Month: July 2021

This piece by Alexander Burns in the NY Times notes that in the past someone with Trump’s legal baggage and the success of the Biden pandemic response and recovery of the economy would change the electorate. But no:

“I think we’re open to small moves; I’m not sure we’re open to big moves,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Partisanship has made our system so sclerotic that it isn’t very responsive to real changes in the real world.”

Amid the mounting drama of the early summer, a moment of truth appears imminent. It is one that will reveal whether the American electorate is still capable of large-scale shifts in opinion, or whether the country is essentially locked into a schism for the foreseeable future, with roughly 53 percent of Americans on one side and 47 percent on the other.

Mr. Biden’s job approval has been steady in the mid-50s for most of the year, as his administration has pushed a shots-and-checks message about beating the virus and reviving the economy. His numbers are weaker on subjects like immigration and crime; Republicans have focused their criticism on those areas accordingly.

This weekend, the president and his allies have mounted something of a celebratory tour for the Fourth of July: Mr. Biden headed to Michigan, one of the vital swing states that made him president, while Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Las Vegas to mark a revival of the nation’s communal life.

On Friday, Mr. Biden stopped just short of declaring that happy days are here again, but he eagerly brandished the latest employment report showing that the economy added 850,000 jobs in June.

“The last time the economy grew at this rate was in 1984, and Ronald Reagan was telling us it’s morning in America,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, it’s getting close to afternoon here. The sun is coming out.”

Yet there is little confidence in either party that voters are about to swing behind Mr. Biden and his allies en masse, no matter how many events appear to align in his favor.

Democratic strategists see that as no fault of Mr. Biden’s, but merely the frustrating reality of political competition these days: The president — any president — might be able to chip away at voters’ skepticism of his party or their cynicism about Washington, but he cannot engineer a broad realignment in the public mood.

Mr. Mellman said the country’s political divide currently favored Mr. Biden and his party, with a small but stable majority of voters positively disposed toward the president. But even significant governing achievements — containing the coronavirus, passing a major infrastructure bill — may yield only minute adjustments in the electorate, he said.Biden’s Agenda ›

Is this helpful?

“Getting a bipartisan bill passed, in the past, would have been a game changer,” Mr. Mellman said. “Will it be in this environment? I have my doubts.”

Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist, offered an even blunter assessment of the chances for real movement in the electorate. He said that the receding of the pandemic had helped voters feel better about the direction the country is moving in — “the Covid reopening certainly helps with the right-track numbers” — but that he saw no evidence that it was changing the way they thought about their preferences between the parties.

“I don’t think anything has particularly changed,” Mr. Schriefer said. “If anything, since November people have retreated further and further back into their own corners.”

American voters’ stubborn resistance to external events is no great surprise, of course, to anyone who lived through the 2020 election. Last year, Mr. Trump presided over an out-of-control pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the American economy to collapse. He humiliated the nation’s top public health officials and ridiculed basic safety measures like mask wearing; threatened to crush mass demonstrations with military force; outlined no agenda for his second term; and delivered one of the most self-destructive debate performances of any presidential candidate in modern history.

Mr. Trump still won 47 percent of the vote and carried 25 states. The trench lines of identity-based grievance he spent five years digging and deepening — pitting rural voters against urban ones, working-class voters against voters with college degrees, white voters against everybody else — saved him from an overwhelming repudiation.

A Pew Research Center study of the 2020 election results released this past week showed exactly what scale of voter movement is possible in the political climate of the Trump era and its immediate aftermath.

The electorate is not entirely frozen, but each little shift in one party’s favor seems offset by another small one in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump improved his performance with women and Hispanic voters compared with the 2016 election, while Mr. Biden expanded his party’s support among moderate constituencies like male voters and military veterans.

The forces that made Mr. Trump a resilient foe in 2020 may now shield him from the kind of exile that might normally be inflicted on a toppled former president enveloped in criminal investigations and facing the prospect of financial ruin. Polls show that Mr. Trump has persuaded most of his party’s base to believe a catalog of outlandish lies about the 2020 election; encouraging his admirers to ignore his legal problems is an old trick by comparison.

The divisions Mr. Trump carved into the electoral map are still apparent in other ways, too: Even as the country reopens and approaches the point of declaring victory over the coronavirus, the states lagging furthest behind in their vaccination campaigns are nearly all strongholds of the G.O.P. While Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, his contempt for public health authorities and the culture of vaccine skepticism in the right-wing media has hindered easy progress.

Yet the social fissures that have made Mr. Trump such a durable figure have also cemented Mr. Biden as the head of a majority coalition with broad dominance of the country’s most populous areas. The Democrats do not have an overwhelming electoral majority — and certainly not a majority that can count on overcoming congressional gerrymandering, the red-state bias of the Senate and the traditional advantage for the opposition party in midterm elections — but they have a majority all the same.

And if Mr. Biden’s approach up to this point has been good enough to keep roughly 53 percent of the country solidly with him, it might not take a major political breakthrough — let alone a season of them — to reinforce that coalition by winning over just a small slice of doubters or critics. There are strategists in Mr. Biden’s coalition who hope to do considerably more than that, either by maneuvering the Democratic Party more decisively toward the political center or by competing more assertively with Republicans on themes of economic populism (or perhaps through some combination of the two).

Mr. Biden’s aides have already briefed congressional Democrats several times on their plans to lean hard into promoting the economic recovery as the governing party’s signature achievement — one they hope to reinforce further with a victory on infrastructure.

Faiz Shakir, who managed Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, said Democrats did not need to worry about making deep inroads into Mr. Trump’s base. But if Mr. Biden and his party managed to reclaim a sliver of the working-class community that had recently shifted right, he said, it would make them markedly stronger for 2022 and beyond.

“All you need to focus on is a 5 percent strategy,” Mr. Shakir said. “What 5 percent of this base do you think you can attract back?”

But Mr. Shakir warned that Democrats should not underestimate the passion that Mr. Trump’s party would bring to that fight, or the endurance of the fault lines that he had used to reorganize American politics.

“He has animated people around those social and racial, cultural, cleavages,” Mr. Shakir said of Mr. Trump. “That keeps people enthused. It’s sad but it is the case that that is going on.”

I’m exhausted just thinking about it. But I think this is right. If the Big Lie and January 6th and the half a million preventable deaths didn’t cause people to rethink the GOP, I don’t know what will. (And that was just 2020!)

We’re stuck in this groove for the time being and that’s why the assault on the electoral system in the states is such a dire threat. They only have to steal a handful of votes. And they are showing they fully intend to do it.

The tweet below popped up late last night. Bystanders to this demonstration proved that white supremacist flash mobs are not exactly welcome in the birthplace of the nation:

Nothing like taking your kids to Philadelphia for the 4th & running into literal Nazis. These scumbags belong to the group Patriot Front. That may or may not be my kids & I joining a growing crowd yelling at the spineless dickholes & chasing them away from City Hall. #fucknazis pic.twitter.com/bqYviUq1Bd

— Not Today (@SunnyDelight888) July 4, 2021

Daniel Politi has more at Slate:

Around 150 white supremacists marched in front of Philadelphia City Hall late on Saturday night. The marchers were part of the Patriot Front, a known white supremacist group based in Texas, and they wore white face coverings while waving flags and shields. Some also carried signs that read “Reclaim America” and chanted “the election was stolen” while they marched. Police said none of the marchers were from Philadelphia.

Philadelphians along the route were not amused.

It seems the white supremacists had their march cut short by angry onlookers who made their feelings clear about having white supremacists openly espousing their views on the streets of Philadelphia. The onlookers started yelling at the protesters and there were a few scuffles with the white supremacists. A witness said the marchers often tossed smoke bombs and then used that as a cover to hit and kick counterprotesters. Although police were present, they apparently didn’t get really involved as counterportesters and white supremacists traded blows.

After a brief demonstration, Patriot Front beat a hasty retreat.

Add this to an embarrassing day for Nazis. Patriot Fart getting chased out of Philly pic.twitter.com/H2hmsxgsj5

— untitled_file(2) (@ACABSTUDIOS) July 4, 2021

The Anti-Defamation League defines the Patriot Front as “a white supremacist group whose members maintain that their ancestors conquered America and bequeathed it solely to them.” Patriot Front members are known to organize “localized flash mob demonstrations,” which is what appears to have taken place in Philadelphia on Saturday night.

The bunch arrived and departed in a series or Penske trucks. Police stopped the trucks on their way to downtown, searched and released those inside, including Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau. In the USA obnoxious is not illegal.

Stunning photos by my Inquirer colleague Jessica Griffin of the march through Philadelphia by the far-right-extremist group Patriot Front — right near Independence Hall on the eve of July 4 https://t.co/Opvvcwr1yD

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) July 4, 2021

On Thursday, Anat Shenker-Osorio recommended branding the Trump cult a faction as James Madison defined it in Federalist 10: “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland* (“Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity“) tweeted on Friday that she wanted to elaborate on implications from her June 30 study. She and colleagues examined “the extent to which citizens’ animus toward (Democratically aligned) minority groups — African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Gays and Lesbians — drove political support for Donald Trump.” Support among his faction, they found, is substantially, perhaps uniquely, rooted in animosity towards these groups, and that animosity transcends traditional party identification.

This animus does not predict future support for other Republican or Democratic politicians or either party. Nor do we find that animus toward Republican groups predicts support for Democratic elites. Trump’s support is thus uniquely tied to animus toward minority groups. 

This new @apsrjournal article by me, @julie_wronski and @UptonOrwell includes an implication that we really only hint at in the conclusion and that I'd like to elaborate on here. https://t.co/nvZy7o31RC pic.twitter.com/3BhxT6q0O6

— Lilliana Mason (@LilyMasonPhD) July 2, 2021

Animosity towards Democratic-linked groups measured in 2011 was predictive of later support for Trump in 2017 and 2018. They found also that “preexisting animus toward Democratic-linked groups does not correspond to support for the Republican Party or its more established leaders.” Moreover, “the effect of animosity toward Democratic-linked groups is substantively identical for both Democrats and Republicans.” But less prevalent among Democrats, as Mason later explains.

The researchers summarize their findings with this warning:

Finally, this research reveals a wellspring of animus against marginalized groups in the United States that can be harnessed and activated for political gain. Trump’s unique ability to do so is not the only cause for normative concern. Instead, we should take note that these attitudes exist across both parties and among nonpartisans. Though they may remain relatively latent when leaders and parties draw attention elsewhere, the right leader can activate these attitudes and fold them into voters’ political judgments. Should America wish to become a fully multiracial democracy, it will need to reconcile with these hostile attitudes themselves.

This faction, while it may have overtaken the Republican Party for now, is not wedded to it nor, where it exists among Democrats, to them either.

Mason spells it out more bluntly in her tweet thread:

The new MAGA/anti-MAGA conflict is not an entirely partisan one. It’s about white Christian supremacy versus a fully multi-racial democracy. The Trump effect occurs most powerfully at the most hateful end of the spectrum (above 0.5 on the animus scale).

And it’s not happening for anyone on the Democratic side. Hating Christians and White people doesn’t predict favorability toward any Democratic figures or the Democratic Party. So it isn’t “anti-White racism” (whatever that means) motivating the left. It’s not “both sides.”

This means that there is a faction in American politics that has moved from party to party, can be recruited from either party, and responds especially well to hatred of marginalized groups. They’re not just Republicans or Democrats, they’re a third faction that targets parties. 

THIS is the faction we, as Americans, should be worried about. “Bipartisanship” is not the answer to the problem. We need to confront this particular faction of Americans who have been uniquely visible and anti-democratic since before the Civil War (when they were Democrats). 

We haven’t really talked about them – except in extreme and isolated ways like talking about the KKK. But Trump served as a lightning rod for lots of regular people who hold white Christian supremacist beliefs. We neglect to name and identify them at the peril of democracy.

Because, Mason adds, “they are not loyal to a party – they are loyal to white Christian domination.”

I still recall the “Baptist church on every downtown street corner” days in the South when conservatives kept Blue Laws in place. There were Confederate monuments in the center of nearly every Southern town, Friday night football games began with prayers to Jesus, and the pep bands played “Dixie.” And you knew who you were then | girls were girls and men were men. And everyone else knew just who was in charge. Those days are all but gone and those once secure in the knowledge that they and theirs were exclusively in charge really don’t like where things are headed.

Once Democrats, then Republicans, Mason identifies them as their own faction.

Polls are all over. Republican registration is down since January 6th and Democratic identification is up. What I wonder is how much does this Trump faction account for the decline of party registration and growth of independents away from either major party?

*Update: Mason recently moved on to Johns Hopkins University.

pic.twitter.com/9gFjBKyrfN

— Dan Scavino Jr.🇺🇸🦅 (@DanScavino) July 4, 2021

Uhm. No.

Donald Trump, the very stable genius whose uncle taught at MIT, single-handedly whipped up the vaccines in the White House kitchen to save all the Real Americans and this is the thanks he gets:

Vaccine-hesitant Americans overwhelmingly reject the reported risks of the coronavirus delta variant, posing questions for the nation’s pandemic recovery on a Fourth of July the Biden administration has marked as a turning point in the nation’s long public health ordeal.

Three in 10 adults in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say they have not gotten a coronavirus vaccine and definitely or probably will not get one. In this group, a broad 73% say U.S. officials are exaggerating the risk of the delta variant — and 79% think they have little or no risk of getting sick from the coronavirus.

President Joe Biden, health officials and others have described the variant as more contagious than other strains, and as such a substantial risk to unvaccinated people. It now accounts for more than a quarter of new cases in the country.

But the government’s plan to address it through vaccinations looks to have hit a wall. Just 60% in this survey, produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates, report having received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. While that’s below official estimates (66.8%, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), it confirms the failure to meet Biden’s target of having 70% with at least one dose by July 4. And among those not vaccinated, a growing share — 74%, up from 55% in April — say they probably or definitely won’t get a shot.

Partisan divisions are sharp, underscoring the politicization of the pandemic: Overall just 45% think the government is accurately describing the risk of the delta variant; 35% say it’s exaggerating it, with 18% unsure. Several groups are especially likely to say it’s being exaggerated, including Republicans (57%), conservatives (55%), evangelical white Protestants (49%) and rural residents (47%).

Even as things stand, emergence from the pandemic is far from complete. More than 15 months after it gripped the nation, just 16% of Americans say their community has recovered fully. Nor is the future assured: While 56% think the country has learned lessons that will help it through the next pandemic, a mere 18% are very confident of this.

Having been fully vaccinated, I personally feel safe. And from what I gather, governments around the country as well as the feds have gone to great lengths to make the vaccines accessible to hard to reach people. Hundreds of millions here and around the world have been vaccinated with almost no serious side effects and the efficacy is a modern miracle we never could have dreamed would work so well.

So, it’s hard to feel any empathy for those who choose not to get vaccinated and get sick at this point. And there are a lot of them, especially in places where the Orange Menace is God.

Millions of people around the world are desperate for these vaccines and spoiled Americans won’t get them. And even here in America, there are immunosuppressed people for whom the vaccines aren’t as effective and all kids under 12.

But who cares about them, amirite? Freedooooom!

The Joe Manchin of yesteryear, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, has a memoir out:

The senator adamantly insisted on bipartisanship. As his fellow Democrats enthusiastically embraced major priorities of the new president, he threatened to withhold his crucial vote unless changes were made and Republicans brought on board. He was statistically the Democrat most likely to break with his party.

His name was Ben Nelson, and he was the Joe Manchin of his day in 2009, when the incoming administration of Barack Obama was being tested by Republicans and could not succeed without the vote of the Democratic centrist from Nebraska.

“In a way, I think I was,” said Mr. Nelson, accepting the comparison with Mr. Manchin, the high-profile but hard-to-nail-down senator from West Virginia whose vote is pivotal to advancing the agenda of President Biden and congressional Democrats. “Though probably not with quite as much publicity about it.”

Mr. Nelson, like Mr. Manchin a popular former governor, was elected to the Senate in 2000. He retired after two terms in 2012, but has kept an eye on Washington and has become discouraged by what he sees.

His coming memoir is titled “Death of the Senate,” and although Mr. Nelson concedes that the institution still has a pulse, he sees it as gasping for breath even as Mr. Biden and some current centrist members struggle to produce a semblance of bipartisanship.

One main problem, Mr. Nelson suggests, is that too many members of Congress come to Washington determined to stop things from happening, rather than finding ways to make things happen while extracting benefits for their constituents and, hopefully, the nation as a whole.

“I wanted to get something done; therefore, by bringing some people together or through my vote, I was able to get something done more than to stop things,” said Mr. Nelson, who was also in the middle of a 2005 effort to prevent Republicans from eliminating the filibuster on judicial nominees. “Everybody wanted to get something done. Maybe they had different ideas about what should be done or how you should do it. But it wasn’t just obstructionists.”

That is a big difference from the current climate, he said, where a significant number of Republicans are committed to yielding no ground to Democrats.

“It is not a governable situation in D.C. right now for the president or for Congress, because you have the commitment of the Republican leader to block everything and let nothing get through,” he said.

Mr. Nelson is referring, of course, to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, whose determination to blockade Mr. Obama beginning in 2009 empowered Mr. Nelson in his dealings with the Obama administration.

The dynamic is similar today, as Mr. McConnell’s zeal for stopping Mr. Biden’s agenda is giving leverage to Mr. Manchin and a few other Democrats. Mr. McConnell comes in for some tough criticism in Mr. Nelson’s book, which refers to the Republican leader as someone whose main interest is to “maintain a grip on political power and partisan advantage, come hell or high water.”

Nelson was a total pain in the ass during the stimulus and Obamacare negotiations, coming under intense criticism for a deal that was made for his state (he says it was misconstrued.) But in the end, after much annoying back and forth, he gave in:

Mr. Nelson supported the bill, becoming the 60th vote for its approval. But the political damage was done as the news coverage of the special provision caused his popularity to drop back home. At the same time, the health care debate was fueling the Tea Party and made the bipartisanship that drove Mr. Nelson a dirty word.

“There was a new element in Congress, a kind of political virus that would virtually kill bipartisanship,” he writes in his book. “There was a restive mood emerging in the conservative areas of the country, a movement of small-government, or antigovernment activists who had been, since the TARP bailout, demanding that their elected representatives stop working on a bipartisan basis with Democrats.”

And yet … say hello to Charlie Brown:

Despite the gridlock and combative partisanship that has swept the Senate, Mr. Nelson said he opposed eliminating the filibuster. In fact, he would like to see the 60-vote threshold restored for executive branch nominees.

He acknowledged that the push for bipartisanship can be time-consuming and frustrating, but that he believed that the Senate was still capable of a change in culture.

“It doesn’t happen at all if you just quit and say, ‘I’m not trying,’” he said.

But if the people in the Senate cannot change, he said, it will be up to voters to change the Senate.

“The change is going to come most likely from people back home saying enough is enough,” he said. “I hope the people back home begin to ask the question of anybody running for the House and the Senate: ‘Are you going to put the county and your state ahead of party? Are you going to be a patriot or are you just going to be partisan?’ Because they aren’t equivalent.”

“The people back home” are already asking ‘Are you going to put the county and your state ahead of party? Are you going to be a patriot or are you just going to be partisan?’ Nelson might want to ask exactly what those people mean by those lecturing people about bipartisanship.

These centrists are the worst kumbaaya singers on the planet. This guy can look at January 6th and ask that question? Does he not know that the Republicans believe in winning by any means necessary and that is what they define as patriotism? That their voters are being propagandized and lied to and otherwise brainwashed into beliving that democracy is an illegitimate process if they don’t win? WTF is he talking about?

Oy. It brings to mind the Letter from a Birmingham jail once again…

Incompetence, arrogance and magical thinking. Hmmmm:

On Independence Day 2020, as a MAGA armada of 100-plus boats sped across Tennessee’s Old Hickory Lake, one Trump supporter who wasn’t taking part in the parade was about to get a taste of the chaos that ensued.

“I’m a seasoned captain. I’ve been in big waves,” Tommy Gravelle told The Daily Beast. But this was different. “If I knew there’d be that big of waves, I would’ve never left the dock.”

Rapidfire crests—waves that came in too fast for a simple pontoon boat to recover—overtook the front of the vessel. Seats got tossed into the water. The frothy foam nearly reached the captain’s chair. Gravelle was about to scream for his family to abandon ship, but he decided to rev the engine, cut through the next swell, and turn around.

The insurance company considered the vessel totaled and cut him a check.“In Tennessee alone, the state’s database shows that Trump flotillas made up a third of all “congested water” accidents there last year.”

“We got on the boat for a family day on the lake, and it ruined the whole day,” he said. “It was unorganized really. I think these people all meant well, they didn’t understand what was going on.”

It’s been a year since the Trump flotilla phenomenon swept through the nation’s lakes and bays. Law enforcement agents, rally organizers, and boaters spoke to The Daily Beast about how these events often got out of control, causing more crashes and near-misses than previously known. In Tennessee alone, the state’s database shows that Trump flotillas made up a third of all “congested water” accidents there last year.

National figures aren’t available that identify events as Trump flotillas, but a state-by-state review of incident reports in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas showed that most accidents never made the news.“You sit in your boat and get tossed around. It’s not an enjoyable part of our job.”— George Birdwell, investigator with Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency

Unlike the average holiday regatta, however, where alcohol is blamed when people jump off moving boats or fall out while peeing over the side, the main culprit at Trump boat parades is the sheer choppiness of the water.

George Birdwell, an investigator with Tennessee’s Wildlife Resources Agency, said law enforcement agents have grown to dread working these events.

“You sit in your boat and get tossed around. It’s not an enjoyable part of our job,” he said. “Big boats show up, and they try to go slow. But they’re still throwing a big wake, and small boats show up too, and they have to deal with those large wakes.”

No incidents were covered by news reports of these parades in Tennessee, but The Daily Beast tracked down four examples in as many rallies simply by requesting accident documentation from the state.

On Sept. 5 on Ft. Loudoun Lake, David Thomas lost his 22-foot, $22,000 SeaRay boat when it was overtaken by the relentless series of wakes, according to an incident report. A dozen people had to jump overboard and get fished out by parade-goers and first responders.

His boat experienced “extremely rough and high water created by other vessels that were mostly participating in the parade,” the report said.

That same afternoon, 140 miles away, a massive flotilla made its way downstream on South Holston Lake. As they squeezed through a bottleneck on the lake, an unidentified boat made an aggressive left and started pulling in too close to Travis Brown’s 19-foot MasterCraft, according to that report

“The bottom line here is, poor seamanship. If they’re doing this and running around, they don’t know what they’re doing. Every boater is responsible for their own wake.”— Captain David B. Mackey, professor at the Mass Maritime Academy

Brown made a hard left turn himself to avoid it, but that sent him into yet another boat. By the time Brown turned back on track, the stern of his boat nicked Teddy Street’s 20-foot Sylvan vessel, decked out in American, Confederate, and Trump flags. The report estimated the starboard hull damage on Street’s boat at $2,600.

At Tims Ford Lake on Sept. 12, 66-year-old Rana Beasley injured her back when she was violently tossed about when an onslaught of waves from the parade hit the boat she was on. The pilot, Steven Tuthill, had just pulled out of the marina and tried to stay close to shore, but the waves kept coming. An ambulance rushed Beasley to a nearby hospital, according to a law enforcement report of the incident.

“There was a significant amount of boat traffic in the area because of a permitted boat parade that had occurred earlier that afternoon,” that report said.

In Oklahoma, the state’s public safety department reviewed four Trump boat parades at The Daily Beast’s behest and identified two separate incidents on Lake Eufaula that resulted in boats sinking. Neither had been previously publicly reported.

The Daily Beast sent public records requests to nearly a dozen states. Many were still searching through files as of publication of this story, including state agencies in Florida, California, and Texas, as well several county sheriff’s offices in Minnesota. Agencies required us to identify the date, time, and body of water where a boat parade took place in order to search records, meaning the results are far from comprehensive or complete.“When you have boat parades like rallies, the energy there creates a different vibe. People standing in parts of the boat where they’re not supposed to, flags that may limit visibility for the operator of the boat, and if there’s loud music, bright sun, maybe alcohol involved… all these factors contributed to dangerous situations.”— Rob Crafa, the waterfront director at the State University of New York’s Maritime College

It’s difficult to track the frequency of these accidents because some government agencies claim to be missing records of publicly reported disasters. One docked boat sank into the St. Croix River in Wisconsin during a Labor Day weekend parade there, according to the local CBS Minnesota station, but the state’s natural resources department said it has no log of an incident there that day.

The vast majority of the parades we reviewed took place on dammed bodies of water managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which issues permits. But it did not respond to questions or provide data.

Captain David B. Mackey, a professor at the Mass Maritime Academy, stressed that boats should be going at 5 miles per hour or slower—alternating between idle and turning the engine off entirely. And he said speeding parader-goers were to blame for damaging his own family member’s rental boat in North Carolina recently.

“The bottom line here is, poor seamanship. If they’re doing this and running around, they don’t know what they’re doing. Every boater is responsible for their own wake. If they do damage to another vessel, they’re responsible. If they do damage to the shore, they’re responsible,” he said.

Austin Collins, who organized one Trump flotilla on Sept. 12 at Oklahoma’s Lake Tenkiller, said he set strict rules to keep boats close together, single file, and slow. But as the lake widened, boaters started speeding around each other. Those that went too fast turned around, creating wakes that bounced off the others.

“I was trying to prevent racing down the lake. It wasn’t a race, it was a parade,” he said. “I kept on my normal pace… I think most people just took off.”

Boat safety enforcement officers in Wisconsin and Minnesota said the waving of giant flags posed an additional particular challenge for boaters, as it reduced visibility on the water when it was more congested than normal.

“When you have boat parades like rallies, the energy there creates a different vibe. People standing in parts of the boat where they’re not supposed to, flags that may limit visibility for the operator of the boat, and if there’s loud music, bright sun, maybe alcohol involved… all these factors contributed to dangerous situations,” said Rob Crafa, the waterfront director at the State University of New York’s Maritime College.

The Labor Day weekend boat rally in Lake Travis, Texas, last year served as the best known example. Five boats capsized at that Trump parade, with the distress calls all coming in during a 15-minute stretch.“Wow! I hear they have thousands and thousands of boats parading in Jupiter, despite the fact that they tried to cancel us. Everyone is having an incredible time.”— Former President Donald Trump

To this day, the “beautiful boaters”—as the former president enjoys calling them—continue to be a source of pride and affirmation for Donald Trump, so much so that he even incorporates them into his baseless arguments that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

According to two people familiar with his private remarks, Trump has in recent months specifically cited the boaters as supposed evidence for why it was “impossible,” in the former president’s words, that he lost to Biden.

“He’ll say [something along the lines of], ‘Look at the crowd sizes, look at the enthusiasm, look at all the boaters, look at all the votes I got,’ and talk about other signs of the great support he has across the country, when discussing how it doesn’t add up,” according to one of the sources who’s repeatedly talked to Trump about the 2020 race since Biden’s inauguration.

As The Daily Beast reported last year, the then-president was so enamored by the images and videos of his diehard boating supporters that he bizarrely asked his political aides, “Are we polling the boaters yet?” and kept asking to see more videos and updates on “the boaters.”

Multiple senior Trump officials have told The Daily Beast that they made a point of showing the then-president videos of the boaters as a way to lift his spirits. The boat parades were never formal campaign events, but Trump encouraged the celebrations several times on his now-deleted Twitter.

With summer 2021 now in full swing, the former president is still on the lookout for the MAGA boat parades, and hopes to see many more of them flourishing in the Biden era, according to a source with knowledge.

In May, when various Trump boaters went out on the water to celebrate Memorial Day weekend in Florida, the ex-president did not let the occasion go by without some words of encouragement.

“Wow! I hear they have thousands and thousands of boats parading in Jupiter, despite the fact that they tried to cancel us,” Trump said in a statement from his office. “Everyone is having an incredible time.”

During the event, a number of the boats could be seen decorated with banners and signs imploring Trump to run for president again in 2024.

And every Trump boater who spoke about their experience at a rally said they’re already working on bringing them back.

“Hell, I might have one later this year,” said Collins, who organized a flotilla in Oklahoma. “I think I’m going to come up with a different reason. Maybe a fallen soldiers rally.”

Although I have always been moved by the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights (the system of government not so much) I’ve never been much attracted to the concept “patriotism” because in America it has so often been centered around chauvinism and militarism. Not my thing. But after January 6th, I’ve been thinking about this more and realize that I do have a sense of American identity that means something to me and I might as well call it patriotism. The stakes are just too high for the humans who live on this planet to embrace the negative.

This piece by Richard Rorty back in 1994 was written as an admonition to “the left” and I’m not sure that framing is relevant at the moment. It’s the right that elects presidents who call the country a laughing stock and makes a mockery of its ideals. But the idea behind it is worth thinking about, nonetheless:

Like every other country, ours has a lot to be proud of and a lot to be ashamed of. But a nation cannot reform itself unless it takes pride in itself — unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it. Such pride sometimes takes the form of arrogant, bellicose nationalism. But it often takes the form of a yearning to live up to the nation’s professed ideals.

That is the desire to which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed, and he is somebody every American can be proud of. It is just as appropriate for white Americans to take pride in Dr. King and in his (limited) success as for black Americans to take pride in Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey and their (limited) successes. Cornel West wrote a book — “The American Evasion of Philosophy” — about the connections between Emerson, Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois and his own preaching in African-American churches. The late Irving Howe, whose “World of Our Fathers” did much to make us aware that we are a nation of immigrants, also tried to persuade us (in “The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson”) to cherish a distinctively American, distinctively Emersonian, hope.

Mr. Howe was able to rejoice in a country that had only in his lifetime started to allow Jews to be full-fledged members of society. Cornel West can still identify with a country that, by denying them decent schools and jobs, keeps so many black Americans humiliated and wretched.

There is no contradiction between such identification and shame at the greed, the intolerance and the indifference to suffering that is widespread in the United States. On the contrary, you can feel shame over your country’s behavior only to the extent to which you feel it is your country. If we fail in such identification, we fail in national hope. If we fail in national hope, we shall no longer even try to change our ways. 

The country is a human endeavor which means that there is plenty of shame but also pride to be had. I have come to realize that it’s important to embrace both.

Anyway, I have especially been thinking recently about why people still want to come here, after everything. This piece by Shay Khatiri in Persuasion speaks to that quite eloquently, I thought:

I grew up in Islamist Iran, but I have always been an American at heart. Even in my youth, before I ever stepped foot on American soil, I felt American—because I understood being American not to be a matter of records but a state of heart and mind. To me, it meant adherence to American principles: respect for human dignity, protection of rights and freedoms, and criticism to make the country better. Now, in my adoptive home, I feel more keenly than ever the truth of those early instincts. 

Once a year, the Fourth of July comes to remind all of us of what the immigrant knows: neither the radicalism of America’s experiment nor its beauty has diminished. The Fourth of July is a great time for drinking, barbecuing with friends, and watching fireworks. But it is more, too—or it should be. The Fourth of July is our annual call to renew our commitment to the American creed. That is why, every Fourth of July, I read four short texts to remind myself why I love this imperfect country in the truest sense—with critical love. 

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First, I read the Declaration of Independence. It has been said that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” is the most famous sentence in the English language. It enshrined the unrealized promise of equality—that every human is born with equal dignity and deserves the respect of fellow humans—as part of our national identity.

But equality of dignity means more than mere toleration. So the second text I read is George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, with its promise of pluralism: 

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation … For happily, the Government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.

How am I to give credence to these extraordinary words of tolerance, written by a man who owned slaves?

Here, Frederick Douglass comes to my aid. To remember the cruelty that burdened America and almost broke its back, the third text I read is Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In the speech, Douglass answers his own question:

[The Fourth is] a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham … a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

We are a better nation because of Douglass’s withering criticisms. His damning condemnation of America is just, but his anger is not at America. Rather, it is at Americans’ failure to live up to their nation’s promise. He concludes:

Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country … [I draw] encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American institutions.

Reading Douglass reminds me that the best argument against injustice is a call to be more American, not less: to appeal to the liberal values of our founding, and to highlight our failure to make them real.

Finally, I turn to Douglass’s only competition for the title of history’s greatest American and the greatest prophet of Americanism: Abraham Lincoln. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln reaffirmed liberty as a foundational element of America and equality of dignity as the country’s mission. But he added, too, a sense of the stakes at play. He ended with a solemn pledge, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The omission of “the” before “government” was deliberate: Lincoln was talking not only about the American government but also about the liberal democratic project. To Lincoln, the collapse of the American republic would have been the end of the experiment of liberal democracy. 

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I spent the first two decades of my life in Iran. But Iran, in the vice grip of tyranny, was no home. When I left to live in Hungary, it quickly became clear that my Middle Eastern background meant that I would not find a new life in Europe. This is not the case in America, where our accents and how we look do not make us any less American than one other. Here, the measure of one’s patriotism is one’s dedication to liberty and the American creed. 

Love for America does not mean blindness to its many faults or to its unfulfilled promises. I was mortified by Donald Trump’s ascent, but I am also proud that the same ballot box that brought him to power ousted him from the presidency. I was outraged by the murder of George Floyd, but I fell in love with America all over again when I saw the outrage it generated among my compatriots.

And my American story is not those three times in the past seven years that I was a target of bigotry because of my background or beliefs. Rather, my American story is that it happened only three times—far fewer than in Hungary or in Iran. I arrived in this country with two suitcases and nothing else. Despite the mountain of expectations I had of America, it has not disappointed me. For the first time, life is not so frustrating that it forces me to focus on my wellbeing alone; freedom has brought with it so comfortable a life that I can now care about others.

Edmund Burke once wrote, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” I do not love America because it is my country. I adopted America as mine because it is worthy of love. Being American is a constant challenge, exhausting and demanding, yet joyful. That’s how love works.

We are one messed up culture and sometimes I think we are beyond redemption. But then I see some change that makes a difference or a new generation taking on the battle for liberty and equality and I realize that for all our faults America is still trying and that’s not true everywhere.

We are at a critical juncture in our history. A neo-fascist movement is gaining strength and a very large number of our fellow citizens are being brainwashed by the propaganda of a grievance cult. It’s a frightening moment. But we have had them before and managed to survive and progress does get made in fit and starts. So we have to hang on. We just have to.

Happy 4th everyone:

Maybe forgo the fireworks this year.

Lytton, British Columbia’s story is yesterday’s news. Like the town itself. A wildfire last week turned 90 percent of it to ash when temperatures reached 49.6 C (121 F).

CNN reports:

Scientists have warned for decades that climate change will make heat waves more frequent and more intense. That is a reality now playing out in Canada, but also in many other parts of the northern hemisphere that are increasingly becoming uninhabitable.

Moscow reported its highest June temperature ever: 34.8 C degrees (95 F) on June 23. A weather station in Verkhoyansk, Siberia (above the Arctic Circle) recorded 38 C (100 F) on June 20. Iraq declared a public holiday in several provinces (including Baghdad) when temperatures there exceeded 50 C (122 F) on Thursday and the electrical grid failed.

Twenty-five miles east of Juneau, Alaska, melting glaciers generated a 2.7 magnitude ice quake last week. In Portland, victims of the heat have collapsed on their walks to cooling centers; others arrived on stretchers with “body temperatures so high their central nervous systems had shut down,” reports the Washington Post.

Experts tell CNN it is unlikely that heat waves striking across the northern hemisphere at the same time is coincidence.

“We carried out a quick attribution study to get some fast answers to ‘What is the role of climate change?'” said UK Met Office meteorologist, Nikos Christidis, who has been developing simulations to carry out such analysis.

“We found that without human influence, it would be almost impossible to hit a new record and such a hot June in the region,” he said, referring to an area including those affected in Canada and the US.

Christidis said in the past, without human-caused climate change, extreme heat in the Northwest US or Southwest Canada would have occurred “once every tens of thousands of years.” Presently, it can occur every 15 years or so, Christidis said.

And perhaps every other year by the end of the century if the world cannot contain greenhouse emissions.

Dying of thirst is next:

A snow drought in the West appeared early last winter, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System. The paltry snowpack, paired with well-below normal rainfall and extreme heat, is at the core of the region’s water-supply concerns.

On Thursday, the US Drought Monitor reported 93% of the West is in drought, the most expansive drought in that region in modern records.

These reports read like the script of a disaster film.

The Washington Post again:

The heat dome was just one of a barrage of climate catastrophes that struck the world in recent weeks. Western wildfires are off to a scorching start, with firefighters actively battling 44 large blazes that have burned nearly 700,000 acres. Parts of Florida and the Caribbean are bracing for landfall of Hurricane Elsa, the Atlantic’s fifth named storm in what is one of the most active starts to hurricane season on record. Nearly half a million people in Madagascar are at risk of starvation as the country grapples with dust storms, locusts and its worst drought in decades.

“Climate change has loaded the weather dice against us,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy.

“These extremes are something we knew were coming,” she added. “The suffering that is here and now is because we have not heeded the warnings sufficiently.”

Yeah, that’s us.

If we continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, studies suggest, the Earth could be 3 to 4 degrees Celsius hotter by the end of the century. The Arctic will be free of ice in summertime. Hundreds of millions of people will suffer from food shortages and extreme drought. Huge numbers of species will be driven to extinction. Some regions will become so hot and disaster-prone they are uninhabitable.

“It’s a very different planet at those levels,” Wehner said. “This is really serious. As a society, as a species, we’re going to have to learn to adapt to this. And some things are not going to be adaptable.”

Sunscreen won’t be much help at that point. Perhaps a stillsuit?