Month: February 2021

Vote suppression is as vote suppression does.

Voter turnout in 2020 was historic and secure, with fraud all but nonexistent. That outcome was driven in part by massive expansion in voting by mail in the middle of a deadly pandemic. The Brennan Center reports that states across the country have since launched a backlash against voting:

In a backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election, and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, legislators have introduced three times the number of bills to restrict voting access as compared to this time last year. Twenty-eight states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 106 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020).

But well-run and fair elections in Georgia produced results not to Republicans’ liking. “So now, Georgia Republicans want to cook the rules,” the Washington Post Editorial Board writes. Fair is on the chopping block in over half the states. “Republicans have concluded that if they cannot win a fair election, they must make elections less fair.” But then, they concluded that decades ago.

The spate of new bills would “end no-excuse absentee voting, ban ballot drop boxes and restrict automatic voter registration.” That is on top of the bill introduced last week to require those voting by mail to provide copies of their IDs both when applying for absentee ballots and with their submission (emphasis mine):

Nothing in the 2020 election experience suggests that wide-scale use of mail-in ballots, the provision of drop boxes or the rollout of automatic voter registration pose major risks to voting integrity. Indeed, automatic voter registration programs are designed to increase the accuracy of voter registration lists. No conceivable public purpose is served by making it harder to register. Meanwhile, the crackdown on mail-in ballots reflects the fact that large numbers of Democrats shifted to absentee voting in 2020.

After last month’s deadly MAGA insurrection failed to overturn the results of the last election, rigging the next one through legislative process must seem like statesman restraint. To someone somewhere.

The Editorial Board reasons:

U.S. democracy needs an overhaul — not to restrict voting but to shut down politicians who seek to tilt the rules at the people’s expense. Using their power over federal elections, Democrats and any Republicans of conscience in Congress must make such an overhaul a top priority in the coming months. Fortunately, Democrats have an appealing bill ready to go that they have been crafting for years. The For the People Act would require automatic voter registration, which could add 50 million people to electoral rolls while improving their quality. It would mandate bipartisan redistricting commissions for congressional maps, ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections. The bill would ensure access to early and mail-in voting and restore voting rights to people with prior criminal convictions. And it would create a public financing system for political campaigns, amplifying the power of small contributions with matching funds for candidates who decide to participate.

Not to mention the vulnerability of the Electoral College process to manipulation by politicians long after Election Day.

Automatic voter registration is of particular interest. Finding the unregistered is perhaps the Holy Grail of turnout activism. Just in North Carolina at one point recently there were a million more DMV customers than registered voters. But DMV records are not publicly accessible for cross-matching and commercial databases for doing so are not cheap. Thus, inviting people to vote who do not appear in voter registration records is a feat of costly data crunching unavailable to grassroots activists. No doubt Republican politicians prefer it that way. Automatic voter registration would make my day more than theirs.

This piece by Jeet Heer discusses the recent brouhaha around AOC’s recitation of her experience during the insurrection. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend that you do. If you think that the national target of violent, right wing, vitriol didn’t have good reason to be terrified when the insurrectionists took over the Capitol, you haven’t been paying attention.

Her personal recollection is gut wrenching to anyone who has even a modicum of empathy. But there’s a bigger issue at stake even than that:

Ocasio-Cortez spoke in such personal terms in order to reject calls to move on from the events of January 6. “We cannot move on without accountability,” she insisted. “We cannot heal without accountability.”

The January 6 riot was so shocking that one would think there should be no need to insist on its importance. But the very fact that the failed insurrection revealed the explosive violence of Trumpist Republicans makes political interests vested in bipartisan cooperation all the more eager to whitewash the events.

This tendency is true not just of Republicans but also the media—and even some factions on the left. The late novelist Gore Vidal liked to quip that America should be called the United States of Amnesia. This national preference for willful forgetfulness is already evident in varied attempts to push the January 6 violence down the memory hole.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is among the most vocal advocates for a quick turn of the page. Appearing on Fox News on Monday, Graham warned that calling witnesses for the impeachment trial of Donald Trump would “open up Pandora’s box.” Graham added, “I hope we don’t call any and we vote and get this trial over next week when it starts.”

Republicans like Graham have obvious reasons to want the public to forget about January 6 as soon as possible. But the same tendency can be seen in media reporting on Ocasio-Cortez’s comments, which zeroed in on her revelations about sexual assault at the expense of what she said about the January 6 riot. The New York Times article was headlined, “Ocasio-Cortez Says She Is a Sexual Assault Survivor.”

That was a moving moment to be sure. Survivors of sexual assault no doubt related instantly to her emotion and discomfort in talking about it. But it wasn’t her point. She was using it to illustrate the dynamic that our politics are dealing with when it comes to these violent conspiracy addled right wingers. Trauma, which most people in the Capitol that day, not to mention the sane members of the public that watched it unfold on television, were traumatized. The country was traumatized by that violent assault on the US Capitol during a joint session of congress to try to overturn the election!

Her personal trauma informs her understanding of what that means and how important it is that perpetrators are held to account in order to move forward. Her belief that this was not just “business as usual” and requires redress was missed by people who seem to think that Trump’s heinous incitement to insurrection was somehow justified because the Democrats deserve it:

[…]

Ocasio-Cortez’s willingness to speak of her vulnerability during January 6, when she spent hours barricaded in the office of colleague Katie Porter, was a powerful reminder of why the Capitol riot still demands redress. But it wasn’t met with universal applause. Aside from the expected right-wing jeers, Ocasio-Cortez also provoked the scorn of maverick leftist Glenn Greenwald.

Speaking on the Jimmy Dore show on YouTube, Greenwald argued that by taking so strong a stance against Republicans, Ocasio-Cortez ruined an opportunity to forge a bipartisan opposition to Wall Street based on the current conflict between small investors organized on Reddit and large hedge funds.

“This week has been the most amazing week of having the left and the right unite against Wall Street,” Greenwald claimed. “Almost everybody across the spectrum supports what those Redditers are doing and is thrilled to see these hedge fund leeches suffering. It has created a major opportunity to regulate, to legislate, to reform. And Ted Cruz, whatever you think of him, reached out by saying, ‘I agree with AOC about this.’ So that was an opportunity for right and left to join together to do something that is supposedly her main reason for existing as a political figure, which is fighting income inequality, and instead she turns around and says, ‘Fuck you, I don’t want to work with you. You guys got me murdered. You’re a white supremacist.’ And suddenly the two camps divide again and over here you have the red team and over here you have the blue team cheering like morons at a fucking high school football game again because she ruined that movement. Because all she wants to do is attack Republicans and fortify the Democratic Party.”

Greenwald went on to add, “I do believe AOC was genuinely rattled by what happened at the Capitol.” But he insisted, “She made it through completely unscathed. Not even a tiny little bruise on her body. Every other member of Congress in the Democratic caucus, including Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and others are equally demonized and they are fucking over it. They got over it. If you want to be a member of Congress, you can’t constantly center your own lived experiences, you’re not there to center yourself in every drama.“

I’m not going to comment on the grotesque “buck up, lady, you don’t have any bruises” aspect of all that. I’ll let others do that. But I will point out that the analysis of the GameStop episode is embarrassingly fatuous, as I wrote earlier.

Heer makes clear the inane naivete of the idea Cruz was acting in good faith. He is a reptilian incubus:

Greenwald’s analysis has many problems. It rests on the assumption that Cruz’s statement of agreement with Ocasio-Cortez was the beginning of a serious, good-faith effort to tame Wall Street. But Cruz is a notoriously slippery character, as distrusted by his Republican colleagues as by Democrats. Given his long-standing connections to Goldman Sachs, it’s hard to believe he would suddenly turn into a populist champion. Further, far from being alone in speaking of the trauma of January 6, Ocasio-Cortez has had her testimony affirmed and praised by colleagues like Porter and Tlaib.

Heer gets to AOC’s point, here:

The force of Ocasio-Cortez’s words rest not just on her personal testimony but also on some undeniable facts: Donald Trump, while still president, stirred up a mob to attack Congress in order to thwart certification of the election of his successor. That’s a shocking deed that undermines all calls for comity. It’s understandable why various political factions are more comfortable in forgetting and moving on. But there can be no true reconciliation until the reality of what happened is acknowledged, which includes punishment for those who instigated the riot—and for those who were complicit in it.

Public figures like Ocasio-Cortez have a moral obligation to keep the memory of January 6 alive until there is accountability. To do less would mean joining the circle of complicity

Some people just don’t think the Capitol insurrection was a big deal:

For more on the idea that AOC’s trauma is incidental and illustrative of nothing, I recommend Jill Filipovic’s latest which is just so true:

https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/1356719384887058437?s=20

I’m sure you remember the video that featured a woman screaming hysterically, “we’re coming for that bitch. Tell fuckin’ Pelosi we’re coming for her, fuckin traitorous cunt … we’re comin’ for all of you!”

I found it to be exceptionally chilling when I first saw it. These people were out for blood and I would have been terrified if I’d been there.

How can anyone lnot see that if that rabid mob had actually found Pelosi or AOC or any of their perceived enemies in the Democratic party, that they were in mortal danger? These people were beating cops with American flags!

If you’ve forgotten that one, here it is:

https://youtu.be/PfiS8MsfSF4

I’m a little boggled that anyone who isn’t a hard right wingnut would shrug off what happened that day as just another protest. But I guess if the people these “protesters” were hunting down are your enemies, you just don’t care much.

Just for the record, if a bunch of left wingers went after Marjorie Taylor Greene like this I wouldn’t excuse it. In fact, I wouldn’t excuse it if anyone did it. It’s horrifying.

… and enjoy:

So the Republicans now want to strip Ilhan Omar of her committee assignments. Of course they do:

House GOP lawmakers are seeking this week to oust Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota from her committee assignments as Democrats push for similar action against embattled Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Fox News has learned.

The House is set to consider a measure this week that calls for Taylor Greene, a controversial first-term lawmaker known for his support of the QAnon conspiracy theory, from her assignment on the Education and Labor Committee.

A proposed GOP-backed amendment to that measure calls for Omar, frequently identified as a member of the “Squad” of progressive Democrats, to be removed from her committee assignments “in light of conduct she has exhibited,” Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pergram reported. In the amendment, Republicans argue that Omar has made anti-Semitic comments that are grounds for dismissal.

Reps. Brian Babin (R-TX), Jeff Duncan (R-SC), Jody Hice (R-GA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Ronny Jackson (R-TX) sponsored the proposed amendment.

Omar’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In Feb. 2019, Omar triggered an uproar after she wrote, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby” in response to a tweet referencing House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s pledge to take “action” against her over her criticism of Israel. Later, Omar suggested that American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, was paying politicians to take a favorable stance toward Israel.

Omar’s remarks drew bipartisan criticism in Congress. She later apologized and thanked colleagues for “educating [her] on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.”

The Republican-backed effort to remove Omar from committee assignments took shape as lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle scrutinized Taylor Greene over her past and recent actions. A separate House effort seeks to remove Taylor Greene from office entirely.

Sure, they’re exactly the same so Republicans have a point, right? Omar said something that was seen as having anti-Semitic overtones for which she apologized and said she had learned from the experience.

Here’s the bill of indictment against Greene:

PolitiFact took a closer look at Greene’s promotion of conspiracy theories over the years.

Election fraud

Greene promoted baseless conspiracy theories that widespread voter fraud helped put Joe Biden in the White House, often on Twitter.

“We aren’t going to let Democrats STEAL this election,” she tweeted Nov. 4. “Stop the steal!” she tweeted the next day.

Over the next two months, and in spite of Twitter warning labels, Greene continued to tweet about voter fraud allegations, with the word “fraud” appearing 26 times.

“Without the widespread voter fraud, out-of-state voters, mail-in ballots from dead people, and ‘discovery’ of hidden ballots, we all know that President Trump wins our state in a landslide,” she said in a Dec. 14 statement. (Pants on Fire!)

“It was a #StolenElection. Trump won,” she tweeted on Christmas Day. (Nope)

“202,377 more votes cast than voters voting in Pennsylvania!” she said Dec. 29. (Wrong.)

In January, Twitter temporarily banned Greene for violating its misinformation policy after she floated more baseless claims about voter fraud in Georgia. That’s because there is no credible evidence that fraud affected the outcome of the election.

Still, Greene’s false voter fraud narrative found a home on friendly TV networks like Newsmax and One America News.

“I know we’re not a blue state. I know for a fact that President Trump won here in Georgia. I feel it 1,000%,” she said on OANN Jan. 19, the day before Biden’s inauguration. (Pants on Fire!)

At a Trump rally Jan. 4, Greene said she refused to “certify fraudulent electoral college votes” for Biden.QAnon

Greene has made several statements that indicate her support of the vast pro-Trump conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

QAnon claims public figures like Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey are Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles. The theory is based on posts from Q, an anonymous internet persona who claims to be a government insider with information on a “deep state” plot to work against Trump. QAnon supporters believe that top military generals convinced Trump to run for president in 2016 to bring the cabal of pedophiles to justice.

“Have you guys been following 4chan, Q — any of that stuff?” Greene says at the start of a video from November 2017. “I don’t know who Q is, but I’m just going to tell you about it because I think it’s something worth listening to and paying attention to.”

Over 30 minutes, Greene lays out several tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

“There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” she said.

QAnon evolved from the Pizzagate conspiracy theory about child sex trafficking and prominent Democrats — another conspiracy theory Greene promoted.

NBC News reported in August that, prior to running for office, Greene wrote dozens of articles as a “correspondent” for a now-defunct conspiracy news site called American Truth Seekers.

In a November 2017 article, Greene linked to a WikiLeaks-promoted website containing stolen documents that she said indicated Pizzagate was real.

Greene has also promoted conspiracy theories closely associated with QAnon and Pizzagate, including a bogus narrative documented by the liberal research group Media Matters that holds Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin sexually assaulted a young girl as part of a gruesome ritual.

In 2019, Greene speculated that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a body double — another popular conspiracy theory among QAnon supporters.

In a February 2019 video published by a pro-Trump website on Facebook, a caller asked Greene if she’d seen a video of Ginsburg walking through Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Here’s the exchange:

Caller: “This woman has been drawn over for how many years, and all of a sudden she’s walking straight upright like it’s a whole new person. Do you believe that is Ruth?”

Host: “It’s almost like a body double like Hillary Clinton. Yeah, like a body double for Hillary Clinton. So it’s interesting.”

Greene: “I do not believe that was Ruth, no. I don’t think so.”Mass shootings

On several occasions, Greene has endorsed or entertained “false flag” conspiracy theories, which say that some major news events, such as mass shootings, were staged or planned for a political purpose.

In one American Truth Seekers article published in October 2017, Greene ruminated on whether the Las Vegas massacre that killed 58 concert-goers was orchestrated as part of a plot to dismantle Second Amendment rights.

“The Second Amendment is under attack. At least I believe it is, and I believe gun control will be the controlled reaction to the horror that unfolded over a week ago at the Route 91 Harvest Festival,” she wrote. “Now there is another source that says that could be the very motive of the Las Vegas Massacre.”

The theory was bogus; the FBI found no motive for the mass shooting, and there is no evidence it was a coordinated plot to reform federal firearm laws. But it wasn’t the last time Greene floated a false flag conspiracy theory.

In a May 2018 Facebook post, Greene shared a Fox News article about the pension of Scot Peterson, a former Broward County, Fla., sheriff’s deputy who was fired for his response during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. A few commenters floated a theory that the shooting was orchestrated.

“It’s called a pay off to keep his mouth shut since it was a false flag planned shooting,” one user wrote.

“Exactly,” Greene replied.

In another reply to a comment on the post, Greene said Peterson was “paid to do what he did and keep his mouth shut!” (The post has since been deleted.)

The Parkland shooting killed 17 people. The shooting was not a false flag event, and those who survived are not “crisis actors.” We awarded that conspiracy theory and related smears against the Parkland students our 2018 Lie of the Year.

But in another now-deleted Facebook post published in December 2018, Greene floated an alternative theory about Democrats’ motivations for supporting gun restrictions: “I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.”Other conspiracies

Greene has also promoted bogus claims about 9/11, laser beams and forest fires.

In a 2018 video, Greene speaks to the conservative American Priority Conference. During the event, she floats a conspiracy theory about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, saying:

“Barack Obama becomes president in 2008, OK? By that time in our American history, we had had George Bush for eight years … we had witnessed 9/11, the terrorist attack in New York and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania and the so-called plane that Crashed into the Pentagon. It’s odd there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon, but anyways, I won’t — I’m not going to dive into the 9/11 conspiracy.”

American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., killing all 64 people on board and 125 inside the building. There is visual evidence of the plane hitting the Pentagon, as well as the aftermath.

In the same video, Greene promoted another baseless conspiracy theory that the Obama administration hired MS-13 gang members to assassinate Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed in Washington in 2016.

“What else did he do? OK, we got the Iran deal. We got the launch of ISIS and we have the open borders. Oh, open borders. MS-13, everyone. Under Obama came MS-13. There’s a lot to that.

“You have to understand, there’s — they have very good — they had very good relationships with MS-13. MS-13 was basically like, they were the kind of the henchmen of the Obama administration. They did a lot of the dirty work. Seth Rich, Seth Rich was murdered by two MS-13 gang members. That’s what I mean by dirty work, OK?”

While his murder remains unsolved, Rich was killed in what authorities believe was a botched robbery attempt. There is no evidence to support conspiracy theories alleging foul play — including claims that the Clintons had him killed. Rich’s family has settled a lawsuit against Fox News, which ran with the false story.

Greene has promoted other bogus theories that accuse high-profile Democrats of being complicit in murder. In a September 2017 article on American Truth Seekers, Greene aired the decades-old conspiracy theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton have killed many of their political enemies. Fact-checkers have been debunking this for years.

Some conspiracy theories Greene has supported are further out there — literally.

In a now-deleted November 2018 Facebook post that Media Matters referenced, she wrote that a laser beam from space may have started the Camp wildfire in California. The bogus claim was popular among supporters of QAnon.

“Space solar generators collect the suns energy and then beam it back to Earth to a transmitter to convert to electricity. The idea is clean energy to replace coal and oil, I’m sure they wouldn’t ever miss a transmitter receiving station right??!!” she wrote. “What would that look like anyway? A laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth I guess.”

But sure, that comment by Omar is pretty much exactly the same as what this raving lunatic has said. Fair’s fair.

Greg Sargent has framed this exactly right:
What’s becoming unmistakably clear is that the assault was unambiguously an effort to nullify the election through violent intimidation at best and violent attacks on lawmakers at worst. And this was done at Trump’s direction.

Exactly. Trump nearly succeeded in his Justice Dept. coup. When that failed, he turned to violent intimidation. And if it got out of hand? Hey, don’t look at me.

This piece by Eric Levitz about the GameStop story is the first I’ve read that makes any sense. This is the kind of thing that makes me a little bit crazy about the populist left. I’m never quite sure what they mean by populist. Half the time it sounds more like what I used to understand as libertarianism or some kind of market fundamentalism. I certainly didn’t think populism meant investors, small-time or otherwise.

Anyway, this piece gets to my niggling questions about what was going on last week:

Last week, a motley mass of shitposters, gambling enthusiasts, and disaffected Zoomers — united by hate for Wall Street and love of chicken tenders — beat a multibillion-dollar hedge fund at its own game. Through their collective intelligence and audacity, users of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets executed a sophisticated “short squeeze” that took money away from some billionaire speculators, gave it to some badly indebted workers, and made a mockery of neoliberal capitalism’s legitimizing myths. Unfortunately, right when these working-class retail investors had Wall Street’s titans on the run, the plutocracy’s visible hand appeared to reach down and thwart them: Robinhood, a trading app popular with young recreational investors, suddenly barred its users from buying GameStop shares, thereby relieving pressure on the hedge-fund shorts.

That is one way of recounting the GameStop rally, anyway.

Here is another: A group of small-time speculators — including some finance-industry professionals — orchestrated a pump-and-dump scheme that involved convincing a lot of financially inexpert (and/or politically disaffected) people that they could stick it to Wall Street’s largest money managers by … bidding up the price of an equity that is owned by Wall Street’s largest money managers. This generated enough momentum to trigger a “short squeeze,” and the price of GameStop shares shot to the moon. Wall-to-wall media coverage ensued. Inexperienced investors bought the hype, and began piling into what now resembled a Ponzi scheme: When the bubble finally burst, those who bought in early would have a chance to cash out before the stock fell beneath their break-even price; those who bought late would have little warning before the “dump” wiped them out. By late last week, so many people were buying GameStop shares over gamified phone apps that regulations aimed at ensuring the stability of financial markets kicked into gear. The stock market’s central clearing hub calculated that it faced a high risk in facilitating more GME buys, and demanded billions in collateral from brokerages ordering such trades. Lacking the funds necessary to meet this demand, Robinhood was compelled to restrict GameStop buying on its platform while it sought an infusion of liquidity. That pause hastened the inevitable end of the GameStop rally, which ultimately achieved little beyond popularizing participation in stock trading (a development that will enrich Wall Street at the expense of working-class people with gambling problems).

There is some truth to both these accounts. But to believe that the GameStop short squeeze was “an updated and superior version of Occupy Wall Street” — which is to say, a populist challenge to the tyranny of high finance that deserved the left’s avid support and attention — one had to accept the first summary as gospel, and dismiss all confounding details as apologetics for Big Hedge Fund.

Unfortunately, a number of influential progressives did precisely this. For a few days last week, amid mass hunger and unemployment, various left-wing Twitter influencers chose to focus their advocacy on the plight of small-time speculators who’d been barred from buying into a pump-and-dump scheme — while socialist congresswomen treated the right of amateur market manipulators to purchase whatever stocks they want, in whatever quantity they can afford, on the phone-based trading app of their choice, as a cause of national importance.

These actions weren’t cynical. At least, not typically. And in the context of the GameStop media firestorm, they may well have been reasonable. On one level, the GameStop story was an object lesson in the power of collective action and absurdity of market fundamentalism. By pooling their wits and capital, a large number of relatively low-wealth, low-clout individuals took money away from a hedge fund. What’s more, they did this in a manner that served to delegitimize financial markets as all-knowing arbiters of economic value: When the share price of a brick-and-mortar video-game retailer increases 20-fold in the course of a month, the notion that there is a tight correspondence between market prices and objective worth becomes difficult to sustain. And absent that premise, the case for entrusting our nation’s investment needs to unaccountable private actors becomes harder to make. The American left is in sore need of converts. When a story with this kind of radicalizing potential becomes national news, progressives may be well-advised to engage with it, so as to steer popular understanding of the event in an egalitarian direction.

But if the left can benefit from engaging trending news stories, so as to remake them in its own image, there is also a risk that chronic immersion in such stories will have the opposite effect: Instead of imbuing social-media uproars with the values of the left, the left may find itself imbued with the values of social media.

Platforms like Twitter and YouTube have democratized participation in public discourse. The range of people and ideological factions that can make their voices heard in America’s political debates is exponentially larger today than it was two decades ago. This has had many salutary effects on our politics. Dubious economic orthodoxies are harder to sustain — and sound heresies, harder to suppress — in an environment of unceasing, unfiltered public debate. The mainstream media’s conventional wisdom is no longer primarily shaped by the social world of Beltway cocktail parties, but by the more diverse and cantankerous chatter of their Twitter feeds. The left has exploited this openness in myriad ways — from influencing the technocratic details of Democratic policy proposals to crowdfunding socialist primary challenges to organizing mutual aid campaigns to bankrolling a vast network of alternative media outlets.

Nevertheless, the republic of tweets is no popular democracy. Twitter users are much younger, more educated, and wealthier than the American public as a whole. And those who tweet about politics are, by definition, far more interested in consuming news media than ordinary Americans. These biases shape Twitter discourse and the viral causes that arise from it. Like social media itself, meme-fueled populist uproars are liable to privilege spectacle over substance, the concerns of college-educated young people over those of those less online constituencies, and the hasty embrace of (ideologically affirming) conclusions over the exercise of epistemic humility.

All these distortions were present in last week’s GameStop discourse. As a substantive matter, it was never easy to explain how thousands of people overpaying for GME shares was supposed to threaten the capitalist order. Whatever utility the GameStop rally theoretically had as a spectacle, its first-order consequence was to transfer wealth from ordinary Americans to Robinhood and Wall Street market makers. But patient, careful reasoning about the relative merits of various causes do not drive Twitter engagement; spectacle does. And while the showdown between WallStreetBets and Melvin Capital was not a class war, it did play one on CNBC.

Listen to this incredible crybaby pic.twitter.com/KmJvZpBQ59

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) January 28, 2021

In a social-media discourse that was demographically representative of the nation as a whole, it seems unlikely that the phrase “working-class retail investors” would be spoken unironically. But on a platform that drastically underrepresents the supermajority of Americans who have less than $1,000 in savings, it was possible for some progressives to mistake the cause of recreational investors for that of the proletariat.

When Robinhood abruptly revoked its users’ capacity to buy GameStop shares, the narratively intuitive conclusion was that the Wall Street Establishment was striking back against the hoi polloi. The idea that the trading app was willfully restricting trading in GameStop arose so naturally out of the preceding discourse, some irresponsible columnists published Q&As that all but asserted as much despite the absence of confirmation (by which I mean, I did that). By contrast, the more likely motivation behind Robinhood’s decision — that its hand was forced by the collateral requirements imposed by a clearinghouse — was difficult for laypeople to comprehend, let alone integrate into a satisfying narrative. So a conspiratorial interpretation of events rapidly proliferated.

Put all this together, and you get some balefully misguided progressive discourse. The left-wing activist and Twitter influencer Jordan Uhl appeared to argue on Friday (1) that it is outrageous for the president to suggest that the plight of the unemployed is worthy of his attention but the plight of GameStop bulls somehow isn’t, (2) that restrictions on fee-free day-trading are a leading cause of wealth concentration in the United States, and (3) that it is insulting for the White House to suggest that it is the SEC’s job to regulate Wall Street.

please, joe biden is VERY SLEEPY! he cannot do more than one thing at a time, everyone just let wall street and big tech continue unobstructed as power and wealth continues to consolidate at the top!!!! https://t.co/AdtiHHZH2o

— jordan (@JordanUhl) January 29, 2021

Can I just say that’s the kind of stupid crap that makes twitter, and all of social media, such a toxic pit? That person thinks he’s a brave leftist revolutionary. Please…

Around the same time, Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “Casino-like swings in stock prices of GameStop reflect wild levels of speculation that don’t help GameStop’s workers or customers and could lead to market instability,” and shared a letter she’d written to the SEC, calling on the regulator to investigate potential market manipulation by the hedge funds that had shorted GameStop, along with any (hypothetical) Reddit users who knowingly misled retail investors in order to pump up the stock.

This won the senator more than 7,000 vitriolic quote tweets and comments from leftists who’d apparently convinced themselves that defending speculators from regulatory scrutiny was a core socialist objective, so long as the speculators in question referred to chicken tenders as “tendies.”

The madness was not limited to Twitter personalities. In the fog of pseudo-class war, left-wing writers and lawmakers struggled to discern reactionaries from populists, and libertarian critiques of Wall Street from progressive ones. Chamath Palihapitiya is a venture capitalist who’s campaigning for governor of California on a platform of school vouchers and state income tax abolition. But he flustered a CNBC anchor by saying some populist-sounding things about GameStop. Which made him a Twitter folk hero for a day. Which got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to invite him onto a livestream (he ultimately did not appear).

https://twitter.com/tonysheng/status/1354491997906591746?s=20

God help the left if this guy is their new hero

Buffett once said: “It’s not about timing the market, it’s about time in market.”

There should be a step down in capital gains tax for individuals as they hold stocks. 20% per year decrease in cap gains tax. 0% after a five year hold period.

Incentivize long term behavior.

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) January 31, 2021

Meanwhile, the leftist gadfly Matt Taibbi seems to have been too infatuated with the spectacle he saw playing out on CNBC to recognize that he was absorbing the network’s Hayekian economic assumptions. In a paean to WallStreetBets, Taibbi derided the Federal Reserve’s “zero-interest-rate policies” as “artificial stimulants” that are preventing “zombie companies” — which account for roughly 30 percent of all U.S. corporations — from going out of business. This argument implies that there is some “natural” benchmark interest rate that exists outside of politics and policy, and that the Fed is corruptly flouting this natural market law, just so it can prevent nearly one-third of America’s large employers from going bust. In other words: Taibbi is making a libertarian argument for central banks to tolerate deeper recessions and higher unemployment, so as to avoid corrupting natural market forces with “artificial stimulants.” It’s the kind of thing one might expect to find in a column by Taibbi’s archnemesis, Thomas Friedman; in fact, it is literally the argument of Friedman’s latest column.

These analytical errors matter. If the ethos of social media leads the left to prize populist sentiment over progressive substance, then its energies will be ripe for misdirection by reactionary forces. Condemnations of the Fed for bailing out corporate America with its easy money policies can sound populist. But their policy implications are brutally regressive. Rallying to the cause of Robinhood traders may feel righteous. But it also has led leftwing lawmakers to the precipice of endorsing deregulation to facilitate riskier recreational speculation.

In the hands of a well-organized progressive movement — one accountable to working-class constituencies, and tolerant of internal dissent — social media is a powerful weapon. In those of an agglomeration of progressive media addicts and creators — who are accountable primarily to their followers, employers’ traffic expectations, and Patreon subscribers — social media is a potent brain toxin that causes its victims to mistake spectacle for substance, anti-intellectualism for anti-elitism, conspiracy theorizing for critical thinking, and the interests of iconoclastic college graduates for those of working people writ large (in severe cases, it may even lead a supposed leftist to mistake Ted Cruz for an ally in the fight against high finance).

Extremely online progressives could have spent last week pressuring congressional Democrats to increase the value of the federal unemployment benefits in Joe Biden’s COVID-relief plan to $600; instead we successfully pressured them into demanding investigations into Robinhood’s treacherous abrogation of its users’ right to lose money to hedge funds.

New: The meme stock GameStop plunged 60% today. Absolute bloodbath. I talked to newbie Reddit traders who lost a fortune from their savings and college funds. One who lost $400k today (!) said, “Who wants to invest in some boomer ass SEARS or Macys stock?” https://t.co/OmsnWCzW2N— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell) February 2, 2021

The perverse incentives that produced this misallocation of memes and energy aren’t going away. And everyone who tries to effect change through posting is subject to them (the incentive to cater to Twitter’s appetites probably informed my decision to write a column on the incentive to cater to Twitter’s appetites rather than one on, say, the coup in Myanmar). But we all need to do our best to swim against the tide — because a left that is optimized for the production of social-media spectacles, instead of the passage of social democratic reforms, will be exactly as threatening to Wall Street’s rentiers as a brief spike in the price of GameStop shares.

Sometimes I think social media was the worst development in human history. It’s made all of us a whole lot dumber.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t seem to know whether he’s coming or going these days. One minute he’s condemning Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene as “a cancer” on the Republican party and the next he’s voting with the majority of GOP senators to reject the idea that Greene’s mentor, Donald Trump, can constitutionally be impeached and convicted for inciting a violent riot. McConnell now appears uncharacteristically unsteady, unsure how to proceed in a world in which his party has become so radicalized that average Republican voters are capable of storming the Capitol and demanding the execution of a stalwart conservative and Trump loyalist like former Vice President Mike Pence.

He shouldn’t be surprised by any of this, however.

The GOP’s intensifying radicalization has been building for a very long time and McConnell and the rest of the establishment adopted a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” stance because they benefited from the energy, dedication and money they received from the ever more crazy Republican grassroots. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent observed that this actually goes all the way back to the early post-WWII years, drawing on the work of political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld’s authors of “The Long New Right,” who say that the right’s addiction to the “politics of conflict” has always made any wall between the extremists and establishment fairly porous. Sargent points to the back and forth between the mainstream and the John Birch Society in the 1960s, flirtations with the Ku Klux Klan and “Newt Gingrich’s conversion of GOP politics into nationalized scorched earth warfare,” the latter of which was the first step to openly marrying extremist rhetoric and tactics to the party itself.

Norm Ornstein, who has written a number of books on the radicalization of the modern GOP noted recently that it was Gingrich who turned the Republican Party into a cult, saying Gingrich “very deliberately generated tribalism” creating a “situation where people could view Democrats as evil, trying to destroy their way of life.” Of course, it wasn’t just Gingrich. He came to prominence at the same time that talk radio became a toxic hatefest creating star propagandists like Rush Limbaugh. Roger Ailes then joined up with Rupert Murdoch to create a TV and print empire to similarly stoke the partisan acrimony. The Clinton years were a dumpster fire of partisan rancor.

The GOP establishment was fine with that, of course. By the time the Bush administration came along, their base was well primed and the media infrastructure solid. The Republican leaders of the Bush-era may not have been as bombastic as Gingrich or Trump but they played a major part in radicalizing the Republican party as well. If you want to talk about Big Lies, look no further than “Saddam had WMDs” and “Saddam was involved in 9/11” for a couple of propaganda success stories. Years later, former Vice President Dick Cheney unsuccessfully tried to wriggle out of it, but of course, it had already gotten the job done and they had moved on to their favorite enemy: Democrats.

After Barack Obama took office in the midst of an economic catastrophe, the big money funders were on hand to help and the Tea Party was born. They ratcheted up partisan hysteria over President Obama’s health care proposal, giving their activist base something tangible to do by instructing them to storm town hall meetings and disrupt the proceedings. They were even known to hang and tar and feather lawmakers in effigy, even converging on the Capitol to get in the faces of a group of Democratic congressmen, screaming the “n” word, spitting at them and taunting an openly gay representative.

The GOP establishment said not a word and they won the 2010 midterms that year in a landslide. Imagine that.Advertisement:

Among their new members was a group of far-right extremists who formed themselves into the Tea Party-aligned House Freedom Caucus, who believed in using the same confrontational tactics with legislation as the Tea Party activists. There was no longer any such thing as compromise or negotiation. It was “my way or the highway” with the Democrats and if the Republican leadership didn’t like it, well, that was too bad.

By 2014, they were gleefully devouring their own. In a shot heard round the beltway, a Tea Party candidate backed by right-wing radio took on the House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., in a primary, and beat him. Cantor’s sin? He had strayed from the orthodoxy very slightly on immigration, which was bubbling up (again) on the right as a central issue. Soon, Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-OH, was forced out as well, replaced by Wisconsin dreamboat Paul Ryan. By the time Donald Trump came along in 2015, Ryan too was already in their crosshairs.Advertisement:https://f6d0941d292663bb1b58db85d8741bee.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Trump watched all of this and in his instinctual, feral way, understood exactly what the Republican party base had become. He didn’t create the cult. It already existed. He just took it over.

For the past 30 years, the Republican establishment has either guided or accepted every step of their party’s descent into extremism. And no one has been more willing to make that deal with the devil than Mitch McConnell. In fact, he made one of the greatest contributions to the radicalism of the GOP by exploding one Senate norm after another and turning the filibuster into a partisan weapon.

Now he’s facing a big problem.

January 6th laid bare just how fanatical and downright seditious the Republican base has become. He’s lost his majority and has several vulnerable members up for re-election in 2022. They are going to have a hard time winning statewide if 25% of their voters reject the Republican party because it’s turned the asylum over to the inmates. He’s greatly worried about corporate America’s revulsion at his party’s behavior and their unwillingness to finance it going forward. Seeing a so-called moderate senator from Ohio, Rob Portman, cutting and running has to hurt.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, on the other hand, is caught between a deep desire to please Donald Trump and a competing desire to please his corporate donors. He’s handling his dilemma even less gracefully than McConnell. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen in the fight between Liz Cheney of Wyoming and the faction backing the Trump worshiping conspiracy monger from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, but the mere fact that such a battle is even happening is testament to the fact that McCarthy has no control over his caucus. I’m sure John Boehner is chuckling mordantly at the thought of his former Freedom Caucus nemesis’ little dilemma as he sips his glass of Merlot on the back nine.

McCarthy also has to be thinking about what happened to Eric Cantor just six years ago. At one time the two of them, along with Paul Ryan, were feted in the GOP as the so-called Young Guns, the new generation of GOP leadership. But the rabble rousing Tea Party candidate who took Cantor’s seat was ousted by a Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, in 2018 and she held on to it in 2020, against all odds. McCarthy is now getting some blowback from Trump voters in his conservative district for failing to show undying fealty to the former president. It’s unlikely his district would go Democratic — but in California’s jungle primaries you just never know what might happen.

The radical chickens have come home to roost and they have taken over the place. The Republican establishment turned a blind eye to right-wing extremism for decades and now it’s come to define the Republican Party. They have no one to blame but themselves.

Salon

Dan Froomkin’s Jan. 31 column at Press Watch is worth your time and attention. Especially if you have torn out much of your hair over media practice/malpractice over the last couple of decades.

But first….

Media critic Eric Boehlert complains this morning that the moment Democrats are back in charge in the White House reporters find spine enough to think it troubling that “on occasion” communications staffers inquire in advance what questions they may have for new White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. One Politico reporter calls it “harassment.” Boehlert calls it out:

After four years of Trump’s White House spokespersons categorically refusing to answer questions with substance, and instead leaning into lies, obfuscations, insults, and empty promises to provide journalists with answers at a later date, it’s strange that Biden’s press team is being criticized for trying to be prepared.

The profession is enough of a mess that with the upcoming turnover in executive editors at the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times, Froomkin offers advice in the form of a speech incoming bosses might give their political staffs. Consider the changeover an inflection point between the profession as it was and as it could be.

Among his recommendations:

First of all, we’re going to rebrand you. Effective today, you are no longer political reporters (and editors); you are government reporters (and editors). That’s an important distinction, because it frees you to cover what is happening in Washington in the context of whether it is serving the people well, rather than which party is winning.

Historically, we have allowed our political journalism to be framed by the two parties. That has always created huge distortions, but never like it does today. Two-party framing limits us to covering what the leaders of those two sides consider in their interests. And, because it is appropriately not our job to take sides in partisan politics, we have felt an obligation to treat them both more or less equally.

Both parties are corrupted by money, which has badly perverted the debate for a long time. But one party, you have certainly noticed, has over the last decade or two descended into a froth of racism, grievance and reality-denial. Asking you to triangulate between today’s Democrats and today’s Republicans is effectively asking you to lobotomize yourself. I’m against that.

Defining our job as “not taking sides between the two parties” has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. We will not take sides with one political party or the other, ever. But we will proudly, enthusiastically, take the side of wide-ranging, fact-based debate.

While we shouldn’t pretend we know the answers, we should just stop pretending we don’t know what the problems are. Indeed, your main job now is to publicly identify those problems, consider diverse views respectfully, ask hard questions of people on every side, demand evidence, explore intent, and write up what you’ve learned. Who is proposing intelligent solutions? Who is blocking them? And why?

The profession must learn from its mistakes, refuse to take government at its word, and challenge claims of secrecy. “The government routinely uses secrecy to protect itself, not the people.”

Habits developed in an era of loyal readers and limited space no longer apply – not when people land on our stories from who-knows-where and we can offer background and verification, through our writing and through supplementary links. What has been the unstated subtext of so many of our stories – that politics bends to the powerful, that bigotry blights so many American lives, that climate catastrophe is imminent – needs to be clear and obvious going forward. It needs to be in the headline.

The “view from nowhere” has to go. Moral clarity is in fashion again.

On diversity in the news and in newsrooms:

I look out at our profession, and I don’t see much of it.

Over time, that has to change. And it will change – but not overnight.

What we need to do, in the meantime, is recognize the effects of that: namely, that we have for a long time now operated in an atmosphere of establishment whiteness, where whiteness and white values are considered the norm.

This has corrupted what the previous generation of leaders considered “objective” journalism. Even if you value being “detached” or “above it all” – which, for the record, I do not — you are neither of those things if you haven’t recognized, not to mention rejected, white privilege and presumptions.

We in this business write and report, by default, from a position of whiteness. Our sources are too often white and male. Our presumed readers – the ones we worry about not offending – are white, male, affluent, and centrist (as if centrism were still a thing.)

We too often think of whiteness as neutral. What we have all witnessed so vividly in the last four years is what nonwhite people have experienced for decades: that it is not.

New rules

From now on, I’m the bad cop when it comes to dishy sources who want to talk to you anonymously. When you tell your sources “my boss won’t let me quote you unless you speak to me on the record,” that’s me.

Granting anonymity is a two-way contract and should only come in return for delivering accurate information of great value to the public. In its ideal form, it protects sources who tell secrets and would otherwise face retribution from the bosses who don’t want the public to know the truth.

But publishing what anonymous sources say is essentially vouching for their credibility, because readers have no way of judging it on their own. It also means the sources can avoid accountability of any kind for what they said, including if they lied.

So new rules:

• No anonymous sourcing unless you and your editor agree that the information is vital to an important story, otherwise unattainable, and you are either satisfied of your source’s altruistic motives or prepared to describe their more venal ones to your readers.
• Warn them that if they lie to you, you will out them.

I’m also abolishing the fact-checking department. Or rather, I’m turning everyone into a fact-checker. Fact-checks shouldn’t be segregated. If a lie is important, that’s a news story. If an entire political party is engaged in gaslighting, that’s a news story.

Even more importantly, we should pursue consequences for lying, because right now there are none beyond a “fact check” that nobody reads. That means interrupting known liars when they are repeating a known lie. That means demanding retractions, publicly and repeatedly. That means denying serial liars the opportunity to use the media – particularly live media — to spread their lies. That means whenever you quote a serial liar, even if they are not provably lying at the time, you warn readers that they lie a lot. That means openly distinguishing in your reporting between people who, regardless of their political views, can be counted on to be acting in good faith from those who can be counted on to be acting in bad faith.

This is crucial to our mission and our economic survival. In a world with no consequences for lying, fact-based journalism has little value.

The Columbia Journalism Review echoed the blogosphere’s assessment of “White House Watch blogger Dan Froomkin’s unceremonious dismissal from The Washington Post” in 2009 that Froomkin was “guilty of nothing more than BWL—blogging while liberal.”

Froomkin continues to believe that reporting from somewhere rather than nowhere is the way the news business stays in business in the 21st century.

Former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman advocates making Donald J. Trump, private citizen, the star witness in his impeachment trial for inciting an insurrection. Akerman made the case on CNN last weekend.

"the first witness I would call is Donald J. Trump. And I would make most of the case through him while he is on the witness stand. I would question him about all of the lies” – @nickakerman, Former Assist Special Watergate Prosecutor pic.twitter.com/vqfa05G6zN

— Ana Cabrera (@AnaCabrera) January 31, 2021

This morning Akerman takes that case to the New York Daily News. To have any hope of getting enough Republicans to vote to convict, House managers need to be compelling and succinct in making their case. They should shake up the trial immediately and enlist Trump to make it for them:

The House prosecutors would be able to confront Trump with videos and tweets of his lies claiming widespread fraud in the election. Trump will be forced to admit that he made those statements. In response to each lie, the prosecutors can then present Trump with the many court decisions that found there was in fact no widespread fraud. As to those court decisions decided by a Trump appointee, Trump can be asked if he is aware that he had appointed the judge who wrote the opinion.

Trump can also be examined on his efforts to change the vote in Georgia, using his recorded conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In that conversation, Trump in veiled threats implored him to find 11,780 votes to make Trump the winner of Georgia’s electoral votes. Trump will have to admit that the recording accurately reflects what he said, including his statement that Raffensperger was taking a “big risk” by not finding those extra votes.

For an ordinary defendant and an ordinary jury that might make sense.

Akerman’s strategy assumes, of course, that Trump would actually honor a subpoena and not order his ragtag band of attorney-supplicants to fight it, pointlessly or not. It assumes that if Trump shows up to testify that he would not make an impossibly hostile witness, that he would not either refuse to cooperate or use the platform to make his own case that he was horribly treated. By Democrats. By Bill Barr. By the “fake news” media. By Twitter. By state officials he could not bend to his will.

Then consider Republicans among the jury. Many of the same senators in Trump’s first impeachment trial took a solemn oath before the chief justice of the Supreme Court to render impartial judgment. Senator-supplicants like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Here is Graham on Tuesday commenting on the controversy surrounding Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

This is an amazing exchange with the oleaginous @LindseyGrahamSC. He refuses to comment on Marjorie Taylor Greene's quotes by claiming they might have been "manipulated." Told some are on video, he keeps insisting he must hear them from Greene herself:https://t.co/WCDLWeQbhp pic.twitter.com/1TUNVyYN0R

— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) February 3, 2021

David Neiwert of Daily Kos (formerly with the Southern Poverty Law Center) on Tuesday reposted an account of the trial of Elizabeth and Marc Hokoana for felony assault with a deadly weapon. At a Seattle protest against Milo Yiannopoulos on January 20, 2017, Elizabeth Hokoana had shot and seriously wounded a 34-year-old antifascist named Joshua Dukes who, Neiwert observed, was engaged in peacekeeping. Dukes was standing feet away from Neiwert, there to report on the event. Neiwert became a key witness.

The judge declared a mistrial after it became clear that three jurors refused to acknowledge clear evidence of guilt and would not budge:

“The jury was biased,” its foreman, a man named Luke, told The Seattle Times. He said that, during deliberations, he had requested a repeat viewing for the entire jury of an informational video about bringing bias into the jury chambers, but “it didn’t do any good” for a small handful of jurors who “sympathized and held similar views” to those of the Hokoanas.

[…]

One of the jurors approached Raam Wong afterward in an effort to set the record straight. She told him that the jury’s deliberations were tainted from the outset by the three Trumpites, led by one particularly bellicose male: “I guess from the very first moment he just kind of sunk his heels in, and said there’s no way in hell I’m going to ruin this woman’s life because of some antifa ringleader who he thought he was human trash and probably deserved to be shot.”

What would it take to move Republican senators who already proved they can ignore or explain away compelling evidence and convict in Trump’s second impeachment trial? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke Monday night of her ordeal during the Capitol assault. One of the men arrested for the Capitol assault threatened to assassinate her. Republican members must fear the AOC treatment from Trump supporters. Insurrectionists wanted to hang then-vice president Mike Pence on Jan. 6.

The Republican Party that once regularly accused the left of moral relativism has for years practiced it. Truth is situational. They long ago abandoned any claimed moral high ground and American principles for whatever it takes to retain power, including pledging fealty to the Seven Deadly Sins on two legs. That man cannot tell the truth, especially if conflicts with his need to armor his fragile ego against the label of loser.

I wish Akerman’s strategy could work, but I am not hopeful.

Trump officials actively lobbied to deny states money for vaccine rollout last fall 

The push, described to STAT by congressional aides in both parties and openly acknowledged by one of the Trump officials, came from multiple high-ranking Trump health officials in repeated meetings with legislators.

Without the extra money, states spent last October and November rationing the small pot of federal dollars they had been given. And when vaccines began shipping in December, states seemed woefully underprepared.

The previously unreported lobbying efforts underscore that even after the Trump administration spent billions helping drug makers develop Covid-19 vaccines, it not only dismissed states’ concerns about the help they would need to roll them out, but actively undermined their efforts to press Congress to get the funding they needed.

Much of the lobbying push came from Paul Mango, the former deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services. He argued, repeatedly, that states hadn’t demonstrated they needed additional funding because, at least as of last October, they hadn’t spent the $200 million that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent to states in September.

Far from denying his efforts, Mango doubled down in an interview with STAT — and even accused states of pressing for the money to bolster their empty tax coffers.

“A lot of them had shut down their economies and they weren’t getting tax revenue,” he said.

“I’m sure they could use money — that’s not in dispute — what’s in dispute is whether they needed money given all they hadn’t used to actually administer vaccines,” Mango added, suggesting that his lobbying efforts were an attempt to protect taxpayers from wasteful government spending.

Mango and other Trump officials started lobbying Congress to deny states the money last fall. At the time, states were working with the Trump administration and the CDC to craft plans to administer the first Covid-19 vaccines, which were expected to be authorized in November. Meanwhile, Congress was busy negotiating a Covid-19 response package that was almost guaranteed to include some funding for the vaccination effort. On Oct. 15, states formally asked congressional leadership for $8.4 billion in funding.

On Oct. 27, Mango told congressional staff, including those working for the House Appropriations Committee, that states did not need more federal funding because they had not yet spent the $200 million provided by the government earlier that year, a Democratic aide told STAT.

Mango also said that HHS had asked states for detailed financial plans for how they planned to spend the extra money, but that their plans were “vague.” STAT was unable to obtain those plans: The Association for State and Territorial Health Officials told STAT it did not have access to them.

[…]

Mango told STAT that the early hiccups with the vaccine rollout were caused by states too closely following CDC recommendations for who to vaccinate first and by natural vaccine supply constraints, not lack of funding.

“A lot of that could have been avoided or smoothed,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, regarding the scramble from states to begin vaccinating in December. “Having more money would have allowed them to devote more resources to planning for the vaccine, making sure they had enough vaccinators … and get in place venues to do mass vaccinations.”

The Trump people could not do anything right. And I mean anything.