Month: May 2021

I try not to be critical of conservative Evangelicals’ religious beliefs but ever since they threw in their lot with the libertine conman Donald Trump it’s been clear that they don’t actually walk the walk. It’s more like a social club or a tribal identity than a real religion and I don’t think we need to keep up the pretense that there is some spiritual element to their political activities. They are right wingers, period.

And guess what? It’s all blowing back on the religious leaders now:

QAnon conspiracy theories have burrowed so deeply into American churches that pastors are expressing alarm — and a new poll shows the bogus teachings have become as widespread as some denominations.

The problem with misinformation and disinformation is that people — lots of people — believe it. And they don’t believe reality coming from the media and even their ministers.

Russell Moore,one of America’s most respected evangelical Christian thinkers, told me he’s “talking literally every day to pastors, of virtually every denomination, who are exhausted by these theories blowing through their churches or communities.”

“Several pastors told me that they once had to talk to parents dismayed about the un-Christian beliefs of their grown children,” Moore added. But now, the tables have turned.

That stunning window into the country’s congregations followed a major poll, out last week: 15% of Americans, the poll found, agree with the QAnon contention that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”

The online poll was taken by Ipsos in March for the Public Religion Research Institute and Interfaith Youth Core. (Poll: 5,625 U.S. adults. Margin of error for full survey: ±1.5%)

“For those who hope that the events of January 6 are in our past, I think this data gives little in the way of assurance,” said Kristin Du Mez, a Calvin University historian of gender, faith and politics, and author of “Jesus and John Wayne.”

The poll found that Hispanic Protestants (26%) and white evangelical Protestants (25%) were more likely to agree with the QAnon philosophies than other groups. (Black Protestants were 15%, white Catholics were 11% and white mainline Protestants were 10%.)

As a New York Times headline put it: “QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.”

Du Mez told me that the factors that produced this result include the decades conservative evangelicals spent “sowing seeds of doubt about the mainstream media”:

“There’s also an emphasis in certain circles on deciphering biblical prophecies that bears some similarities to decoding QAnon conspiracies — the idea that there is a secret meaning hidden within the text that can be discerned by individuals who have eyes to see.”

“This isn’t just a problem for faith communities, of course,” the professor added. “It is deeply troubling in terms of the health of our democracy.”

Moore, who recently joined Christianity Today magazine after serving as the top political voice of the Southern Baptist Convention, said that for many, QAnon is “taking on all of the characteristics of a cult, from authoritarian gurus … to predictions that don’t come true.”

Context: Q first took hold on social media with a videogame-like structure, inviting the curious on a quest to unlock successive layers of hidden knowledge, Axios managing editor Scott Rosenberg points out.

Then its anonymous gurus promised a series of millenarian-style big reveals that never materialized.

They don’t care if the reveals never materialize. They are superstitious primitives who can obviously rationalize anything. As I have said many times, the upside is that we no longer have to allow them to dictate the definition of morality for the whole country as they were allowed to do for at least 3 decades.

Trump backers are going all out, falsely claiming #COVID19 came out of the Wuhan lab, and Tony Fauci paid for it. This is the side of a truck cruising around Falls Church VA. pic.twitter.com/uBCP5G2tTE

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) May 31, 2021

It is part of a longstanding plot by right wing operatives. This is from May 2020, when the pandemic was raging:

A cadre of influential conservatives is growing increasingly convinced that the nation’s foremost infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is recklessly driving the nation to financial ruin—possibly even in a concerted attempt to undermine President Donald Trump. And in an effort to stop him, they’re resorting to tried and true methods: from public shaming, to online conspiracy theories, to lawsuits meant to unearth emails pertaining to his work.

At the heart of the effort to knock Fauci down a peg are some of the biggest luminaries in Trump’s orbit—including key figures who helped spearhead the campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, insisted in an episode of his podcast on Wednesday that Fauci had “set up President Trump for failure in the fall.” He was reacting to Fauci’s testimony before a Senate committee this week, during which Fauci questioned efforts by some elected officials, including a number of Trump allies, to “reopen” schools and businesses shuttered in an effort to control the spread of the coronavirus.

It is coming to fruition a little late for Trump’s purposes but they they are not letting up. They now want him investigated, I assume, for reason?

Tucker Carlson is leading the charge. He said this on Friday:

“The question is who commissioned the work, who started the work that they were doing in that lab, and the answer… comes back right to here, to our country, to Dr. Fauci.”

Fox News had Peter Navarro on March 30, and he called Fauci “the father of the coronavirus,” also alleging that Fauci created the pandemic.

I hope they’ve reinforced his security. This could easily get violent.

By the way, there are legit questions about the origin of the virus. Maybe it did escape from the lab. But Fauci had nothing to do with that and the small NIH grant for the Wuhan lab was for something else, and it’s absurd to blame him for any of this. The science has been evolving (as it does) over the course of the pandemic and everyone had their best theories at the time.

Fauci’s work on vaccines over all these years is what’s making it possible for us to leave our homes after a year and resume normal life. This crusade against him is disgusting.

If the right thinks we can stay safe from viruses by shutting off global scientific cooperation we might just as well pack it in. Between disease and climate change, it’s all over for this species if these people are allowed to prevail.

It looks like these wingnuts are going after Black, Hispanic and women personnel as well as LGBTQ members of the military. I don’t see how else you can interpret what this means:

On Saturday, Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton and Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, both military veterans, teamed up to release a whistleblower form for military members to fill out if they spot any “woke” training efforts.

With written permission we will anonymously publish egregious complaints on social media and tell the country what’s happening in our military.

— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) May 28, 2021

Last Sunday, Crenshaw took note that the new “woke” recruitment videos released by the U.S. Army had precipitated so much criticism that comments on the videos on YouTube were shut down. He fired, “I hope the message to military leadership is clear: We aren’t going to stand by as our military becomes another institution crippled by woke political correctness. No more critical race theory, no more identity politics, no more political witch hunts. We’ve had enough.”

In fact, they are simply going after the military for adapting to the modern world as it exists, not the antediluvian, throwback these phonies want to pretend it is.

And you have to love this: “no more political witch hunts.” Lol. He says this as he’s launching a political witch hunt! Are these people really this brain dead or do they think everyone else is?

It’s an inherently political institution, of course, but the military was the last institution in America on which Republicans and Democrats alike seemed to confer legitimacy and allow to run without a whole lot of cheap partisan interference. That seems to have come to an end. Untroubled by the pardoning of sociopathic war criminals and the treatment of the military brass as political operatives for Trump, Republicans are gravely concerned about intolerance for racism and sexism among the troops.

I guess it was inevitable that the right wingers would bring the culture war to the military. What could go wrong?

Oh, and speaking of military heroes, here’s one who seems to be saying something you might think some of these people would actually be concerned about, seeing as they’re all such great patriots and all:

Here is the video of former national security advisor Michael Flynn saying that he thinks a coup like the coup in Myanmar should happen in the US. pic.twitter.com/7mGYjfXg18

— Mamie (@MC_Hyperbole) May 30, 2021

That was at a big QAnon convention this weekend. You’ll notice the crowd was ecstatic at the thought of it.

Charlotte Alter writes about the “Millennial Young Guns” Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik who once “understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation’s core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions.” They were the ones who represented the “new” Republican Party envisioned by the 2012 Autopsy and they all seemed destined for national leadership.

Then Trump came along:

By 2018, Mr. Trump’s antics had helped lead Mr. Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall Mr. Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.

Yeah, that was bad timing. Also, the Republican Party’s tent just isn’t big enough for people who think things like “climate change is real” or that the country needs to work harder to achieve racial equality. Whatever they thought the GOP stood for hasn’t been true since the 1960s. Trump revealed its true nature, he didn’t change it.

Anyway, this is interesting:

When I interviewed Ms. Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. “The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.

Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.

Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden. His youth vote margin was sufficient to put him over the top in key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to an analysis by Tufts University, and young voters of color were particularly energized.

Contrary to conventional wisdom that young people are always liberal and older people are always conservative, most voters form their political attitudes when they’re young and tend to stay roughly consistent as they age. And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.

“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,” said Benji Backer, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate action group. He told me that Ms. Stefanik had “distanced herself from the youth conservation movement,” after years of being one of the most climate-conscious Republicans in Congress. Now, he said, “peddling misinformation about the election and Jan. 6 has made it harder for young people to look up to her as a future voice in the party.”

The new G.O.P. of 2015 has been replaced by a newer G.O.P.: a cohort of young Republican leaders who seem far more concerned with owning the libs on social media than with proposing conservative solutions to issues that matter to young people.

This cohort includes millennials like Representative Matt Gaetz and Representative Lauren Boebert as well as Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Gen Z-er, all Trump loyalists who voted to overturn the electoral vote result. Mr. Gaetz introduced a bill to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Boebert introduced a bill to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Mr. Cawthorn has so embraced the Trumpian ethos of rhetoric as leadership that he once said he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”

It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.

She’s right about the fact that people tend to hew to the political identity they assume when they are young, so this bodes well for the Democrats. But the Millennial generation is huge and there are tens of millions of those young Gaetzes and Boberts who are simply trolling bullies who love the Trump party as much as their elders do. And I hate to say it, but the baby boom generation was also predominantly liberal and quite a few went over to the dark side as time went on and they now comprise the Fox News audience. Demographics aren’t destiny.

Still, this is a hopeful sign. It’s hard to imagine millennials and zoomers reverting to the racism and sexism of their elders and I suspect the economic tumult of the past few years have given young people of all stripes a more healthy respect for government’s role in American life. But the nasty trolls are going to be with us I’m afraid. That’s a psychology that finds its expression in politics, it’s not ideology.

I guess Trump 2.0 really feels the need to show his dominance as the biggest asshole in the Trump cult (after Dear Leader, of course.)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is on a collision course with one of the state’s biggest industries over a law he signed banning businesses from asking customers whether they’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19.

Cruise ship operators, who sail out of Florida’s large southern ports, say the order will make it make it harder for them to safely return to the seas, possibly imperiling a major economic driver in the state.

The GOP, under the influence of former President Donald Trump, has pursued cultural fights that roil its base at the expense of traditional conservative values, like free-market capitalism, with DeSantis, who is considering a presidential bid in 2024, and others picking fights with companies that they say undermine American values.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave the go-ahead Wednesday to begin work toward restarting cruises for the first time in over a year after the massive ships became some of the first superspreader locations for the coronavirus.

With populations the size of small cities packed into close quarters, cruise ships are uniquely vulnerable to viral spread. So to comply with CDC guidance and keep passengers and crew members safe, several cruise liners want to require nearly everyone onboard to be fully vaccinated.

But that could now be illegal in Florida, the center of the American cruise industry, under a law DeSantis signed this month that prohibits businesses from discriminating against unvaccinated customers.

“In Florida, your personal choice regarding vaccinations will be protected, and no business or government entity will be able to deny you services based on your decision,” DeSantis said of the law, which codified executive orders he had already issued.

The law is the last thing the cruise industry needs, said travel industry analyst Patrick Scholes, managing director of Truist Securities, as they try to reassure passengers that it’s safe to return to their all-you-can-eat buffets after 15 months.

“It has been a year of migraines and kicks in the teeth for the cruise industry. Now, they’re finally getting ready to restart, and you have the governor of Florida basically playing a game of chicken with them,” Scholes said.

The dispute may end up in court, as the cruise industry argues that the state law doesn’t apply to it thanks to federal rules. In the meantime, companies may decide to move ahead with plans to require vaccinations, even if it means racking up violations in Florida.

“It might even be cheaper for them to just eat the fines,” Scholes said. “They are burning millions of dollars a day having their ships idle.”

Florida, which is by far the biggest embarkation point for cruises in the U.S., is home to the headquarters and key infrastructure of several major cruise lines, including Norwegian, whose CEO said the Miami-based company might have to pull its ships out of the state because of the vaccine passport prohibitions.

“We hope that this doesn’t become a legal football or a political football. But at the end of the day, cruise ships have motors, propellers and rudders. And God forbid we can’t operate in the state of Florida for whatever reason, then there are other states that we do operate from. And we can operate from the Caribbean for ships that otherwise would have gone to Florida,” CEO Frank Del Rio said on a recent earnings call with investors and analysts.

This is a pointless fight and I really hope the cruise ships don’t back down. It’s ridiculous. Cruise ships are petri dishes for disease on a good day.

This post by @NYCSouthpaw, a twitter luminary (also a lawyer named Luppe B Lumen) made the rounds this week-end and I think it’s well worth sharing. It seems more important than ever to try to remember that while our species is eternally flawed and our country has fallen egregiously short of its ideals, there are some ideas underlying our nation. One of them is the simple fact that those ideals are still worth fighting for:

One hundred fifty years ago today, when Frederick Douglass stepped to the rostrum at Arlington National Cemetery to give the address that is reproduced in full below, he looked out on a country in the midst of moving on. It was Decoration Day, a ritualized annual return to decorate the graves of the war dead—begun by former slaves in Charleston in 1865—that would eventually become our modern Memorial Day. But by then, the Civil War was six years over, legally-recognized chattel slavery was six years dead, the Fifteenth Amendment addressing black Americans’ voting rights—the last and least-abided-by of the post-Civil War constitutional amendments—had been ratified the previous year (amidst celebrations that tended toward an unearned triumphalism), and the egalitarian social experiment called Reconstruction, though still years from its final collapse, had passed its high water mark.

While President Ulysses S. Grant, Secretary of War William Belknap, and Secretary of War George Robeson were reportedly in Douglass’s audience, he did not have much of the nation’s attention. On front pages the following day, the big headlines told of the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune—a revolutionary socialist government that had seized control of the French capital earlier in 1871—and the investigation of a deadly coal mining accident in Pennsylvania. In the New York Times, a one-paragraph account of Decoration Day at Arlington was tucked between a report on Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s precarious health and the President’s summer vacation plans; none of the speakers, including Douglass, wass named and nothing of what they said was reprinted. (Even today, the text of Douglass’s speech is a little hard to find outside of door-stopping anthologies.)

Nevertheless, what Douglass said that day belongs, in my opinion, in the top tier of speeches ever given in the United States. Had more of America paid attention, it might have become one of the most timely and important.

“We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle,” Douglass said, “and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it, those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.”

Douglass’s text puts squarely before its audience the question of American public memory, its importance to the future, and the continuing relevance of the Civil War as a furious conflict between different ideas of America.

As the historian Eric Foner wrote:

Two understandings of how the Civil War should be remembered collided in post-bellum America. One was the “emancipationist” vision hinted at by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address when he spoke of the war as bringing a rebirth of the republic in the name of freedom and equality. The other was a “reconciliationist” memory that emphasized what the two sides shared in common, particularly the valor of individual soldiers, and suppressed thoughts of the war’s causes and the unfinished legacy of emancipation. By the end of the century, in a segregated society where blacks’ subordination was taken for granted North and South, “the forces of reconciliation” had “overwhelmed the emancipationist vision.”

The growth of the vaseline-lensed reconciliationist vision of the Civil War in post-war America gave Jim Crow and the Lost Cause mythology the space to grow and prosper. In the moment when this tragic transition was gathering force, Douglass addressed it head on.

I’ve long thought it was worth trying to plant this extraordinary speech a little more firmly in the public record. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read it or reread it.

---

The Unknown Loyal Dead
Frederick Douglass, Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia,

Decoration Day, May 30, 1871

Friends and Fellow Citizens:

Tarry here for a moment. My words shall be few and simple. The solemn rites of this hour and place call for no lengthened speech. There is, in the very air of this resting-ground of the unknown dead a silent, subtle and all-pervading eloquence, far more touching, impressive, and thrilling than living lips have ever uttered. Into the measureless depths of every loyal soul it is now whispering lessons of all that is precious, priceless, holiest, and most enduring in human existence.

Dark and sad will be the hour to this nation when it forgets to pay grateful homage to its greatest benefactors. The offering we bring to-day is due alike to the patriot soldiers dead and their noble comrades who still live; for, whether living or dead, whether in time or eternity, the loyal soldiers who imperiled all for country and freedom are one and inseparable. 

Those unknown heroes whose whitened bones have been piously gathered here, and whose green graves we now strew with sweet and beautiful flowers, choice emblems alike of pure hearts and brave spirits, reached, in their glorious career that last highest point of nobleness beyond which human power cannot go. They died for their country.

No loftier tribute can be paid to the most illustrious of all the benefactors of mankind than we pay to these unrecognized soldiers when we write above their graves this shining epitaph.

When the dark and vengeful spirit of slavery, always ambitious, preferring to rule in hell than to serve in heaven, fired the Southern heart and stirred all the malign elements of discord, when our great Republic, the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world, had reached the point of supreme peril, when the Union of these states was torn and rent asunder at the center, and the armies of a gigantic rebellion came forth with broad blades and bloody hands to destroy the very foundations of American society, the unknown braves who flung themselves into the yawning chasm, where cannon roared and bullets whistled, fought and fell. They died for their country.

We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it, those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice. 

I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my “right hand forget her cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,” if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict. 

If we ought to forget a war which has filled our land with widows and orphans; which has made stumps of men of the very flower of our youth; which has sent them on the journey of life armless, legless, maimed and mutilated; which has piled up a debt heavier than a mountain of gold, swept uncounted thousands of men into bloody graves and planted agony at a million hearthstones – I say, if this war is to be forgotten, I ask, in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?

The essence and significance of our devotions here to-day are not to be found in the fact that the men whose remains fill these graves were brave in battle. If we met simply to show our sense of bravery, we should find enough on both sides to kindle admiration. In the raging storm of fire and blood, in the fierce torrent of shot and shell, of sword and bayonet, whether on foot or on horse, unflinching courage marked the rebel not less than the loyal soldier.

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic. We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers.

If today we have a country not boiling in an agony of blood, like France, if now we have a united country, no longer cursed by the hell-black system of human bondage, if the American name is no longer a by-word and a hissing to a mocking earth, if the star-spangled banner floats only over free American citizens in every quarter of the land, and our country has before it a long and glorious career of justice, liberty, and civilization, we are indebted to the unselfish devotion of the noble army who rest in these honored graves all around us.

Update — BTW:

For 110 years, the numbers stood as gospel: 618,222 men died in the Civil War, 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South — by far the greatest toll of any war in American history.

But new research shows that the numbers were far too low.

By combing through newly digitized census data from the 19th century, J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, has recalculated the death toll and increased it by more than 20 percent — to 750,000.

The new figure is already winning acceptance from scholars. Civil War History, the journal that published Dr. Hacker’s paper, called it “among the most consequential pieces ever to appear” in its pages. And a pre-eminent authority on the era, Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University, said:

“It even further elevates the significance of the Civil War and makes a dramatic statement about how the war is a central moment in American history. It helps you understand, particularly in the South with a much smaller population, what a devastating experience this was.”

That wasn’t enough, apparently.

Texas Democrats showed some true grit yesterday:

Texas Democrats staged a dramatic walkout in the state House late Sunday night to block passage of a restrictive voting bill that would have been one of the most stringent in the nation, forcing Republicans to abruptly adjourn without taking a vote on the measure.

The surprise move came after impassioned late-night debate and procedural objections about the GOP-backed legislation, which would have made it harder to vote by mail, empowered partisan poll watchers and made it easier to overturn election results. Republicans faced a midnight deadline to approve the measure.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) tweeted that he would add the bill to a special session he plans to call later this year to address legislative redistricting. “Legislators will be expected to have worked out the details when they arrive at the Capitol for the special session,” he wrote.

But it was an unmistakable defeat for the governor and fellow Republicans, who had crafted one of the most far-reaching voting bills in the country — pushing restrictions championed by former president Donald Trump, who has falsely claimed that his defeat in the 2020 election was tainted by fraud.

They used the power they had to stop this atrocity:

The exodus from the floor came after Chris Turner, the House Democratic chairman, sent instructions to colleagues at 10:35 p.m. Central time instructing them to exit the House, according to an image shared with The Washington Post.

“Members, take your key and leave the chamber discreetly,” Turner wrote, referring to the key that locks the voting mechanism on their desks. “Do not go to the gallery. Leave the building.”

“We decided to come together and say we weren’t going to take it,” state Rep. Jessica González (D) said in an interview after the walkout, adding that she objected to the measure’s content and the way it was crafted with no input from her side of the aisle. “We needed to be part of the process. Cutting us out completely — I mean, this law will affect every single voter in Texas.”

The Republican-majority House took up the legislation after the Senate passed it early Sunday following a marathon overnight debate that stretched more than seven hours. The measure mirrors other GOP-backed legislation approved in Georgia, Florida and other states.

In a statement, Turner said that dozens of House Democrats were prepared to give speeches objecting to the bill, but that “it became obvious Republicans were going to cut off debate to ram through their vote suppression legislation. At that point, we had no choice but to take extraordinary measures to protect our constituents and their right to vote.”

[…]

Check out this lame response from the Repubicans:

In a statement late Sunday, Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan said the decision by Democrats to abruptly leave the chamber killed a number of other pending bills that had bipartisan support. “Texans shouldn’t have to pay the consequences of these members’ actions — or in this case, inaction,” he said, adding that majority of Texans support “making our elections stronger and more secure.”

Please. They passed that BS bill in the most underhanded way possible and he knows it:

Republicans hashed out a final version behind closed doors late last week over the objections of Democrats, civil rights leaders and business executives, who said the measure targets voters of color. President Biden on Saturday called it “wrong and un-American,” and Democrats vowed to immediately challenge it in court.

The Texas measure is the latest example of how Republican legislators around the country have pushed for new voting restrictions as Trump has kept up a barrage of false attacks on the integrity of the 2020 election.

GOP lawmakers in Texas argued the bill is necessary to shore up voter trust, even though they have struggled to justify the need for stricter rules in the state, where officials said the 2020 election was secure.

[…]

The final version included numerous provisions inserted at the last minute, including language making it easier to overturn an election, no longer requiring evidence that fraud actually altered an outcome of a race but rather only that enough ballots were illegally cast that could have made a difference. The legislation also would have changed the legal standard for overturning an election from “reasonable doubt” to “preponderance of the evidence” — a much lower evidentiary bar.

As I wrote yesterday the whole bill was horrible. But that last bit was terrifying. If these right wingers get away with this and it grows among other states, we really are screwed.

Rosanne Boyland, 34 and a Trump supporter from Georgia, lapsed into unconsciousness and died outside the west entrance to the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Asphyxiated in the crush of Trump rioters assaulting the building.

That happens in large crowds:

For months before the rally, Ms. Boyland had bombarded her friends and relatives with messages and links to long videos about the fantastical theories she had come to accept as fact. Many of the false claims spilled from QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory movement that rose in popularity over the course of his presidency and promoted the idea that many Democrats and celebrities are part of a global pedophile ring — a theory that 15 percent of Americans believe, according to one poll this week. Many of its supporters falsely believed that President Biden had stolen the election, and some attended Mr. Trump’s rally on Jan. 6.

Ms. Boyland’s sudden fixation so alarmed her family members and friends that some of them asked her to stop talking to them about politics — or just to stop talking altogether.

Some of her closest friends believe that Ms. Boyland was a vulnerable target for the conspiracy theorists. After a stint in drug rehabilitation, she had returned to her parents’ home and largely avoided drugs for several years, her family said. But the isolation brought about by the pandemic was making it harder. QAnon filled a void in her life, they said, helping distract her from thoughts of returning to drugs even as it acted as a different kind of hallucinogen.

Different kind of hallucinogen indeed.

There will be no hot dogs or hamburgers for me this Memorial Day. Not because I’ve gone vegetarian or vegan. Life just won’t allow time for it, holiday or no. Vaccine shots secured, the habits of the last year are not easily abandoned. I’m still bulking up on groceries once every two weeks — early morning, when few customers are in the store. My neighborhood eateries are still doing contactless take-out and no dine-in. It’s reflex anymore to don a mask when entering a local business. Still, the other night there seemed to be only one employee wearing one at (not my preferred) neighborhood pizza joint, and not the guy who ran my card.

Writer and columnist Tim Kreider knows what it’s like:

“For the last year,” a friend recently wrote to me, “a lot of us have been enjoying unaccustomed courtesy and understanding from the world.” When people asked how you were doing, no one expected you to say “Fine.” Instead, they asked, “How are you holding up?” and you’d answer, “Well, you know.” (That “you know” encompassed a lot that was left unspoken: deteriorating mental health, physical atrophy, creeping alcoholism, unraveling marriages, touch starvation, suicidal ideation, collapse-of-democracy anxiety, Hadean boredom and loneliness, solitary rages and despair.) You could admit that you’d accomplished nothing today, this week, all year. Having gotten through another day was a perfectly respectable achievement. I considered it a pass-fail year, and anything you had to do to get through it—indulging inappropriate crushes, strictly temporary addictions, really bad TV—was an acceptable cost of psychological survival. Being “unable to deal” was a legitimate excuse for failing to answer emails, missing deadlines, or declining invitations. Everyone recognized that the situation was simply too much to be borne without occasionally going to pieces. This has, in fact, always been the case; we were just finally allowed to admit it.

My former profession was a leading economic indicator and workload tended to tank months ahead of the rest of the economy. Seemed like a good time to bail in the spring of 2019. The move seemed prescient a year later when Covid hit: good timing for once in my life. Life took on a different rhythm. Actually watched TV (aside from cable news and movies) for the first time in decades. How do people find the time to follow episodic TV even if it’s good?

Quarantine has given us all time and solitude to think—a risk for any individual, and a threat to any status quo. People have gotten to have the experience—some of them for the first time in their life—of being left alone, a luxury usually unavailable even to the wealthy. Relieved of the deforming crush of financial fear, and of the world’s battering demands and expectations, people’s personalities have started to assume their true shape. And a lot of them don’t want to return to wasting their days in purgatorial commutes, to the fluorescent lights and dress codes and middle-school politics of the office. Service personnel are apparently ungrateful for the opportunity to get paid not enough to live on by employers who have demonstrated they don’t care whether their workers live or die. More and more people have noticed that some of the basic American axioms—that hard work is a virtue, productivity is an end in itself—are horseshit. I’m remembering those science-fiction stories in which someone accidentally sees behind the façade of their blissful false reality to the grim dystopia they actually inhabit.

Even post-apocalypse, some people want to recreate what was lost rather than deal with what is. They want to go to the beach, have a barbecue, and pretend everything’s back to normal when, clearly, it isn’t.

Many probably feel like they’ve joined the French Underground.

Sadly, I think these people really believe that saying requests to be vaccinated is the same as being sent to the gas chamber is a perfectly normal thing to say. That’s how delusional and extreme their victimization has become. Despite their free, privileged, prosperous lives they spend all their time feeling sorry for themselves.

Screenshot of a now-removed post from hatWRKS Nashville. Store owner (pictured) didn’t want to talk, and told us to leave her property. We’re talking to synagogue leaders tonight on FOX17 News at 9. pic.twitter.com/Di79WwB9mq

— Rachel Tiede (@RMTiede) May 28, 2021

She seems nice.

But she has a problem:

As a result of the offensive content and opinions shared by HatWRKS in Nashville, Stetson and our distribution partners will cease the sale of all Stetson products. We thank you for your continued support and patience.

— Stetson (@stetsonusa) May 29, 2021