Month: May 2020

There are riots in the streets and the president is fanning the flames with his adolescent tough guy fantasy. Yesterday, he encouraged his MAGAts to take to the streets explaining that “they love the black people.”

Question: With your tweet today, are you concerned that you may be stoking more racial violence?
Trump: No not at all… I have no idea if they’re going to be here. By the way, they love African Americans, they love black people. MAGA loves the black people. pic.twitter.com/SCnTY3ZRhX

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 30, 2020

This is what the reporters were asking about:

The professionally managed so-called “protesters” at the White House had little to do with the memory of George Floyd. They were just there to cause trouble. The @SecretService handled them easily. Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2020

Basically he’s calling for a clash between “his” people and those protesting police violence. In front of the White House.

I just don’t know what to say.

Meanwhile, we now have more than 103,000 Americans dead in the last three months. And yesterday, Trump announced that he wants to kill many more around the world:

Experts in health policy are contending with the real possibility that the United States will pull away from the World Health Organization (WHO), fracturing a relationship that began in the wake of the Second World War.

They say that the repercussions could range from a resurgence of polio and malaria, to barriers in the flow of information on COVID-19. Scientific partnerships around the world would also be damaged, and the United States could lose influence over global health initiatives, including those to distribute drugs and vaccines for the new coronavirus as they become available, say researchers.

A fissure between the US and the international health agency opened further last week, when US President Donald Trump tweeted a letter to WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, threatening to make permanent the US freeze on WHO funding that began in April, unless the organization “can actually demonstrate independence from China” within 30 days. He added that he will reconsider the United States’ membership of the organization. “I don’t think this is an idle threat,” says Kelley Lee, a global health-policy researcher at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.

Proposals for new US-led initiatives for pandemic preparedness abroad do little to quell researchers’ concerns. Some say these efforts might even add incoherence to the world’s response to COVID-19, and global health more generally, if they’re not connected to a fully-funded WHO. “It’s surreal to even be having this conversation, since it’s so hard to get one’s head around the massive implications,” says Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

The acrimony is poorly timed, given the need for international coordination and cooperation to contend with the coronavirus. “In this pandemic, people have said we’re building the plane while flying,” Katz says. “This proposal is like removing the windows while the plane is mid-air.”

Trump’s letter, which he tweeted on 18 May, alleges that the WHO intentionally ignored reports that COVID-19 was spreading between people in Wuhan, China, in December. “I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America’s interests,” he wrote. A few of Trump’s points were immediately debunked. For example, he claimed that the medical journal The Lancet had published on the new coronavirus in December. The next day, the journal issued a statement calling the claim factually incorrect because their first reports on COVID-19 were published on 24 January. The journal also refuted other allegations in the letter, concluding that the claims are “damaging to efforts to strengthen international collaboration to control this pandemic.”

Tedros has reiterated his commitment to a comprehensive and independent evaluation of the WHO’s response to COVID-19, and an assessment of the organization’s operations in the first part of 2020 is already public. But when reporters asked Tedros about additional, immediate investigations in response to Trump’s allegations at a WHO press briefing, he said, “Right now, the most important thing is fighting the fire, saving lives.”

Trump does not need Congressional approval to withhold funds from the WHO, and global health researchers say the gap left by the US is a big deal. Last year, the US government gave the WHO roughly US$450 million. Nearly 75% of that was voluntary, and the other quarter was mandatory — a sort of membership fee expected from the 194 member countries, adjusted by the size of their economies and populations. The United States is the biggest donor, representing about 15% of the WHO budget. So far this year, it has paid about one-quarter — $34 million — of its membership dues, according to a WHO spokesperson. Voluntary funds are more complicated because a large portion were paid last year, however the spokesperson says that the freeze has put a hold on new agreements, meaning that the full-blown effects of the decision will be felt in 2021.

The US government provides 27% of the WHO’s budget for polio eradication; 19% of its budget for tackling tuberculosis, HIV, malaria and vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles; and 23% of its budget for emergency health operations. If these initiatives shrink, researchers say, death and suffering will surge. David Heymann, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says this will also amount to squandered investment for the United States, particularly for polio. Gains won through vaccination campaigns that cost hundreds of millions of dollars would be lost, he says.

He does not care. And neither do his followers who have all turned into sadists in love with pain and violence. Maybe they were always this bad but I think Trump has finally, completely, unleashed the beast.

This twitter thread by law professor Steve Vladek is informative. I had questions about Posse Comitatus and he answered them. It’s not reassuring:

There’s a fair amount of disinformation and misinformation going around about the federal government’s legal authority to use troops to help respond to the unrest in Minneapolis.

Here’s a short #thread with answers (and citations to authority) for the five big questions: 

1. “Isn’t the military already on the ground”?

A: Yes, the MN National Guard has been deployed by Gov. Walz. But the Guard wears (at least) two hats. Right now, it’s wearing its “state” hat, subject to the control solely of the Governor, which is uncontroversial. 

2. “Doesn’t the Posse Comitatus Act bar use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement?”

A: No. The PCA only bars such use of the military *without* statutory authorization.

18 U.S. Code § 1385 – Use of Army and Air Force as posse comitatus

Several statutes *authorize* such use of the military for law enforcement. 

2a. As relevant here, the Insurrection Act (uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?pat…) and 10 U.S.C. § 12406, which governs federalization of Guard troops (law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10…).

When these statutes are (properly) invoked, there is no Posse Comitatus problem with domestic use of the military. 

3. “Doesn’t the Governor have to request troops before the President can send them?”

A: Not necessarily. Although *some* of these authorities require a state request before federal regulars or federalized Guard troops can be used for domestic law enforcement, some of them don’t. 

4. “But if the Governor has already called out the National Guard, doesn’t that block them from being federalized?”

A: No. The authorities to federalize the Guard do not depend on what they were doing beforehand; there may just be less *need* to do so if they’re already on site. 

5. “Okay, fine. So what are the actual limits on when the President can use Guard or regular troops for domestic law enforcement?”

A: I’ve saved the hardest one for last. The Insurrection Act is open-ended, leaving to the President the power to decide if circumstances warrant:5a. Historically, the real checks on abuse of these authorities have been political. The Insurrection Act hasn’t been invoked since 1992—largely because domestic use of the military is generally unpopular.

But it’s not implausible to argue that these statutes *could* apply now. 

5b. And it’s hard to imagine courts second-guessing factual determinations by the President that circumstances warrant use of the military to restore order.

Instead, the real constraint today might be *responsibility*; if Trump invokes these statutes, he’d own all that follows. 5c. There’s a lot more to say on the topic, but I don’t want to belabor the key points.

If you’re curious about the broader historical and constitutional foundation for these authorities, see this paper I wrote back in 2004.

P.S. It’s worth adding that, once deployed in this context, the military’s job is to supplement civilian law enforcement, not supplant it—enforcing same laws with same penalties.

Many will still be wary of domestic use of troops, but it’s not a per se threat to the rule of law. See also:

The implementing DoD regulations are *key* to how the PCA + Insurrection Act are followed by troops on the ground. The military counts 14 statutes that permit direct support to law enforcement. See enclosure 3

This would not be coming up right now if we didn’t have a president who has been dying to put his Big Beautiful Expensive Military on display in American streets since before he took office. It’s not normal for a president to eagerly threaten to use the armed forces to quell domestic unrest as he’s been doing the last few days, but I suspect this was always something he had in mind when he built up the military.

He wants to do it. And it appears that he can. So get ready.

The Pentagon said Saturday it was ready to provide military help to authorities scrambling to contain unrest in Minneapolis, where George Floyd’s death has sparked widespread protests, but Gov. Tim Walz has not requested federal troops.

Jonathan Rath Hoffman, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said several military units have been placed on higher alert “as a prudent planning measure” in case Walz asks for help. The Associated Press first reported on the potential deployments and, citing sources with direct knowledge of the orders, named four locations from which soldiers would be drawn.

Hoffman did not identify the units, but other officials said they are mainly military police. Hoffman said these are units normally on 48-hour recall to support state authorities in the event of crises like natural disasters. They are now on four-hour alert, Hoffman said.

The Pentagon said they would not go unless the Governor specifically asked for their help.

But as you can see, that is not necessary. The Commander in Chief could order it on a whim after he sees something on Fox that upsets him.

I think this piece by Karen Attiah in the Washington Post is one of the most revealing essays about the state of America I’ve read.:

If we talked about what is happening in Minneapolis the same way we talk about events in a foreign country, here’s how the Western media would cover it. The quotes and those “quoted” in the piece below are fictional.

In recent years, the international community has sounded the alarm on the deteriorating political and human rights situation in the United States under the regime of Donald Trump. Now, as the country marks 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, the former British colony finds itself in a downward spiral of ethnic violence. The fatigue and paralysis of the international community are evident in its silence, America experts say.

The country has been rocked by several viral videos depicting extrajudicial executions of black ethnic minorities by state security forces. Uprisings erupted in the northern city of Minneapolis after a video circulated online of the killing of a black man, George Floyd, after being attacked by a security force agent. Trump took to Twitter, calling black protesters “THUGS”’ and threatening to send in military force. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts!” he declared.

“Sure, we get it that black people are angry about decades of abuse and impunity,” said G. Scott Fitz, a Minnesotan and member of the white ethnic majority. “But going after a Target crosses the line. Can’t they find a more peaceful way, like kneeling in silence?”

Ethnic violence has plagued the country for generations, and decades ago it captured the attention of the world, but recently the news coverage and concern are waning as there seems to be no end in sight to the oppression. “These are ancient, inexplicable hatreds fueling these ethnic conflicts and inequality,” said Andreja Dulic, a foreign correspondent whose knowledge of American English consists of a semester course in college and the occasional session on the Duolingo app. When told the United States is only several hundred years old, he shrugged and said, “In my country, we have structures still from the Roman empire. In their culture, Americans think that a 150-year-old building is ancient history.”

Britain usually takes an acute interest in the affairs of its former colony, but it has also been affected by the novel coronavirus. “We’ve seen some setbacks with the virus, but some Brits see the rising disease, staggering unemployment and violence in the States and feel as if America was never ready to govern itself properly, that it would resort to tribal politics,” said Andrew Darcy Morthington, a London-based America expert. During the interview, a news alert informed that out of the nearly 40,000 coronavirus deaths in the United Kingdom, 61 percent of the health-care workers who have died were black and or have Middle Eastern backgrounds. Morthington didn’t seem to notice. “Like I was saying, we don’t have those American racism issues here.”

Trump, a former reality-TV host, beauty pageant organizer and businessman, once called African nations “shithole countries.” But he is now taking a page from African dictators who spread bogus health remedies, like Yahya Jammeh of Gambia, who claimed he could cure AIDS with bananas and herbal potions and pushed his treatments onto the population, resulting in deaths. Trump appeared to suggest injecting bleach and using sunlight to kill the coronavirus. He has also said he has taken hydroxycholoroquine, a drug derived from quinine, a long-known jungle remedy for malaria. Doctors have advised against using the treatment to prevent or treat the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, Americans desperate to flee will face steep challenges to cross borders, as mismanagement of the coronavirus and ethnic tensions in the country have made them undesirable visitors. But some struggling American retailers, like Neiman Marcus, are hoping to lure shoppers with traditional 19th-century colonial travel fantasies through neutral khakis and cargo shorts as part of a “Modern Safari” collection. “Utilitarian details & muted tones meet classic femininity,” reads a caption under the photograph of a white woman. Pith helmets were not included in the accessory lineup.

Some nations are considering offering black Americans special asylum. “Members of the white ethnic majority are forming armed militia groups, demanding their freedom to go back to work for the wealthy class who refer to workers as ‘human capital stock,’ despite the huge risk to workers,” said Mustapha Okango, a Nairobi-based anthropologist. “This is a throwback to the days when slavery was the backbone of the American economy. Black slaves were the original essential workers, and they were treated as non-human stock.”

Africa could be an ideal asylum destination, as several African countries have managed to contain the coronavirus outbreak through aggressive early measures and innovations in testing kits. Senegal, a nation of 16 million, has only seen 41 deaths. “Everyone predicted Africa would fall into chaos,” Okango said. “It is proof that being a black person in this world doesn’t kill you, but being a black person in America clearly can.” The African Union did not respond to requests for comment, but it released a statement that said “we believe in American solutions for American problems.”

Around the world, grass-roots organizations, celebrities, human rights activists and even students are doing what they can to raise money and awareness about the dire situation in America.

“It’s sad that the Americans don’t have a government that can get them coronavirus tests or even monthly checks to be able to feed their families,” said Charlotte Johnson, a 18-year-old Liberian student activist, who survived the Ebola pandemic. “100,000 people are dead, cities are burning, and the country hasn’t had a day of mourning? Lives don’t matter, especially not black lives. It’s like they’re living in a failing state.”

Sometimes you have to see yourself through another’s eyes to truly understand who you are.

It isn’t, of course. But any strategies to mitigate the spread are pretty obviously no longer operative. In a strange way, hitting that 100,000 number was perceived as some sort of victory margin. We have moved on.

Naturally, the right has seized upon the protests as the sign that all restrictions should be lifted:

These riots are not just about pent up frustration over police brutality and the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. In part, they’re about a population being locked up for three months while 40 million people lose their employment.

Politicians like New York City mayor Bill de Blasio cracked down on Jewish funerals and schools. They remained silent last night as hundreds of people joined protests which turned into riots in Brooklyn, injuring police officers and resulting in the arrest of several members of the Blac Block anarchist group, antifa.

Mayors in Atlanta and Minneapolis condemned the violent crowds which had gathered by the hundreds to turn on corporate businesses and small businesses alike and even the CNN headquarters building. But what was conspicuously missing from these condemnations were any health warnings that the deadly COVID-19 virus might spread as a result of these outbursts. We saw next to no hand-wringing and finger-wagging from the media or politicians about health concerns amid the riots, as we saw when Florida beaches and Lake of the Ozarks swimming pools started to fill up. If people can gather to torch a Target or an Autozone, why people should not be allowed to gather on restaurant patios and sports stadiums? The protesters have spoken with their feet.

The message is loud and clear: lockdown is over. Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is out walking the streets on a beautiful sunny day, broadcasting on Instagram Live without a mask covering her face. If our congressional representatives can stroll freely in the streets without face coverings and the dire warnings of increasing the spread of COVID-19, so can we. Enough is enough.

Token gestures toward the pandemic are still being made. In a headline ripped straight from the Onion, Minneapolis’s flaccid Mayor and Governor are telling people to wear their masks should they go out in public to protest. Thanks for the permission! Closed down bars and businesses have made alluring targets for groups of rioters looking for vulnerable targets. The property damage in Minneapolis is incalculable, and while opening up businesses immediately would not temper the entire mood of the country, it would certainly give the public other options. Give people something to do other than either sit home or join the hoards. Hair salons, restaurants, tattoo parlors, churches, bars, clubs, movie theaters and sports venues — open them all. Public officials have all but unofficially declared lockdown is over. Now is the time to open the country — all of it. End the lockdown. Stop the riots.

The “lockdowns” were already ending so he’s arguing with a strawman to own the libs. But I’m afraid his argument will have some salience among government officials. Trying to contain the pandemic is probably over at this point.

I’m afraid it’s just going to run its course and the best we can hope for is that most cities were able to prepare their health care systems to handle whatever comes next. Younger folks can still get very sick even if they aren’t as likely to die as people with pre-existing conditions and, needless to say, they can spread it to those who do. Hopefully, the fact that people were outdoors, many of them wearing masks, will mitigate the inevitable spike in cases.

What a nightmare.

It’s like something out of a movie:

BREAKING: Police shoot non-lethal rounds at people as they stand on their porch in Minneapolis pic.twitter.com/j0aIACIRwE

— BNO News (@BNONews) May 31, 2020

I have watched dozens of videos of the protests and police response over the past couple of days. These days of rage are being documented in ways we’ve never seen before. There are scenes of tremendous violence at the hands of police and intense frustration among the protesters.

That video above is one of the most chilling to me.

Those people weren’t rioting. They weren’t looting. They weren’t even protesting. There wasn’t a manhunt going on or some other kind of deadly threat.

Those people were on their own front porches in a residential neighborhood simply watching the authorities go by on the street.

That’s authoritarianism, people.

This seems like a good day to reprise this piece I wrote for Al Jazeera almost ten years ago:

What happens when a government builds a massive, unaccountable police apparatus to thwart infiltration by a foreign menace, only to see the society it’s supposed to protect take to the streets for entirely different reasons?

It looks as though we may be about to find out. The Occupy protests have been mostly peaceful, with a few fairly dramatic exceptions. But the sight of a huge police presence in riot gear is always startling, and tactics that have been honed in Europe (such as “kettling”) against anarchist actions have not been as common in the United States as elsewhere. More standard forms of crowd control, such as the aggressive use of pepper spray and “rubber” bullets have so far been the outer limits of the police use

What happens when a government builds a massive, unaccountable police apparatus to thwart infiltration by a foreign menace, only to see the society it’s supposed to protect take to the streets for entirely different reasons?

It looks as though we may be about to find out. The Occupy protests have been mostly peaceful, with a few fairly dramatic exceptions. But the sight of a huge police presence in riot gear is always startling, and tactics that have been honed in Europe (such as “kettling”) against anarchist actions have not been as common in the United States as elsewhere. More standard forms of crowd control, such as the aggressive use of pepper spray and “rubber” bullets have so far been the outer limits of the police use of force. But it is hardly the outer limits of the possibilities.

The US has actually been militarising much of its police agencies for the better part of three decades, mostly in the name of the drug war. But 9/11 put that programme on steroids.

Recall that six short weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the US congress passed the PATRIOT Act, a sweeping expansion of domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering capabilities. This legislation gave the government the ability to easily search all forms of communication, eased restrictions on foreign intelligence-gathering at home, gave itself greater power to monitor financial transactions and created entirely new categories of domestic terrorism to which the PATRIOT Act’s expanded powers to police could be applied.

It was one of the greatest expansions of government police power in history, an expansion which, after some tweaking, has been mostly validated by the congress and reaffirmed by the courts.

A little more than a week after the PATRIOT Act was passed, President Bush created the Office of Homeland Security to “develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks” and a year later, the Department of Homeland Security was established by the Homeland Security Act of 2002.

Today it is the third-largest government agency, after the departments of defence and veterans’ affairs. Aside from the billions the federal government spent on its own agencies, it has disbursed many billions more to various state and local police agencies, ostensibly for the purpose of fighting the terrorist threat.

Campus police with M-16s

More often, it created new surveillance opportunities for non-terrorist activity. In one notorious case from 2006, it was revealed that Homeland Security had given the remote Alaskan village of Dillingham (population 2,400) $202,000 to purchase surveillance cameras in order to track alleged terrorist activity.

Needless to say, Dillingham was not on any known terrorist’s target list, so the only people the surveillance cameras were watching were the citizens. But surveillance wasn’t the end of it.

As reported by Radley Balko in the Huffington Post, a Pentagon programme – started in the 1980s – to give military equipment to local police escalated in the 2000s, with even university campus police receiving everything from M-16s to armoured personnel carriers. Balko quoted one county sheriff saying that he’d use his new Homeland Security-funded SWAT team “for a lot of other purposes, too … just a multitude of other things”.

All over the country, police switched out their traditional uniforms for Battle Dress Uniforms, dubbed by one retired policeman in the Washington Post as “commando-chic” regalia. It wouldn’t be surprising to find that swaggering around armed to the teeth and dressed like RoboCop might lead some cops to adopt a more militaristic attitude.

Former San Jose chief of police Joseph McNamara raised these alarms as early as 2006 in the wake of the Sean Bell shooting in New York. He pointed out that the effects of the drug war and 9/11 had led to “an emphasis on ‘officer safety’ [where] paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed”.

Likewise, in the name of “officer safety”, the Taser became a common tool in everyday policing, deployed with little knowledge of the effects, and a tendency to Taser first and ask questions later. But over the course of the past decade, the body count grew as it became more and more obvious that tasers were sometimes as deadly as the guns they purported to replace.

‘Pain compliance’

And that’s the most prosaic of the new policing toys that are becoming available. Reporter Ando Arick analysed the new generation of weaponry in an article in Harper’s called “The Soft-Kill Solution – New Frontiers In Pain Compliance“. He recounts a 60 Minutes investigation into a new weapon to be used for what the military said was “crowd control in Iraq”.

Yet in military exercises in Georgia, soldiers were dressed as protesters, carrying signs that say “world peace”, “love for all” and “peace not war” for some reason. In what was presented as a choice between backing off and shooting into the crowd, the audience was then shown that a “ray gun” was on top of the Humvee.

“An operator squeezes off a blast. The first shot hits them like an invisible punch. The protesters regroup, and he fires again, and again. Finally they’ve had enough. The ray gun drives them away with no harm done.”

Except for the repeated “invisible punches”, of course. But like the Taser, the whole point of this “pain compliance” is to inflict short-term physical agony on human beings to “induce behavioural modification”.

They have developed plans for a flying drone that fires stun darts at suspects, a “Shockwave Area-Denial System”, which blankets the area in question with electrified darts, and a wireless Taser projectile with a 100-metre range, helpful for picking off “ringleaders” in unruly crowds.

Would the public balk? Probably not. After all, they’ve accepted the Taser to such an extent that it’s now a staple of movie comedies and viral YouTube videos. The ground has been well-prepared. And after all, just as the government has expanded its police powers and built up its arsenal of “pain compliance” weaponry, the broader culture was lifting the centuries-old taboo against torture.

It was an abstract and obscure debate that took on a surreal cast when it was revealed that early government brainstorming meetings about interrogation tactics at Guantanamo relied heavily on the question, “What would Jack Bauer do?”

Jack Bauer, of course, was a fictional character in the then-popular television show “24”, a secret agent who was known for his willingness to break any law and social norm in the pursuit of a ticking time bomb. He was specifically admired for his innovative torture techniques.

This character was a great favourite of high-ranking members of the government – notorious torture memo author John Yoo cited him in his memoir, and even Justice Antonin Scalia once publicly exclaimed: “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?”

The idea that sometimes the threat was so great that authorities had no choice but to set aside even deep cultural taboos was promulgated by the most powerful people in the nation.

The lesson from that debate was that there are times when the government has to, as Vice-President Dick Cheney famously described it, “take off the gloves”. What wasn’t decided was the criteria the nation would use to decide when that “time” was.

Today we are in a different world.

Economic justice

No longer is the nation obsessed with the terrorism threat. Guantanamo is rarely mentioned. Osama bin Laden is dead. The president has declared that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” have ended. A few stalwart civil libertarians are still fighting in the courts, but the nation’s attention has turned to a new threat – economic injustice, income inequality and political corruption. And they are taking their grievances into the streets all over the country.

So far, there have been few clashes between the Occupy forces and the police, although Oakland and New York have both seen some dramatic confrontations and the events at the UC campus in Berkeley last week were downright brutal. There have been many arrests, however, and some of the communities are starting to react unfavourably to the demonstrators, demanding that the occupations disperse. The big question for everyone is what will happen if they don’t.

Arick concluded his Harper’s report with an ominous observation:

“Each year, some 76 million people join our current 6.7 billion in a world of looming resource scarcities, ecological collapse and glaring inequalities of wealth; and elites are preparing to defend their power and profits. In this new era of triage, as democratic institutions and social safety nets are increasingly considered dispensable luxuries, the task of governance will be to lower the political and economic expectations of the masses without inciting full-fledged revolt. Non-lethal weapons promise to enhance what military theorists call ‘the political utility of force’, allowing dissent to be suppressed inconspicuously.”

The United States has never had fully militarised police before, armed with the kind of high-tech surveillance and weaponry that would never be allowed if the National Guard were called up in an emergency. And neither have we ever had such a malleable definition of what constitutes an emergency. At a time of increasing citizen unrest, it’s a volatile combination.

Certainly the government seems to have been preparing for such confrontations for some time now.

Whether the people will accept high-tech “pain compliance” to “modify” dissent remains to be seen. If the attitude towards Tasers is any guide, many won’t have a problem with it and “enhanced interrogation” of terrorist suspects has become, at best, a moral grey area for many in the US.

We have essentially normalised torture and created a high-tech police apparatus with more capability than any military in history. Human nature suggests that if you build it, they will use it.

I figure after the last few days we all need one .

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

CNN’s Daniel Dale, doing his job:

Undeterred by the pandemic, Trump kept using a bunch of his old favorite false claims. (No, he is not the one who got the Obama-era Veterans Choice program passed; no, he has not always protected patients with pre-existing conditions.) But he also created entire new categories of pandemic-specific dishonesty.

Trump made 71 false claims about the pandemic and travel. He made 37 about coronavirus testing. This includes one of his most infamous and most egregious false claims of the crisis — his March 6 declaration that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” — and 12 renditions of perhaps his most absurd pandemic false claim, the insistence that the Obama administration left him bad or old tests for this new virus for which there could not have been a test until Trump’s presidency.

Trump also made 24 false claims about ventilators and the Strategic National Stockpile. Ten of these were versions of his claim that he was left entirely empty stockpile shelves by Obama. In reality, Obama left thousands of ventilators and various other supplies.

One indication of the brazenness of Trump’s dishonesty: he made 12 false claims about what it was he himself had said in the past — sometimes things he had said just the day prior, sometimes in the very same briefing. In theory, the daily White House coronavirus briefings gave the President a chance to inform Americans about the crisis. In practice, they became modified campaign rallies — a nearby stage on which Trump could be Trump, with all the usual boasting, rambling, and disregard for truth.T

rump made 16 false claims at the briefing on April 6, a marathon session where he appeared for more than 95 minutes. He made 14 more at the April 13 briefing, where he appeared for more than 100 minutes.

We counted 23 briefings in which the President made five or more false claims. Trump’s three most dishonest events during this 14-week period all came before he stopped traveling because of the pandemic: 21 at a January rally in Des Moines, 19 at a February rally in Las Vegas, 18 at a March Fox News town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But Trump also made 16 false claims at a pandemic-related Fox News “virtual town hall” at the Lincoln Memorial in early May.

Trump averaged about 8.5 false claims per day from July 8, 2019, when we started counting at CNN, through January 26, 2020. During this 14-week pandemic period starting on January 27, it was about 6.7 false claims per day.So that’s a decline. But 6.7 false claims is a lot, especially in a crisis. Let’s not judge Trump only against his own astonishingly high (or low) bar.

Oh, and by the way:

This thing isn’t over. And if I had to guess, we’re going to see those US numbers go up substantially over the next month for a variety of reasons…

Straight out of the totalitarian playbook. Without evidence, serving your political agenda, declare your enemies criminal, and turn the power of the federal government against them. Bill Barr's Department of Injustice gets more dangerous by the day. https://t.co/SHHEXod8OC

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) May 30, 2020

Bill Barr in 1992:

He’s always been that guy.