Month: October 2021

Our understanding of history sets the parameters of how we think of ourselves and how we imagine it is possible to live. If all we know is what we have experienced, few other possibilities present themselves. We view our lives through a keyhole.

In her appearance on “The Last Word” Thursday night, author Isabel Wilkerson observed that “the majority of Americans don’t get a chance [or] an opportunity to know our country’s true history, our true and full history.” Readers have told her, “I had no idea. I had no idea that this happened in our country, and I had no idea that this happened in my region of the country. I had no idea,” she said.

“And not having an idea has consequences because … it’s harder to see what we have in common, it’s harder to get on the same page about how we got to where we are, it’s harder to understand how we happen to be where we are.”

Harder still today because the losers of the Civil War succeeded in rewriting the history of the conflict to make themselves into mythic heroes. There were essentially no consequences for the South for making war on the United States. We are living today with the consequences of not holding the South more accountable in 1865.

What few realize, Wilkerson said, is that slavery lasted for 246 years. For so long, that it will not be until 2022 that the U.S. will have been a free nation as long as slavery existed here.

“Slavery lasted so long that no adult alive today will be alive at the point at which African Americans will have been free for as long as African Americans were enslaved,” Wilkerson added. That won’t happen until the second decade of the 22nd century.

"How was it that a rioter was able to deliver the confederate flag further than Robert E. Lee himself?” @Isabelwilkerson tells @Lawrence that "there was never a true reckoning after the Civil War and for that reason we are still reliving it." https://t.co/KabyZWGZRm pic.twitter.com/QXhW2CV86Y

— The Last Word (@TheLastWord) October 22, 2021

At The Atlantic, William Deresiewicz writes how the late David Graeber and co-author David Wengrow have rewritten the history of the last 10,000 years of human civilization in “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.”

The standard narrative is linear:

Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.

Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. 

Etc., etc.

Not so, say Graeber and Wengrow and their 63-page bibliography. The real history is “far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring,” Deresiewicz explains.

According to Graeber and Wengrow,

… hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a “hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state.” They describe an indigenous Amazonian society that shifted seasonally between two entirely different forms of social organization (small, authoritarian nomadic bands during the dry months; large, consensual horticultural settlements during the rainy season). They speak of the kingdom of Calusa, a monarchy of hunter-gatherers the Spanish found when they arrived in Florida. All of these scenarios are unthinkable within the conventional narrative.

The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.

Or to enslave them in the name of profit and to fight a bloody civil war to keep them.

What the authors argue against is our own stuckness brought on by lack of imagination and commitment to the modern bureaucratic state that has written out other models that functioned well and provided greater freedoms over the last 10,000 years. But perhaps didn’t enrich and empower the right people.

Is “civilization” worth it, the authors want to know, if civilization—ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, imperial Rome, the modern regime of bureaucratic capitalism enforced by state violence—means the loss of what they see as our three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? Or does civilization rather mean “mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others”?

When French missionaries arrived in North America, the pair explain, Natives with a long intellectual tradition already had well-developed opinions on “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”

The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom. The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition). They go further, making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.

Right now, those most invested in enriching themselves and retaining control have no interest in building back better, much less in building back different. And for all their chants of freedom, theirs is a more constricted view of it than existed before their view of civilization became the dominant one. A fuller understanding of history ancient or modern is not their idea of better.

Whither the Biden agenda?

A Joe Biden tweet from Thursday received a lot of attention and raised hopes that the Democratic president sees beyond prosaic “kitchen table” issues in his Build Back Better agenda. Democracy itself is on the line.

To make real the full promise of America, we must protect the foundational right from which all rights flow: The sacred right to vote.

It is democracy’s threshold liberty. With it — anything is possible. Without it — nothing is.

— President Biden (@POTUS) October 21, 2021

Voting, Biden tweeted, “is democracy’s threshold liberty. With it — anything is possible. Without it — nothing is.”

Fine words, Joe. But in the words of Untouchable Jim Malone, “What are you prepared to do?“

The New York Times reports more Biden words this morning:

President Biden said on Thursday that he was open to ending the Senate filibuster so Democrats could pass voting rights legislation, raise the federal debt limit and possibly enact other parts of his agenda that had been blocked by Republicans.

Speaking at a CNN town hall meeting, the president also expressed optimism about passage of his infrastructure and social safety net bills even as he offered candid descriptions of closed-door negotiations with two Democratic holdouts.

Mr. Biden had previously said that changing the filibuster rules to allow a debt limit vote was “a real possibility,” but his remarks on Thursday evening suggested that he was ready to pursue broader changes to bypass Republican opposition.

At the town hall, he said ending the filibuster — a Senate tradition that allows the minority party to kill legislation that fails to garner 60 votes — would have to wait until after he secured passage of his spending bills, which are under negotiation on Capitol Hill.

The president said he would lose “at least three votes” on his social policy bill if he pushed an end to the filibuster. He did not say which senators he would lose.

Biden here seems to be counting votes to lose that he hasn’t yet won.

But Mr. Biden was blunt about his intentions once the debate over the spending bills was over. He said the need to pass sweeping voting rights legislation favored by Democrats is “equally as consequential” as the debt limit vote, which protects the full faith and credit of the United States.

Asked by Anderson Cooper, the host of the event, whether that meant he would be open to ending the use of the filibuster so that Democrats could pass a voting rights bill, Mr. Biden said, “and maybe more.”

Talk is cheap. A vote will be even cheaper if Democrats fail to defend America from the UnAmericans in what was once the Republican Party. “Democracy itself is dying,” Ari Berman (“Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America“) told MSNBC ‘s Nicole Wallace this week.

Here is @DataProgress poll showing 70% of Americans support Freedom to Vote Act, including 54% of Republicans

Yet it was filibustered by 41 GOP senators representing just 21% of country https://t.co/USRRBcJQe9 pic.twitter.com/schGEulPZi

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) October 21, 2021

Just as cinema’s Al Capone had police and juries in his pocket, Republicans have the courts in theirs. Public confidence in the Supreme Court is at a two-decade low. And Republicans are rapidly expanding their ability to decide the outcome of future elections no matter what the majority of the American public wants. We won’t even be able to measure what the public wants if Republicans have their way with elections and Democrats fail to stop them. And permanent, one-party, minority rule will be “legal” (in quotes) and “democratic” (also in quotes). Because Republicans will have done it using democracy to unmake democracy.

Talk is cheap, Democrats. What are you prepared to do?

This is a great piece in the New Republic about the people nobody talks to: the vaccinated who have to live among those who refuse to get theirs:

​We’ve heard repeatedly from the country’s vaccine resisters. But what about the people who follow the rules? They’re ignored and forgotten—and they are in pain.

Divinity was everywhere I looked in Mobile, Alabama. It glinted in the language used to describe the pandemic: the purgatory of its looping ebbs and flows, the perils of congregation, the miracle of vaccines, and the blind devoutness of the sheep inoculated with them. Hoping to tap its deeply religious community’s trust, Mobile County had converted some of the city’s 370-plus places of worship into vaccination clinics. Hoping to boost its health care workers’ morale, local leaders asked the houses of worship to toll their bells each day at noon for eight days of appreciation in August. Even I—a nonbeliever, and a Northerner plopped down in this Bible Belt county of 413,210 people—felt it, too, in the two nuns aboard my flight to Mobile, and the sign outside an abandoned building I kept driving by that proclaimed, ambiguously, SHIELD OF FAITH.

But alongside these spiritual symbols, I also witnessed the grotesque realities of a county battling its worst surge—more than a year and a half into the pandemic and with only about one in three residents vaccinated at the time of my visit (the number was 41 percent as of October 20). When I arrived in late August, the city’s hospitals were overrun with Covid-19 patients, too many of whom would never be discharged. In the ICUs, patients sick with the Delta variant were drowning in air and begging health care workers for vaccines. The Alabama Department of Public Health sent temporary morgue units into the area. “There’s no room to put these bodies,” an emotional Alabama state health officer, Dr. Scott Harris, told reporters at a press conference. The city’s EMS system reached a total saturation point, leading officials to urge residents to stop and consider—before they called 911—whether they really needed an ambulance. “The entire emergency medical system is overwhelmed,” Steven Millhouse, an EMT and spokesperson for Mobile Fire-Rescue, told me. “It’s just way too much.”

Early vaccine uptake had initially inspired genuine hope for the pandemic’s end. Nationwide, people rushed to stadiums, schools, mall food courts, beachfronts, banquet halls, and empty airport hangars to get their shots as soon as they could. Across Alabama, mass vaccine sites quickly hit choke points as demand outstripped the state’s supply. On March 2, Mobile County administered a record-high 4,079 doses—almost 1 percent of the county’s entire population was blessed with partial immunity in a single day. “It was steady, all day long,” Vicki Davis, a registered nurse and vaccinator with the Mobile County Health Department, told me from behind a table at All Saints Episcopal Church, where she and her colleague, another registered nurse, Adrienne Irvin, prepped for the morning’s clinic. “No matter where we were,” Irvin added, “lines.”

Then, in late spring, vaccination stalled. “It was like we reached the number of people who wanted it,” said Carolyn Eichold, a volunteer at that day’s vaccine event. By July, when a CNN crew showed up to film a vaccine pop-up at a food truck festival in Mobile, a mere 12 people got the shot—over three hours. That month, with just 34 percent of its residents inoculated, Alabama earned the undesirable distinction of being the country’s least vaccinated state (it no longer is).

“Sure, I wish we had a line out the door,” Eichold said. That morning, about two dozen people would end up trickling into All Saints. Some were regulars at the church’s weekly food share. Today, planting a seed—not harvesting by the acre—is the goal, Eichold said. “It’s a tremendous relief every time someone comes in,” she said. “I think, ‘We’ve reached somebody, and they can reach somebody.’”

At their station, Davis and Irvin prepared 30 to 40 doses of Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 shots for the morning. “If we did that many, that’s successful,” Davis said. I asked them both how they felt when they got their shots. “It brought a lot of relief,” one of them told me. The other widened her eyes and shook her head no. “I wish you wouldn’t ask me that,” she told me, returning her gaze to a paper in front of her tallying the morning’s recipients. In a few hours, bells at houses of worship would toll for exactly one minute at exactly noon. Tomorrow, Healthcare Prayer and Appreciation Week would be over. You’d have to be amid an ICU’s cacophony or close enough to a mobile morgue’s hum to hear the sound of Mobile’s everlasting Covid-19 crisis.

From the pulpit in 1882, Archdeacon Thomas Colley denounced the evils of inoculation. This “abominable mixture of corruption, the lees of human vice, and dregs of venial appetites,” he preached in a Sunday sermon entitled Vaccination: a Moral Evil; a Physical Curse; and a Psychological Wrong, “in after life may foam upon the spirit, and develop hell within, and overwhelm the soul.”

One hundred and thirty-nine years and several epidemics later, it’s salvation through injection being offered at churches throughout Mobile. In a suffocating atmosphere of distrust, public health officials need to tap into faith, wherever they find it. “Any time you’re going and doing something unknown, a house of worship is certainly a place of calm,” Davis, the nurse and vaccinator, told me. “It’s a place they know and are comfortable.”

Meanwhile, beyond sanctuary, a soulish war between blind faith and grim hopelessness seemed to rage within Mobile’s vaccinated minority. Plenty of ink and pixels have been invested in their unvaccinated counterparts, and the myriad reasons—political, personal, or otherwise—for their abstention. But what, I wondered, about people living in red America who have embraced immunity? In the national battle over vaccination, their voices have largely been drowned out. Perhaps that gave them even more to say. I set out to listen—to find out what being marginalized for being vaccinated does to a person’s sense of safety, belonging, and community. They may be, statistically speaking, more sheltered from death by Covid-19, but would they ever recover from a total loss of faith in humanity? For those who have maintained compassion for vaccine holdouts or refusers, it is a mounting struggle to keep loving the neighbors who endanger by abstaining from our best tool to save ourselves. By delaying or refusing to get vaccinated against Covid-19, a majority of Alabamians have offered up their bodies to host the virus, spread its disease, and incubate its next, potentially more dangerous variant. It is a biblical question—“Am I my brother’s keeper?”—that leaves Mobile’s vaccinated sleepless by night and dread-filled by day.

“There’s a hardening of hearts,” Pastor Jim Mather told me in the mint green living room of the home where he and his wife, Mary, run Friends of Internationals, a Christian ministry focused on international students at the University of South Alabama and the rest of the international community in Mobile. The pandemic has become more than a public health emergency. “It is a spiritual crisis,” Mather said. “We are being revealed.” It had been a shock for many to realize that mercy is not infinite, it can be drained, that there may be a hard edge to grace, and it can be reached. It was a greater shock to realize that the survival of so many in Mobile would depend on their whittled-down patience and worn-thin compassion. How else, but with open arms and hearts, could they welcome the unvaccinated majority into their outnumbered ranks? How else could they draw another soul into the sanctity of herd immunity?

“You’re tempted to be so frustrated. It breaks your heart. Like, man, this is preventable,” said Dr. Tiffani Maycock, a family doctor and vaccine hesitancy researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “In the back of your mind, you know they chose not to get a vaccine. It takes a lot of discipline to not entertain that thought. I have to force myself to be empathetic.” She is not alone. Dr. Nina Ford Johnson—a pediatrician, president of the Medical Society of Mobile County, and wife of a pastor who works at a funeral home—faces Covid-19, one way or another, every day. To her dismay, many of her patients remain unvaccinated. “Maybe they don’t believe what I do or what I’m saying,” she told me. “It’s been a challenge. I do ask God, ‘Why are we going through this?’”

Even spiritual leaders have grown weary. “I have to watch myself. My patience is wearing thin,” said the Reverend Jim Flowers, All Saints pastor. “I just don’t understand it. I’m convinced there’s a segment of our population that would rather die than get vaccinated.”

There is much, much more and it’s heartbreaking. These are all people trying to find some compassion in their hearts for people who just don’t give a damn and are happy to see people die solely out of stubbornness and radical politics. It’s just … infuriating.

I feel for the people who are trying to do the work of getting these people vaccinated so they can keep the community safe. What an utter horror this must be.

Originally tweeted by Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) on October 21, 2021:

My former comrades on the right saying that “Because Mitch didn’t dump the filibuster in 2017, he never will” are acting as if the past four years didn’t happen. So, to use a political science term, let us engage in cutting the shit here for a moment.

McConnell and the GOP are without principle; their only principle is power and the expediencies that create power. In 2017, it was not in Mitch’s interest to end the filibuster, especially with the risk that the GOP would lose seats in 2018. He knew he might need it.

This is the same McConnell whose respect for norms and tradition denied Garland a hearing and rammed through Barrett weeks before an election he knew Trump was likely to lose. He’s a master of obstruction and opportunism. So let us cease this nonsense about Mitch’s principles.

When @MichaelSteele said Mitch wouldn’t think twice about “jettisoning the filibuster if it meant getting the GOP’s agenda,” he was right. Just because he didn’t do it in 2017 doesn’t mean that he has some sort of respect for tradition. It was about raw power calculations.

I have long defended the filibuster because I think there are things that should not be decided 51/49, that should require a greater show of comity. But Barrett’s confirmation, in particular, made a mockery of that idea. This is hardball. Mitch plays it. Dems must play it too.

As a practical matter, I often advised not doing things the GOP could then adopt and use against the Dems (like dumping the filibuster). But that was from a different time, before the GOP became infested with the kind of mooks and poltroons who acquitted Donald Trump *twice*.

This is no longer a civic competition between two political parties. This is a direct competition between a coalition in favor of the rule of law and liberal democracy vs a party that has become Trump’s weird cult of personality and an authoritarian political movement.

The GOP is using a Senate rule to forestall legislative action against state-level authoritarian measures from a GOP base that is enraged at losing a fair election.

So if it comes down to that one Senate rule or democracy itself, dump the rule and pass the bill.

Mitch would.

This isn’t going to be the last test of the democracy coalition against the authoritarians. My biggest fear, really, is that the President Biden (himself too much a product of the Senate) and his Democrats – the leaders of this unwieldy coalition – are not up to the challenge.

But in any case, please spare me the bad-faith bloviation about how Mitch stood on principle in 2017. He made a smart call about what tools he’d need in the coming four years. He’d change that in a hot second if he reaches a different conclusion – and you know it.

What he said.

The idea that Mitch McConnell (Mitch McConnell!) the man who argued that Obama couldn’t appoint a supreme court justice because it was 8 months before an election and then turned around four years later and let Trump appoint a justice 6 weeks before and election. Please.

He is a malevolent, power-mad monster.

David Brock has an op-ed in the NY Times in which he says that he had always underestimated Trump and even saw him as a slightly kooky but fairly typical Republican president (which I find weird — he was a shockingly bizarre president and his behavior on the world stage was beyond outrageous.)

Anyway, he’s changed his mind:

Once he was in office, I misread Mr. Trump again. Having worked inside the conservative movement for many years, I found his policies familiar: same judges, same tax policy, same deregulation of big business, same pandering to the religious right, same denial of science. Of course, there were the loopy tweets, but still I regarded Mr. Trump as only a difference of degree from what I had seen from prior Republican presidents and candidates, not a difference of kind.

When a raft of books and articles appeared warning that the United States was headed toward autocracy, I dismissed them as hyperbolic. I just didn’t see it. Under Mr. Trump, the sky didn’t fall.

My view of Mr. Trump began to shift soon after the November election, when he falsely claimed the election was rigged and refused to concede. In doing so, Mr. Trump showed himself willing to undermine confidence in the democratic process, and in time he managed to convince nearly three-quarters of his supporters that the loser was actually the winner.

Then came the Capitol Hill insurrection, and, later, proof that Mr. Trump incited it, even hiring a lawyer, John Eastman, who wrote a detailed memo that can only be described as a road map for a coup. A recent Senate investigation documented frantic efforts by Mr. Trump to bully government officials to overturn the election. And yet I worry that many Americans are still blind, as I once was, to the authoritarian impulses that now grip Mr. Trump’s party. Democrats need to step up to thwart them.

Are Democrats up for such a tough (and expensive) fight? Many liberal voters have taken a step back from politics, convinced that Mr. Trump is no longer a threat. According to research conducted for our super PAC, almost half of women in battleground states are now paying less attention to the political news.

But in reality, the last election settled very little. Mr. Trump not only appears to be preparing for a presidential campaign in 2024; he is whipping up his supporters before the 2022 midterms. And if Democrats ignore the threat he and his allies pose to democracy, their candidates will suffer next fall, imperiling any chance of meaningful reform in Congress.

Going forward, we can expect bogus claims of voter fraud, and equally bogus challenges to legitimate vote counts, to become a permanent feature of Republican political strategy. Every election Republicans lose will be contested with lies, every Democratic win delegitimized. This is poison in a democracy.

As of late September, 19 states had enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for their citizens to vote. The Republican National Committee’s “election integrity director” says the party will file lawsuits earlier and more aggressively than they did in 2020. Trump wannabe candidates like Glenn Youngkin, running for Virginia governor, are currying favor with the Republican base by promoting conspiracy theories suggesting that Virginia’s election may be rigged.

More alarmingly, Republicans in swing states are purging election officials, allowing pro-Trump partisans to sabotage vote counts. In January, an Arizona lawmaker introduced a bill that would permit Republican legislators to overrule the certification of elections that don’t go their way. In Georgia, the legislature has given partisan election boards the power to “slow down or block” election certifications. Why bother with elections?

Democrats now face an opposition that is not a normal political party, but rather a party that is willing to sacrifice democratic institutions and norms to take power.

The legislation Democrats introduced in Congress to protect our democracy against such assaults would have taken an important step toward meeting these challenges. But on Wednesday, Republicans blocked the latest version of the legislation, and given the lack of unanimity among Democrats on the filibuster, they may well have succeeded in killing the last hope for any federal voting rights legislation during this session of Congress.

Having underestimated Mr. Trump in the first place, Democrats shouldn’t underestimate what it will take to counter his malign influence now. They need a bigger, bolder campaign blueprint to save democracy that doesn’t hinge on the whims of Congress.

We should hear more directly from the White House bully pulpit about these dire threats. The Jan. 6 investigators should mount a full-court press to get the truth out. Funding voting rights litigation should be a top priority.

Where possible, Democrats should sponsor plebiscites to overturn anti-democratic laws passed by Republicans in states. They should underwrite super PACs to protect incumbent election officials being challenged by Trump loyalists, even if it means supporting reasonable Republicans. Donations should flow into key governor and secretary of state races, positions critical to election certification.

In localities, Democrats should organize poll watching. Lawyers who make phony voting claims in court should face disciplinary action in state bar associations. The financiers of the voting rights assault must be exposed and publicly shamed.

The good news is that liberals do not have to copy what the right is doing with its media apparatus — the font of falsehoods about voter fraud and a stolen election — to win over voters. Democrats can leapfrog the right with significant investments in streaming video, podcasting, newsletters and innovative content producers on growing platforms like TikTok, whose audiences dwarf those of cable news networks like Fox News.

Issues like racial justice, the environment and immigration are already resonating online with audiences Democrats need to win over, such as young people, women and people of color. Democratic donors have long overlooked efforts to fund the media, but with so much of our politics playing out on that battlefield, they can no longer afford to.

He’s right about all of that, although I remain mystified how anyone could have missed the autocratic impulses in this guy and the personality defects that would inevitably lead to an attempted coup should he lose election. The idea that he would just “cry it out” then leave and play golf was always ridiculous. He had said outright that he would never accept an election he didn’t win and laid out the argument long before anyone voted. He is psychologically unable to accept that he isn’t a massively popular super star that everyone in America reveres.

Anyway, I think Brock’s solutions are right but so far it’s hard to see the kind of energy required to get that done. I hope I’m wrong.

It is a tragedy of epic proportions. I still can’t believe that people are actually refusing to get vaccinated in light of nearly 3/4 of a million deaths. It’s just stunning to me.

By the way, Moderna gal here. I’m glad I chose that one. But they are all good and there is no reason for anyone not to have access at this point.

The right wing harasses, intimidates and threatens people online. They aren’t going to stop, because it works for them.

When you watch someone screaming and punching a flight attendant when they are asked to wear a mask, it changes what you might do when you see someone not wearing a mask.

When people show up with guns at school board member’s house they aren’t there using their 1st Amendment rights. it’s not a conversation about an issue. It’s a threat. 

In today’s Justice Department oversight committee hearing, AG Merrick Garland was asked to re-edify Jamie Raskin’s colleagues on what the 1st Amendment protects and what it doesn’t protect. He said,
“What they are not allowed to do is threaten people with death or serious bodily injury.”

I admire the school board member who spoke out about her death threats, but how many people think, “I’m not going to be on a school board if it means getting death threats & people coming to my house with guns.”?

I’ve noticed that the media is very reluctant to push for any consequences for threatening speech. They get all balled up into questions of, “What is free speech?” and bend over backwards to give people the benefit of the doubt for their threatening speech.

The media never want to be seen as being against people’s speech.  But threatening speech is not protected speech.  When I use that phrase, it starts questions of definitions. What is the definition of a threat? What is “true threat”? What is actionable by law enforcement? What was the intent?

The justice system is slow. Social media & TV news is fast. When the media run threat stories, they usually can’t show any immediate legal consequences to the ones making the threats. Occasionally they can show people getting fired. Or kicked off social media. But often there are no negative consequences at all.

People are rewarded for their violent rhetoric with likes and shares. In some cases it leads to donations, electoral votes and political power.

If people are arrested, tried and punished for their threats, those cases can take years to be resolved. I think that the resolution of those cases should be widely publicized, but they are not.

I’ve been following up on cases of death threats to public health officials in Colorado, Idaho, California and Oklahoma from the start of the pandemic. Cases are still pending. The public hears NOTHING about what happened to the people doing the threatening until months or years later. But the impact on those threatened lingers, especially with no resolution.

There was a recent story saying that COVID lockdowns have made things worse.

Following the killing of Sir David Amess, there have been renewed concerns about whether lockdowns have created the conditions for a surge in hate, as frustrated extremists or people vulnerable to radicalisation hunkered down over their laptops and mobile phones.

‘Nastier than ever’: have Covid lockdowns helped fuel online hate? Guardian. 10-21-2021

Intimidations and threats to election workers, health care officials and politicians is all part of Trump’s legacy. I’ve seen multiple stories on Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes & Lawrence O’Donnell’s shows about this, but because they just happened, we can’t see the negative legal consequences to the people making the threat.

One way to address the slowness of the justice system regarding threats would be when the media runa a story about a NEW death threat, they could look at similar cases that have already made it through the legal system.

For example, do you remember the guy who called Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C. office on March of 2019 and threatened to shoot and kill the congresswoman? It made the news with the line that someone, “ought to put a bullet in her skull.” but few people know what happened next. I wrote about it here in May of 2019

What should people do about on-line death threats?

Patrick W. Carlineo, 55, of Addison New York spent a year in prison. He was released in March of 2021. The sentence could have been longer, but it wasn’t because of a request for leniency from Rep. Omar.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Frank P. Geraci Jr., she had urged leniency and a restorative justice approach at sentencing, writing: “The answer to hate is not more hate; it is compassion.”

She said a lengthy prison term or a burdensome fine would “only increase his anger and resentment” while restorative justice would let him “make amends and seek redemption.”

In death threat case, court nixes penalty Rep. Omar urged, AP May 21, 2021

What has happened to all the men and women who have threatened AOC, Omar and others BEFORE 1/6? What about the people who threatened Dr. Fauci and multiple health care officials? How many have been charged? Are any in prison? How many were given a slap on the wrist? 

When I’ve brought up the need for consequences for those making death threats and violent rhetoric I’ve suggested multiple responses. My preferred method is to cut their revenue streams. Others have contacted their employers and licencing boards.

Another way is to alert the people in their community and social groups they belong too. The key is to find the groups whose opinion they care about and who publicly will come out against death threats.

Is Carlineo Catholic? Get his parish priest to condemn the death threats to Rep. Omar. Make it clear that what Carlineo said was not protected free speech and they will condemn it. Does he call himself a Christian? Find his minster and ask what Jesus had to say about threatening to kill others.

“But Spocko, what’s the point? He was probably a member of a nutball church, Oath Keepers & Proud Boys! They love it when someone attacks a member of the Squad!”

Sure, it’s possible all the groups he belongs to are extremists, but most groups publicly condemn violent rhetoric, death threats and threats of physical violence. In fact, many of them have by-law’s and organizational rules against threatening speech. Until Trump became President, the Republican party would publicly condemn threats of violence.

Why bother getting statements condemning violence from the groups people like Carlineo belong to? To RE-NORMALIZE that making death threats is wrong.

I’m sure everyone remembers the hysterical, overwrought coverage of the Clinton Foundation, an international charity run by former President Bill Clinton when Hillary Clinton ran for office in 2016. The entire media establishment had a monumental case of the vapors over what they considered to be an egregious conflict of interest because people might give money to the charity in order to influence the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. It was a major scandal that contributed heavily to the unprecedented, hostile coverage of Clinton.

Trump got critical coverage too but he was treated as more of a clown. Hillary ws treated like a criminal.

It will be very interesting to see how this is handled:

Former President Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that he had lined up the investment money to create his own publicly traded media company, an attempt to reinsert himself in the public conversation online from which he has largely been absent since Twitter and Facebook banned him after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

If finalized, the deal could give the new Trump company access to nearly $300 million in spending money.

In a statement announcing the new venture, Mr. Trump and his investors said that the new company would be called Trump Media & Technology Group and that they would create a new social network called Truth Social. Its purpose, according to the statement, is “to create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the ‘Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley.”

Since he left office and became the only American president to be impeached twice, Mr. Trump has had an active presence in conservative media. But he lacks the ability he once had to sway news cycles and dominate the national political debate. He filed a lawsuit this month asking Twitter to reinstate his account.

The announcement on Wednesday also pointed to a promised new app listed for pre-sale on the App Store, with mock-up illustrations bearing more than a passing resemblance to Twitter.

The details of Mr. Trump’s latest partnership were vague. The statement he issued was reminiscent of the kind of claims he made about his business dealings in New York as a real estate developer. It was replete with high-dollar amounts and superlatives that could not be verified.

Rumors of Mr. Trump’s interest in starting his own media businesses have circulated since he was defeated in the November 2020 election. None materialized. Despite early reports that he was interested in starting his own cable channel to rival Fox News, that was never an idea that got very far given the immense costs and time needed to put into it. A close adviser, Jason Miller, started a rival social media platform for Trump supporters called Gettr. But Mr. Trump never signed on.

In a statement on Wednesday night, Mr. Miller said of his and Mr. Trump’s negotiations, “We just couldn’t come to terms on a deal.”

Mr. Trump’s partner is Digital World Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. These so-called blank-check companies are an increasingly popular type of investment vehicle that sells shares to the public with the intention of using the proceeds to buy private businesses.

Digital World was incorporated in Miami a month after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election.

The company filed for an initial public stock offering this spring, and it sold shares to the public on the Nasdaq stock exchange last month. The I.P.O. raised about $283 million, and Digital World drummed up another $11 million by selling shares to investors through a so-called private placement.

Digital World is backed by some marquee Wall Street names and others with high-powered connections. In regulatory filings after the I.P.O., major hedge funds including D.E. Shaw, Highbridge Capital Management, Lighthouse Partners and Saba Capital Management have reported owning substantial percentages of Digital World.

Digital World’s chief executive is Patrick F. Orlando, a former employee of investment banks including the German Deutsche Bank, where he specialized in the trading of financial instruments known as derivatives. He created his own investment bank, Benessere Capital, in 2012, according to a recent regulatory filing.

Digital World’s chief financial officer, Luis Orleans-Braganza, is a member of Brazil’s National Congress.

Mr. Orlando disclosed in a recent filing that he owned nearly 18 percent of the company’s outstanding stock. Mr. Orlando and representatives for Digital World did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This is not Mr. Orlando’s first blank-check company. He has created at least two others, including one, Yunhong International, that is incorporated in the offshore tax haven of the Cayman Islands.

At the time that investors bought shares in Digital World, it had not disclosed what, if any, companies it planned to acquire. On its website, Digital World said that its goal was “to focus on combining with a leading tech company.”

At least one of the investors, Saba Capital Management, did not know at the time of the initial public offering that Digital World would be doing a transaction with Mr. Trump, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly lied about the results of the 2020 election while accusing the mainstream news media of publishing “fake” stories to discredit him, leaned hard into the notion of truth as his new company’s governing ethos.

“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American president has been silenced,” Mr. Trump said in his written statement, vowing to publish his first item soon. “This is unacceptable.”

Unless he gets a bad diagnosis or has shuffled off hi mortal coil, Trump is running for re-election in 2024. And will have his own propaganda machine, run by him without even the semi-useless mediation of the current right wing media.

ON the other hand, this just looks like another grift so it may have no impact at all other than to put a bunch of badly needed cash in the Trump family coffers:

The truth behind TRUTH Social is right there in the first paragraph of the announcement, which is not focused on the technology behind the platform, or anything that Trump is bringing to the table. Instead, that paragraph is dedicated to explaining how the project has been given “an initial enterprise value of $875 million” and “a cumulative valuation up to $1.7 billion.” Which is amazing, because what it seems to have is nothing more than a credit line and some highly generic code that was hacked within minutes of the beta address becoming known.

No sooner had the first test invites been handed out than someone spoofed Trump’s account and posted, well, as Daily Beast contributor Steven Monacelli accurately puts it, “a photo of a pig defecating on its own scrotum.” Two hours after it first went up, the whole site came down.

However, it doesn’t matter if the site ever sticks its head above the waste pool again. Because that’s not the point. Donald Trump is potentially walking about with $340 million, even if it fails completely. That’s the point.

What Trump is attempting here is something called a SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition Companies. It’s also known as a “reverse merger” or a “blank check company.” It’s a scheme in which some low-value shell company that’s already listed on a stock market “buys” a private company, then relists itself under the name of that new company. In almost all cases, what’s really going on is that the private company is just taking over the empty husk of that shell company—a company that may have existed for no other purpose than to serve as a placeholder for some future SPAC.

Why go through these steps? Because getting listed on a stock exchange generally requires clearing a number of hurdles, including meeting requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission. SPACS can just pop into existence, taking a fast track to a stock listing while dodging almost every qualifying step. 

The whole idea of the SPAC is relatively new, and in the last year they’ve really taken off. In some cases, these schemes have allowed start ups to jump immediately to market, capitalizing on interest in new technology or rising industries. Among others, several small electric car companies made a sudden appearance on NASDAQ last year after taking over the corpses of fading corporations.

But there’s one particular kind of SPAC that’s described in this article from Mergers and Acquisitions. A kind known as the “celebrity SPAC.” 

First, a “celebrity” or another notable person (the “Sponsor”) raises capital by taking an empty holding company (the SPAC) public in an IPO. This SPAC then uses the cash proceeds from the IPO and a large stock issuance to acquire a private company, making it public. 

That’s exactly what’s happening with TMTG. Teenage Mutant Turtle Gropers—sorry, that’s Trump Media and Technology Group—doesn’t have to rival Twitter. It doesn’t even have to threaten whatever “conservative social media platforms” are still limping along out there. It just has to collect investors. Because this:

Unlike IPOs, however, the Sponsor gets a 20% stake, called a “Promote,” and there’s much less regulatory scrutiny. Oh, and this “Sponsor” invests almost nothing in exchange for this 20% stake.

Remember the numbers on how this was being “valued” in Trump’s announcement? That’s right. This is an attempt by Trump to scam between $175 million and $340 million with essentially no investment and no effort. As the article explains, the “sponsor” can walk away with a bundle, “even if the SPAC performs horribly and the share price plummets, while normal investors will lose everything.”

Trump already has a good idea how this works, because, as CNBC noted in 2020, former Trump adviser Gary Cohn put together a SPAC worth a potential $600 million (and $120 million directly to Cohn) when it formed a “blank check” holding company whose entire purpose seems to be simply to get people to buy into shares. A SPAC of this variety is nothing more than a exchange-based Ponzi scheme in which the original Ponzi is guaranteed to walk away with a mountain of cash.

TMTG isn’t a social media platform. It’s a scam. Trump does need another social media platform. He needs suckers willing to buy stock. And Trump has always been very, very good at locating suckers.

Sweeet….

Comments last night from Yale historian David W. Blight  (“Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory“) are worth transcribing here.

Drawing on Blight and on historian Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, MSNBC’s Joy Reid drew parallels between the Reconstruction and Redemption eras in the South and now.

The refusal of the South to accept Abraham Lincoln’s presidency led to the bloodiest period in American history as well as to the Civil War’s bloody aftermath. “Rather than contest the correctness of the popular and electoral vote count, the pro-slavery southerners withdrew from the Union, state by state,” wrote Wilentz.

More recent subversions of democracy have occurred through means more subtle and less historically memorable.

The full scope of Richard Nixon’s perfidies were not public even at the time of the Watergate hearings and Nixon’s resignation. The notorious (and oft-forgotten) “Brooks Brothers” riot during the Florida vote count in 2000 halted vote counting in Al Gore-leaning Miami-Dade County, perhaps making it “one of the most consequential events in American political history.”  

“[I]n national politics, the secessionists committed treason by repudiating the democratic Union,” Wilentz wrote, “but the Trump Republicans committed something akin to treason by repudiating democracy itself.” Wilentz adds (emphasis mine), “Trump and the GOP have in fact attempted nothing less than a kind of virtual secession from the American political system.”

Blight tells Reid:

The late 19th century is very instructive for this moment and it may be less about what happened to the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction as it is remembering some other actual coups.

For example, what happened in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. Just a quick note on that. Five days after this infamous coup, this riot conducted by a concerted conspiracy for white supremacy by the officials of the state of North Carolina in which almost 60 people were killed — black voters just murdered in the streets — a huge rally was held in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Huge, torchlight rally celebrating this white supremacist takeover. And … the platform met under a banner that read, “Victory, White Supremacy and Good Government.” By good government they meant getting corrupt Black people out of government. Just think of that banner: “Victory, White Supremacy and Good Government.” That’s almost the same banners that people had flying there on January 6th, in some ways.

We have to realize that just talking persuasion to Republicans is not going to work. Hypocrisy is not just a moral failure. It’s a strategy. And to keep telling them they’re hypocrites is getting us nowhere. Hypocrisy is a strategy in this case. And it has to be treated as a strategy for power by other power.

Charlie Sykes: Understand the GOP is setting itself up for restoration to power https://t.co/pUU6Dtop7m via @msnbc

— @TomSullivan@mstdn.social (@BloggersRUs) October 21, 2021

Republicans have divorced themselves from the very idea of a multi-racial democracy, said Reid. They claim for themselves the right to nullify the election of any non-white candidate. “Only the people that they decide should be allowed to win can.”

“If you liken the Obama era to something like Reconstruction, this is Redemption,” Reid said.

“Redemption on steroids,” said Blight. And a new Lost Cause with its own martyrs.

Change of strategy. But what?

First, set down your coffee.

Conservatives are happier than liberals. So say a couple of studies Thomas Edsall cites this morning:

Two similarly titled papers with markedly disparate conclusions illustrate the range of disagreement on this subject. “Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?” by Jaime Napier of N.Y.U. in Abu Dhabi and John Jost of N.Y.U., and “Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals, but Why?” by Barry R. Schlenker and John Chambers, both of the University of Florida, and Bonnie Le of the University of Rochester.

Using nationally representative samples from the United States and nine other countries, Napier and Jost note that they

consistently found conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers). This ideological gap in happiness is not accounted for by demographic differences or by differences in cognitive style. We did find, however, that the rationalization of inequality — a core component of conservative ideology — helps to explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals.

See no evil. Hear no evil. Don’t worry. Be happier.

Napier and Jost contend that their determinations are “consistent with system justification theory, which posits that viewing the status quo (with its attendant degree of inequality) as fair and legitimate serves a palliative function.”

Not to be outdone, Schlenker, Chambers and Le offer another perspective:

In contrast to Napier and Jost’s “view that conservatives are generally fearful, low in self-esteem, and rationalize away social inequality,” Schlenker, Chambers and Le argue:

Conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, in general and in specific domains (e.g., marriage, job, residence), report better mental health and fewer mental and emotional problems, and view social justice in ways that are consistent with binding moral foundations, such as by emphasizing personal agency and equity.

Clearly, these researchers have never viewed footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection, set foot in a honky-tonk, watched reality TV, or worked in an emergency room on a Friday night.

See, the problem with you liberals is you have a relativist moral code, as opposed to conservatives’ absolutist one, say Schlenker, Chambers and Le:

A relativist moral code more readily permits people to excuse or justify failures to do the ‘‘right’’ thing. When moral codes lack clarity and promote flexibility, people may come to feel a sense of normlessness — a lack of purpose in life — and alienation. Further, if people believe there are acceptable excuses and justifications for morally questionable acts, they are more likely to engage in those acts, which in turn can create problems and unhappiness.

Ahem, let me introduce you to the Republican caucus in the U.S. Congress and in the [your state’s name here] legislature.

There’s more, of course. The usual nod to conservatives’ heightened disgust response, etc., and to liberals’ tolerance for change and ambiguity.

Other researchers disagree with the first set. Edsall gives them space to rebut:

Emma Onraet, Alain Van Hiel and Kristof Dhont concluded in their paper “The Relationship Between Right-Wing Ideological Attitudes and Psychological Well-Being” that a comprehensive examination — a meta-analysis — of previous studies involving 97 samples with 69,221 participants shows “that right-wing attitudes are only weakly related to psychological well-being” and that “our results thus do not support previous theories that claim that right-wing attitudes yield substantial relationships with psychological well-being.”

Prejudice and intolerance can be found on both sides of the political divide, says Jarret Crawford, a professor of psychology at the College of New Jersey:

When it comes to denying political rights to specific groups, Crawford continued,

we see pretty consistently that conservatives and liberals are intolerant of their political opponents (e.g., a liberal will oppose a pro-life group on campus to the same degree a conservative will oppose a pro-choice group on campus).

But, Crawford stressed,

where we do see pretty consistent ideological differences is in abstract democratic principles (endorsing things like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, voting rights, etc.). I think this is to say that there is a stronger anti-democratic impulse on the right than on the left, less of a commitment to democracy. And, of course, I think we’re seeing that play out in national and local politics right now.

The more either group is thwarted in its efforts to achieve its political goals, the more anguish people experience, says Michael Steger, a professor of psychology at Colorado State University.

Edsall provides this caveat:

First, be wary of the conclusion that conservatives are happier than liberals and that they find greater meaning in life.

In “Are Conservatives Really Happier Than Liberals?,” Tom Jacobs points out that

researchers report that conservatives are more likely to proclaim they are happy. But liberals are more likely to provide clues indicating they’re experiencing actual joy, including the words they choose to use, and the genuineness of their smiles.

Jacobs cites the work of Sean Wojcik, a senior data scientist at Axios, and Peter Ditto of the University of California, Irvine, who find in their paper “Conservative Self-Enhancement” that political conservatives have “a strengthened tendency to evaluate the self in an overly positive way.”

That is, conservatives rarely admit to themselves, to others, or to researchers that they’ve made mistakes or are as unhappy with their lives as closet-drinking, opioid addiction, and participation in cultish political violence suggests. See honky-tonk comment above.