Month: May 2020

For too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. — Trump, January 2017

His Inaugural address wasn’t describing the state of America at the time. It was his first-term agenda. And he was being uncharacteristically modest.

This interview with James Fallows is strangely reassuring:

James Hamblin: People keep using the word unprecedented. And yet when I hear you talking about unprecedented times, I take it seriously.

Fallows: I’ll give you my voice-of-history overview here. I did a piece for The Atlantic a couple of years ago where I said that I realized that every article or book I’d ever written had really been about just one question: Is America going to make it? The story of the U.S. is trouble and the response to trouble.

But one thing that’s particular to this moment is that national leadership is the worst in my lifetime, and arguably the worst in our history. We’ve never had a head of federal government as unmatched to the duties of that role as we currently do. The question is how all the other sources of resilience and health in the country balance that singular but very important point of dysfunction and the party that supports him too.

Wells: What does good leadership during a crisis look like?

Fallows: In my sordid youth, I worked as a speechwriter in the Carter White House, and what’s interesting beyond party and beyond era is that in a time of crisis, every effective leadership message boils down to a very simple matrix. If you look at FDR’s Pearl Harbor speech or if you look at George W. Bush after 9/11 or Reagan after the Challenger explosion, they always do three things.

First, they express empathy and compassion. We recognize this has been hard and terrible. We recognize you are scared. We recognize that people have lost loved ones and lost livelihoods. I recognize, as the sort of head of the national family, recognize how terrible this time is. The second thing they do is express long-term confidence. We’ve been through hard times before. This is hard. But we know how to persevere. The third thing they do is provide a plan. Tomorrow, we’re going to do this. Next week, we’re going to do that. A year from now, we’re going to be in this position.

That is just the three-part summary of what any leader says in a time when that leader’s people are distressed, injured or wounded, afraid, et cetera. And we have not heard a single message of that sort from the White House.

I think there’s kind of phantom-limb pain. People recognize they should be hearing it, and they are hearing it from mayors and they are hearing it from governors and they are hearing it in their communities. And that’s the contrast.

Wells: Phantom-limb pain is an interesting way to describe that. I feel like I have totally felt that.

Hamblin: I like that comparison as well. If governance has become so dysfunctional, how can we as a country unite against the virus? It feels like, initially, nearly everyone was unified around the need to shut down and take extreme measures to prevent this, but now it’s growing into a wedge issue. How do we keep that from getting worse?

Fallows: Part of the responsibility is for all of us in the media to keep things proportional. There is a small group of people who think the disease is a hoax and won’t wear face masks, but it’s a small group. It’s a cinematic group and a dramatic group, but it shouldn’t be all over cable news all the time.

Wells: I have often been totally locked up at home consuming national news sources, and it’s hard not to feel completely disempowered by it. You must have a method for somehow putting into context the things you hear in the national news.

Fallows: I hadn’t thought about this until you all brought it up, but I’m realizing that we have a whole country right now of people whose firsthand experience is being attenuated. Most of us are seeing the world through the media or through Zoom calls, and there’s only so many Zoom calls you can stand. It’s a nationwide, maybe perilous experiment of what it’s like when most people can’t see the world except out their own windows.

When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I find myself turning to historical times of trouble. The U.S. is in most ways a success story, but it’s a success story in constant turmoil, constant injustice, and constant trauma. I find it weirdly reassuring to read what people have been through before and how their struggles fit into our struggles too.

I just read the U.S. Grant biography by Ron Chernow. Yes, it has been worse, a lot worse. But I think what scares me the most about his moment is what Fallows said here:

[O]ne thing that’s particular to this moment is that national leadership is the worst in my lifetime, and arguably the worst in our history. We’ve never had a head of federal government as unmatched to the duties of that role as we currently do. The question is how all the other sources of resilience and health in the country balance that singular but very important point of dysfunction and the party that supports him too.

I wish I felt confident that the system was strong enough to survive him. But any system that could produce him is by definition weak and compromised. So I think we just have to hope that our luck holds out.

If you’re feeling a little bit … unnerved today, watch this. It is just a small thing but it is important to remember:

As riots in Minneapolis continue, a center for low-income housing put out a call asking for food donations.

This is how people responded.

There was so much food it became a distribution center for anyone — at all — who needed it.

Humanity.🌎❤️😇 pic.twitter.com/5tEIC4TBKT

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) May 30, 2020

The cooperative, altruistic side of human nature is still more important than the selfish side. It’s how we survive and evolve.

He’s having fun. He loves this. And he believes it will work for him. I honestly don’t know if it will. But rather than calling for calm as any normal president would do, he’s agitating the right-wing and his MAGA cops to bust heads.

This piece by Linda Hirshman in the Washington Post will leave you a little bit breathless:

The union representing Minneapolis Police Officers has long felt that the democratically elected mayor, Jacob Frey, should not be the boss of them. Across the country, armed insurgent demonstrators have expressed similar feelings about their governors: In Michigan, a gang with assault weapons drove the state senators to abandon the capitol. Turns out, in uniform or out, white men with guns can pose a real problem for old-fashioned representative government. In attitudes and political loyalties, a scary number of the people professing to defend the government look more like the problem than the solution.

Just six months ago, Frey issued an order forbidding police officers from wearing their uniforms on the podium at political events. This angered Police Federation of Minneapolis union President Bob Kroll, a President Trump supporter who was set to take the stage alongside Trump at a Minneapolis rally in November. More recently, Frey terminated the warrior-style police training program called “killology,” a system linked to the earlier killing of black Minneapolis citizen Philando Castile. The mayor’s directive about how his city’s police should be trained was “illegal,” Kroll announced; the union chief committed to continue teaching police how to apply lethal force to the population that employed them. The officers keep reelecting him. When he retires next year, his second-in-command is set to succeed him.

This sense of revolt among uniformed officers — a distrust of the very state they pledge to protect and serve — has been growing. Police officers are more invested in gun rights than the public is, 74 percent to 53 percent; two-thirds of the public support bans on assault weapons, while only one-third of police surveyed do, according to Pew. Cops prefer politicians who give them complete, unquestioned license: members of the NYPD routinely turn their backs on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, when he appears at occasions like slain officers’ funerals. Kroll says his union supported Trump because, while President Obama embraced “the handcuffing and oppression of police,” Trump “let cops do their job.” The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest and oldest police union, has often endorsed the more conservative candidate in each election since it backed George Wallace in 1968. (The FOP didn’t endorse a presidential candidate in 2012.)

Why weren’t the officers of the law deployed more effectively when armed opponents of stay-at-home orders chased elective officeholders out of town? Where were they when protesters gathered, from coast to coast, in blatant disregard of the quarantine orders? The answer may lie in the many ways that members of law enforcement hold attitudes that are more like contemporary Second Amendment activists than those of defenders of the state.

This may look like politics as usual in the era of the conservative revival. Since the controversy over the FBI’s raid on the heavily armed Branch Davidian religious compound in Waco, Tex., in 1993 during the Clinton administration, the federal government has been skittish about deploying force in face of armed resistance. When rancher Ammon Bundy and his allies occupied government lands in Oregon to protest the imprisonment of ranchers for arson on public land, federal officials during the Obama administration did nothing to force them out; eventually, Trump pardoned Bundy. A conservative majority of Supreme Court Justices created an almost limitless Second Amendment doctrine in support of maximum gun distribution and reversed the half-century of federal voting rights enforcement. The armed resistance in Lansing followed Trump’s tweet to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN.”

It was not supposed to be like this. When people stopped believing that God had picked the ruler and were starting to think about why we have governments, they figured this out. In a state of nature, without collective institutions like government, people would be — as the defiant Michiganders are — scary. Greedy, proud and fearful, they would kill each other for their crops, or to prove they were just as good as the smarter kid, or because they were afraid the others would kill them first. Life would be, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously suggested, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Better to get together and contract to make a government to protect us all from each other. Follow-on thinkers soon added the requirement that government must not make matters worse, either. The English, and then others, began establishing governments that satisfied these tests.AD

The social contract state has two salient features, and both are jettisoned when armed resisters take over a capitol building and a police union defies a ban on “killology” training. The government is inherently equal, as each person is as threatening and as possessed of human rights, as any other in the imagined state of nature. However imperfect, elected representative government manifests that inherent equality. And the elected government must have a meaningful monopoly on the use of force. Otherwise it cannot protect us from each other.

When the gun-toting protesters openly walked into the Michigan statehouse and the Senate vacated the chamber in face of future threats, egalitarian representative government surrendered to the rule of the strong. Threatening death and brandishing death, both in the form of firearms and the often unmasked contagion, the demonstrators proved how potent was the threat of anarchy and how fragile the contract that had contained it for so long. When the police establish their own killology-driven order, the democratically elected government similarly loses its monopoly on force, and mayors sit by, wringing their hands while the unelected police take over the role of the state.

Cellphone cameras play a big role in revealing the deep lawlessness in some areas of law enforcement, but those revelations began 30 years ago with the filmed beating of Rodney King. The persistence of the uniformed revolt and the retreat before the coronavirus protesters are just the most recent in a long retreat from the experiment in self-government. With a critical election looming, the prospect is ominous.

Ominous. Yes. Terrifying, actually.

Where to begin?

People protested through the night “in at least 20 cities” from coast to coast, angered over the police killing of yet another unarmed black man, George Floyd, this week in Minneapolis. In New York, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis saw clashes between police and protesters. In Washington, D.C., the Secret Service put the White House on lockdown briefly as protesters there threw over temporary barricades.

Some police are acting out as are the usual handful of black-clad anarchists who use any protest as an excuse for wilding.

After weeks of COVID-19 shutdowns, an economy in distress, armed protests by anti-shutdown/anti-mask white protesters, and over 100,000 Americans dead (with more to come), America was already a tinderbox, Michelle Goldberg writes in the New York Times.

Anger erupted after months of non-leadership on the deadly pandemic from the White House. The novice president has expended more energy issuing angry tweets and dodging responsibility than in coordinating a national strategy. There is none. Donald Trump has blamed China, blue-state governors, and the World Health Organization. He’s touted phony miracle cures and taunted the press.

To Floyd’s family, to his community, or to nonwhites accustomed to patterns of discrimination deeply embedded in the structure of the culture, the acting president offers nothing. He has nothing to give. The last time he tried (under pressure in March), it was a disaster:

David Litt, who wrote speeches for Obama, posted: “As a former presidential speechwriter, my careful rhetorical analysis is that he’s gonna get us all killed.”

Now, with his poll numbers falling as the November election looms, Trump has fallen back on his old formula of weaponizing racial and ethnic tensions to keep his political base ginned up. Protests over the death of another unarmed black man at the hands of police is just what he needed. Republican leaders have fallen in line or fallen silent.

Trump is that familiar egotist who seeks political office to be somebody rather than to do something.

In this leadership vacuum, however, there are still voices of solace, voices of reason. Police chiefs in Atlanta and Dallas, both women, expressed empathy with protesters and offered support so long as protests remained peaceful.

https://twitter.com/joonhopekook/status/1266494398080172032

Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields told protesters, “You have the right to be upset and scared and to want to yell.” Shields said, “I hear you. I’ve heard from so many people that cannot sleep, they’re terrified, they’re crying, they’re afraid for their children.” Too many officers were looking to use force to defuse the tensions. “And I’m not having that.”

Dallas Police chief Hall spoke with a protestor. Tells them to stay off the streets and not hit police vehicles. @dallasnews pic.twitter.com/dKWlrprLQH

— Obed Manuel (@obedmanuel) May 30, 2020

“We’re giving you the streets. We’re giving you the sidewalks,” Dallas Police Chief Renee Hall told a protester after rocks were thrown at officers. “Y’all can walk all night long and we’re going to be out here to make sure nothing happens to you, but don’t hit my people.”

Former President Barack Obama issued a brief statement:

It’s natural to wish for life “to just get back to normal” as a pandemic and economic crisis upend everything around us. But we have to remember that for millions of Americans, being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly “normal” — whether it’s while dealing with the health care system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in a park.

This shouldn’t be “normal” in 2020 America. It can’t be “normal.” If we want our children to grow up in a nation that lives up to its highest ideals, we can and must be better.

Former Vice President Joe Biden knows how it feels to lose family members:

The original sin of this country still stains our nation today, and sometimes we manage to overlook it. We just push forward with the thousand other tasks in our daily life, but it’s always there, and weeks like this, we see it plainly that we’re a country with an open wound. None of us can turn away. None of us can be silent. None of us can any longer, can we hear the words “I can’t breathe” and do nothing. We can’t fail victims, like what Martin Luther King called “the appalling silence of good people.”

Every day, African-Americans go about their lives with constant anxiety and trauma, wondering who will be next. Imagine if every time your husband or son, wife or daughter left the house, you feared for their safety from bad actors and bad police. Imagine if you had to have that talk with your child about not asserting your rights, taking the abuse handed out to them so, just so they can make it home. Imagine having police called on you just for sitting in Starbucks or renting an Airbnb or watching birds. This is the norm black people in this country deal with. They don’t have to imagine it. The anger and frustration and the exhaustion is undeniable.

But that’s not the promise of America. It’s long past time that we made the promise of this nation real for all people. You know, this is no time for incendiary tweets. It’s no time to encourage violence. This is a national crisis, and we need real leadership right now. Leadership that will bring everyone to the table so we can take measures to root out systemic racism. It’s time for us to take a hard look at the uncomfortable truths. It’s time for us to face that deep open wound we have in this nation.

The damaged psyche occupying the Oval Office has no time of that or for anyone but himself. He is not a leader. He doesn’t have it in him. But it’s worse than that.

“We now have a leadership that’s been crystal clear that it’s perfectly OK if we descend into utter civil war,” University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson told Goldberg.

This week, Trump threatened military action against protesters, indicating he is, in fact, prepared to get people killed.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.

I’m not sure how soothing this is, but it’s interesting:

A gang of monkeys attacked a laboratory assistant and escaped with a batch of coronavirus blood test samples, it has been reported.

The bizarre incident saw the troop of primates launch their assault near Meerut Medical College in Delhi, India.

According to local media, the animals then snatched COVID-19 blood test samples that had been taken from three patients and fled.

One of the monkeys was later spotted in a tree chewing one of the sample collection kits, the Times of India reported – adding that test samples from the patients had to be taken again.

The undamaged kits were later recovered, the Meerut medical college superintendent, Dheeraj Raj, told AFP.

He added: “They were still intact and we don’t think there is any risk of contamination or spread.”

It is the latest example of the highly intelligent, red-faced rhesus macaques taking advantage of India’s nationwide lockdown to combat the spread of coronavirus.

I just re-watched “Outbreak.” Yikes.

Ok, let’s have a real soother. It’s been a rough week… 🙂

here's a dinosaur reading a bedtime story to puppies and I don't know who needs to see this but I sure as hell did https://t.co/RYmymYjOOC

— shauna (@goldengateblond) May 28, 2020

HT to SS

Compare and contrast:

“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” Trump tweeted in the early hours of Friday morning.

On May 1, Trump praised a group of protesters in Michigan who were armed with assault rifles and carrying signs with violent and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

“The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire,” Trump tweeted of the protesters, who were demanding a reopening of the state economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.”

The rhetoric from those protesters was so violent that Facebook removed a group organizing a similar protest, as they were calling for violence against Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, including calls to “hang, behead, shoot, and beat” her, according to the MetroTimes, a Detroit news outlet.

In fact, Trump has egged on similar protests calling on governors to reopen the government in the wake of the coronavirus, even though those protests have gotten increasingly violent and ugly.

At a protest on Long Island on May 14, protesters held a sign that read, “Hang Fauci. Hang Gates. Open all our states.“

Trump also seemed to condone a protester who got in the face of a journalist who was simply reporting on the protest, retweeting a video of the incident with the comment, “people can’t get enough of this. Great people!”

Trump also infamously praised the white supremacist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, who were protesting the removal of Confederate monuments.

He said there were “very fine people” among the crowd of white supremacists, who chanted “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us” — which are white supremacist and anti-Semitic statements.

“If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly,” Trump said in April 2019 of his “very fine people” comment. “And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”

One of those fine people actually killed someone in Charlottesville.

I think you can see the problem.

Trump held what was supposed to be a press conference today but instead he and his henchmen gathered reporters to the Rose Garden to announce that he’s terminating the United States’ relationship with the World Health Organization and said China’s moves on Hong Kong are a “violation of Beijing’s treaty obligations and “a tragedy for the people of Hong Kong,” so he’s decided to make things even worse by eliminating policy exemptions that give Hong Kong different and special treatment” under a “full range” of agreements, from extradition to trade to technology.

Then he turned around and left.

Essentially he announced the beginning of a new cold war and then refused to answer for his own incitement for the National Guard to summarily execute American citizens, his ongoing bungling of the global pandemic including, his total abandonment of the global effort to find a vaccine, the destruction of the American economy or his latest authoritarian power grab against any American company he disapproves of. He needed to get back to his TV and his diet coke so he could watch his fluffers on Fox News and OAN talk about how great he is.

But none of them were wearing masks so we know they are super macho, manly men.

Tune in as I address the unfolding situation in Minnesota and the killing of George Floyd: https://t.co/AKk14gGif5

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 29, 2020

Meanwhile, here’s the man he’s running against. As you know, last night he made this odious, violent threat:

Today, he’s trying to walk this back in the dumbest way possible:

Ah. Well, that’s completely different. He was tweeting a “fact” not a “statement.”

This is as absurd a walkback as this one:

U.S. President Donald Trump clarified his comments in Helsinki, saying he meant to say “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,” with regards to the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Moscow did in fact meddle in the 2016 election.

He is pathetic.

Update: More pathetic bullshit:

Question: How would you know that phrase and not know its racially charged history?
Trump: Well I’ve heard that phrase for a long time. I don’t know where it came from. pic.twitter.com/tXcgduNl4I

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 29, 2020

CNN reports:

President Donald Trump has angrily complained this week about social media companies, repeatedly accusing them of censoring conservative voices and going as far as to sign an executive order Thursday seeking to limit their power. But data from Facebook, the world’s largest social media company, pours cold water on the assertion that conservative voices are being silenced.

In fact, according to CrowdTangle, a data-analytics firm owned by Facebook, content from conservative news organizations dominates Facebook and often outperforms content from straightforward news organizations. Additionally, over the last month on Facebook, Trump has captured 91% of the total interactions on content posted by the US presidential candidates, according to CrowdTangle. Biden has captured only 9%.

CrowdTangle computes interactions by totaling the number of likes, comments, and shares a post receives. Over the last month, the top performing news organization in the US was Fox News, a conservative network which largely echoes the Trump White House’s messaging. Fox News captured 13% of all interactions among US news organizations with more than 29 million likes, comments, and shares, according to CrowdTangle.

The second top-performing page belonged to Breitbart, a right-wing website that is largely supportive of the President and has close ties to the White House. Its Facebook page accounted for 9% of the total US media interactions over the last month with more than 20 million likes, comments, and shares.

The third best performing US news organization was CNN, with 7% of the interactions; the fourth was ABC News with 5%; the fifth was NPR with 4%.

When sorting by US political media, the data skews largely in favor of conservative news organizations, according to CrowdTangle. Six of the top 10 US political media pages belonged to conservatives. Ben Shapiro, the prominent conservative news personality, generated more than 25 million interactions over the past month on his page, accounting for 29% of the total share from US political media on Facebook, according to CrowdTangle. 

The second top US political media page belonged to Breitbart, with 23% of total interactions. Other conservative outlets in the top 10 for US political media over the last month: The Western Journal in fifth with 4% of the total interactions; TheBlaze in seventh with 3% of the total interactions; IJR in eight with 2% of total interactions; and the Washington Examiner in ninth with 2% of interactions. 

Trump and Republican lawmakers have repeatedly accused Facebook and other social media platforms of bias, painting the companies as villains in a longstanding culture war used to excite the conservative base. Technology platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have banned certain users in the past for violating hate speech policies.In a widely covered move, Facebook, YouTube, and Apple booted right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from their platforms in 2018 for violating hate speech and harassment policies. The companies maintained that they do not discriminate against users for their political beliefs.

 But the nuance has been lost on Trump, Republican leaders, and members of the conservative media.Republicans and right-wing media outlets have been all too happy running with the narrative that social media companies are censoring conservatives, regardless of the facts. Fox News, Breitbart, and other outlets have amplified claims that conservatives are under fire on social media platforms. In addition to the president, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump Jr. have been among some of the Republicans to promote this narrative.

Claims of social media bias and censorship have also made their way to Congress. Lawmakers have held hearings on the so-called practice of “social media filtering” where right-wing personalties have been asked to testify about the discrimination they’ve supposedly faced at the hands of the companies.The narrative is unlikely to go away anytime soon. The politicians and media outlets on the right that push it do not seem moved by the facts. Instead, they seem more interested in a narrative that resonates with and whips up the conservative base.

This is an old stale tactic going all the way back to the 60s. The liberal media is being unfair to us waah, waah, waah. And you can see how well it works by observing the man who is the richest, most powerful social media titan in the world basically punt in favor of the Republicans rather than standing up for truth and reality. After all, he could have pointed out those statistics shown in that graph when he went on Fox News, and instead, he pandered.

If Zuckerberg spent a little less time looking in the mirror and seeing Augustus Caesar and a little bit more time reading about the world he actually lives in, he might understand how he’s being played. Of course, it may just be that he’s one of them in which case Facebook truly is an enemy of democracy and truth.

This is Christianity. It’s also common human decency. It’s also simple common sense.

The soaring sanctuary of the Shrine of the Sacred Heart, in the District’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, bustles daily in normal times with parishioners — predominantly immigrants, many undocumented. But the coronaviruspandemic has shuttered communal worship for the church, as with most congregations across the country. It has also cut off many parishioners and neighborhood residents from work and unemployment benefits. And thus from food.

And that’s when prayer took another form at Sacred Heart.

The Catholic parish became one of the U.S. houses of worship that has transformed its sacred and communal spaces into a kind of food distribution center. With gloves and masks, in small teams, mostly in silence, congregants for the past few weeks have come to the sanctuary to pack some 560 baskets of food. Beans, oil, rice, carrots. One basket for each family who needs food. The packers don’t know the names of the recipients, some of whom are fellow congregants, some of whom aren’t even Catholic.

And this point should be stressed:

“A church is more than a building, that’s in scripture. But I also feel spaces can evoke emotion. Both of those things can be true,” she said. Porter has had those feelings in virtual worship and in preparing food boxes.

“We at All Souls are very clear that the church is not a building,” said the Rev. RK Keithan, social justice minister at the church, where he says attendance online has been higher than that typically in-person. “Our building is closed but All Souls is very much open.”

This, of course, is the exact opposite of the un-Christian, indecent, and irrational behavior of the christianists, who have weaponized Christian symbolism for right-wing causes — and which have disgracefully sickened so many.