Month: March 2019

My Salon Column this morning:

It has seemed odd from the very beginning that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a billionaire several times over, would patronize a massage parlor called the Orchids of Asia for a little quickie on his way to the AFC championship game. After all, men like Kraft can easily hire high end escorts and they often have mistresses on the side. Why go to a cheap strip mall?

But Kraft wasn’t the only vastly wealthy john who got caught in the sting that has put him in the headlines. Private equity mogul John Childs and former Citigroup president John Havens were also arrested. There is obviously more to this sordid story of Chinese sex trafficking to come out in the days to come. With the recent re-evaluation of the extremely disturbing Jeffrey Epstein case from the previous decade, it seems that an illegal sex trade has been thriving in the ultra-rich enclaves of South Florida.

A woman named Cindy Yang founded the “day spa” where all these wealthy powerful men went to release their … stress. Although Yang no longer owns the specific business where Kraft was videotaped receiving oral sex, it was known for offering the same “services” in her time. Her family still operates several similar enterprises that are also under suspicion for sex trafficking and prostitution. And wouldn’t you know it, Yang is a big-time Republican who now owns a company that sells access to another wealthy and powerful man with a big presence in South Florida: the president of the United States.

The Miami Herald first reported that Yang had attended a Super Bowl gathering at Mar-a-Lago, and produced a selfie of Yang and President Trump posing together at the party. The Herald also published pictures of other events showing Yang and Trump’s adult sons, along with a trio of Florida Republicans — Sen. Rick Scott, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Rep. Matt Gaetz — as well as onetime vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel.

According to the Herald, Yang had shown no interest in politics prior to 2016 — she never even voted — but “has now become a fixture at Republican political events up and down the East Coast.” These gatherings all charge big donations to attend, although much of the money collected at Mar-a-Lago affairs goes straight into Trump family coffers to pay for the event. It’s a tidy form of double dipping — and, at least in general terms, not illegal.

Yang and her family have been generous to Trump and the GOP, giving more than $42,000 to the Super PAC Trump Victory and more than $16,000 to the Trump 2020 campaign in 2017 alone. As David Corn, Dan Friedman and Daniel Schulman of Mother Jones reported last Saturday, that’s just the cost of doing business for Yang’s company, which was started a year into Trump’s presidency. Yang and her husband, Zubin Gong, started GY US Investments LLC, which they describe as an international consulting firm, in 2017. Displaying pictures of Mar-a-Lago, it openly markets access to Trump to Chinese business representatives.

For obvious reasons, national security experts were alarmed by this report. This startling combination of sex trafficking, prostitution and politicians presents a perfect opportunity for espionage and blackmail. In an explosive follow-up report on Sunday, the Mother Jones reporters make clear that these observers were right to be concerned:

Yang is an officer of two groups with ties to China’s Communist government. And she founded a Miami-based nonprofit that promotes “economic and cultural exchange” between China and the West in coordination with “senior … Chinese leaders” in the United States, according to a profile of Yang posted on a Chinese social media platform … .
[A] cursory examination of the organization’s leadership structure reveals that [Yang’s nonprofit] is directly subordinate to the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. In July, the Daily Beast reported, “‘Peaceful reunification associations’ — the term refers to Beijing’s intent to obtain sovereignty over Taiwan—have a close relationship with the [Communist Party’s] United Front Work Department, in some cases functioning almost as an extension of its Overseas Chinese Affairs Office.”

If you were following politics in the 1990s, you might be getting a little feeling of déjà vu. Chinese fundraising scandals were a staple of political investigations during the Bill Clinton years. Perhaps you remember the names Johnny Chung, Yah-Lin “Charlie” Trie, John Huang, James Riady and Maria Hsia. These were all major Democratic Party and Clinton donors who were investigated for campaign finance law violations and, in a couple of cases, connections to Chinese intelligence and other Chinese government officials.

The Justice Department first started investigating all this in 1996, right after that year’s presidential campaign. Congress soon took it up and the matter escalated into a major scandal that continued for years. Republicans repeatedly demanded an independent counsel but were rebuffed by Attorney General Janet Reno, who insisted the Department of Justice was capable of handling this investigation. It did. The probes resulted in several guilty pleas, large fines and probation. There was no evidence of any collusion with the Clinton administration or the DNC, and the campaigns returned the money.

The Republican majority in Congress made fools of themselves, as they are wont to do in these situations, and turned the congressional hearings and investigations into a circus. The House Oversight Committee, chaired at the time by the slightly daft Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., spent more than $7 million on its investigation, at the time the most expensive congressional probe in U.S. history.

Congressional expert Norm Ornstein said at the time:

Barring some dramatic change, I think the Burton investigation is going to be remembered as a case study in how not to do a congressional investigation and as a prime example of investigation as farce.

The Clinton campaign finance scandals were messy and damaging. But there was no sex trafficking or prostitution involved, and those foreign donors weren’t putting cash into the president’s personal bank account, as Yang and company are doing with big parties at a private club owned by the president. This is blackmail just waiting to happen — if it hasn’t happened already.

Presidents divest themselves of their businesses not just to avoid the “appearance” of conflict of interest, but to avoid the possibility of compromise. This president seems to have a peculiar fetish for putting himself in as many compromising positions as possible.

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“Dollar store” index
by Tom Sullivan

If ever there was a wake-up call for Democrats’ need to take back control of the U.S. Senate it was the Merrick Garland/Brett Kavanaugh saga. As 2019 wears on, whatever Robert Mueller brings, 2020 fever will take hold, media hype will increase, and the presidential derby will be in full swing. We treat the quadrennial presidential race like the political Super Bowl. What Garland/Kavanaugh should have taught us (and probably hasn’t) is that so long as Mitch McConnell controls the Senate, the presidency is not where real power in Washington lies.

The dominance of small, red states in the Senate is built into the Constitution and not likely to change. Adding new states is a short-term solution that does not argue against the merits of individual cases. As part of the last week’s voting rights package, the Democratic-controlled House voted to endorse statehood for the District of Columbia.

Howard Dean, as Democratic National Committee chair in 2006, promised, “We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years. If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.” That effort coincided with Democrats’ last wave election before 2018 and lasted for Dean’s tenure, then fizzled.

Democrats last fall, however, picked up congressional seats in places they have not since then. That holds promise for Senate pickups going forward.

Lara Putnam and Gabriel Perez-Putnam have some interesting analysis at Washington Monthly on measuring Democrats’ relative strength in more rural places they have not fared well. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) may have its informal Waffle House Index for measuring the scope of hurricane damage. Their “Dollar Store” index teases out the shifting politics among “pure urban,” “urban-suburban,” and “pure rural” areas. Higher density of SNAP-authorized dollar stores in a congressional district tracks lower median incomes, lower life expectancies, and lower educational attainment rates.

The slow decline of unions and working-class churches in such areas matched Republican gains over time. What Putnam and Perez-Putnam find is that may be changing again. They find a measure of dynamism in the sorts of places where Dean wanted Democrats to compete again. There are lots of charts:

But it isn’t just that more Democrats ran in dollar store country. The above plot shows congressional districts where Democrats ran in both 2016 and 2018. Each dot’s color shows the party that held the district going into the midterm election. Each dot’s location shows the magnitude of the congressional vote swing. The breadth of the shift is clear. Very few districts moved towards the GOP in 2018. Those that did were almost entirely in (and remained in) Democratic hands. Rather, even in districts with many dollar stores, congressional votes totals moved somewhere between a little and a lot towards the Democratic candidate. In fact, in 2018, Democrats improved their vote share as much in high-dollar-store districts as they did in ones with the fewest stores. The party’s vote share improved most in the mid-to-high dollar store districts in between.

What’s changed?

So how did Democrats make a comeback? In place after place, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, local progressives decided they could no longer wait for someone else to fix a political system they saw as broken. They stepped forward, found each other, created and used online resources, and took hands-on political action. Where Democrats’ local infrastructure had most atrophied, the new presence was most impactful.

New or re-energized progressive groups in red districts have repopulated local Democratic committees and altered the ecosystem for campaigns up and down the ballot. These groups aided candidate recruitment and fundraising, knocked on doors and made calls, and encouraged campaigns to come hold events in locales they might otherwise have skipped.

Dean wanted to turn red-state Democratic committees that had devolved into social clubs back into functioning political organizations. The governor found out that is not the DNC’s core mission. New progressive groups are making it theirs.

It won’t win back the Senate overnight, but it’s a start.

The libertine Right

by digby

Back in the day when Sean Hannity pretended to care about morality:

When the unfaithful candidate was Democrat John Edwards, Sean Hannity railed against the credibility of cheaters.

A presidential candidate who has cheated on his wife cannot be trusted to be honest with the American people, according to Fox News host Sean Hannity.

But Hannity was not talking about his good friend Donald Trump. Rather, the conservative television and talk show host held this view when it was a Democratic presidential candidate who was caught being unfaithful.

Media Matters put together a compilation of the times Hannity said on air in 2008 that John Edwards could not be trusted due to his extramarital affair and subsequent lies about it.

“You’re living a life that’s a lie. If you’re not honest, it’s a character issue,” Hannity said of Edwards. “Don’t we have a right to know before we elect somebody?”

“If you cheat on your wife, are you going to be honest with your country?” the Fox host wondered aloud.

At another point, Hannity pondered whether there is “any level of love” or “concern” on the part of a cheating husband. And he termed such behavior as a “fundamental issue.”

“I want to go back to this fundamental issue,” Hannity said. “You got to explain this to me. I’m just not getting this… If you can’t keep the promise to your family, can’t keep your promise to your wife, you’re having an affair, you’re lying about the affair repeatedly — why should the American people trust you when you say you’re not going to lie to them?

For the record, Trump reportedly has cheated on all three of his wives and lied about it.

Don’t think they won’t go right back to self-righteously scolding Democrats for personal morals. Hypocrisy is a foreign concenpt to them. And you know how much they hate anything foreign.

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“There is no Trump Tower in Moscow. But there never had to be…”

by digby

Marcy explains the Trump Tower quid pro quo to the Russia denialists:

Because there’s no shiny tower in Moscow with Trump’s name on it … it is proof that when Don Jr took a meeting in June 2016 at which he (according to the sworn testimony of four people who attended) committed to revisit Magnitsky sanctions if his dad got elected, the possibility of a $300 million payoff didn’t factor in to Junior’s willingness to sign away American policy considerations on behalf of his father.

That’s not how criminal conspiracy law works.

If you sign up for a deal and take steps to make good on it — as Don Jr did on June 9, 2016 and Paul Manafort appears to have done on August 2, 2016 and Mike Flynn appears to have done, on Trump’s behalf, on December 29, 2016 — then it doesn’t matter if the partner to that deal fucks you over later in the process. And, after all, the Russians did continue to supply Trump with a steady supply of dirt on Hillary Clinton all through the election. They got Trump elected, or at least did what they could to help, even if that payoff wasn’t the one Trump was most interested in.

Do you think Oleg Deripaska, a key player in both the deal-making and likely in the cover-up of it, gives a shit if Paul Manafort — who had screwed Deripaska over years earlier — had his life ruined as part of the process of compromising a President and getting sanctions relief? My suspicion is we’ll learn that Deripaska actually magnified Manafort’s hurt, once he had gotten him to compromise himself and the campaign.

Do you think Putin really cares whether Trump — to say nothing of the United States — benefits from the stupid choices Trump made during the election? Putin — a far better “deal” maker than Trump — got a win-win either way: Either Trump succeeded in compromising America’s rule of law in an effort to squelch any investigation into what happened, robbing the United States of the claim to idealism that so irks the master kleptocrat, Putin, or Trump would spend his Administration desperately trying to find a way out, all the while Putin connives Trump into dismantling the alliances that keep Russia in check.

And, too, Putin’s election year operation exacerbated the polarization between Democrats and Republicans such that most Republicans and a goodly number of Democrats have been unable to step back and say, holy shit, this country got attacked and we need to come together to do something about it. Trump’s win got Republicans to fear Trump’s base so much that they care more about those fevered hordes than doing what is right for this country. And Democrats rightly want to punish Trump for cheating, but haven’t thought about what a least-damaging off-ramp for that cheater might look like.

Putin doesn’t care if Trump benefits from all this — though he is happy to keep toying with Trump like a cat plays before he eviscerates his mouse. He cares about whether he and his cronies win. And there are multiple ways for him to get a win out of this, whether or not Trump manages to eke out any kind of real payoff past the election.

And let’s be honest, Putin isn’t the only one playing this game. Certainly, Mohammed bin Salman feels the same way, even if his record of ruthless dealmaking is shorter and sloppier than Putin’s. The truth is that Donald Trump and Jared Kushner are easy marks for a whole range of skilled operators willing to stroke their egos and dangle loot, and over and over again they’ve let themselves be bested in foreign policy negotiations, to the detriment of the interests of the United States. That they are so bad at deal making in no way disproves their culpability.

There is no Trump Tower in Moscow. But there never had to be. All that was needed was the promise of a ridiculously lucrative narcissism-stroking deal for the Trump family to agree to shit that would hurt this country. And all the evidence suggests that they did, and continue to do so.

James Fallows interviewed Russia hand Bill Burns and Burns had this observation about Putin and Trump:

Fallows: Everyone who is not an expert has this question for Russia experts like you. Why does Donald Trump never criticize Putin, ever? Or cross him in any way? How can this be?

Burns: Whatever may lie beneath the surface of what Mueller is investigating, I don’t know. It’s important for us to find out, and I think we’re going to find out a lot more than we know now.

But even at this stage, what’s obvious is the case of Putin envy that Trump has. I think he’s attracted to the way autocrats lead. Maybe that’s how he led the Trump Organization, I don’t know. But there’s this very transactional kind of muscular unilateralism which Putin has come to embody, at least in the imaginations of a lot of people. And Trump is clearly enamored of that. So those are clearly two factors, and what the balance is between them, I just don’t know.

There’s a profoundly mistaken view that in dealing with an autocrat like Putin, what you want to do is just curry his favor and get along, and your amiable personal relationship is going to translate into the promotion of American interests. I think there’s little evidence in the history of dealing with Putin in the last 20 years that that pays off.

Fallows: Have you seen them interact in person?

Burns: I have seen Putin lots of times over the years. I watched [on TV] their event in Helsinki. I said publicly it was the single most embarrassing performance by an American president on the international stage I’ve ever seen. And that goes back a long ways! You had Trump standing alongside Putin, throwing 17 U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies under the bus—all in an apparent effort to get along with Putin. Which is totally at variance with what diplomacy is all about. It’s not about getting along with people. It’s about promoting your interests.

Fallows: What was Putin thinking then?

Burns: Oh, you could almost see it crossing his face: What an easy mark. It’s true of a lot of autocrats, that he sees that effort to ingratiate as a sign of weakness, and as opening the door to manipulation.

That doesn’t mean you have to pound the podium and throw things at him. But what he appreciates are firmness and consistency, and what he saw was anything but that.

Putin undoubtedly also knew before the election just how desperate Trump had been for a Moscow Tower project. He’d been angling for one for decades.

What an easy mark…

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Lil’ Marco, schmaht as a whip

by digby

Rubio is the top Venezuela congressional point man for the Trump administration. Of course he is.

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But marching with Nazis is a-ok

by digby

Said by a Fox anchor tonight. “Think about it Omar wears a hijab.” Jeanine Pirro goes on to ask in her monologue and latter her guests if Omar follows sharia law. https://t.co/kGHHS0bs66— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) March 10, 2019

Sure Jeanine:

TRUMP: Those people – all of those people, excuse me – I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.

REPORTER: Well, white nationalists –

TRUMP: Those people were also there, because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue Robert E. Lee. So – excuse me – and you take a look at some of the groups and you see, and you’d know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you’re not. Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week, it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after. You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

REPORTERS YELL INDISTINCTLY

TRUMP: But, they were there to protest – excuse me – you take a look the night before, they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. Infrastructure question. Go ahead.

REPORTER: Does the statue of Robert E. Lee stay up?

TRUMP: I would say that’s up to a local town, community or the federal government, depending on where it is located.

REPORTER: On race relations in America, do you think things have gotten worse or better since you took office with regard to race relationships?

TRUMP: I think they’ve gotten better or the same – look – they have been frayed for a long time, and you can ask President Obama about that, because he’d make speeches about it. I believe that the fact that I brought in, it will be soon, millions of jobs, you see where companies are moving back into our country. I think that’s going to have a tremendous positive impact on race relations. We have companies coming back into our country. We have two car companies that just announced. We have Foxconn in Wisconsin just announced. We have many companies, I’d say, pouring back into the country. I think that’s going to have a huge, positive impact on race relations. You know why? It is jobs. What people want now, they want jobs. They want great jobs with good pay. And when they have that, you watch how race relations will be. And I’ll tell you, we’re spending a lot of money on the inner cities – we are fixing the inner cities – we are doing far more than anybody has done with respect to the inner cities. It is a priority for me, and it’s very important.

REPORTER: Mr. President, are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?

TRUMP: I am not putting anybody on a moral plane, what I’m saying is this: you had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch, but there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.

REPORTER: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?

TRUMP: I do think there is blame – yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say.

REPORTER: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.

TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

REPORTER: George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same.

TRUMP: Oh no, George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down – excuse me. Are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down his statue? He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? You know what? It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.

REPORTER: I just didn’t understand what you were saying. You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly?

TRUMP: No, no. There were people in that rally, and I looked the night before. If you look, they were people protesting very quietly, the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call ‘em. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know, I don’t know if you know, but they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit. So I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country.

That’s what they like about him.

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Venezuela 

by tristero

The usual suspects deny it, sometimes in oh-so-thoughtful pieces, but the power outage in Venezuela has “USA” and “Trump” stamped all over it.  Stuxnet, anyone?

As the article itself notes, “Cyberattacks against utilities have the ability to disrupt all facets of modern life and generate mediagenic imagery without undue risk to the initiating country, making them an almost perfect weapon.”

Yet the article concludes, without any evidence, that the US likely wasn’t involved.  And the US denies it, of course.

I believe the Trump administration is behind it but even if I’m wrong, it’s so plausible that a vast number of Venezuelans will believe the US did it. They will blame the US for the deaths and suffering it causes.

More enemies. Just what this country least needs.

What Are We Gonna Clutch When They Take Away Our Pearls? 

by tristero

Back in the late  70’s, the NY Times ran a front-page article with the lede:

The sharp right turn in the Republican Party and the rise of hard-right presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Republicans who increasingly fear that the party could fritter away its chances of beating President Carter in 1980 by careening over a conservative cliff. 

Ok, I lied. The NY Times never wrote a lede warning Republicans they were going over a cliff by becoming too conservatives. It’s inconceivable that they ever did, or will. Despite the fact that Americans are far more liberal than the mainstream press seems to think we are.

But here is what the Times actually published on the front page today:

The sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats who increasingly fear that the party could fritter away its chances of beating President Trump in 2020 by careening over a liberal cliff.

Recently, I read a wonderful book, Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin (actually I listened to it, great readers including Goodwin herself). The number of progressive policies FDR passed in the first 100 days of his administration was astounding. The positive impact on American society of all this unleashed progressivism — cultural impact, economic impact, moral impact, and so on — was simply breathtaking.

So I have a question for the “moderates” setting editorial policy at the Times: does the American economy have to crash again, do we have to see breadlines and economic suicides again, before this country and its presses will come to its senses and stop belittling liberalism and progressivism?

I hope not.

A crisis of public sanity
by Tom Sullivan

Still image from Koyaanisqatsi (1982).

In many ways, Americans never seem to have recovered psychologically from the September 11 attacks. They were a kick to the gut, a shattering of our sense of invincibility still recovering from the trauma of Vietnam, a shattering of our sense of how things are and ought to be.

Digby tweeted an article Saturday from a February Texas Observer describing a bill introduced by Representative Matt Krause from the state legislature’s far-right House Freedom Caucus. It would not only make it easier for state parents to get exemptions from vaccinating their children, it would prohibit the Texas Department of State Health Services from keeping a record of vaccine exemptions, limiting its ability to respond to disease outbreaks.

Representative Bill Zedler doesn’t get all the fuss. He got lots of childhood diseases. He got over them:

“They want to say people are dying of measles. Yeah, in third-world countries they’re dying of measles,” Zedler said, shaking his head. “Today, with antibiotics and that kind of stuff, they’re not dying in America.” Zedler says he’s adamantly in favor of “freedom of conscience” and against mandatory vaccination. “This is not the Soviet Union, you know.”

A six-year-old Oregon boy contracted tetanus from a cut on his forehead and spent 47 days in intensive care and $811,929 for want of a tetanus shot:

On day 57, he was released from the hospital and transferred to a rehabilitation center. He spent another 17 days there. And it took another month after his rehab before he was back to his old activities, including running and riding a bike.

Despite the heart-wrenching saga and “extensive review of the risks and benefits of tetanus vaccination by physicians,” his parents refused another DTaP vaccination—and all other recommended vaccines. That means he’s still vulnerable to a whole slew of vaccine-preventable illnesses and could one day get tetanus again.

I had the #Measles #Mumps #ChickenPox as a child and so did every kid I knew – Sadly my kids had #MMR so they will never have the life long natural immunity I have.

Come breathe on me!— Darla Shine (@DarlaShine) February 13, 2019

Frank Bruni has heard it before. From the wife of Bill Shine, the soon-to-be former White House communications director (who believes childhood diseases help fight cancer), and from “vaccine hysterics” who prefer their own alternative facts to medical science. Among everything from birtherism to the “Pizzagate” urban legend about child sex slaves in the nonexistent basement of a Washington pizza joint, fear of vaccines is another Internet-fueled popular conspiracy, only one with a public health impact. The anti-vaccine movement has contributed to outbreaks of measles confirmed in 11 states in 2019.

The phenomena are not just a public health crisis, Bruni writes, but “a public sanity one, emblematic of too many people’s willful disregard of evidence, proud suspicion of expertise and estrangement from reason.”

Not only that, but an anti-social rejection of any responsibility for the public good that imposes any demands on oneself. In this case, for contributing to herd immunity. As Bruni notes, anti-vaxxers inhabit both left and right on the political continuum. The movement reflects a kind of public embrace of truthiness as the preferred way information vigilantes navigate an increasingly complex world built on facts selectively accepted or rejected.

Armed to the teeth, Edgar Welch drove from North Carolina to Washington to liberate children he believed were Hillary Clinton’s captives in the basement of that pizza parlor. He believed nutty rumors because the news is fake. The government lies. Experts aren’t. Welch, like pioneers of America myth, would discover the facts for himself … a man alone, self-reliant, in a car constructed of engineered materials, designed by teams of designers, and fueled by gasoline refined through precisely controlled chemistry and part of a worldwide supply network.

Conspiracies are everywhere. Except where they are not. Some facts do not challenge our identities, our personal autonomy, our sense of how things ought to be. You can trust such “true facts” whatever so-called elitist experts say. In these altered states of America, alternative facts can guide to policymaking as well as dowsing.

Donald Trump has been chosen by God. Lying for him is virtuous and noble. Plundering the commons in his service is forgivable. Evidence is not evidence. Reality has a well-known liberal bias. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. So have we.

Saturday Night at the Movies

Broken wing: Birds of Passage (***½)

By Dennis Hartley

There have been myriad articles, books, series, documentaries and films recounting the tumultuous history of the Columbian drug trade, but nothing I have previously read or seen on the subject prepared me for Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s Birds of Passage.

Spanning 20 years from 1960 to 1980, the film (based on true events) is equal parts crime family saga and National Geographic special; The Godfather meets The Emerald Forest. On paper, this may seem like a familiar “rise and fall of a drug lord” story- but the filmmakers tell it through the unique cultural lens of Columbia’s indigenous Wayuu tribe.

The Wayuu people have dwelt in the desolate La Guajira Desert (which overlaps Columbia and Venezuela) for nearly 2,000 years. They have managed to keep many of their cultural traditions remarkably intact…considering. In other words, I’m not saying that they haven’t gotten their hair mussed once or twice throughout the millennia; from 18th-Century invasions and persecution by the Spanish, to a veritable laundry list of discriminatory and exclusionary edicts by the Columbian and Venezuelan governments.

Considering all the limitations historically placed on them (which includes having little control over and restricted access to raw materials on their own land) it is not surprising that the Wayuu have relied heavily on farming and trading as the chief means of survival.