“The only way we can succeed and retain the trust of the American people is to adhere to the norms that have become part of the DNA of every Justice Department employee since Edward Levy’s stint as the first post-Watergate Attorney General,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told his new staff on Thursday. “[T]hose norms require that like cases be treated alike. That there not be one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans; One rule for friends and another for foes; One rule for the powerful and another for the powerless; One rule for the rich and another for the poor; Or different rules depending upon one’s race or ethnicity.”
Levi’s norms are, unquestionably, the standard that should be upheld by every U.S. Attorney General, but the political landscape—and the nation—that Garland inherits is vastly different from the one that Levi confronted nearly fifty years ago. On Wednesday, the intelligence community released a report warning that the threat of domestic violent extremism was rising. Partisanship is at its highest levels in decades. Public trust in institutions, from Congress to the courts, is at a near-record low. Republicans and Democrats increasingly get their information from cable and online information ecosystems that describe opposite realities. This division reached a zenith in the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, which left five dead after an attempt to block Congress from certifying last year’s election results, and in Donald Trump’s subsequent second impeachment for his role in inciting the violence. In a recent poll, eighty-one per cent of Democrats said that Trump was mainly responsible for the violence and destruction. In a separate poll, fifty-eight per cent of Trump voters said that the attack was primarily inspired by Antifa.
Those alternate universes will not be reconciled by a norms-reset. But it could not hurt.
There has never been equal treatment under law in this country. Garland has little chance of rectifying that. But he can set a tone by public demonstration that the powerful and connected do not exist in a separate legal universe.
The obvious fact that there is one rule for the powerful and another for the rest has gnawed at public confidence for decades. Combined with Republicans’ relentless efforts to undermine faith in the democratic process, two-tiered justice has contributed to feelings that the entire system is broken beyond redemption. Among some citizens this manifests in the feeling that only the blood of unspecified tyrants will cure what ails the republic.
A few more perp walks for the rich and powerful won’t eliminate that sense, but could help take the edge off.
The New York Times Editorial Board this morning adds that unequal treatment dominates where it comes to taxation:
In a remarkable 2019 analysis, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that Americans report on their taxes less than half of all income that is not subject to some form of third-party verification like a W-2. Billions of dollars in business profits, rent and royalties are hidden from the government each year. By contrast, more than 95 percent of wage income is reported.
Unreported income is the single largest reason that unpaid federal income taxes may amount to more than $600 billion this year, and more than $7.5 trillion over the next decade. It is a truly staggering sum — more than half of the projected federal deficit over the same period.
Readers can probably call to mind one tax cheat in particular who has spent a lifetime making wage earners pay his way.
A former Internal Revenue Service chief, Charles Rossotti, proposes a new form of reporting non-wage and corporate income. Something like a 1099 for investments. It would not increase anyone’s tax rate, just depress their inclination to cheat.
Consider what happened after Congress passed legislation in 1986 to require taxpayers to list a Social Security number for each person claimed as a dependent. The government could not easily crosscheck all of those claims then, but the requirement itself caused a sharp drop in fraud. The next year, seven million children abruptly disappeared from tax returns.
The Editorial Board offers other tax enforcement recommendations and concludes, “The government can crack down on crime, improve the equity of taxation — and raise some needed money in the bargain. There are many proposals to raise taxes on the rich. Let’s start by collecting what they already owe.”
Garland and the IRS could make public examples of powerful malefactors’ poor choices. Punish their violations of law with punishments with more toothy than fines. Demonstrate that rich and poor alike will face the same justice, and that “and justice for all” is not just an empty slogan.
The public cheers when villains get theirs in films. Perhaps public confidence would be restored, just a little, by making life imitate art.
Supreme Court building, Washington, DC, USA. Front facade. (Public domain)
Students of the Bible find in it very different interpretations of the same faith. Nicholas Kristof celebrates the rising influence of progressive Christians who take their Christianity more from the books of the Bible with Jesus in them than from the older ones. Interpretations are driven more by believers’ dispositions than most care to admit.
So it is with the U.S. Constitution. This week the U.S. Supreme Court will again tackle property rights (and their limtations) vis-à-vis the “takings” clause.
Under California law, union organizers may access farm properties “four times a year for a 30-day period “for the purpose of meeting and talking with employees and soliciting their support.” Cedar Point Nursery on the Oregon border and Fowler Packing Co. of Fresno have challenged this rule as a taking of property requiring government compensation.
The Fifth Amendment says private property shall not “be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Cedar Point and Fowler, represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, argue court precedents establish that the California regulation that compels them to allow union organizers on their property for 120 days a year constitutes a taking of a real property interest, for which they must be compensated. This case illustrates how governments nibble away at property rights, which provide individuals a zone of sovereignty.
This constitutes a kind of easement, plaintiffs argue, which in another case the Court ruled amounted to “imposition of . . . a servitude” and an appropriation “for which compensation should be made.”
Over at the New York Times, Nikolas Bowie, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, cites past Supreme Court civil rights rulings:
If the government was going to force Southern businesses to “serve Negroes,” then the government should have to pay the businesses for each Negro they allowed on their property.
That, at least, was the Supreme Court argument of Moreton Rolleston Jr. shortly after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The white owner of an Atlanta motel, Mr. Rolleston took pride in never serving Black customers. Yet the new civil rights law prohibited him from discriminating on the basis of race.
Mr. Rolleston promptly sued the government. Among his claims, he argued that a business’s right to exclude unwanted visitors was a “property right.” Because the Fifth Amendment declares that “private property” cannot be “taken for public use without just compensation,” he wanted the government to pay him $1 million for taking away his right to exclude Negroes.
Fifth Amendment precedent required compensation only for literal taking of land, the court ruled. But since the Supreme Court decides which cases it hears, this more conservative one will reconsider in 2021 whether Rolleston’s property rights took precedence over civil rights. Cedar Point and Fowler argue the state must compensate them not to discriminate against the unions. We will see how much the court’s 21st-century originalists are disposed to read into the text of the Fifth Amendment.
Bowie explains:
That might sound great for opponents of organized labor. But Mr. Rolleston’s rule would affect far more than union organizing. For example, health and safety laws require businesses to give unwanted inspectors “access” to their workplaces. Mr. Rolleston’s rule would require the government to pay “just compensation” every time a health inspector searches for rats.
Affordable housing laws similarly require landlords to give low-income tenants “access” to their rental properties. Mr. Rolleston’s rule would require the government to pay landlords who would rather exclude these or any other tenants.
Will counters:
Ratification of the Bill of Rights, including the takings clause, was effective Dec. 15, 1791. Three months later, in a newspaper article on property, James Madison quoted, as the Founders were wont to do, the English jurist William Blackstone, who said the property right means the “dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”
Yet, rights are not absolute but in tension. In cases in which persons are at odds, every court in the land must weigh whose rights take precedence. Recognizing that is not a denial of anyone’s rights, but humble admission that none are absolute in society. Where they conflict, courts must decide whose rights are superior and whose must yield.
Will might take care not to make a “zone of sovereignty” argument or quote Blackstone too loudly lest women’s rights advocates overhear.
The story of America’s immigrants is all of our stories, all Americans. Outside of indigenous Americans, none of us are really “from” here; if you start tracing your family’s genealogy, I’ll bet you don’t have to go back too many generations to find ancestors born on foreign soil. Unfortunately, some Americans have conveniently forgotten about that…
It’s been over five years since Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and launched a longshot bid for president with a xenophobic, immigrant-bashing speech that electrified white nationalists and set a dark tone for his campaign and presidency.
Throughout his tenure, Trump continued to sow division and hate with a steady stream of racist conspiracy theories and lies – all while installing extremists in positions of power and executing radical policies, such as banning Muslims from entering the country, separating immigrant children from their parents at the border and reversing basic protections for the LGBTQ community.
Trump’s words and actions had consequences.
Hate crimes and far-right terrorist attacks surged. Teachers across America reported a sudden spike in the use of racial slurs and incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags. And in the first two years of Trump’s administration, the number of white nationalist hate groups rose by 55 percent, as white supremacists saw in him an avatar of their grievances and a champion of their cause.
Now, Trump is gone from Washington. But the extremist movement he energized may be entering a perilous new phase […]
While this week’s mass shooting in Atlanta that left 8 people dead (6 of them women of Asian descent) is still under investigation and not yet been officially declared a hate crime, the incident has sparked a much-needed national dialog addressing recent spikes in racially motivated violence, particularly targeting members of the Asian-American community.
President Biden and Vice President Harris called for unity after attacks against Asian Americans have surged since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
“There are simply some core values and beliefs that should bring us together as Americans,” Biden said during a speech at Emory University in Atlanta on Friday. “One of them is standing together against hate, against racism, the ugly poison that has long haunted and plagued our nation.”
Biden’s remarks came three days after a gunman opened fire at three massage businesses in the Atlanta area, killing eight people, including six women of Asian descent.
While the suspect, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long of Georgia, told investigators that the shootings were not racially motivated, physical violence and verbal harassment against members of the Asian American community have spiked over the past year.
“Whatever the motivation, we know this, too many Asian Americans walking up and down the streets are worried,” Biden said. “They’ve been attacked, blamed, scapegoated, harassed, they’ve been verbally assaulted, physically assaulted, killed.”
The president said that these incidents are evidence that “words have consequences.” […]
Harris, who joined Biden during the trip to Atlanta, called Tuesday’s shooting rampage a “heinous act of violence” that has no place in Georgia or the United States.
She also said that the uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes is a reminder that racism, xenophobia and sexism is real in America and “always has been.”
Looking on the bright side of this week’s news…one of the most oft-quoted lines from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech from the March on Washington on August 28, 1963 is this one: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I’d like to think that we edged a little bit closer to that better day this past Thursday:
That would be Kamala Harris, a woman of South Asian and West Indian heritage, a daughter of immigrants and the first female Vice-President of the United States… conducting the swearing-in ceremony for Deb Halaand, a woman who now holds the distinction of serving as the first Native-American Interior Secretary of the United States.
That only took us 245 years. But you know…baby steps.
Granted, it doesn’t solve all our problems, but it gives one hope, which is in short supply.
That’s why I think it’s time for some music therapy. I’ve chosen 10 songs that speak to the immigrant experience and serve to remind us of America’s strong multicultural bedrock.
Alphabetically:
“Across the Borderline” – Freddy Fender
This song (co-written by John Hiatt, Ry Cooder, and Jim Dickinson) has been covered many times, but this heartfelt version by the late Freddy Fender is the best. Fender’s version was used as part of the soundtrack for Tony Richardson’s 1982 film The Border.
“America” – Neil Diamond
Diamond’s anthemic paean to America’s multicultural heritage first appeared in the soundtrack for Richard Fleischer and Sidney J. Furie’s 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer (thankfully, Diamond’s stirring song has had a longer shelf life than the film, which left audiences and critics underwhelmed). Weirdly, it was included on a list of songs deemed as “lyrically questionable” and/or “inappropriate” for airplay in an internal memo issued by the brass at Clear Channel Communications in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Go figure.
“America” (movie soundtrack version) – West Side Story
This classic number from the stage musical and film West Side Story (with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and music by Leonard Bernstein) is both a celebration of Latin immigrant culture and a slyly subversive take down of nativist-fed ethnic stereotyping.
Ave Que Emigra” – Gaby Morena
Speaking of exploding stereotypes-here’s a straightforward song explaining why cultural assimilation and cultural identity are not mutually exclusive. From a 2012 NPR review:
As a song that speaks of being an immigrant, [Gaby Moreno’s “Ave Que Emigra”] strikes the perfect emotional chords. So many songs on that topic are gaudy, one-dimensional woe-is-me tales. Moreno’s story of coming to America is filled with simple one-liners like “tired of running, during hunting season” (evocative of the grotesque reality Central Americans face today at home and in their journeys north). Her cheerful ranchera melody, with its sad undertone, paints a perfect portrait of the complex emotional state most of us immigrants inhabit: a deep sadness for having to leave mixed with the excitement of the adventure that lies ahead, plus the joy and relief of having “made it.”
No habla espanol? No problema! You can see the English translation of the lyrics here.
“Buffalo Soldier” – Bob Marley & the Wailers
Sadly, not all migrants arrived on America’s shores of their own volition; and such is the unfortunate legacy of the transatlantic slave trade that flourished from the 16th to the 18th centuries. As Malcolm X once bluntly put it, “[African Americans] didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the Rock was landed on us.” Bob Marley entitled this song as reference to the nickname for the black U.S. Calvary regiments that fought in the post-Civil War Indian conflicts. Marley’s lyrics seem to mirror Malcom X’s pointed observation above:
If you know your history, Then you would know where you’re coming from Then you wouldn’t have to ask me Who the heck do I think I am
I’m just a Buffalo Soldier In the heart of America Stolen from Africa, brought to America Said he was fighting on arrival Fighting for survival
“Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” – Arlo Guthrie
Woody Guthrie originally penned this “ripped from the headlines” protest piece as a poem in the wake of a 1948 California plane crash (the music was composed some years later by Martin Hoffman, and first popularized as a song by Pete Seegar). Among the 32 passengers who died were 28 migrant farm workers who were in the process of being deported back to Mexico. Guthrie noticed that most press and radio reports at the time identified the 4 crew members by name, while dehumanizing the workers by referring to them en masse as “deportees” (plus ca change…). His son Arlo’s version is very moving.
“The Immigrant”– Neil Sedaka
Reflecting back on his 1975 song, Neil Sedaka shared this tidbit in a 2013 Facebook post:
I wrote [“The Immigrant”] for my friend John Lennon during his immigration battles in the 1970s. I’ll never forget when I called to tell him about it. Overwhelmed by the gesture, he said, “Normally people only call me when they want something. It’s very seldom people call you to give you something. It’s beautiful.”
I concur with John. It’s Sedaka’s most beautifully crafted tune, musically and lyrically.
“Immigration Blues” – Chris Rea
In 2005, prolific U.K. singer-songwriter Chris Rea released a massive 11-CD box set album with 137 tracks called Blue Guitars (I believe that sets some sort of record). The collection is literally a journey through blues history, with original songs “done in the style of…[insert your preferred blues sub-genre here]” from African origins to contemporary iterations. This track is from “Album 10: Latin Blues”. The title says it all.
“Immigration Man” – David Crosby & Graham Nash
After an unpleasant experience in the early 70s getting hassled by a U.S. Customs agent, U.K.-born Graham Nash (who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1978) didn’t get mad, he got even by immortalizing his tormentor in a song. The tune is one of the highlights of the 1972 studio album he recorded with David Crosby, simply titled Crosby and Nash. I love that line where he describes his immigration form as “big enough to keep me warm.”
“We Are the Children” – A Grain of Sand
A Grain of Sand were a pioneering Asian-American activist folk trio, who hit the ground running with their 1973 album A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle of Asians in America. Chris Kando Iijima, Joanne Nobuko Miyamoto, and William “Charlie” Chin use minimalist arrangements, lovely harmony singing and politically strident lyrics to get their message across. I find this cut to be particularly pertinent to reflecting on the events of this week and quite moving.
Lol. He’s lying, ofcourse. Many of the changes were approved by Republican state legislatures and he lost anyway.
But it’s clear they intend to push the idea that state legislatures should decide presidential elections.They are pretending that there was something unusual about State Supreme Courts, Secretaries of State or local elections officials handling the administration of the election and that the changes they made to accommodate the pandemic were illegal — and therefore he “won big.” It’s a fatuous excuse for his defeat but what would you expect.
But underlying all that folderol about election rules, which they certainly would like to invest in partisan politicians who could intervene at the last moment to tilt an election their way, there is a very basic attempt to destroy our democracy. Check out this little shot across the bow from Arizona:
Rep. Shawnna Bolick, R-Phoenix, has proposed letting the Legislature void the results of a presidential election if it chooses.
House Bill 2720 would allow the House, by a majority vote, to revoke the secretary of state’s certification of presidential electors chosen by Arizona voters to cast the state’s electoral college votes.
After the bill was proposed, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs questioned why the Legislature doesn’t get rid of the presidential election altogether, contending that’s essentially what Bolick’s bill would do.Your stories live here.Fuel your hometown passion and plug into the stories that define it.
Bolick, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, defended the bill on Friday as it attracted national attention.
“This bill would give the Arizona Legislature back the power it delegated to certify the electors. It is a good, democratic check and balance,” she said in a statement.
Mar-a-lago has a COVID outbreak. So they closed the outside services and kept the inside of the resort open. Seriously:
Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida has been partially closed after some of its employees were infected with the coronavirus, according to an email sent to club members Friday afternoon.
“As some of our staff have recently tested positive for COVID-19, we will be temporarily suspending service at the Beach Club and à la carte Dining Room,” club management said, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.
“Banquet and Event services remain open,” the email said.
The Trump Organization declined to say how many workers were affected. The Palm Beach club — which includes the former president’s home as well as restaurants and banquet facilities — has dozens of employees during the winter season.
“Out of an abundance of caution we have quarantined some of the workers and partially closed a section of the club for a short period of time,” a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization said in a statement to The Post.
Lee Lipton, a member at the club, said he received a phone call Friday saying his dinner reservations were canceled for Friday and Saturday nights. “But they said the car show was going on Sunday, and the hotel rooms are fine,” he said.
On Thursday, America was graced with a gloating op-ed from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in The Wall Street Journal explaining how “the elites”—meaning, apparently, everyone who ever took a biology course in high school—were so, so wrong when they tried to slow down the spread of COVID-19 and he was absolutely right to encourage parties on the beach. On the same day, Politico staffer Michael Kruse added a coat of finest boot polish with a second editorial insisting that DeSantis “won the pandemic” because “Florida has fared no worse … than other states.”
DeSantis is not just taking a victory lap over a course paved with 32,000 dead Floridians, he’s doing so at a time when his state is still logging 5,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day (second highest in the nation). That’s over twice the level Florida was reporting last fall right before it experienced the sharpest surge of the whole pandemic. So yes, lauding DeSantis is premature. Yes, it’s hideously ugly and insensitive—not just to the families of the dead, but to the hundreds of thousands of Floridians left with long-term damage from COVID-19.
But there is something that really should be earning DeSantis the admiration of Republicans everywhere. Becauseli while New York nursing home numbers may be getting national attention, the truth is we have not a #$%ing clue about what actually happened in Florida. That’s because no one, in no other state, has done more to cover up the facts of the pandemic than Ron DeSantis.
Going into the pandemic, Florida had a system that mirrored that of many states. At the county level, medical examiners tallied both the numbers and the cause of death. This information was both made available to the public and sent to the state. By no coincidence at all, one of DeSantis’ first moves during the pandemic was to stop county officials from making these numbers public. Starting in March 2020, county medical examiners were forbidden from revealing the numbers or cause of death, and instead told to report their information only to the state.
If this sounds like it wouldn’t make much difference, in April there was a strange spike in “pneumonia deaths” in Florida—a spike that existed nowhere else. The official Florida site blamed these deaths, when they were given any cause at all, on flu. This was happening at a point when flu numbers were already way down in other states, but COVID-19 deaths were on the rise. Right from the beginning, to believe DeSantis means that Florida was having an absolutely unique experience in which COVID-19 was less deadly than anywhere else in the nation, but they were plagued by a mysterious, unconnected rash of respiratory illness.
And then there was just how those Florida numbers on COVID-19 were getting to the public. Data scientist Dr. Rebekah Jones was hired to create a dashboard for the state where the official numbers could be displayed. But in May, Jones was fired from that position after she was told to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.” At that time, when “only” 2,000 people had died in Florida, DeSantis was already taking a victory lap around the state, claiming to have defeated the coronavirus without making spring breakers set down a single Heineken.
By then, the state’s medical examiners were up in arms over the differences between what they were seeing and what the state was reporting. They called the DeSantis numbers “a sham” and pointed out that the number of respiratory deaths the state was shoveling into the pneumonia category, with no mention of COVID-19, was the highest in at least five years. As the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported, the sharp increase in pneumonia deaths “alters the fundamental narrative of the coronavirus outbreak in Florida: This pandemic started earlier and has been broader, deadlier and more rampant than previously known.” When the Miami Herald managed to get their hands on data from medical examiners, they found it “riddled with holes.”
It also became clear that not only was Florida not taking any responsibility for tourists who came there, shared coronavirus on the beach, and returned home to deliver their virus souvenir to family and friends, it wasn’t counting the people who died in Florida if they were from out of state. That didn’t just include those who dropped in for a few weeks, it included “snowbirds” who spend a good part of the year at Florida homes. People who lived in Florida, got sick in Florida, and died in Florida did not show up on Florida’s dashboard unless they were also official residents of Florida—and even then, the odds that they might have been left off seem high.
By June, Jones was tweeting out claims that that DeSantis’ government was covering up increasing hospitalization rates and had manually deleted at least 1,200 cases of COVID-19 in order to artificially meet guidelines that allowed for more rapid reopening in advance of the July 4 holiday. Jones then created her own website to give Florida a better idea of what was actually happening, including showing available hospital beds and ICU beds—information that DeSantis had stripped from the official site.
Almost immediately, Jones came under attack with claims that she had “illegally accessed” data—data that should have been public in the first place. She was repeatedly harassed by state officials and her attempts to provide more accurate data were blocked by a tightening of security around data that DeSantis, unlike every previous administration, claimed to be private. This culminated in a Dec. 7 raid on Jones’ home by Florida state police who carried off the computers used for her alternative data site. The action was egregious enough that, as the Tampa Bay Times reported, a lifelong Republican attorney who had been appointed to a judicial nominating commission by DeSantis resigned his position, saying that he want to call attention to how Florida was blocking “public access to truthful data.”
The truth about Florida is … we don’t know the truth about Florida. We do know that DeSantis has behaved recklessly and irresponsibly, that he has defied medical advice, used authoritarian tactics to hide information, and sold vaccine access to the highest bidder while denying vaccine to communities of color.
But even if the information that is currently out there were perfectly accurate … how is it a “win?” Yes, “Florida has fared no worse” than some other states … if by that Politico means those states that were unfortunate enough to be caught in the blast of the initial surge at a time when there were neither available tests nor information about how to treat COVID-19. Florida is squarely in the middle of the list of states on both deaths by population and cases by population. If it’s done better than about half the states, it’s done worse than the others. That includes running a worse rate of both deaths and cases than California. Just looking up the Atlantic coast, the rate of deaths in Florida is 27% higher than in Virginia and 36% higher than in North Carolina. Hell, it’s 180% higher than in Maine.
What exactly is supposed to represent a “win” here? Is DeSantis supposed to be given accolades because Florida didn’t slip beneath the sea under the weight of all the dead bodies? Republicans aren’t just ready to hand DeSantis a participation trophy, they’re trying to turn it into a blue ribbon.
You can see this Trump 2.0 valorization slipping into cable news talk too. It’s disturbing to say the least.
If you hated Trump, your going to loathe this nasty man. The press will give him much more leeway, however. He went to Harvard. He’s younger. He’s slicker. He’s dangerous.
Apparently, the newly minted right wing populists have also decided that they are monarchists. Yeah. They don’t have to make sense. If it feels good to them, they just do it. And it’s not just because they hate the Black duchess, Meghan Markle, or revere the gold plated Donald Trump who went on TV this week and made this pathetic comment when asked about Meghan possibly running for president in 2024 (which may be the dumbest rumor of the century)
“I hope that happens. If that happened, I think I’d have an even stronger feeling toward running. I happen to think, I know the Queen, as you know. I have met with the Queen and I think the Queen is a tremendous person, and I am not a fan of Meghan.”
As I said: pathetic. But there’s more to this than Meghan Markle and that fool. Josh Marshall put together an interesting twitter thread explaining the deeper origins of all this:
The British monarchy is quaint, good for streaming costume dramas and something I really don’t care about in any way. But the new pro-monarchism on the US right, which seems to flow downstream from hostility to Meghan Markle, is a fascinating development. It goes without saying that rejection of the British monarchy is literally about as foundationally American as you can get. But it’s worth stepping back and appreciating the radicalism of this stance for Americans in the final decades of the 18th century.
Read the correspondence of a Jefferson or a Washington and they bristle with hostility not only to *the* King but the concept of kings. This seems obvious to us. After all America doesn’t have kings and they rebelled against a king. But you cannot understate the degree to which the whole political world in which these men were reared was centered around loyalty to the King and the commonsense reality that countries were governed by kings.
The overthrow of the particular and the very idea is deeply radical. And the element of the rejection drives deep into the political culture and indeed the culture itself. During Washington’s first term Jefferson (state) and Hamilton (treasury) are the two ideological poles of the cabinet. As tension around the French Revolution escalates, Jefferson and his supporters are quite sure that Hamilton and his supporters want to bring back monarchy. Jefferson in his correspondence calls them “monocrats”. That’s not really true, though people around Hamilton (who has a deep influence on Washington) do want to bring back some of its trappings. But it illustrates the depth of the hostility to an institution and a foundation of political existence that all of these guys had been born into and long sworn allegiance to. It’s not just a governmental revolution but one of manners and morals as well.
No ones talking about bringing back Kings to the US. So it can all seem a bit theoretical and distant. But we should remember that the hostility to Kings is the taproot of hostility to inequality, something that was altogether incomplete at the time and remains so today. Indeed, it’s hard to find anyone in whom this contradiction remains more present than in Jefferson. In any case, I focus on him only because he’s well-known and his extant correspondence is voluminous. What I’m describing is widespread across American in these years.
Rejection of monarchy was and is deeply radical and its umbilically connected to political equality which remains deeply relevant today and not at all hypothetical. There’s no harm in some fascination with the modern day British monarchy which is little more than a generously funded dress-up show. But monarchy, adoration of monarchy, giving it some pride of place in a ‘heritage’ that is anything Americans should want to honor is deeply unamerican.
The final point here is that nostalgia for monarchy and sometimes more than nostalgia is a recurrent theme in the US, almost always among conservatives of some sort. That is almost always because playing out the rejection of monarchism and the interlaced rejection of inequality brings a certain kind of conservative to a place they don’t like. So they end up running the chain back in the opposite direction. If equality is this uncomfortable maybe we need to give monarchy another think? And here we are.
I shouldn’t laugh, but what in the world is wrong with these people? The wife of a member of the FBI Pittsburgh Division’s violent crimes task force unit went to the insurrection with her boyfriend, posted pictures of herself inside the capitol and lied to the FBI about it:
A Pennsylvania woman was arrested — and lost her marriage — for her role in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection.
Jennifer Marie Heinl was taken into custody Thursday and charged with violent entry, disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds and other felonies in connection with the riot, which left one police officer and four Donald Trump supporters dead, reported WPXI-TV.
Her husband Mike Heinl, a Shaler police detective and a member of the FBI’s violent crime taskforce unit in Pittsburgh, filed for divorce last month and was on duty at the time of the insurrection, which his department chief said he did not support.
Court documents show Jennifer Heinl was associated with Kenneth Grayson, a Bridgeville man charged in January with crimes related to the riot, and a the FBI executed a search warrant that revealed Facebook messages between the pair from Nov. 12 to Jan. 11 discussing travel arrangements to Washington, D.C.
Defendant Jennifer Heinl, the feds say, lied to the FBI about entering the Capitol.
“Court records indicate he filed for divorce in February, one month following the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol… The department’s chief tells Channel 11 Heinl was on-duty at the time of the insurrection and does not support what took place…”
The affidavit against the wife of a member of the FBI Pittsburgh Division’s violent crimes task force unit was written by a FBI special agent on the FBI Pittsburgh Division’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
“Mmm, beer.” (Photo via Asheville Brewing Company)
No, not yet. Josh Holland’s tweet Friday night hit home.
The thing that I find really crazy about this is that not only are we months away from being able to eat out safely, we’re just *days* away from it being warm enough to go to a restaurant and eat outdoors. Supposed to hit the mid-60s next week.
Three Ulster County restaurants announced they have had a staff member tested positive for Covid-19 this week.
Oriole 9, 17 Tinker Street, Woodstock, said today that an employee who last worked Saturday, March 13 had tested positive, and that it would sanitize the restaurant and have all other employees tested. Here’s the announcement:
Another Woodstock restaurant, Pearl Moon, located at 52 Mill Hill Road, announced yesterday that it would close March 17 and 18 after an employee tested positive for Covid-19. Here’s the announcement:
A third Ulster County restaurant had to close because of a positive case among the staff. Ask Covid long-haulers about inconvenience.
Order take-out. Eat outside if weather permits. It is just now getting to where afternoons are warm enough to meet friends we have not seen in person for a year for a (socially distanced) drink outdoors. But as desperate as we are for a taste of normal (or craft beer from a local tap), it is not worth the communal risk to eat indoors even if you yourself are full vaccinated. Don’t.
I told the masked man who handed me my pizza outside Friday night about Holland’s tweet minutes before. He is anxious to reopen for indoor dining (and a full menu), but not until they can do it safely.
I know all of this already, Anne Applebaum thought (The Atlantic) in reading the National Intelligence Council’s unclassified report on foreign interference in the 2020 election. Russian President Vladimir Putin worked his mischief through players close to President Donald Trump. The Iranians tried using online influence. The Chinese considered playing but dropped the idea. The Trump administration, claiming intelligence proved otherwise, touted China as the principal threat and dismissed Russia. They were liars. But we knew that already too.
Applebaum’s second reaction was If I know this already, and none of it seems to matter, then something is seriously wrong with the American political system. A third thing we knew already.
Russia interferes because, having studied how Americans take in information, spreading disinformation is easy. Rank partisans on the right no longer care about the information’s source or credibility so long as they can use it as a bludgeon:
As a result, supplying an edited audiotape or a piece of false evidence to one of the bottom-feeders of the information ecosystem is incredibly easy; after that, others will ensure that it rises up the food chain. Russian disinformation doesn’t succeed thanks to the genius of Russians; it succeeds thanks to the sharp partisanship of Americans. Russian disinformation works because Americans allow it to work—and because those same Americans don’t care anymore about the harm they do to their country.
A couple of Friday tweets got me thinking about just how long this evolution took.
Chris Labarthe may be correct on both counts about the large-scale and proximate causes of the devolution of the Republican Party into an anti-American one. Still, what we see today perhaps represents the end state of the American paranoid style Richard Hofstadter described so famously in 1964. Russia has simply exploited it for its own ends.
Rick Perlstein and Edward H. Miller observed (The New Republic) that “violent anti-democratic sentiment is rampant in the conservative movement.” The journalistic narrative, they wrote, is that the movement is reverting back to its pre-Buckley paranoid roots before conservatism exiled “outright racists and conspiracy theorists, like Robert Welch and his John Birch Society” to its fringes.
Not so, Perlstein and Miller argue, citing examples from Buckley to Reagan. They’ve been here all along but with a lower profile. It was Birchers who first decided sex education was a tool for the Red takeover. Abortion too:
It was the John Birch Society that first discovered the power of the nascent Christian right’s most galvanizing issue. And because the John Birch Society was a secular organization with members of all faiths, it pioneered the sort of operational unity between evangelical Protestants and Catholics that the Moral Majority received credit for when it came along, nine years after the Supreme Court’s landmark abortion rights decision in Roe—a group that Ronald Reagan hugged tight as an ally, even as Birchers were officially personae non gratae.
The John Birch Society leaders’ motivations for joining this fight, as always, were fantastical. They believed abortion was part and parcel of the strategy of the “Insiders”—the shadowy globalists who directed the Communist conspiracy—to weaken America by shrinking its population. It was “people control,” just like “gun control.” That is how front groups work: Find an inviting come-on with the power to arouse an angry citizenry, even if it is just to win their vote; and if this becomes the gateway drug to sell the whole crazy conspiratorial package, all the better.
Donald Trump, QAnon, the Proud Boys, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are merely the latest manifestation of the latent paranoid style in conservatism (the left’s strain is there but less virulent). Perlstein and Miller conclude, “This is why Trumpism is not a reversion to an older, more gothic form of conservatism but an apotheosis decades in the making.”
Soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, my late father brought home a Bircher filmstrip series about the creeping Communist menace called “Two Worlds.” (The old phonograph-and-filmstrip-beep thing.) He had his kids watch it at night in the dining room. I think that’s where I learned you had to beware of propaganda because the commies would use it to undermine America from within. Decades later my dad, his friends, and plenty of your crazy uncles would traffic in “pass-it-on,” conservative chain-mail. Virtually all of it lies, smears, and distortions: propaganda.
Pass-it-on spams don’t ask people to write their congressman or senator. They don’t ask people to get involved in or contribute to a political campaign. Or even to make a simple phone call. No. Once you’ve had your daily dose of in-box outrage, conservative reader, all these propaganda pieces ask is that you “pass it on” to everyone you know. So now that you’re good and angry — and if you’re a Real American™ — you’ll share it with all your friends so they’ll get and stay angry too.
“They know it’s wrong and they don’t care,” as Larry Haake, the general registrar in Chesterfield County, Virginia, said of disinformation spread in 2013 by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. Truth is no longer an American value.
To this day I wonder if there was an overseas shop churning out at least some of those conservative emails about the Clinton “death list” and other faux scandals the way teens in the Balkans churned out fake news during the 2016 presidential campaign. Their style — with the large text, the waving-flag gifs, praying hands, and “if you love America and this makes you angry” codas — played so neatly into a paranoid narrative building for decades. The news isn’t telling you the truth; they hate America and are behind it all; the government is in bed with the enemies of freedom, etc.
It’s very tempting to say that they should just be allowed to get sick and die if they choose to, as Trump says in that video. But It’s not healthy to think such things. That way lies madness. But on a more practical level, it’s also not helpful since they can serve as hosts for new and more deadly variants and spread them around. It’s a bad situation.
