“There was a story two days ago, in a major newspaper, talking about people living in Canada, coming into the United States, and smuggling things back into Canada because the tariffs are so massive. The tariffs to get common items back into Canada are so high that they have to smuggle them in. They buy shoes, then they wear them. They scuff them up. They make them sound old or look old.”
He got that from this silly op-ed in the NY Post which one of his flunkies probably clipped for him.
Here’s Graham this week, making a similarly weird point:
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) bizarrely claims 40,000 Brazilians heading for Connecticut "wearing designer clothes and Gucci bags" illegally crossed the border: “This is not economic migration anymore.” pic.twitter.com/SYg0cWWJHc
I assume he got this clap-trap from Fox News or looney right wing website.
Graham has always been a fatuous tool. But he’s now turning himself into Trump which is really creepy to watch. Trumpism is bad enough. Taking on his freakish personality is even worse.
If you read on thing about this “popularism” debate (which I glancingly addressed earlier this week) read this from Brian Beutler:
It took my old pal Ezra Klein and his fancy New York Times column to drag the topic into the mainstream, and he did a good, evenhanded job adjudicating between David Shor, the high priest of popularism, and several of Shor’s critics (though not me, his most articulate and handsome critic).
The one nit I would pick with the piece is that it largely centers the debate around a single, poorly understood historical fact, rather than interrogating the prescriptive power of the popularist theory of politics.
Here’s the fact in question: In 2020, non-college voters of color broke in larger-than-expected numbers for Trump, exacerbating a decades-long shift of all non-college voters from the Democratic coalition into the Republican coalition, exemplified by the fabled working-class white Trump voter. Popularists stipulate that this happened because Democratic Party aides, activists, and donors have become trapped in a bubble of over-educated progressives who communicate in the idioms of woke Twitter and thus increase the salience of unpopular ideas.
But, as the piece shows, the causal evidence for this theory is highly disputed. So is the baseline assumption that the shift (as pertains to voters of color) will endure beyond Trump himself—an exceptionally strange politician, running with the benefits of incumbency and hyper-celebrity at a historically pitched moment, in an election that generated extraordinary turnout, which by definition included a bunch of new voters we can’t possibly understand. And because a debate like this won’t be resolvable for months or years, the essay ends on a kind of shruggy-emoticon note: Everyone agrees Democrats face structural disadvantages in elections, and that they need to change something about how they do politics to pad their margins so the country doesn’t slip into oblivion. What that something is remains elusive.
But the thing is, popularism offers an answer, and we can examine how the formula performs in both real-world and hypothetical settings. And what shoots out the other end of the algorithm is bad.
② THE GOLDEN WAGE
Irrespective of why non-college voters of color swung a bit toward Trump in 2020, or who’s to blame for it, the popularist prescription for arresting the swing is that Democrats should do and talk about things that poll well. More precisely, they should actually do very little, because the public is change averse, but the things they choose to do (particularly when they act in high-profile ways) should all be super-popular, and they should moor their rhetoric in kitchen-table policy appeals that poll well. A kind of Clintonism for the Trump era.
One valid, but somewhat narrow response to this advice, articulated here by David Dayen, is that if Democrats talk a big game about popular stuff, but then don’t do much of it when they have power, they will eventually brand themselves as frauds and promise breakers, which is politically toxic in and of itself.
From where I sit, though, that facet of the debate highly overweights the extent to which voters are attuned to policy promises and whether politicians keep them, and underweights bigger questions like whether focus-grouped, policy-drenched appeals are responsive to what voters are looking for from their leaders.
I think Shor and the popularists would be infinitely more credible if they adopted Obama’s foreign-policy lodestar—“don’t do stupid shit”—and applied it to Democratic rhetoric and agenda setting: Whatever you do, stay away from truly toxic issues. Good advice! But instead they invert the formula: Do and say popular things. And that prescribes a kind of antipolitics—it’s a recipe for turning politicians into automatons who constantly and evasively pivot to their safe issues, because they don’t know how to respond when new issues arise unexpectedly and capture people in real time.
One canonical popular issue is the minimum wage. Another one (of much lower salience, but that Shor has highlighted repeatedly) is the Loan Shark Prevention Act, which would fight predatory lending. Democrats (because they’re already much more popularist than the popularists care to admit) love pivoting to health care. These are fine issues. But a politics assembled around relentlessly invoking them is only going to hit the mark of addressing what most animates people in a stopped-clock kind of way.
Talking about health care a lot in 2018 made some sense because Republicans had just tried to take health care away from tens of millions of people. You could go back several election cycles before you find one where relentless minimum-wage message discipline would have been responsive to the driving passions of the moment. Almost nobody in the whole world knows what the Loan Shark Prevention Act is or does, and using it as a rhetorical or substantive crutch in an election, now or at any point in the past, would be downright bizarre.
Even today, in a climate dominated (for good reasons) by angst about the coronavirus pandemic and (for bad reasons) by “critical race theory,” the directive to talk about drug prices or the minimum wage isn’t savvy; it’s uncanny. At worst it’s gonna demoralize many people who’ve placed their real, deeply-held hopes for the future in the party. At best it’s gonna leave them puzzled over why the soundbites are all nonsequiturs.
③ POLL NO PUNCHES
A better alternative, consistent with the “don’t do or say extremely unpopular things” mantra, would be for Democrats to speak to the biggest and most pressing needs the country faces (your mileage may vary on what those needs are, but they’re all gonna be familiar, mainstream, sometimes even popularist issues), to not make obvious errors, and to try to keep promises—but also to realize that the coming election is more likely to be decided by propaganda about a far off Ebola outbreak than about any real issue. And that means, in addition to doing the kinds of popular things that are in the Build Back Better agenda, Democrats should be nimble enough to do battle on that kind of us vs. them terrain, in defiance of the temptation to just recapitulate all the things they did for people’s kitchen tables.
NBC’s Benjy Sarlin recalled a good example of how this works in the 2009 auto bailout. That policy polled quite poorly at the time, and while popularists might aver that things are different when the fate of the American economy is on the line and there are no popular ways to save it, a political party steeped in their philosophy might have been too timid or hidebound to do what had to be done. Or perhaps they would’ve been inclined to do it, but then swept the whole episode under the rug.
Instead what happened is Barack Obama saved the American auto industry and embedded his success in a patriotic, culture-drenched campaign appeal: GM is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead. Read: The other guys let bin Laden get away, and would’ve let GM die.
Right now in Virginia, where the gubernatorial election is just a couple weeks away, Democrats have given everything over to reminding voters that Republican Glenn Youngkin is a stalking horse for Trumpism, and now, as the New York Times reports, “In interviews outside Fairfax’s early-voting site, every McAuliffe voter cited Mr. Trump as a reason for supporting the Democrat. Transportation, education and taxes—longtime core issues of Virginia governor’s races—were scarcely mentioned.”
On the flipside, we have issue polling to thank for the early aversion among elected Democrats to imposing uncompromised vaccine requirements. We see now why flouting the polls and taking more assertive steps several months ago would’ve been wise, even if they would’ve been less popular in survey data than the hodgepodge we got: You can actually crush COVID-19 and brag about it, or you can chase polls into a muddle that leaves everyone unhappy.
We can similarly draw a pretty straight line from popularism to President Biden embracing Trump’s migrant-expulsion policy over the objections of lawyers, experts, and activists to no apparent political avail and at the cost of needless cruelty. All because polls suggest that key sub-sub-sub groups of voters prefer ‘be a bit of a dick to would-be immigrants for show’ to more humane policy.
And as I laid out a couple weeks ago popularism will sometimes point to absolutely wild conclusions, like that raising taxes on middle-income parents (to finance a permanent entitlement for poor parents) is sound political advice, maybe better even than the alternative of leaving the existing child tax credit program that benefits both classes of parents in place. It’ll warn Democrats to tread very lightly when Republicans throw around the words “law and order,” but it can’t begin to fathom ways Democrats might actually hold their ground in the culture war.
That isn’t a record that inspires me to think popularists know what Democrats need to do to win by wider margins in Wisconsin. I’ll reiterate what I wrote in that above-linked article, that we have better barometers for how Democrats can succeed politically in tough states in the form of over-performing senators like John Tester, Sherrod Brown, and Wisconsin’s own Tammy Baldwin. These politicians test their intuitions against issue polls like any other, but none of them behaves as if they think politics has an autopilot setting that’ll get them from one election through the next by never running afoul of survey data.
If they did that, I don’t think they’d be senators anymore. Because in practice it turns out campaigns are more like driving than flying. You shouldn’t go too fast or too slow; you need to keep your eyes on the road, but also check your mirrors. And you really ought to know what to do in the event that you hit a patch of ice or one of your tires explodes or someone else wrecks their car 50 feet ahead. We can all fantasize about a future in which computers do all the work, but until we get there, we have to accept that driving is just way riskier and more prone to human error than flying. That means the best drivers are ones with skill and practice; the worst ones hit cruise control at the speed limit and take a nap behind the wheel.
I still can’t get over the fact that people are touting “poll everything and pick the most popular ideas to run on” as some kind of revolutionary strategy that has never been tried. My God, poll-tested politics has been done since the advent of polling. The idea that this is a major insight just astounds me. And by the way, it’s a terrible way to do politics.
Sure, you need to poll, but to think that’s the key to success is ridiculous. If it was, no candidate could ever lose. They all poll.
Beutler’s critique is right on the money in my opinion. The public doesn’t understand the implications of most issues and they often tell pollsters what they want to hear. They very often have contradictory views and spout conventional wisdom. Good analysts can sort that out to some degree and professionals who conduct focus groups are able to see through some of the subjects’ attitudes to get to what they really think. But none of that is static. People change their minds, they waffle they go with the crowd or take contrarian stances for all kinds of reasons. Events can change everything.
Mostly people just vote with their tribe because it’s easier. And in this polarized political environment the real task for the parties is to find a way to get people to identify with yours and/or reject the other guy’s. There are ways to do this. As Beutler points out, Democrats have examples like Tester, Brown and Baldwin to prove that.
I have always been skeptical of the Pee tape story. It just seemed to good to be true. The David Corn and Michael Isikoff book provided some evidence that Trump had visited sex clubs in Moscow where the practice was part of a wild stage show, so maybe it briefly tickled his fancy. But it just didn’t seem like him .
But who knows? People have kinks. And after reading this last night, I kind of think it might be one of his. If there’s one thing about Trump, if he’s obsessed with something and denies it too vociferously it’s almost certainly true:
Former President Donald Trump went off on a bizarre tangent on Thursday where he denied enjoying “golden showers” and even suggested that former first lady Melania Trump would agree it’s not something he’d like.
“I’m not into golden showers,” Trump said unprompted in a private speech at the National Republican Senatorial Committee retreat, according to The Washington Post. “You know the great thing, our great first lady — ‘That one,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe that one.’”
Trump was referring to one of the most salacious allegations in the unverified dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele: the existence of a so-called “pee-pee tape.” The dossier claimed that Trump, while staying at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow in 2013, hired prostitutes to perform a golden showers show on the hotel bed, where then-President Barack Obama had previously stayed.
Ex-FBI director James Comey, who was famously fired by Trump, wrote in his book that the former president had an obsessive interest in the allegation.
“I’m a germaphobe,” Trump told him, per the book. “There’s no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.”
Well, it’s official! QAnon Ron Watkins, after consultation with his pastor, says he’s decided to “double down with God as my compass,” and filed today to run against Congressman Tom O’Halleran from Maricopa. Your 2021 Republican Party! pic.twitter.com/RPFNwgaakg
The New York Times did a typically pessimistic take on Democratic hopes in Virginia this morning but within the piece there is this:
The question now is if the accelerating demographic shift in Virginia — no Republican has won a statewide race since 2009 — and Mr. Trump’s continued presence on the political scene are enough to lift Democrats even in a less than favorable environment.
There are signs that those two factors could prove sufficient for Mr. McAuliffe, so long as he can galvanize Democrats in the same fashion as Mr. Newsom did.
While Virginia Democrats may in some ways be victims of their own success, having claimed every major office and taken control of the legislature, their dominance has also allowed them to loosen voting laws. While other Southern states have been tightening voting access, Virginia enacted expansive early voting this year. Residents can vote in person or by mail between Sept. 17 and Oct. 30.
What’s more, Northern Virginia has become increasingly hostile to Republicans. Fairfax County, the state’s most populous, split about evenly between Mr. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Last year, Mr. Trump won just 28 percent of the vote there.
Mr. Youngkin, who, like Mr. McAuliffe, lives in Fairfax, is positioned to perform far better there. But the threat of Mr. Trump’s return to the White House has clearly alarmed voters in the affluent and well-educated county.
In interviews outside Fairfax’s early-voting site, every McAuliffe voter cited Mr. Trump as a reason for supporting the Democrat. Transportation, education and taxes — longtime core issues of Virginia governor’s races — were scarcely mentioned.
Paul Erickson, an architect from Vienna, Va., summoned a reporter back after revealing his concerns about Mr. Trump and said in an urgent tone that he had more to share.
“What I didn’t say is, for the first time in my adult life I fear for our nation,” Mr. Erickson said. “We’re tearing ourselves apart from within.”
Others were less expansive but equally to the point.
“I don’t like Trump, and I believe Youngkin is equal to Trump,” said Carol Myers, a retiree who, with her husband, was voting before playing a round of golf at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington.
Elections are nationalized these days, particularly as long as Trump remains on the scene and Republicans are attached at the hip. I guess we’ll see if Virginia Democrats are paying attention but Californians sure were and I suspect they are too.
It appears that the January 6th commission is getting ready to rumble. The bipartisan probe in the House of Representatives has been taking the testimony of various participants and observers of the events leading up to the insurrection and has issued 19 subpoenas for some who have so far refused invitations to appear.
The most recent recipient is Jeffrey Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Division of the Justice Department who reportedly broke agency rules by working directly with the president and outside lawyers on a plot to overturn the election. Often portrayed as a lowly background player with no profile, according to the New Republic, Clark is actually a high-level conservative movement legal activist with an Ivy League pedigree, a clerkship with a very right-wing judge, a long association with The Federalist Society as well as Kirkland and Ellis, the law firm known for housing right-wing attorneys in between service in GOP administrations. Clark served on the Romney campaign in 2012 as an “energy adviser” and along with his duties in the civil division, he worked as the assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division, where Bloomberg reports he diligently worked to slash and burn existing environmental policy. In other words, he is a full-fledged creature of the Republican establishment. Attempts to portray him as some sort of eccentric gadfly are wrong. Clark is a member of the club.
It will be interesting to see if he responds to the subpoena or tries to claim attorney-client privilege. The Department of Justice told employees that it would not invoke executive privilege some time back and Trump himself has declared that he would not sue to stop them. Clark will have to do some fancy footwork to get out of it.
Meanwhile, four of Trump’s closest accomplices were due to appear this week and failed to do so.
Dan Scavino Trump’s Deputy Chief of staff and social media director eluded the process for some time but was finally served and has been given more time to respond. Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Trump loyalist/jack of all trades Kash Patel are both said to be working with the committee to come up with some agreement and have also been given a temporary reprieve. That leaves Steve Bannon, former Trump adviser and current podcaster extraordinaire.
Having escaped accountability for the fraud he was alleged to have perpetrated against Trump’s followers by obtaining a pardon from the leader they revere, just 10 months later, Bannon is once again committing crimes. He has decided to defy the subpoena, setting up a criminal contempt charge which could land him in jail for one year and cost him $100,000. The January 6th Committee has said it will refer the charge to the DOJ.
Bannon is apparently claiming executive privilege based upon the fact that Trump says he doesn’t want him to talk. There is no privilege for former presidents and even if he were still in office, a podcaster would not be able to claim it. Bannon has not been a member of the executive branch since 2017 when Trump fired him for shooting off his mouth to author Michael Wolff for his book “Fire and Fury” and taking too much credit for Trump’s election success. Bannon has no claim to any kind of privilege but he’s more than willing to push the envelope with the committee and the Department of Justice in order to foment revolutionary anger among the Trump faithful. That is his raison d’etre and has been for quite some time.
As Washington Post authors Bob Woodward and Bob Costa detail in their book “Peril,” and as Bannon has since confirmed, in the days before the insurrection, Bannon told Trump “People are going to go, ‘What the fuck is going on here? We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th, fucking bury him. We’re going to kill it in the crib, kill the Biden presidency in the crib.” On January 5, Bannon told his listeners, “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow. Tomorrow is game day. I’ve met so many people through my life who said, ‘Man if I was at the revolution, I would be, I would be with Washington at Trenton.’ Well, this is for your time in history.” On the morning of January 6th, he told his Facebook followers, “TAKE ACTION. THEY ARE TRYING TO STEAL THE ELECTION.” His parting words during his podcast that day were, “Today is not just a rally. The president is going to give you his opening argument. I think Eastman’s up there actually throwing down. .. at 1:00 there’s going to be some pretty controversial, controversial things going on.”
Apparently, Bannon was very much in the loop. One can understand why the Committee would like to talk to him.
But what’s in it for him — or Trump, for that matter — to defy the subpoena? Why not just go in there and admit everything and dare them to bring charges against him. There’s very little chance they would. What would they be for? Sedition?
As I wrote earlier, Bannon is planning Insurrection 2.0 and people are listening. He’s talking about preparing “shock troops” to take over the executive branch when Trump is restored to the presidency and his “precinct strategy” to get Trump followers to take over local administration of elections and storm school boards has been taken up by thousands of MAGA true believers. As he told his listeners last May, “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option. We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
Trump, meanwhile, has turned Ashli Babbit (the woman who was shot crawling through a broken window trying to get to members of Congress on January 6th) into a martyr.
"She went to Washington to help us see the light, like the millions that also heard the call" sang 'Texas Loves Ashli Babbit' organizer Al Manica.
"But the Democrats that took our love away, you know they shot her, they shot her down. Pelosi. Schumer. Harris. Buh buh buh Biden." pic.twitter.com/PuAwr6Ca0a
At a fundraiser for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Younkin this week, followers pledged allegiance to a flag that was supposedly present on January 6th. (No word on whether it had any policemen’s bloodstains on it.) Bannon was the featured speaker.
It’s impossible to know whether Trump and Bannon are strategizing together, but it’s clear that they have the same goal. They are turning January 6th into a rallying cry for more insurrection. Both Bannon and Trump have spoken of the people indicted for their crimes in the insurrection as “political prisoners” and I suspect Bannon would like nothing more than to turn his criminal contempt citation into a revolutionary cause for the MAGA faithful.
I don’t know if they allow prisoners to podcast from their jail cells but Bannon wouldn’t be the first to spend his time behind bars working on a manifesto. And Trump can wave the bloody shirt of January 6th to keep the Big Lie alive for his run in 2024. It’s going to be quite a show.
Nicolle Wallace has really grown on me. There’s nothing quite like the zeal of the “born again.” In her case in the political sense.
On her Thursday MSNBC show, Wallace spotlighted just how dangerously her former party has turned on the country, calling its actions malevolent, cynical and anti-democratic. Her launch pad on the day after William Shatner finally flew into space was Marc Elias’s essay at Democracy Docket making clear (again) in how much jeopardy the Republican agenda has put this country’s democracy:
We are one, maybe two, elections away from a constitutional crisis. More than a year ago — before Election Day — Donald Trump made clear that he would not accept the results of free and fair elections if he did not win. Too few people paid attention, discounting it as the ravings of a soon-to-be failed candidate. In the days following the November 2020 election, Trump and his allies executed a plan to subvert the election results. While they failed, Republicans learned from the experience and are prepared to try again. The future of our democracy rests on whether those committed to free and fair elections will prepare as well.
Immediately following the insurrection on January 6, Republican state legislatures began laying the groundwork for 2022 and 2024. They enacted new voter suppression laws optimized to disenfranchise Black, brown and young voters. They created false narratives of election irregularities and rallied their supporters around the Big Lie. Most recently, they began using their power in the redistricting process to ensure Republicans control the U.S. House over the next decade.
Meanwhile, Democratic efforts in the states have been more limited. Where they control state power, Democrats have not expanded voting rights at the same pace as Republicans have restricted them. New York still has many restrictive voting laws, including a ban on providing food and water to people waiting in line at the polls. Virginia requires an ID to vote in person and a witness signature to vote by mail. Colorado, which prides itself on its vote-by-mail law, rejected 29,000 mail-in ballots, two-thirds of which were from voters under the age of 35.
Republicans have moved on from alleging voter fraud and passing crafty laws for restricting access to the ballot box. They now are engaged across the country in subverting elections on the back end after votes have been cast, and in manufacturing fraud where none exists to justify doing it.
Watch the Deadline White House segments:
"The Big Lie is only becoming bigger, we see that. But that is not stopping the former president and others from continuing to tell it. That's why these piecemeal solutions, in the absence of federal intervention, are not gonna be enough" – @emarvelous w/ @NicolleDWallacepic.twitter.com/Wg1MKl6CXx
Former Republican Matthew Dowd, now a Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor in Texas, says Donald Trump and Republicans have no interest in seeing themselves held accountable through voting.
“Donald Trump has no respect, no respect for his own voters. None! Because if he says, basically, because if I didn’t get what I want, you shouldn’t vote at all. You shouldn’t vote in an election, you shouldn’t participate in an election that may actually improve their lives.” Because of personal grievance.
"Trump and the Republicans have no respect for their own voters, zero respect for their own voters… Trump and the Republicans have absolutely no respect for what's going on in your life… if you fall, they're not gonna be there to pick you up"-@matthewjdowd w/ @NicolleDWallacepic.twitter.com/wSoVaXVKy8
Rick Stengel loosely quotes Thomas Paine: “The right [to vote} … is the primary right by which other rights are protected.” “Voting rights and the suppression of the vote are two flip sides of the same coin,” Stengel says. “and the Republican party is trying to do both at the same time.”
“Republicans love talking about … how the Constitution protects minority rights, and it does, but it doesn’t protect the minority that is trying to disenfranchise the majority. And that is what’s happening now.”
"When you have one of those governing parties… trying to decrease the franchise, that undermines our democracy in a profound way… You have one party now that is trying to take the right [to vote] away" – @stengel w/ @NicolleDWallacepic.twitter.com/Q008n4nnoT
One of the panelists disagreed with Elias. The constitutional crisis is not out there in the future. It is here right now. And Democrats in Congress don’t seem to acknowledge it as the clear and present danger it is.
Given that Trump is threatening to bring down Republicans’ party on their heads, it would be ironic if the twisted man whose gut is all grievance saved the country accidentally the way Gollum saved Middle Earth from Sauron.
But we cannot count on accidents. Democrats have to step outside the box and act decisively.
States that have rejected Medicaid expansion look a lot like the Confederacy. This is a recurring theme, isn’t it? That — what do we call it? — stubborn reluctance to actually join the rest of the red, white, and blue country Southerners loudly and proudly celebrate alongside their battle-flag-waving “heritage” of insurrection means many would rather harm themselves than accede to rejoining the Union not just in fact but in spirit.
For those Hullabaloo readers in one of those orange states shown above, the following approach to flanking Republican objections to expanding Medicaid might hold promise.
Casey Cooper is the CEO of the Cherokee Indian Hospital in Cherokee, North Carolina, home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the western tip of the state. Cooper has been making presentations advocating Medicaid expansion to Republican-dominated county commissions in Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s NC-11.
“In the interest of efficiency, I will just jump right to the punchline,” Cooper told Macon County’s board of commissioners (pop. 37,000) in August. “It’s my hope that at the conclusion of this presentation tonight that you will feel compelled to support a resolution to help close the coverage gap in North Carolina.” Meaning a resolution supporting Medicaid expansion.
Cooper’s strategy is to get county governments on board as a means of pressuring lawmakers in the state capitol. Commissioners in Swain and Jackson counties had both unanimously passed his resolution. Their commissioners might be majority Democratic, but their counties voted for Trump in 2020. This is not unusual. Voters select Democrats to run things locally but Republicans in federal elections.
Brian McMahan, the chairman of Jackson County’s Board of Commissioners, explained that he was in favor of Medicaid expansion before Cooper came to speak with the board, but he described the presentation as “thorough” and “compelling.” He said it strengthened his resolve.
“We literally have people who are dying because they don’t have access to health care,” said Brian McMahan, chairman of Jackson County’s Board of Commissioners. “And if that’s not enough reason, the fact [is] that it’s a job creator.”
Back in 2019, Dale Wiggins, the Republican then-chairman of Graham County’s Board of Commissioners, publicly clashed with Senate leader Republican Phil Berger (Eden) over Medicaid expansion. Graham County’s board passed a unanimous resolution supporting a bill, co-sponsored by then-Rep. Kevin Corbin (R-Franklin), which would have expanded Medicaid coverage.
“What we have learned is if you cut out all the political rhetoric and just get down to the real facts of this issue, which then that puts it on a human being level, it’s not about Republicans. It’s not about Democrats,” Wiggins said in a recent conversation. “It’s about my neighbors, your neighbors, [who] are human beings. And in 2021, people need health care.”
Working through Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) bipartisan North Carolina Council on Health Care Coverage, the pair set out to work on building support for the state expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. North Carolina is one of 12 states that have refused the opt-in.
In order to qualify for Medicaid coverage in North Carolina today, Casey Cooper explained in an interview, “If you are an adult, you have to be below 42 percent of the federal poverty level to qualify, and, I mean, that’s horrible. That’s like $7,000 or $7,300 a year.”
“If you’re a mama with two babies — and it’s not uncommon, right, to be a single mom with two babies — you don’t qualify for Marketplace subsidies until you get to $21,000 a year,” Cooper said. “If you make between $9,000 and $21,000 a year, you can’t get coverage.”
People who work full-time minimum wage jobs in North Carolina fall squarely into this gap. State minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, meaning someone working 40-hours a week would bring home $14,500 before taxes.
Expansion would open up eligibility to workers – with and without children – earning below 138 percent of the federal poverty level ($23,791 for a family of two).
Closing the gap in coverage, Cooper told Macon commissioners, “could lead to providing coverage for about 1,300 of your citizens, create about 62 jobs and about $169,000 in county revenues, and about $10 million a year in new business activity.” His data from Georgetown University, George Washington University, and the governor’s task force “has been shared pretty widely across the state and to my knowledge has not been contested or questioned by anybody.”
Six red WNC counties have passed Cooper’s resolution. But first he has to dispell a few myths:
“One of the misconceptions about closing the coverage gap is that the folks that are uninsured are too triflin’ to work, and it’s simply not true. The data clearly demonstrates that the majority of folks that are uncovered are working,” he told the Macon commissioners. “Unfortunately, they’re working and they’re working poor.”
Cooper points out that many of the uninsured in the western part of the state are white people, mothers and veterans.
“Most of the time, it’s mamas who are taking care of babies who still have Medicaid, they got their babies covered, they’re getting well child visits for the babies, but these mamas are going without coverage,” he said.
Not only that, but the health care funding pinch has meant the closing of smaller hospitals in rural America, including WNC. “Since 2010, over 120 rural hospitals have closed across the United States, including seven in North Carolina alone,” WRAL (Raleigh) reported in June.
But the Republican chair of Haywood County’s Board of Commissioners will not bring the resolution up for a vote. He doesn’t have the votes for passage. Despite expanded federal help that lowers the cost to the state even more, other commisssioners ask wonder who pays for it.
The Raleigh News and Observer reported in early October that Senate leader Berger indicated behind closed doors that he was open to negotiations involving expansion. However, in a statement last week, Berger’s office maintained the senator’s opinion has not changed, and that he believes Medicaid expansion is “bad policy.”
COVID Update: COVID has been defined by its unpredictability. But what happens next is as predictable as it’s ever been.
Our job now is to beat away any potential surprises.
1. Case & death rates should decline in much of the country & most hospitals should get a reprieve.
Danger areas will be in rural areas in the Upper Midwest & Great Plaines.
The hard way or the easy way…
Big states like Texas and Florida have seen their surge & our thankfully recovering.
The Northeast & California have high levels of vaccinations. Those states should have low levels of COVID relative to last winter.
Because population centers will see mostly declines, the overall national picture will blur trouble spots in less vaccinated rural areas.
Until vaccines spread across these regions, expect some trouble spots.
2. Booster shots will magnify the effective reduction in deaths & in some cases even infections.
We are 2 weeks into the booster program, boosting mostly seniors who were vaccinated in March.
While the effects should just be beginning here, we have solid data from Israel that extends only the 2 months their program has been running.
It reveals what we should expect.
Data in Israel show very positive impact in reducing hospitalizations & deaths for seniors.
For those under 60, where severe cases are less likely, there appear to be a strong reduction in cases & the ability to spread the infection.
Boosters only work if people take them however.
It’s hard to predict the take up rates for vaccines for people under 60. There’s the matter of which vaccine they took, when, whether they’re technically allowed to get vaccinated & if they even want to.
Booster approval & availability will likely improve the safest areas even further this Fall but have little impact in trouble spots.
3. Higher vaccination levels at employers, universities & health care settings with new requirements & at schools with 5-11 year olds soon vaccinated will cause case counts to drop & reduce spread.
4. What about variants?
We can’t eliminate the possibility that another variant that spreads more easily than Detla won’t arrive, but the chance of this happening in 2021 is going remote.
COVID mutations, unlike the flu, are subject to a survival of the fittest competition. Variants that don’t spread as fast as Delta have had a difficult time multiplying in the face of Delta & vaccines.
Should a troublesome variant emerge it is most likely to emerge from a part of the world with low vaccination rates &/or areas with lots of immunocompromised people.
The one place this increasingly describes is Africa. Our vaccination mission there couldn’t be more important.
But if the worst does happen & a new variant begins to rapidly spread in Africa or another part of the world, unless it was both faster spreading & highly immune evasive, the damage would be muted among vaccinated populations & areas where people take layered precautions.
If all of this sounds like a somewhat rosy picture, there’s some important cautions still.
The first is many of us can’t shake the feeling that as soon as we have started to take our eyes off of the pandemic & let our habits slip, we end up paying the price.
This is true. Until case counts, down 40% over the last few weeks, do this 2x again, masks will be needed.
And the holidays of course have triggered massive increases in cases in the past. To be clear, after nearly 2 years of the pandemic, people absolutely gather this year with family & friends & travel.
While this increases certain risks, those risks can be mitigated & in many cases will be worth taking.
Rapid resting before you fly, vaccination requirements at holiday gatherings, ventilation, masks & caution around vulnerable populations should make most of this safe.
The areas with super-spreader events will be in unvaccinated areas, particularly where there has been less COVID. This is not a mystery to those communities but it is a danger to them & others.
Until we get to the summer & the point where 70%+ of the globe is vaccinated, complacency will be our enemy— particularly as conditions brighten.
There will be small steps backwards even under the best of circumstances & particularly in 2022, there is room for surprises.
The difference between today & last year is we can act to reduce the likelihood & severity of those surprises.
Sadly, we have many miscreants in this country who are intent upon making us as miserable as possible. And much of the world has still not been vaccinated. So ….
I am most hopeful that what Slavitt says about new variants is correct. That would spell the end of this thing at some point…
I’m sure you remember the fulminating over the alleged disrespect for the flag when some athletes took a knee to protest police brutality against Black people. Why, you would have thought they had stormed the capitol and staged an insurrection or something.
Recall this from Donald Trump:
Trump wishes NFL owners would tell anthem protesters "get that son of a bitch off the field right now" pic.twitter.com/gq4EH3lNoY
Far-right extremists over the years have adopted a number of flag designs as their representative banners. First it was the yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flag flown by the Patriot movement and tea party. The alt-right came up with its Naziesque “Kekistan” banner. In the past few years, the prominent use of flags by belligerent far-right Trump fans, particularly those in “Trump Trains” or participating in right-wing invasions of urban liberal centers, has ranged from basic Trump or MAGA banners to “Blue Lives Matter” flags to their most recent “Fuck Biden” iterations.
Now, amid far-right protests against COVID-related vaccine and mask mandates, far-right extremists are unfurling their latest symbol: An all-black American flag, with stars and stripes mainly visible through variations in material and shading. “No quarter shall be given” is the black flag’s traditional message—and in the context of the building drumbeat of right-wing “civil war” talk, a deeply ominous one. People flying them are essentially signaling that they’re prepared to kill their liberal neighbors.
The black flags have been showing up at various right-wing protests, such as last weekend’s “Health Freedom Rally” in Spokane, Washington—really a low-turnout affair mainly comprised of anti-vaccination protesters standing on a street corner, waving flags. One of these was a black American flag. Another one turned up when the protest moved to Riverfront Park.
The same flags have been showing up on people’s home flag displays as well, as Michelle Davis of Living Blue Texas observed in a post headlined, “Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning On Killing You?” Primarily, videos of people erecting these flags on the fronts of their homes are being widely shared on social media, particularly TikTok and Facebook; Davis reported finding hundreds of them.
Black flags have a particular historical meaning for Americans: They first appeared on Civil War battlegrounds, carried by some Confederate Army units, and symbolizing the intent of the soldiers to neither seek any quarter nor give any—essentially, the opposite of the white flag of surrender, signifying that enemy combatants are to be killed rather than taken prisoner. It’s a vow to massacre their enemies.
The people posting the “black flag” videos on TikTok appear primarily to use two different pieces of music as accompaniment: The first, “Raise the Colors,” is a gloomy sea shanty from Pirates of the Caribbean 2; the second, the song “God We Need You Now” by country rapper Struggle Jennings and cowriter Caitlynne Curtis, features QAnon-derived lyrics that threaten retribution for the people who “desecrate” the “values of our country and our God”:
We’ve been dancing with the devil way too long
I know it’s fun but get ready to pay your dues
Oh God, come back home
This crazy world is filled with liars and abusers
We need you now before we’re too far gone
I hope one day they finally see the truth
God, we need you now
Davis noted that the same right-wing channels where the black flag-raisings are being posted are similarly rife with “patriots” advising their cohorts to prepare for a civil war. “Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated,” she notes. “So, we’re the enemy, and they’re openly professing to want to execute us.”
Their primary grievance appears currently to revolve around COVID restrictions, with a number of military members talking about their imminent discharges for refusing to be vaccinated.
“The biggest message they have been sending out is, ‘it’s time’ or ‘the time is now’,” Davis notes. “They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.”
Some of the people posting videos of black flag hangings appear to be police officers, including one from Pea Ridge, Arkansas, who takes pains to carefully fold and unfold both his ordinary American flag and his all-black version. Several “black flag” groups have already formed on Facebook, and some Twitter accounts, such as the Michigan-based “Great Lakes Black Flag Coalition” (“Our mission is to unite Liberty minded organizations, communities and individuals for the purpose of promoting and restoring Freedom”) specifically reference the symbol.
American far-right extremists have fantasized about embarking on a “second civil war” for several decades now, but the idea began building in intensity during the tea party years, when militia groups like the “Three Percenters”—whose name references its members’ desire to embark on a “second American Revolution”—began attracting significant numbers of participants. It began gaining real traction during Donald Trump’s tenure as president, mainly through the growth of such phenomena as the “Boogaloo” movement, which is specifically focused on preparing for a civil war.
Trump himself encouraged this narrative by threatening to unleash a civil war if Congress dared to impeach him, which sparked a wave of fevered preparations among his “patriot” fans in the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters and similar far-right groups. When it became apparent late in the 2020 campaign that he was likely headed for defeat at the polls, the civil-war discussions became intense, particularly among militia groups and white nationalists who were engaged in street-brawling protests, and “Boogaloo” activists tried leveraging street protests as opportunities for violence. Terrorism experts warned even then that fanatical Trump supporters were likely to engage in acts of mass violence.
This same, faux-patriotic worldview is what eventually inspired the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, which was the apotheosis of the GOP’s two-decades-and-longer descent into right-wing authoritarianism, fueled by eliminationist hate talk, reality-bereft conspiracist sedition, anti-democratic rhetoric and politics, and the full-throated embrace under Trump of the politics of intimidation and thuggery. There was a reason the insurrectionists believed they were all partaking of a “1776 moment”: they envisioned themselves as heroic patriots saving America from the commies.
If anyone believes the radicalized American right’s drive to push the nation into bloody civil strife was somehow expiated or exhausted that day, they only need check the presence of black American flags the next time there is a right-wing protest in their town. Or maybe they can just check the front porches in their neighborhoods.
I knew the right would go batshit if Trump wasn’t made president for life. But honestly, it’s much worse than I thought.
