Month: April 2021

Wake-up crews at your local TV station soon may have to include mass-shooting and police-killing forecasts alongside drive-time traffic reports and weekend weather:

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A gunman killed eight people and wounded several others before killing himself in a late-night shooting at a FedEx facility near the Indianapolis airport, police said, in the latest in a spate of mass shootings after a relative lull during the pandemic.

Five people were hospitalized after the Thursday night shooting, according to police. One of them had critical injuries, police spokesperson Genae Cook said. Another two people were treated and released at the scene. FedEx said people who worked for the company were among the dead.

A witness told WTHR-TV that he was working inside the building when he heard gunshots.

“I see a man come out with a rifle in his hand and he starts firing and he starts yellin’ stuff that I could not understand,” Levi Miller said. “What I ended up doing was ducking down to make sure he did not see me because I thought he would see me and he would shoot me.”

Know your killings

The Indianapolis event was the deadliest mass-shooting since 10 died in a Boulder, Colo. grocery store on March 22. Eight others died in a spree-killing (“killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders“) in Atlanta on March 16.

These gunfire deaths follow the News-at-Six video released Thursday of a Chicago police officer gunning down a 13-year-old kid.

And in the murder (by strangulation) trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin:

Judge Peter Cahill told the 14 members of the jury that they should return to court at 9 a.m. CDT on Monday and be prepared to hear closing arguments from attorneys on both sides. Following that, Cahill will instruct the jurors on the laws in the case before the panel members start verdict deliberations. Two members of the jury will be informed that they were alternates and will not be part of deliberations  

The jury will be sequestered during its deliberations.

Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s death last Memorial Day. If convicted of the most serious charge, he could face 10½ years to 15 years in prison under sentencing guidelines for first-time offenders. But he could receive a lesser term.

Know your travel advisories

A friend just returned from Cabo San Lucas. Before she left, I checked the State Department’s travel advisories for Mexico. The state of Baja California Sur is not on it, but five Mexican states are on the Department’s “Do Not Travel To” list because of crime and kidnapping. Another 11 are on the “Reconsider Travel To” list because of crime.

And what of travel to this country?

Before the pandemic hit but after 2019 mass shootings in Gilroy, California, El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, the Japanese government described the United States as a “gun society” and warned its citizens to “be aware of the potential for gunfire incidents everywhere in the United States.“

France’s warning addressed gun culture in the U.S.:

In the French advisory’s “Culture” section, the diplomatic service warns French visitors that “carrying firearms is authorized and common” in several US states. “Visitors must therefore, in all circumstances, keep their calm and sang-froid.”

Amnesty International called gun violence in the U.S. a human rights crisis threatening travelers without regard to race, country of origin or sexual orientation:

“People in the United States cannot reasonably expect to be free from harm,” said Ernest Coverson of Amnesty International USA. “A guarantee of not being shot is impossible.”

So, if there is rain in your forecast this weekend, don’t forget the umbrella. A Kevlar vest or heavier body armor is recommended now any day of the week.

Jesus Christ, they are just going for it:

NEW In @PunchbowlNews Midday

A new America First Caucus — led by @mtgreenee and @RepGosar — is recruiting people to join based on “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” architectural style that “befits the progeny of European architecture”

Some of the most nativist stuff we’ve seen

Take a look at how they describe their immigration and infrastructure policy.

They say the group is trying to follow in Trump’s “footsteps”

Originally tweeted by Punchbowl News (@PunchbowlNews) on April 16, 2021.

Between Tucker Carlson mainstreaming The Great Replacement and these Congressional Reps going full Nazi, I think we have a bit of a problem, don’t you? (Taylor Greene is a serious anti-semite too, in case you were wondering.)

By the way, this Nazi architecture stuff isn’t just here:

By adopting a visual language of white marble statues, groups such as Identity Evropa have embarked on a culture war to redefine what – and who – is “authentically” European.

In March [2018], 60 Americans unfurled a banner outside the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee that read “European Roots, American Greatness”. Their choice of building was deliberate. Identity Evropa, the group in question, are atypical of white supremacists. They adopt code names such as “Virgil” and distribute fliers depicting neoclassical sculptures, lending a cultured facade to their racist agenda.

While the Nazis thought neoclassical architecture an authentic expression of German identity, today’s far right updates this doctrine for the social media age. As Stephan Trüby, an architectural historian at the University of Stuttgart, told me, right-wing populists have begun to sharpen their focus on architecture. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland party has spawned a revivalist movement of far-right isolationists who revere folk mythology and Saxon castles. Trüby writes that, “Filled with disgust at any kind of metropolitan multicultural way of life,” these settlers retreat to rural Germany to rehearse the “preservation of the German Volk”.

But the alt-right’s fixation on architectural heritage also reflects the notion of “metapolitics”, a concept popularised by “New Right” thinkers of the 1970s and 1980s. This denotes political domination that extends beyond the state into the realm of culture and ideas. As Guillaume Faye, a French journalist and New Right theorist, put it, “politics is the occupation of a territory”, whereas “metapolitics is the occupation of culture”. By adopting a visual language of white marble statues, groups such as Identity Evropa have embarked on a culture war to redefine what and, by implication, who, is “authentically” European.

The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, author of The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism (1994), is an influence on this movement. Scruton, 74, was recently named chair of the UK government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful commission, a quango that aims to restore notions of “community” and “beauty” to Britain’s urban landscape.

He favours traditionalist architects such as Léon Krier, a disciple of Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, and champions Poundbury, Krier’s mock-Georgian settlement near Dorchester, a place about as authentic as Chessington World of Adventures.

The controversy that followed Scruton’s appointment, where he denied accusations of bigotry, is partly informed by how easily conservative concepts of “tradition” can be appropriated by those with more extreme views. British activist Paul Joseph Watson, who works for alt-right website InfoWars, last year published a YouTube video entitled “Modern architecture SUCKS” that cuts twice to Scruton, citing his 2009 documentary Why Beauty Matters as a “MUST WATCH”. In common with Scruton’s disdain for brutalist landscapes, Watson’s central thesis is that a tyranny of skyscrapers – modern, postmodern, some as ugly as an “abortion” – have displaced the quaint authenticity of the European townscape.

Scruton was an apt choice for a commission intent on preserving tradition and moral rectitude. A recent tweet by the housing minister Kit Malthouse previewed what lies ahead. Contrasting the curvilinear glass Park House in London with Washington, DC’s Palladian Federal Building and Courthouse, Malthouse declared: “Both built in the last ten years. One will stand for centuries, one won’t… [the commission] will help us create [future] conservation areas.”

There’s nothing inherently reactionary about the belief that architecture should remain sensitive to local surroundings. But this laconic celebration of Anglo-European heritage descends into something more troubling – the protection of a nativist social order.

Yet such iconoclasm is blind to history. Greek statues were never white, and the binary opposition of modernism versus classicism is a 1980s relapse that masks how contemporary buildings have adapted classical forms.

What narrative does such selectivity advance? As Trüby noted, in Germany certain terms camouflage far-right identity politics. “Words like ‘tradition’ and ‘beauty’ are used to establish ideas of a unified people and nation, which excludes migrants and many parts of the population.” Beauty is infused with connotations of blood, soil and a Volk.

What could go wrong?

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1382708676583129089

Let me just reiterate that point: Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, a man who had spent the previous decade working in Ukraine on behalf of a Russian affiliated politician, was a man in deep debt to some seriously dangerous people from that part of the world. Yet he worked for Trump for free and shared highly confidential polling data and other information from the campaign with his long-time Ukrainian second in command, Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence operative. We now know that Kilimnik gave that information to Russian Intelligence.

Yes, Donald Trump certainly may not have known about any of that and originally just wanted to curry favor with Putin because he always admired him and thought he could make a good deal for Trump Tower Moscow. And later he may have continued to curry favor with Putin as president because he a) just really liked the cut of his jib, b) still thought he could cut some deals after he was out of office c) hated the idea that the Russians had helped him get elected so he perversely doubled down on the coziness as a way to defy his critics d) realized once he was in office that the Russians probably had all kinds of dirt on him or e) knew everything all along and just thought it was a perfectly fine way to do business.

I have no idea what was in his mind and how much he knew. He wouldn’t agree to be interviewed. But it’s not impossible that there were elements of all of the above. I think he really did like Putin because he is a macho,macho man and he loves him an authoritarian thug. He clearly thought he had a good deal in his pocket if he fluffed Putin during the 16 election and lost. He’s got the temperament of a schoolyard bully so he no doubt loved to kiss up to Putin even though it made everyone even more suspicious because it proved his power that they couldn’t stop him from doing it. And he no doubt realized just how deep he was in once he had access to all that intelligence but still didn’t think he’d done anything wrong.

The best you can say for Trump in this situation is that he was so massively stupid and incompetent that he hired a man acting on behalf of a Russian Intelligence agent to run his campaign. The worst is that he knew exactly what he was doing. Either way, the fact that he was impeached twice but wasn’t impeached for that still boggles my mind.

Video has been released of the shooting of Adam Toledo in Chicago. It’s difficult to watch, so I’ll just link here if you want to see it, and post the description:

The videos show the moments leading up to the officer shooting Toledo, the shooting itself and the aftermath.

Video taken from the front door of a Little Village church shows Toledo and 21-year-old Ruben Roman walking down the street before stopping at the corner of 24th Street and Sawyer Avenue, where it appears Roman fired shots at a target that is out of view. Toledo and Roman leave, video footage shows.

Body-camera footage shows an officer chasing Toledo through an alley, with the officer yelling at Toledo to stop. The officer catches up to Toledo, who appears to have stopped running near a gap in a fence between the alley and a church parking lot.

Video from a different angle appears to show Toledo toss the gun behind the fence moments before he is shot.

The officer flashes a strobe flashlight at Toledo and says, “Hands! Show me your fucking hands!”

Immediately after commanding Toledo to show his hands, the officer shot the boy at close distance. Toledo’s hands were raised when he was shot, the footage shows.

Footage released by police does not show Toledo point or raise a gun at the officer at the end of the chase. Toledo does not appear to be holding the gun as the officer shot him.

Toledo collapsed into the parking lot after being shot.

The conclusion of the foot chase to the fatal shooting happened in only one second, said Brendan Deenihan, Police Department chief of detectives.

After the officer shot Toledo, he walked toward the boy and radioed for backup and an ambulance, the footage shows.

“Look at me. Look at me. You all right? Where you shot?” the officer says to Toledo, who is unresponsive. The officer lifts up Toledo’s sweatshirt to look for a wound and tells the boy, “Stay with me.”

The officer radios for someone to bring him a medical kit. Responding officers and the officer who shot Toledo then begin to treat the 13-year-old, performing CPR on the boy.

The officer who shot Toledo walks away from the scene by himself. Minutes later, a police supervisor radios in to officers on the scene to turn their body cameras off.

COPA initially said it would not release videos of the shooting due to Toledo’s age — but, amid mounting pressure, the agency reversed course and said it would release videos within 60 days. The office first invited Toledo’s family to watch the videos, which they did Tuesday.

The family asked COPA to delay releasing the videos, but officials said they would still come out. People can view all the material online.

Toledo, a seventh-grader at Gary Elementary School, was laid to rest Friday. His family thanked Little Village community members for the outpouring of support they have received since his death.

“Adam’s memory can best be honored by refraining from violence and working constructively for reform,” the attorneys said.

Lightfoot acknowledged trust between the police and many communities in Chicago has been broken by years of abuse, but she urged people to “wait until we hear all the facts” before making up their minds on the case.

Lightfoot said she has seen the videos. She would not comment on what they show, though she said Toledo did not shoot at any police officers.

Before Lightfoot saw videos relevant to the shooting, someone described what they showed to her. In a press conference April 5, she repeatedly said Toledo had a gun.

Toledo’s family is “still, critically, in the throes of grief,” Lightfoot said Wednesday. “I want to be respectful of the family, but I also do think something like a police-involved shooting, particularly under these circumstances, it’s important for us to be transparent.”

I just don’t know what to say. I looked at all the videos. The whole thing is just awful.

Too many guns. Racism. Militarized policing. Our culture is infected with all of it and it’s killing people.

Some new polling on race relations from Monmouth is worth looking at in detail. I think it’s illuminating and we should pay attention:

Most of the country has been following the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd last May. More than 6 in 10 (63%) have heard a lot about it and 31% have heard a little, while just 6% have heard nothing at all. If Chauvin is found guilty of murder, 37% feel this will be a positive step for race relations in the country while 12% say it will be a negative step. However, a plurality of 46% say race relations would not change either way. If he is found innocent of the charges, though, a clear majority (63%) say this will be negative for race relations. Just 5% say it would be positive and 29% say it would not change race relations on the whole.

The full-blown racist cohort is pretty small but I expect that quite a few of them opted for “will make no difference” along with the pessimists (who are somewhat justified…)

There is not a lot of difference between white Americans and people of color on the impact they think these different verdicts would have on race relations. However, there are significant differences among whites based on their partisan identity. Just 13% of whites who identify as Republican or lean to the GOP say a guilty verdict would be a positive outcome for race relations, while a majority (56%) of whites who identify as Democrat or wholly independent feel it would. Differences of opinion on the impact of a not guilty verdict are less stark but still significant. While 56% of white Republicans say Chauvin being let free would be a negative step for race relations, 77% of other whites feel that way.

“Most people feel a not guilty verdict would be more consequential than a guilty verdict in the long run. The key difference is that a conviction may not improve race relations, but the impact of a not guilty outcome would be expected to be largely negative,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute. [Note: this analysis reflects public attitudes about the potential impact of a verdict; it is not an assessment of the actual guilt or innocence of the accused in a court of law.]

When you go deeper into these attitudes you can see where the real problem lies:

Nearly half (49%) of the public feels that police officers are more likely to use excessive force against a black person than a white person in similar situations. This is slightly lower than early June, in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death, when 57% said the same; but this sentiment is higher than in prior Monmouth polls (34% in 2016 and 33% in 2014). There is a huge gap between white Americans who identify as Republican (12%) and non-Republican whites (77%) on whether police are more likely to use force against a black person.

It’s absurd to think that Blacks aren’t more subject to excessive force. It’s just absurd. All you have to do is look at the attitude expressed by our former Attorney General to see the truth:

“I do think that there appears to be a phenomenon in the country where African Americans feel that they’re treated, when they’re stopped by police, frequently as suspects before they are treated as citizens,” Barr said in an interview with CNN. “I don’t think that that necessarily reflects some deep-seated racism in police departments or in most police officers. …

“I think people operate very frequently according to stereotypes, and I think it takes extra precaution on the part of law enforcement to make sure we don’t reduce people to stereotypes, we treat them as individuals,” he said.

Clearly, he didn’t have even the slightest idea what racism is:

An arrogant, deluded, extremely powerful, white man blathering on about something he clearly doesn't understand. https://t.co/Ns5JIBNVCK

— digby (@digby56) September 2, 2020

“I think there are some situations where statistics would suggest that they are treated differently. But I don’t think that that’s necessarily racism. Didn’t Jesse Jackson say that when he looks behind him and he sees a group of young Black males walking behind him, he’s more scared than when he sees a group of White youths walking behind him. Does that make him a racist?”

Jackson wasn’t talking about some “black youths.” He was talking about a specific gang that had killed a relative. But whatever…

Thirty percent say that there is more racism among police officers than among other groups in society while 14% say there is less and 51% say there is the same amount. Non-Republican whites (42%) are more likely than Republican whites (10%) to say there is more racism among the police than other groups.

Looking back at nearly a year of protests over police involvement in the deaths of Black civilians, 36% say that the anger of these protesters, regardless of their actual actions, is fully justified. This number is similar to 39% who said the same in the fall but has dropped from 46% in late June and 57% in early June. Another 30% in the current poll say the protestors’ anger is partially justified and 32% say it is not at all justified. Those saying the protestors’ anger is fully justified includes 41% of people of color (including 58% of Black Americans). Among whites, 33% say this anger is fully justified, but that breaks down to just 5% among white Republicans compared with an overwhelming 61% among other whites.

“The partisan lens that separates white Americans on racial issues is astoundingly huge,” said Murray.

62% of whites acknowledging that Black anger is justified is not enough, of course. But the fact that the people who bring that number down includes almost all Republicans is something worth grappling with. All humans are guilty of racism, of course, especially white people who have lived within a privileged sphere their whole lives. And the system itself is racist in so many ways that we don’t even see that it makes it worse.

But it is good news that 61% of whites are at least recognizing this and, hopefully, trying to reckon with it. After all, there are a whole lot of white people in this country.

Most Americans (79%) say racial and ethnic discrimination is a problem in the United States, including 63% who say it is a big problem. Just 20% say it is not a problem. This result is basically unchanged from November (65% big problem), but remains lower than early June (76%) when protests started across the nation. Demographically, 72% of people of color (including 90% of Black Americans) see this as a big problem, while 59% of white Americans agree. Among whites, though, there is a significant difference between those who identify as Republican (32%) and those who identify as Democrat or completely independent (85%).

Fully 9 in 10 (91%) of Americans say it is very important that all races have equal opportunities and 7 in 10 Americans agree that other factors in our society prevent many people in certain racial and ethnic groups from achieving equality even when the law requires equal opportunity (including 45% who strongly agree and 25% who agree somewhat). Similarly, 7 in 10 support efforts to achieve racial equity that go beyond current laws on providing equal opportunities (including 51% who strongly support this idea and 19% who support it somewhat). Support for additional efforts to provide equal opportunities is much more likely to come from non-Republican whites (88%) than Republican whites (42%).

“Most Americans seem to agree that current efforts to create equality do not go far enough, but the partisan gap among whites is a crucial dividing line on what should happen next,” said Murray.

Yes. There are many barriers to making the changes we need, and they come from all of us in one way or another. But it’s important to note that the major impediment to changes is white Republicans.

This is kind of poignantly hopeful, however, and speaks to a the indomitable optimism of American culture. Maybe we aren’t doomed after all:

In the end, most Americans remain basically optimistic about the future of race relations. This includes 23% who are very hopeful and 48% who are somewhat hopeful. On the other hand, more than 1 in 4 are either not too (17%) or not at all (11%) hopeful. The combined number who are not hopeful (28%) is somewhat higher than in polls conducted last year (15% in September and 16% in June).

And we all know it. But Vox’s Ian Millhiser does a nice concise job of laying out the argument:

Four Democratic members of Congress plan to introduce legislation that would add four seats to the Supreme Court, which would, if passed, allow President Biden to immediately name four individuals to fill those seats and give Democrats a 7-6 majority.

The bill, which is being introduced by Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Hank Johnson (D-GA), and Mondaire Jones (D-NY) in the House and by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) in the Senate, is called the Judiciary Act of 2021, and it is very brief. It amends a provision of federal law providing that the Supreme Court consist of a chief justice and eight associate justices to read that the Court shall consist of ‘‘a Chief Justice of the United States and twelve associate justices, any eight of whom shall constitute a quorum.”

Although the Constitution provides that there must be a Supreme Court, it leaves the question of how many justices shall sit on that Court to Congress. Under the Judiciary Act of 1789, the Court originally had six seats, and it briefly had 10 seats under President Lincoln.

Realistically, the bill is unlikely to pass anytime soon. Until recently, adding seats to the Supreme Court was considered a very radical tactic — President Franklin Roosevelt proposed similar legislation in 1937, and it did not end well for him. President Biden has in the past expressed reluctance to add seats to the Court.

But the politics of Supreme Court reform have moved very quickly in recent years, and it’s possible to imagine a critical mass of lawmakers rallying behind Court expansion if a majority of the current justices hand down decisions that are likely to outrage Democrats, such as a decision neutralizing what remains of the Voting Rights Act.

The new court-expansion bill would effectively neutralize a half-decade of work by Republicans to manipulate the Senate confirmation process in order to ensure GOP control of the nation’s highest Court.

In February of 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died. In response, Senate Republicans refused to give President Obama’s nominee to fill that seat, now-Attorney General Merrick Garland, a confirmation hearing or a floor vote.

To justify this decision, Republicans invented a new rule, claiming that it is not appropriate to confirm a Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year. Prior to 2016, there had been seven election-year confirmations since the beginning of the 20th century, including the confirmation of Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1988.

The vacant seat was eventually filled by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch after President Trump took office in 2017.

Then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September of 2020. Republicans immediately abandoned the rule they invented to justify blocking Garland’s confirmation and confirmed Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett just eight days before the 2020 election, which Trump lost.

It’s worth noting, moreover, that Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots in 2016. And, while Republicans controlled the Senate for Trump’s entire presidency, they only controlled it because the Senate is malapportioned to effectively give extra seats to small states.

Throughout Trump’s presidency, the Democratic “minority” in the Senate represented millions more Americans than the Republican “majority.” And all three of Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court — Gorsuch, Barrett, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the country.

So legislation adding seats to the Supreme Court would give Democrats control of a body that they rightfully would already control if the United States chose presidents and senators in free and fair elections where each citizen’s vote counted equally.

Democrats are trying very hard to preserve our democracy despite the fact that America isn’t particularly democratic. It’s one thing to have a bill of rights and a system that protects the minority. It’s quite another to have a system that ensures minority rule.

Beavis had a lot to say at this hearing. Unfortunately.

Jim Jordan's questioning of Dr. Fauci devolves into a shouting match among several committee members, eventually resulting in Maxine Waters yelling: "You need to respect the chair and shut your mouth!" pic.twitter.com/Phzr4DCGmM

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 15, 2021

Fauci was thanked properly by Congresswoman Waters, so at least there’s that. The hating on Fauci is one of the many low points of our era…

.@RepMaxineWaters gives a heartfelt thanks to Dr. Fauci despite former Pres. Trump mishandling the pandemic: ‘You literally saved millions of folks … I want to thank you so very, very much for what you’ve done for all of us’ pic.twitter.com/vrrTOxvvop

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) April 15, 2021

Rep. Jordan (R-OH) demands Dr. Fauci give him a date for the end of COVID mitigation measures:

“15 days to slow the spread turned into 1 year of lost liberty.”

Fauci says: “I don’t look at this as a liberty thing, Congressman Jordan. I look at this as a public health thing.” pic.twitter.com/Pgv2mEySeo

— The Recount (@therecount) April 15, 2021

About police killing unarmed black men. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday grilled Kristen Clarke about that. Clarke is President Biden’s nominee to head up the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. She would be the first Black woman to do so in the division’s history.

What we saw was mostly performative outrage, writes Dahlia Lithwick. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas tried to smear her with a satirical piece she wrote at 19 for the Harvard Crimson, a lampoon of “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.” Cornyn seemed not to notice it was satire. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah implied she “pressured the Justice Department not to prosecute the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation in 2008. She’d left the department in 2006.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri implied Clarke held prejudice towards Orthodox Jews when she had, Litwick explains, launched “several lawsuits against violent and anti-Semitic white supremacists.” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas based his attack on a Newsweek headline she didn’t write for an article about George Floyd in which “she expressly did not call for defunding the police willy-nilly, and in fact argued for a more complicated strategy …” But complexity does not make for a spicy Fox News crawler.

Lithwick eye-rolls at “the rank silliness” of suggesting Clarke is bent on burning down the U.S. “policing, justice, voting, and civil rights” systems:

After graduating from Harvard and Columbia Law School, she went to the Department of Justice, then joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, then served the Office of the New York State Attorney General as head of the Civil Rights Bureau. As president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, she has worked like a demon to protect voting rights, minority rights, religious and women’s rights, all in precisely the way a lawyer would: through bold lawsuits and advocacy. I’ve argued that targeting civil rights lawyers for strongly worded tweets and advocacy evinces a shocking double standard for women of color in public life. But when the white men who are targeting a Black female lawyer as lawless and reckless and dangerous still won’t accept the results of the last presidential election and take no responsibility for the property damage and loss of life their words have caused, it just feels like cynicism for its own sake. That cynicism is the point. That this conversation is happening as the country is again roiled to the breaking point over racist police violence is why this transcends cynicism to become simply gross.

Face it, it’s all kayfabe.

But to Charles M. Blow, it is rage-inducing how our “systems of law enforcement, criminal justice and communal consciousness have adjusted themselves to a banal barbarism” represented by police killings of unarmed Black people:

This has produced in me and many others an inextinguishable rage, a calcification of contempt. As for me, I no longer even attempt to manage or direct my rage. I simply sit with it, face it like an adversary staring across a campfire, waiting to see how I am moved to act, but not proscribing that action and definitely not allowing society’s idea of decorum to proscribe it.

A society that treats this much Black death at the hands of the state as collateral damage in a just war on crime has no decorum to project. That society is savage.

On top of that, police have up-armored themselves because of firearms proliferation, and cities have configured their budgets to rely on police fines, turning policing into a ” profit-generating enterprise.” Blow states the obvious: “It is all so perverse. And too often it is Black people, particularly Black men, who bear the brunt when all this pressure culminates in a killing.”

In fact, Kimberly A. Potter, the 26-year police veteran who shot Daunte Wright last weekend in Brooklyn Center, Minn. was training other officers that day. She was, presumably, teaching them how to perform a pretextural traffic stop (expired tag) that if nothing else might generate a fine for the city’s coffers. A 20-year-old Black man and father is dead, Potter is under arrest, the region is under curfew, and National Guard troops stand “with guns outside of the city’s police station, which has been the center of nightly clashes.”

No wonder Blow is left only with rage.

Recalling his service in Afghanistan, former Marine captain Timothy Kudo tries to come to terms with his service there and whether it had any meaning. “But what if the answer is no?” he asks himself.

I remember I once asked a village elder whether he knew why I was there. He responded that we’d always been there. Confused, I asked him about the attacks on America. He said, “But you are Russians, no?” After 30 years of war, it didn’t matter to him who was fighting but only that there was still fighting.

Afghan children dream about the fighting. It’s all they have ever known.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday pledged to “end the forever war” and have U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 this year, the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. It remains to be seen whether he will accomplish that goal. If he does, he will simply have conceded the inevitable.

Afghanistan has been the “graveyard of empires” since Alexander the Great — for so long that the phrase’s origins are unclear. Foreign correspondent Rod Nordland wrote in the New York Times in August 2017:

In truth, no great empires perished solely because of Afghanistan. Perhaps a better way to put it is that Afghanistan is the battleground of empires. Even without easily accessible resources, the country has still been blessed — or cursed, more likely — with a geopolitical position that has repeatedly put it in someone or other’s way.

In the 19th century there was the Great Game, when the British and Russian empires faced off across its forbidding deserts and mountain ranges. At the end of the 20th century it was the Cold War, when the Soviet and American rivalry played out here in a bitter guerrilla conflict. And in this century, it is the War on Terror and a constantly shifting Taliban insurgency, with President Trump promising a renewed military commitment.

Trump eventually cut a deal with Taliban forces (he excluded the Afghan government; he wanted a “win”) for the U.S. to exit Afghanistan by May 1 this year. That is not going to happen. The are NATO and European forces there as well. But if the U.S. pulls out as Biden proposes, they will as well.

The Taliban agreed under Trump not to kill Americans as they exit and they haven’t, Dexter Filkins (“The Forever War“) told Terry Gross of “Fresh Air” in March. Instead, they are assassinating Afghans:

So the Taliban – the leaders are sitting at the table, and they’re negotiating with the Afghan government right now about some kind of peace deal, you know, cease-fire or some kind of interim government, the thing that’s supposed to end the war. But at the same time they’re doing that, they’ve launched this very aggressive assassination campaign, which is basically targeting the elites and the educated classes, the people and the women – the people who have benefited most and the people who have really stepped to the fore since 9/11. It’s the 9/11 generation, the post-2001 generation, which, basically, the United States has enabled. And so it’s educated people. It’s women. It’s women’s rights activists. It’s people with master’s degrees and Ph.D.s. And they’re targeting them – judges, lawyers, journalists, aid workers – one after the other. So I think we’re at pretty close to 500 assassinations since the peace agreement was signed.

All those responsible for 9/11 are dead. Gone. There is no external solution for what remains. The Taliban want a medieval society, an “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” and they have time on their side.

As a video in today’s New York Times explains, “Democracy Doesn’t Come in a Box.” Nor out of a gun barrel.

From the video transcript:

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis: I consider myself a conservative, a Republican. In 2011, I had read that things were on the way to getting better. But when I was deployed to Afghanistan, I can tell you, I saw violence was going up, the civilians were getting killed, the Afghan military were not being effectively trained. Our leadership had been lying to us. You cannot accomplish with military power a political outcome….

There’s this line of thinking that if we withdraw from Afghanistan, there will be a new civil war that’s going to start. O.K., there is a civil war going on in Afghanistan right now. The Afghans were having a civil war in 2001 when we first went in there. They had been fighting for years. And our presence there does not stop it.

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Danny Sjursen: Whether we leave tomorrow or whether we leave 10 years from now, the outcome is the same, which is a brutal civil war and half the country is going to fall under Taliban rule again and women are going to live in a medieval situation until the Afghan people as a whole come up with an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem.

The question now in this period of intensifying xenophobia in the U.S. is who will we abandon there to die when we leave as Trump did with allies in Syria?

https://twitter.com/EmmaMAshford/status/1382376836223672323?s=20

Based on the comment thread for the tweet above, some “Americans” (it’s Twitter) are ready to do to allies in Afghanistan what Trump did to Syrian Kurds. And with no pangs of conscience about it.

Once they show that they’re willing to kill you just to make a point, why would you stay?

Jason Watts said days after attending a Republican Party district meeting at a restaurant in Portage, he heard that several others at the meeting contracted COVID-19 and started feeling symptoms himself.

Watts tested positive for COVID-19. Now, nearly two weeks after the meeting, he is recovering in a hospital after fighting the deadly virus. The treasurer of the 6th District Republican Committee and an Allegan County resident, Watts spoke to MLive on Tuesday, April 13.

Watts said he was required to come to the March 31 meeting at Travelers Café and Pub in Portage, where officials were planning to consider a petition to remove him from office because he talked to the New York Times and gave comments critical of Donald Trump, saying the party needed to move on from the former president. Some in the group wanted him out, but that did not happen at the meeting, Watts said.

He ended up in a Grand Rapids hospital soon after the meeting instead.

Watts, 44, said he was one of probably three people he saw wearing a mask during the meeting. After he left, he heard rumblings that people had COVID-19, he said.

Watts estimates there were six people he knows of who were positive for COVID-19 afterward, though he believes there are others. He spoke to some of them directly, he said. Some who tested positive later were seated at his table, he said. According to Watts, none of them knew they had the virus at the time.

Watts said he reported the incident. A Kalamazoo County health department official said the agency is aware of the event.

“This has been on our radar as well as all facilities that hold meetings that may be in violation of the MDHHS Epidemic Orders,” Public Information Officer Matt Johnson said.

“At this time, we do not have enough information to state that this was an outbreak or super spreader event,” he said on Tuesday.

The county’s health department was notified through contact tracing of positive cases, Johnson said. The health department has contacted the establishment, he said.

Watts believes he contracted the virus at the Portage restaurant. He said he went to only one other restaurant in the two weeks before the meeting. He said he has been careful to avoid exposure to the virus otherwise, only going into convenience stores briefly, for example.

He felt he needed to be at the March 31 meeting because of an effort to eject him, he said.

“I was required to go,” Watts said. “There was no Zoom option.”

As he walked in wearing two cloth masks, he said he noted other people were not wearing masks.

“I felt like I was going into a den of virus,” he said of the setting. He estimates there were nearly 70 people there, and he thought the room he was in would have been safer if it had fewer people in it.

Michigan’s restaurant restrictions reduce occupancy by 50%. For Travelers Café, that means 80 people, according to General Manager Brandon Jeannot.

The restaurant operates under the state’s guidelines, Jeannot said. When a customer is seen walking around without a mask, staff will ask the person to please wear a mask, he said. They do their best to police it, he said.

Customers are permitted to take masks off when at the table while eating, he said.

Watts said some people who contracted COVID-19 don’t want it known publicly. Others who were at the meeting have announced a positive test result.

Berrien County Commissioner Ezra Scott, who recently announced plans to run for congress, was one of the attendees, Watts said. Scott posted on his Facebook account on April 6, “Just tested positive for the Rona virus.” Scott could not be reached for comment.

Kalamazoo County Republican Chair Scott McGraw said he believes precautions were taken at the March 31 meeting. McGraw said he sat at a table with Watts and did not catch the virus.

“Granted, there’s a faction of the Republican Party who don’t want to get the vaccine,” McGraw said, though he is not among them. He recently got his second vaccine dose, encourages others to consider getting the vaccine and also encourages people to wear masks.

“I would think it would probably have its roots in in our resolve for freedoms,” McGraw said about the resistance, though he has a different view about the virus himself.

McGraw said he takes it seriously. He lost his father to COVID-19 in December, he said.

“We had a meeting,” McGraw said. “Some people got COVID unfortunately after the meeting. I assume it was from the meeting but I can’t really pinpoint what these people were doing before and after a meeting.

“I just think you can still follow all the rules and the virus can spread easily.”

[…]

“A mask shouldn’t have a political party,” Watts said. “A vaccine shouldn’t have a political party, but we’ve conjured these things to have these connotations. People are getting sick. And to put these connotations on these things does nobody any good.”

Well only if you think killing people isn’t good. I’m not sure these people do.