of the democrats . . . that by so doing they are splitting the democratic party and giving the reactionaries the possibility of victory. The ultimate purpose of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is infinitely more important than the advantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.” To these kernels of wisdom, Lenin added the necessary body.

full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/10/28/august-nimtz-on-lenin-and-lesser-evil-voting/

n Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 03:31 PM, Michael Meeropol wrote:

Michael Moore has been quoted as saying he "Knows" many of these militia types and that most of them are cowards ---

 

A handful have engaged in murderous acts and there is very little "group" support for those actions ---

 

So I would hope (if Moore is right) that the brandishing of weapons is all posturing ---

 

(we can hope, right?)

Fearmongering out of a CIA handbook and David Kicullen--whoever he is--aka "experts"--is pretty thin porridge.  Still, the threat of all those millions of assault rifles is real.  

 

 

Check out the comments. I posted a few as "Al M" from Norfolk.

https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/industry-totals?highlight=y&ind=F27&src=a

Hedge Funds & Private Equity Donations

If you’re a supporter of that radical extremist group Keep America Habitable for Human Beings, you might have been encouraged by the 2020 presidential race.

In 2016, climate change — the scientific fact of the earth’s encroaching uninhabitability — was mostly ignored, including in the debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. This year, the changing climate and what to do about it got airtime in both presidential debates and the vice-presidential debate. Climate change was also one of the top issues during the Democratic primary race. Several candidates published detailed climate plans; Joe Biden’s proposal is the most ambitious response to climate change ever proposed by a major-party nominee for president.

And yet I keep getting discouraged by how far there is to go. Voters, the candidates and especially the political media have not given it enough attention this year, considering the stakes at hand. Worse, when politicians do address climate change, the discussion in mainstream media is often uninformed, following a script favorable to oil companies.

These problems were on stark display in the ridiculous dust-up over Biden’s statement during the debate last week that the United States needs to transition away from oil. When asked about climate change, Biden told a series of truths. He noted, correctly, that it’s an “existential threat to humanity,” that “we don’t have much time” to address it, that doing so could create hundreds of thousands of jobs and that it would involve eliminating our reliance on the cause of the problem, fossil fuels.

ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

Trump’s answer was a series of absurdities. He said that he loves the environment, but that plans to address climate change would cost a lot of money and many jobs, would require buildings with very small windows and that wind power creates “fumes” and kills a lot of birds. (In fact, cats, buildings and cars are far bigger threats to birds.)

I’m not sure how anyone could come away from that debate thinking that Biden is the one who made a rhetorical flub. “The takeaway isn’t what Biden said, it’s what Trump said,” Kendra Pierre-Louis, a former reporter for The New York Times who is now a reporter on the podcast “How to Save a Planet,” told me. “Trump effectively said he doesn’t have a climate plan, and we are facing an existential crisis.”

Yet it was Biden, not Trump, who got in political hot water for his answer. After the debate, Trump’s campaign, with an assist from talking heads on cable news and the internet, began suggesting that Biden’s comments would hurt his chances in oil- and gas-producing states like Texas and Pennsylvania. Biden later walked back his comment, explaining that a transition away from oil would take very long time.

What a disaster. Why can’t we abide an honest discussion about climate change?

One problem is the Electoral College: Our nutty electoral system gives more say to some voters than others. This year the nation has suffered a string of terrifying weather disasters hastened by climate change. Large parts of the West are on fire, and there have been so many tropical storms that we had to go deep into the Greek alphabet to name them. But in the race for president, the future of the fracking industry in Pennsylvania is elevated above all these other problems, because Pennsylvania is a swing state and Louisiana is not.

To make things much worse, the pundit class on Twitter and cable news rarely discuss climate change as the existential threat to humanity that it now plainly is.

ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

It’s easy to dismiss talking heads as background noise, but how we talk about climate change does real damage. The climate is often viewed through a narrow, partisan lens — as if it’s just another lefty issue, somewhere on the priority list between free college and a higher minimum wage.

But passing a climate plan wouldn’t be a partisan win for Democrats — it would be a win for human beings. Climate change isn’t a policy issue — it’s a reality that every other political question hinges on: jobs, tax policy, national defense, and the size and scope of the welfare state. As climate change becomes increasingly damaging, we will have to think about all of these issues through the larger response to a changing planet.

Finally, efforts to address climate change are usually framed as a trade-off between the environment and jobs, which is way off base. The trade-off goes the other way. Every major climate proposal involves lots of government spending to create more sustainable technologies and infrastructure — a process that experts say would result in more economic activity, including new jobs.

On the other hand, ignoring climate change will be costly. A report published by 13 federal agencies in 2018 estimated hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and a reduction in gross domestic product of up to 10 percent by the end of the century if America does nothing.

Emily Atkin, a journalist who covers climate change in her newsletter, Heated, analyzed media coverage of last week’s Trump-Biden climate exchange. Out of 30 mainstream news outlets, she found that only a handful mentioned the cost of inaction on climate change, raising the concern that “voters might not be getting a balanced look at presidential climate policy at a crucial point in the election,” she wrote.

One possibly very silly metaphor I have found useful for conveying the enormity of climate change is an alien attack. Imagine that the Martians arrive, hover over our planet and aim their weather machines at us to create hurricanes and fires, flood our cities, raise the seas, and otherwise generally cause destruction.

How would we talk about the problem then? If one candidate showed us a plan for creating a new ray gun to defeat the aliens, and the other insisted everything was fine and the alien ships were actually just clouds, who would you vote for?

ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

As people who want a habitable planet, we’ve got to demand that political media and politicians approach this issue with the gravity it deserves. Climate change is real. Its effects are now being felt around the nation and the world. And when one politician offers a plan to address the thing causing all this misery and the other does not even bother, it shouldn’t be this difficult to spot the problem.

The sitting president of the United States has no plan to address the most important problem facing humanity. That’s it. That’s the scandal. That’s the tweet. That’s the headline.

The probability of civil war in the US revolves around the tens of millions of rightwing fanatics who are meant to be thirsting for blood and ready to shoot.  FYI--this piece from, er, Rawstory quoting various Deep State authorities on how that can happen and may be about to happen.  

Is this right?  If not, what?  Please, refute this ...

Among other questions: how many prison camps and firing squads would the revolution need to fight this menace, and where the H. would all that come from?  

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/10/experts-fear-us-is-on-the-brink-of-civil-war-millions-of-people-are-actively-prepared-to-their-countrymen/

I ducked this issue by voting for Hawkins, whom I admire and who I think would do a more than competent job of presidenting if he had the chance.

The reality is that in DC, where I live, there is zero chance of the Rump winning the little pot of electors.  Biden winning is a foregone conclusion.

People living in less "safe" localities have a decision to make.  

The only thing I'll say about that is that Biden is very unlikely to accomplish much. It's just possible that he will allow someone in government to organize a more effective response to the pandemic.  For the rest, I expect him to dither around and "reach out across the aisle" to the assorted grifters and child rapists of the Republican parties and to launch some kind of witch hunt if the Left gets stroppy about being thrown under the bus.  I give him two years before a mid-term disaster for the Demicraps.  Maybe the Post Office will get back to "normal."

We wouldn't have Trump now if there were any "normalcy" to return to.  Marxists in general--however at daggers drawn they may be among themselves--probably don't need much reminding of this; still, it's one thing to know a historical probability and another to face up to it when it manifests.

People assume Trump wants to be some kind of dictator, and he probably does.  But what he means by that is anarchy in a bad sense.  If he's the beneficiary of a coup, the result will be more chaos rather than a regimented saubere reich.  State power will be used to ensure chaos where Trump wants it and the retreat from governance and the accompanying plundering will accelerate.

The reality is that Biden will fail by his own standards.  Maybe two years of delivering the mail and a funcctioning CDC are worth it.  But in all likelihood, there will immediately be a campaign of suppressing the Left in order to win the mid-terms.  This will never stop--there will be a bogey Greater Evil at every point.

NY Times, Oct. 28, 2020
When a Kidnapping Ring Targeted New York’s Black Children
By Parul Sehgal

The Kidnapping Club
Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
By Jonathan Daniel Wells
Illustrated. 354 pages. Bold Type Books. $30.

In 1833, Black children began to vanish from the streets of New York City.

Frances Shields, age 12, with cropped hair and a scar over her right eye, was last seen walking to school wearing in a purple and white dress. John Dickerson, 11, disappeared while running an errand for his parents. Jane Green, 11, was speaking to a stranger before she went missing. Or so it was believed; none of the children were heard from again.

More children began disappearing — more than one a week. The police refused to investigate the cases, and the mayor ignored the community’s pleas for help. Black parents searched on their own, scouring orphanages, prisons, poorhouses. It was whispered that supernatural forces were involved; what malign spirit was hunting these children?

Not a spirit — a club, of sorts.

In “The Kidnapping Club,” the historian Jonathan Daniel Wells describes the circle of slave catchers and police officers who terrorized New York’s Black population in the three decades before the Civil War. They snatched up children, as well as adults, and sold them into slavery.

Under the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause, states were required to return anyone fleeing bondage to their enslavers. Some New York police officers, like the notorious Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash — central members of the club — used the mandate to target the Black population of New York, with the assistance of judges, like the city recorder Richard Riker, who’d swiftly draw up a certificate of removal. There were no trials. The slaves were not even permitted to testify on their own behalf. Some really were fugitives from the South; others were free people — seized off the street, or from their homes in the middle of the night, and sold for a handsome fee. Boudinot bragged that he could “send any Black to the South.”

David Ruggles, an indefatigable journalist and a leader in the city’s Black antislavery organizations, gave the group the sobriquet. He was early to sound the alarm about the missing children, and helped to found the New York Committee of Vigilance, which sheltered runaways and led protests against the abductions.

Ruggles anchored the movement, and he anchors this book. He was a brilliant and frustrating figure, equally nettlesome to his enemies and his comrades. Possessed of unfathomable energy, the man appeared to be everywhere at once — protesting at City Hall, editing his journal, The Mirror of Liberty, needling officials. While members of the Kidnapping Club stalked Black men and women as they walked alone along the desolate wharves, Ruggles stalked them in return.

Slavery had been outlawed in New York by 1827, but the city remained profoundly dependent on the institution. “New York was the most potent pro-slavery and pro-South city north of the Mason-Dixon Line,” Wells writes. Slavery had given shape to the city from its earliest days, when enslaved Africans cleared the forests and plowed the farms. By the late 1600s, New York was the largest slaving port in North America. In its infancy, Wall Street had hosted slave auctions, and now it extended credit to the cotton mills of the South. Insurance companies insured slave ships and took on the enslaved as collateral.

Wells conjures the pungent atmosphere of Manhattan in the early 19th century — the crooked streets and smoke-choked skies, the reek of manure, the Dutch village feel. During the 30-year span covered by this book, however, the city boomed. The streets were lit and paved. Railroads connected neighborhoods, and after the fire of 1835 devastated Lower Manhattan, the city sprang out of its own ashes in mere months, grander than ever. Real estate prices soared.

That expansion, Wells writes, “had been built on the backs of Southern slaves who picked cotton for hundreds of thousands of cotton bales every year, a crop that was financed by Wall Street banks and exported to New England and British textile mills via New York brokers, businesses and financiers.”

Slavery was prohibited in the state, but slave ships still docked at New York’s harbors, and the warehouses on the waterfront held cotton and tobacco. Sugar refining was Brooklyn’s biggest industry in 1850. Slavery openly continued in some quarters. When Ruggles heard of a Savannah businessman living in Brooklyn with three enslaved people, he took the ferry from Manhattan across the East River and knocked on the door.

The mistress of the home mounted a vague defense. Finally she claimed that her captives depended on her. She turned to one of them, Charity, and said, “You know you are subject to fits and will suffer if you leave me.”

Charity responded evenly: “Yes, I know I had fits from your beating me on the head, missee.” She left with Ruggles. Difficulties pursued her — a pregnancy and poverty. The press reported on the story with relish. This newspaper denounced Ruggles at the time, for his meddling.

New York was beholden to the South, enriched by it and dependent on it — never mind the frenzy of the Kidnapping Club and the children who kept vanishing.

Like Henry Scott, age 7.

Henry was at school practicing his letters when two men — a Southerner and a New York City sheriff — burst into the classroom, claiming he was a fugitive to be returned to Virginia. Henry’s terrified classmates ran after the men for as long as they could.

Henry was permitted to stay in New York, but his case, Wells writes, left a long scar on the city. The narrative is constructed around such incidents that outraged Black New Yorkers, and incited huge, well-coordinated protests. Hundreds of people would show up at a dock after hearing news of a kidnapped person smuggled in a ship. Protesters flooded courtrooms, and under the public glare, the members of the Kidnapping Club began to quail.

There are other, more comprehensive studies of the kidnappings — Eric Foner’s “Gateway to Freedom,” for example, which looks at their wider history and prevalence. Other cities, like Philadelphia, were also deeply marked by such disappearances. Wells’s achievement is keeping his focus closely trained on New York and on the missing. There are no minor characters in his book; every person on the page is accorded the rights of the protagonist, rendered as fully as possible, with every detail available (like Frances Shields, with her cropped hair and her purple and white dress).

Wells writes, one senses, not to memorialize the missing, but to reopen their cases — to make a larger argument about recompense. “The question of reparations is fraught,” he writes in conclusion, “but surely with the input of historians and many others we can find a solution that will in some significant way attempt to compensate generations of African-Americans north and south who have endured the theft of rights and belongings and lives.”

This is history read with a sense of vertigo, suffused with the present: a rash of child abductions met with official complacency, stories about Black men and women attacked while sleeping in their homes and praying at church.

“So we passed,” Solomon Northup wrote in “Twelve Years a Slave,” his 1853 memoir of traveling from New York to Washington, D.C., and being kidnapped and sold into bondage in Louisiana. “Handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington, through the capital of a nation, whose theory of government, we were told, rests on the foundation of man’s inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed!”

Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.

https://socialistworker.org/2018/08/20/precedents-for-flexibility

Did Lenin Advocate Tactical Support for a Capitalist Party?
Nate Moore | In the current SW debate, some have considered whether to critically support socialist candidates who run in the Democratic Party.

In challenging the idea that revolutionary socialists should not under any circumstances support candidates who run in the Democratic Party, Eric Blanc, in his latest contribution “A Few Lessons from History,” makes the following argument to show that the Bolsheviks in Russia did not have a principled stand of non-support for the liberal Cadet Party, and instead exercised “tactical flexibility.” He writes:

"In both the 1907 and 1912 elections...Lenin’s current advocated that Marxists support “the compilation of common lists of electors” with liberal parties in the second round of the elections..."

Lenin sometimes even openly advocated a lesser-evil voting tactic in the second round of elections in Russia: “When a socialist really believes in a Black-Hundred danger and is sincerely combating it — he votes for the liberals without any bargaining.”...[O]ur revolutionary socialist predecessors often displayed more tactically flexibility than many comrades have yet acknowledged.

The last paragraph was also a quote from Blanc.

https://socialistworker.org/2018/08/20/precedents-for-flexibility

Did Lenin Advocate Tactical Support for a Capitalist Party?
Nate Moore | In the current SW debate, some have considered whether to critically support socialist candidates who run in the Democratic Party.

In challenging the idea that revolutionary socialists should not under any circumstances support candidates who run in the Democratic Party, Eric Blanc, in his latest contribution “A Few Lessons from History,” makes the following argument to show that the Bolsheviks in Russia did not have a principled stand of non-support for the liberal Cadet Party, and instead exercised “tactical flexibility.” He writes:

"In both the 1907 and 1912 elections...Lenin’s current advocated that Marxists support “the compilation of common lists of electors” with liberal parties in the second round of the elections..."

Lenin sometimes even openly advocated a lesser-evil voting tactic in the second round of elections in Russia: “When a socialist really believes in a Black-Hundred danger and is sincerely combating it — he votes for the liberals without any bargaining.”...[O]ur revolutionary socialist predecessors often displayed more tactically flexibility than many comrades have yet acknowledged.

The article by Lenin that Eric quotes from is “The St. Petersburg Elections and the Hypocrisy of the Thirty-One Mensheviks.” It was written in February 1907 and concerns the lead-up to the second elections to the Duma — a toothless parliamentary body set up by the monarchy as a concession to the revolution of 1905.

I believe, on the contrary, that rather than Lenin demonstrating “tactical flexibility,” a reading of this article in context shows his principled position of independence from the liberal capitalist Cadets and provides some lessons for us today.

Some background

Before looking at the article, it is necessary to briefly describe how the second Duma elections were structured, and understand the political groupings under discussion.

Before the elections, parties registered under “lists.” These “lists” operated like electoral coalitions. In the Duma elections, there were three lists: the Black Hundreds (far right), the Cadets (liberal) and Social Democratic (revolutionary).

The election process for obtaining seats in the Duma involved two rounds. In the first round, people voted for “electors” (representatives). In the second, the electors voted for the final composition of the Duma. By design, the second round weeded out radicals, thereby leading to a more conservative grouping of representatives.

At this time, the revolutionaries were organized in one party: the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). This party, although formally united, had two main wings: the Bolsheviks, the more revolutionary wing, and the Mensheviks, the more moderate.

Lenin wrote the article that Eric quotes from to show that the Menshevik position of supporting agreements with the Cadet Party during the first round of elections was inconsistent. The Mensheviks justified agreements with the Cadet Party, arguing that the Black Hundreds winning a majority of seats in the Duma was a real danger. Later, the Mensheviks broke from the Cadets over the latter not giving the former a seat in the Duma.

Lenin points out the inconsistency of the Mensheviks with the argument that if the Mensheviks thought the Black Hundreds were really a danger, they wouldn’t have broken over the issue of not getting a seat in the Duma. The Mensheviks’ actions proved that they prized electoralism — that is, winning a Duma seat — over a principled position of independence from Cadet liberalism.

By contrast, Lenin’s point was to argue for independence from the Cadets throughout the whole election process.

Eric is right that Lenin was open to the idea of giving some level of support for Cadets in the second round of elections to the Duma to prevent a Black Hundred majority. But Lenin’s statement is highly qualified.

First of all, he was writing about a hypothetical scenario, not a real one. Lenin argued that the electoral sentiments and mood of the country made it highly unlikely, if not impossible, for a split vote between Cadets and Social Democrats to lead to a Black Hundred majority. Instead, the manufactured fear of a Black Hundred majority was the Cadets’ excuse for getting workers to vote for them. The Mensheviks broadcasting this fear was evidence of their inconsistent policy.

Second, if the highly unlikely hypothetical scenario did become a reality, Lenin believed it would not compromise the revolutionary principle of political independence from the Cadets because the second round of “elections” was a closed session among electors. There was no longer any Social Democratic agitation that could be conducted among the people.

The second round was merely haggling over the division of seats among electors in a toothless body where the Russian masses no longer had a say. Consequently, it would cost revolutionaries, at most, a few Duma seats and no loss of independent revolutionary influence among the people to prevent a Black Hundred majority.

More than displaying Lenin’s tactical flexibility toward liberals, his writings at this time show that Lenin didn’t prize a symbolic seat in the Duma at all costs, as was the case with the Mensheviks. Symbolic support could be given in the event of a highly unlikely split vote without revolutionaries tying their hands.

What does this mean for socialists today?

I believe the article Eric quotes from and other articles from this time better illustrate Lenin’s argument for a principled independence from liberal capitalist parties than any confirmation of Bolshevik “tactical flexibility” toward liberalism.

The Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP approached the first round of elections as an independent party. They only permitted electoral agreements with other radical parties like the Social Revolutionaries. They never ran elections under a Cadet Party banner or platform. This is as much the case in 1907 as 1912.

While the Bolsheviks stayed independent throughout the elections, the Mensheviks, by contrast, made an electoral pact with the Cadets, only to be burned by the liberals in a deal that didn’t go their way.

How does any of this apply to the U.S. electoral context today? Though conditions are obviously very different in the two cases, the first round of elections to the Duma more resembles the situation with U.S. elections today in the sense that both involve open agitation of political parties among the people. The second round of elections in Russia isn’t at all comparable to anything we face electorally in the U.S.

In the first round, Lenin was adamant on complete independence from the Cadet Party, with no electoral agreements.

Concluding that Lenin exhibited tactical flexibility toward liberalism — and therefore that we consider doing so today with the Democratic Party — because of a highly qualified and hypothetical scenario in the second round of elections that has no parallel in the U.S. electoral system today is a stretch, and all the more so when one looks at everything Lenin wrote before the elections regarding why Social Democrats should oppose the Cadets.

It includes voting as effectively against Trump as possible, not so much voting for Biden. The state of the climate and toe ecological precipice require getting rid of Trump who is on a tear of erasing public and ecological protections and working overtime on environmental destruction. Biden is a weak corporate politician but better on the issue. He can and must be pushed by massive citizen pressure and actions. In the short term, its our best bet since there is no way Howie Hawkins will be elected.. 

Most of the obituaries have not mentioned di Prima's activism, particularly her anti-war stance, her advocacy of abortion rights, her leadership in the sanctuary movement of the 1980s. 

Some choice quotes: "When I was 14 and I decided I was going to be a poet, I knew that that meant right then, starting and writing every day. And I wrote EVERY DAY." - "There IS a craft and you never stop learning it. And you're on the lookout for what's gonna give you the next piece of it." - "Your imagination has YOU as its instrument, and you've got to provide it with as many strings to play on as possible!"  

NY Times, Oct. 28, 2020
As Election Nears, Trump Makes a Final Push Against Climate Science
By Christopher Flavelle and Lisa Friedman

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has recently removed the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s premier scientific agency, installed new political staff who have questioned accepted facts about climate change and imposed stricter controls on communications at the agency.

The moves threaten to stifle a major source of objective United States government information about climate change that underpins federal rules on greenhouse gas emissions and offer an indication of the direction the agency will take if President Trump wins re-election.

An early sign of the shift came last month, when Erik Noble, a former White House policy adviser who had just been appointed NOAA’s chief of staff, removed Craig McLean, the agency’s acting chief scientist.

Mr. McLean had sent some of the new political appointees a message that asked them to acknowledge the agency’s scientific integrity policy, which prohibits manipulating research or presenting ideologically driven findings.

The request prompted a sharp response from Dr. Noble. “Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?” he wrote, according to a person who received a copy of the exchange after it was circulated within NOAA.

Mr. McLean answered that his role as acting chief scientist made him responsible for ensuring that the agency’s rules on scientific integrity were followed.

The following morning, Dr. Noble responded. “You no longer serve as the acting chief scientist for NOAA,” he informed Mr. McLean, adding that a new chief scientist had already been appointed. “Thank you for your service.”

It was not the first time NOAA had drawn the administration’s attention. Last year, the agency’s weather forecasters came under pressure for contradicting Mr. Trump’s false statements about the path of Hurricane Dorian.

But in an administration where even uttering the words “climate change” is dangerous, NOAA has, so far, remained remarkably independent in its ability to conduct research about and publicly discuss changes to the Earth’s climate. It also still maintains numerous public websites that declare, in direct opposition to Mr. Trump, that climate change is occurring, is overwhelmingly caused by humans, and presents a serious threat to the United States.

Replacing Mr. McLean, who remains at the agency, was Ryan Maue, a former researcher for the libertarian Cato Institute who has criticized climate scientists for what he has called unnecessarily dire predictions.

Dr. Maue, a research meteorologist, and Dr. Noble were joined at NOAA by David Legates, a professor at the University of Delaware’s geography department who has questioned human-caused global warming. Dr. Legates was appointed to the position of deputy assistant secretary, a role that did not previously exist.

Neil Jacobs, the NOAA administrator, was not involved in the hirings, according to two people familiar with the selection process.

The agency did not respond to requests for comment and a request to make the new officials available for an interview.

David Legates, second from right, was appointed to the position of deputy assistant secretary. Credit...Kris Connor/Getty Images
NOAA officials have tried to get information about what role the new political staff members would play and what their objectives might be, with little success. According to people close to the administration who have questioned climate science, though, their primary goal is to undercut the National Climate Assessment.

The assessment, a report from 13 federal agencies and outside scientists led by NOAA, which the government is required by law to produce every four years, is the premier American contribution to knowledge about climate risks and serves as the foundation for federal regulations to combat global warming. The latest report, in 2018, found that climate change poses an imminent and dire threat to the United States and its economy.

“The real issue at play is the National Climate Assessment,” said Judith Curry, a former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology who said she has been in contact with Dr. Maue, the new chief scientist. “That’s what the powers that be are trying to influence.”

In addition to Dr. Curry, the strategy was described by Myron Ebell, a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a former member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, and John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Dr. Christy, a critic of past National Climate Assessments, said he was asked by the White House this summer to take on a senior role at NOAA, according to E&E News, but declined the offer. He said he understood the role to include changing the agency’s approach to the climate assessment.

Ms. Curry and the others said that, if Mr. Trump wins re-election, further changes at NOAA would include removing longtime authors of the climate assessment and adding new ones who challenge the degree to which warming is occurring, the extent to which it is caused by human activities and the danger it poses to human health, national security and the economy.

A biased or diminished climate assessment would have wide-ranging implications.

It could be used in court to bolster the positions of fossil fuel companies being sued for climate damages. It could counter congressional efforts to reduce carbon emissions. And, it ultimately could weaken what is known as the “endangerment finding,” a 2009 scientific finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that said greenhouse gases endanger public health and thus obliged the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Other changes  could include shifting NOAA funding to researchers who reject the established scientific consensus on climate change and eliminating the use of certain scientific models that project dire consequences for the planet if countries do little to reduce carbon dioxide pollution.

Dr. Noble, the new chief of staff, has already pushed to install a new layer of scrutiny on grants that NOAA awards for climate research, according to people familiar with those discussions.

Meaningfully changing the National Climate Assessment’s findings would be hard to accomplish, according to Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science for the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of a chapter in the latest edition of the report.

Still, Dr. Ekwurzel said NOAA’s role leading the report is vital and added that any attempt to undermine climate research for political purposes would threaten public safety and economic growth. “You need to have a well-functioning scientific enterprise,” she said. “The more we back away from that, the more we erode our democracy.”

Most of the changes at NOAA could be reversed by the next president, officials say, making next week’s election a referendum on the future of the agency.

The dissonance between NOAA’s work and Mr. Trump’s dismissiveness toward climate change became clear at the end of 2018, with the publication of the latest installment of the National Climate Assessment. The report put Mr. Trump in the awkward position of disavowing the findings of his own government. “I don’t believe it,” the president said of the economic assessment in the report.

But for the president’s advisers, the climate assessment posed a greater problem than being mildly embarrassing. It threatened the administration’s policy aims, because its conclusions about the threat of climate change made it harder, from a legal perspective, for the administration to justify rolling back limits of greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Ebell and another former member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, Steven J. Milloy, said they expected that Dr. Legates in particular would steer the next National Climate Assessment in a sharply different direction. They said Dr. Legates intended to question the models that NOAA scientists use to predict the future rate of warming and its effects on precipitation. Climate denialists broadly say the models used by scientists are flawed.

That could ultimately make the endangerment finding, the scientific and legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, vulnerable. As recently as July, Mr. Legates explained the connection himself: In an op-ed for Townhall, a conservative website, he noted that the science that underpins the endangerment finding relies primarily on the National Climate Assessment and claimed the models employed by its authors “systematically overestimate” warming.

Officials at NOAA also say they fear that the new staffers will bring more climate denialists into the agency and push out scientists who object. They cite an executive order Mr. Trump signed last week making it easier to hire and fire civil servants involved in setting policy.

The spate of new appointees isn’t the only example of growing political constraints.

In August, a few weeks before the new political staff began arriving at NOAA, the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA and a handful of other agencies, issued a surprise memorandum: All internal and external communications must be approved by political staff at the department at least three days before being issued. The restrictions applied to social media posts, news releases and even agencywide emails.

The new policy meant that Dr. Jacobs, the NOAA administrator, could no longer send messages to his own staff members without having them cleared from above. The goal of the policy was to make sure all communications “serve the needs of your employees and mission while aligning with the over-arching guidance from the White House and Department,” the memo said.

“I think that until recently NOAA has been mostly spared the political interference with science that we’ve seen as a hallmark across this administration,” said Jane Lubchenco, who served as NOAA administrator in the Obama administration.

“That integrity and the credibility that it brings are threatened by these recent appointments,” Dr. Lubchenco said. “The positions that these individuals are in gives them the perfect opportunity to suppress, distort and cherry-pick information to make it whatever the party line is.”

Christopher Flavelle focuses on how people, governments and industries try to cope with the effects of global warming. He received a 2018 National Press Foundation award for coverage of the federal government's struggles to deal with flooding. @cflav

Lisa Friedman reports on federal climate and environmental policy from Washington. She has broken multiple stories about the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal climate change regulations and limit the use of science in policymaking. @LFFriedman

(The print edition title is "Why Socialists Should Vote for Biden". I've never heard of Aleem before but Googling "Zeesham Aleem" and Venezuela revealed a typically reactionary article on Vox, a liberal magazine.)

Why Leftists Should Vote for Biden in Droves
Politics is about power, and the left will have more under a Biden presidency.
By Zeeshan Aleem

Should have mentioned that this is in today's NYT.

(The print edition title is "Why Socialists Should Vote for Biden". I've never heard of Aleem before but Googling "Zeesham Aleem" and Venezuela revealed a typically reactionary article on Vox, a liberal magazine.)

Why Leftists Should Vote for Biden in Droves
Politics is about power, and the left will have more under a Biden presidency.
By Zeeshan Aleem

If you were to think up a nightmare for the socialist left, it would be hard to think of someone more horrifying than President Trump: an authoritarian billionaire who uses the White House to enrich himself and his inner circle while deploying racism to cleave the working class and shunning international cooperation.

And yet in some quarters of the left there are signs of hesitation about voting for Joe Biden.

Briahna Joy Gray, press secretary for Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, caused a stir in a recent debate with Noam Chomsky by questioning the value of voting for Democrats. And even among those who do support voting for Mr. Biden, it is common to see them attach qualifications that narrow that to swing-state voting.

After Mr. Sanders dropped out of the 2020 primaries, Krystal Ball, a left-wing commentator, argued that leftists should decide whether they want to cast “nose holding” votes for Mr. Biden in the general election. And she committed to not “judging or shaming” former Sanders supporters for weighing their options, a choice each one would have to make “for themselves.”

But Ms. Ball’s formulation, ironically, has a whiff of bourgeois liberalism to it. Leftists don’t tell one another to split up and act in isolation; they derive power and meaning from debating and executing collective action, like labor politics and protests and community organizing. And leftists shouldn’t conceive of politics as self-expression: Politics is about the balance of power in society — between capital and labor, between elites and the marginalized.

It’s evident that while socialists detest Mr. Trump’s embodiment of plutocracy, some still feel icky about casting a ballot for a man pledging to restore the status quo and whose prominent surrogates proudly point out that he could not be mistaken for a socialist. But they shouldn’t. Instead, they should mobilize en masse on behalf of Mr. Biden in every state, without apology or embarrassment — and even with some excitement. To do so would not be to renege on their commitment to socialism, but rather to advance its cause.

A social movement that wants to reshape the world seeks out political terrain more conducive to change.

Mr. Trump’s re-election would mean four more years of scrambling to shield the already insufficient Affordable Care Act, but a win by Mr. Biden would allow socialists to go on offense and push for a Medicare-for-all system. Mr. Trump’s re-election would deal irreversible damage to the planet, but there are signs that Mr. Biden could be pressured to adopt the ambition of the Green New Deal. And without Mr. Biden to rebalance the ideological makeup of the courts, most of the policies that the left is pushing on organized labor or the welfare state would be rendered legally impossible.

These policies would not constitute the realization of socialism, but they would help lay the foundation for liberating workers.

Since Americans are far more motivated to enter the voting booth for presidential candidates than for politicians for any other office, encouraging turnout for Mr. Biden could also tip the outcome of competitive down-ballot races: Socialists and their fellow travelers on the left could ride into office in federal, state and local elections on his coattails, pulling the Democratic Party left and enacting policies that protect the poor and communities of color.

Just as important, it could help ensure that Democrats win back control of the Senate. If Mr. Biden slips into the presidency without the Democrats’ taking control of the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell will filibuster even the most vanilla Democratic bills into oblivion.

The unique threats that Mr. Trump poses to democracy with acts like the politicization of the Justice Department and calls for violent crackdowns on protests should clarify the stakes for the left.

An overwhelming majority of active socialists in the United States today are democratic socialists — they believe that political and economic democracy are both indispensable and interconnected. That means they have a duty and an interest in thwarting the emergence of an authoritarian regime.

Mr. Trump’s efforts to interfere in the elections are yet another reason for a massive left-wing mobilization: Given his attempts at tampering and his questioning the legitimacy of mail-in voting, legal scholars like Lawrence Douglas at Amherst College argue that a huge margin in favor of Mr. Biden may be the country’s best weapon against Mr. Trump trying to steal the election.

A very fringe view on the left holds that the election of reactionaries like Mr. Trump intensifies the crises that will inspire people to turn to socialism and justifies ignoring the polls or voting for third-party candidates. This argument suffers both from ethical and strategic problems.

Subjecting the planet and the most vulnerable people who live on it to suffering on the hope that it prompts people to question capitalism is a cruel gamble at odds with principles of leftist solidarity. Moreover, it’s a reckless wager: Consider that authoritarian regimes that deprive their citizens of rights and prosperity are capable of great longevity, as we’ve seen in countries like Russia and North Korea. No student of history would underestimate the possibility of things to simply get worse.

The left is ultimately investing in its own electoral future by taking voting for Mr. Biden seriously. A great deal of political science literature shows that voting is habitual; lefty organizations should be building get-out-the-vote infrastructure and socializing the left to think about voting as a routine collective action so that they can mobilize more effectively in future races.

While general elections often involve uninspiring choices, the rise of Mr. Sanders and a left-wing bloc in Congress led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have illustrated how Democratic primaries provide critical opportunities for the left to insert itself into American political life. If the left becomes a consistent constituency rather than a periodic threat to potential turnout numbers, it will have more leverage over the party establishment.

A sophisticated and strategic left — a left that strives to win power — knows how to pick its fights and its adversaries. The primaries are over, the party convention is over, and voting has already begun. Change does not begin or end in the voting booth. But voting is one of the simplest and most tangible ways to tilt the playing field and offer some protection to the vulnerable.

Socialists should fight like hell to get Mr. Biden into office — and then fight him like hell the day that he becomes president.

Zeeshan Aleem is a freelance political journalist and publisher of What’s Left.