Month: November 2021

This piece by Brian Beutler is the best thing I’ve read about the lessons of Tuesday’s election:

​① Because Democrats lost the Virginia election so narrowly, it’s natural that the recriminations will center around small-bore tactical decisions that might’ve made the difference

② That’s all fair game, but it’s much more important for Dems to reflect on how the national mood dimmed so rapidly under their leadership, and fix those mistakes—quickly—before the midterms

③ And if anything it’s even more important for Dems to ask themselves how it came to be that Republican voters are more concerned about fake threats to democracy than their voters are to real ones

WAITING IN THE SWINGS

What follows is the best after-action analysis of the elections in Virginia and New Jersey you will read, because unlike other take-slingers, I’ve had days to reflect upon why the returns confirm all of my priors. [Lol — d}

Most of the gut-check punditry Tuesday night and Wednesday centered on proximate causes: Why did Dems lose in Virginia? Why did both states swing so dramatically toward the GOP? To be clear, these are good questions, and I’ll try my best to answer them below; the races were both very close, which means (as anyone who’s heard of James Comey understands) they could have come out differently under slightly different conditions. Virginia was winnable, in other words, and given the stakes, it’s fair and worthwhile to second guess campaign tactics and any other factors Democrats had the power to influence. What if Terry McAuliffe had grown a mustache? We can only wonder.

But relative to 2017, the rightward swing in New Jersey was about 15 points; in Virginia it was about 12. Had Democrats, through better electioneering, held it to (say) 13 and 10—juuust enough to eke out victories in both elections—it would still be terribly ominous, because nationwide swings anywhere close to that large, if sustained, would annihilate Democratic majorities and governorships next year, and very plausibly doom the republic.

That’s why I ultimately want to home in on what makes the returns more disturbing than a normal pendulum-swing of the kind we saw Tuesday usually is. They imply (and polling bears this out) a horrifying mismatch between real, looming threats to democracy and public perception thereof; that Republican voters are more worked up about lies (2020 election-fraud lies, Great Replacement lies, QAnon lies) than Democrats are about real, ongoing schemes to steal popular sovereignty. And that suggests the failures were baked in long ago.

① THE ‘WHAT ‘IFFE’ GAME

So let’s start small and work our way up to the big-picture stuff. Recriminations began flowing as soon as the writing in Virginia was on the wall. Among the most popular: With Trump no longer menacing front pages, or social-media feeds, it was a mistake for Terry McAuliffe to expend so much energy tying Glenn Youngkin to a figure from the past; he should’ve focused on kitchen-table issues; Democrats should’ve nominated someone newer/better/younger/etc, the education issue in Virginia was really about last year’s school closures.

These kinds of explanations are by definition untestable, but as applied here, they strike me as underbaked, or clearly wrong.

For instance: It’s not crazy to me to imagine that another candidate might have won, but there has to be a real theory to the case. For all his flaws, McAuliffe was a popular governor in his first (and—too soon!—only) term, and has universal name recognition in the state. But, for instance, he was also unusually poorly positioned to capitalize on Youngkin’s career as a soulless private-equity rich guy, or to grow his appeal in rural Virginia. Maybe one of the other Dems in the primary would’ve done a better job at that, but the Democratic track record on this score is honestly small and pretty spotty. Here’s a sobering reminder: When Democrats lost Florida in 2018, crusty old Bill Nelson actually got more votes for Senate than either Andrew Gillum OR Ron DeSantis did for governor.

For another, instance, it was a mistake for McAuliffe to ignore schools and the GOP’s critical race theory propaganda blitz, particularly after Republicans were able to consolidate opposition to Biden in the early months of his presidency with culture-war claptrap alone. McAuliffe tried to jiujitsu the issue at the end of the campaign, but out of complacency, fear of culture war, or arrogance about their invulnerability on the issue, Dems ceded the entire terrain to the GOP through most of October, and by the time they reversed course, it was too late.

For another ‘nother instance: It’s true that McAuliffe tried to use Trump’s unpopularity (and Youngkin’s subservience to Trump) as a motivator, and then lost anyhow. Must mean it backfired! This would be fallacious propter hoc logic under most circumstances, but it may actually be worse than that in this case, because the race in New Jersey was much more issue focused, and Dems there did slightly worse. It just happened to be a bluer state. There will be many, many GOP candidates next year who are far Trumpier than Youngkin (remember Larry Elder?) and it’d be a real fiasco if Dems said nothing about it based on incorrect snap reactions they had on November 2. Youngkin ran scared from Trump for a reason.

Still, at best all we can say is the Trumping of the Virginia race was better than the alternative of ignoring Trump altogether. But it also clearly wasn’t enough on its own. What seems to have been missing from both races was anything that might’ve stemmed or offset the red tide just a bit more than Dems were able to.

② BAD MOOD RISING

These are all small bore criticisms. They may explain the margin of victory but not the overall swing, which should serve as a reminder that heavier currents will swamp tactical choices, and governing parties should thus do whatever they can to shape those currents before sweating the small stuff. In some ways they make me think Democrats would’ve been better off losing by a wider margin, so they’d focus on how and why those currents turned against them.

Part of the explanation surely lies beyond their control. If you’re a political junky, you’ve probably heard the term “thermostatic public opinion,” to describe the well-documented phenomenon of the public quickly turning against incumbent presidents and parties. It swung against Democrats in Virginia the way it normally does. And as unsatisfying as it is to attribute so much consequence to the poorly understood animal spirits of the American electorate, it did so by a pretty normal amount.

But that’s not to say Democrats were helpless. The national mood has dimmed considerably since Biden’s first 100 days. Biden almost-but-didn’t-quite tame the pandemic. The persistence of the pandemic has harmed the economic recovery on a couple of fronts. Then on top of it all, Biden’s economic agenda stalled out in Congress.

Here I think there’s much more blame to go around. The atmosphere in American life today didn’t just rise from the earth or fall from the skies like a fog. Democrats can’t control everything, but it is completely reasonable to expect our leaders to be savvy enough to anticipate predictable risks and insure against them.

They should have known that Republicans would try to harm both the economy and the pandemic recovery, and used their power to create buffers against it. The American Rescue Plan (if not the CARES Act before it) should have tied pandemic relief to objective economic and public-health conditions. Democrats should have permanently neutralized the debt limit, either on their own or as a concession for their CARES Act votes when Trump was president. They should’ve known (because I knew) that Republicans would try to sabotage herd immunity after Biden won by fanning vaccine rejection, and embraced vaccination requirements much earlier than they did. Joe Biden should not have wasted several weeks under the illusion that Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) would negotiate an infrastructure deal with him in good faith; Senate Democrats in the Gang of Whatever shouldn’t have then taken the baton and wasted months more to agree on policy that they could just as easily have devised themselves and passed through the budget-reconciliation process along with the rest of Biden’s agenda. They were supposed to prove democracy works, but instead they spent months trying to prove bipartisanship works, even though those are very different concepts—and by the time they corrected course, Biden’s popularity was already sinking.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats are pointing fingers inward, mostly on the assumption that McAuliffe might’ve won if he’d had some or all of Biden’s economic agenda to run on. I actually think there’s something to that. The gridlock left a big blank in what might have been a simple “we’re awesome because of ______; they suck because of Trump” message. But that’s another small-bore issue; the bigger one, coming on top of the Delta variant surge, is the demoralizing specter of a weak-seeming president. It has hurt Biden everywhere, and as goes Biden so goes the party. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin deserve a lot of the blame for that, but the bipartisanship bug didn’t bite them alone, and without that, Dems could’ve passed the whole agenda by September or earlier.

③ THE COWERING INFERNO

Fix any or all of those blunders and I think McAuliffe would’ve won; maybe not by a lot, but by enough. And by the same token, if Democrats fix them going forward, the midterms won’t look so bleak.

What troubles me even more than the governing errors, though, is the fact that Republicans were able to become competitive anywhere in any blue territory in the country so soon after Trump killed hundreds of thousands of Americans with incompetence and lies, then tried to steal the election leaving dead bodies in the halls of Congress. We can’t expect memories to last forever, but we can expect them to last longer than a year. There is plenty of precedent for the kind of reckoning Republicans deserve, and the fact that the entire GOP isn’t toxic in much more of the country after what we just lived through is prima facie evidence of a political failure.

In Brazil, the Senate equated Jair Bolsonaro’s COVID-19 policies with mass murder and recommended he be tried for crimes against humanity. In America, a federal judge had to scold the Justice Department for taking such a blasé approach to accountability for a violent insurrection. “No wonder parts of the public in the U.S. are confused about whether what happened on January 6 at the Capitol was simply a petty offense of trespassing with some disorderliness, or shocking criminal conduct that represented a grave threat to our democratic norms.”

But it’s not just the Justice Department processing hundreds of rioters with petty crimes charges; it’s a party-wide inclination to cower in the face of a vast, acute threat to free society.

Again, there is plenty of blame to go around; The congressional leaders who ducked oversight obligations and accountability measures wherever they could while Trump was still president; the ambivalence they showed about impeaching him in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection; the pockets of resistance to abolishing the filibuster, which are large enough to keep Joe Biden on the sidelines; the unwillingness to extend the full rights of citizenship to the people of Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, and other territories; or remediate the Republican theft of the courts. It’s Chris Coons convincing Democrats to end Trump’s second impeachment trial without seeking any evidence, because he and his colleagues were so excited about Valentine’s Day; it’s Biden and the leadership prioritizing infrastructure policy—including normalizing relations with Republicans—over an emergency effort to safeguard democracy; it’s congressional Democrats wasting weeks and weeks pleading with Republicans to participate in an investigation of the insurrection, even offering them the power to neuter the inquiry; it’s liberal legal elites, up to and including Merrick Garland, so inclined to leave Trump above the law that after two weeks, they have still yet to render judgment on whether Steve Bannon defied a valid subpoena from the January 6 committee. (He did.)

I don’t think most Americans like lying, cheating, and stealing, let alone the idea that any one party would try to seize dictatorial power for itself. And while I accept that Democrats lack the kind of big propaganda apparatus that would allow them to easily warn the country about what’s coming, they are by no means mute. They have tremendous agenda-setting power right now, but what they’ve said and done has been in no way commensurate with the threat. And while I can’t cite any fancy polls, I’m confident that if Democrats had ever tried in a sustained way to brand Republicans for what they are, the way Republicans have branded Dems for what they’re not, Republicans would be in big trouble.

That’s why they engaged throughout the Trump era in a series of coverups, and why the coverups continue today. They know the truth is radioactive and they’re desperate to hide it. Up until now, they couldn’t have asked for a more accommodating opposition: a party that has let scandal after scandal drift by, that latched on to none of them with anything like the ferocity Republicans showed through years of Benghazi agit-prop, that has since responded less vigorously to an attempted coup than Republicans have to the totalitarian myth that Trump actually won the election.

Add it all up and Tuesday starts to make an eerie kind of sense: A Republican base behaving, based on lies, the way you’d want people to act if they thought their way of life and tools for self-governance were being plundered. Meanwhile there’s a live torpedo aimed right at the hull of America’s popular majority, and our representatives refuse to act like it, plausibly costing Democrats a big swing vote.

It may be that if Democrats had done everything you might expect from a party facing such a menace, it wouldn’t have mattered; maybe creeping fascism matters less to the center-left public than the passing currents that have carried us into a moment of national malaise. If that were true, it would be fair to chalk the end of democracy up to a failure of the people. But Democrats haven’t done anything close to that; and until they do—assuming it’s not already too late—it’s a failure of the leaders.

‘Nuff said.

It appears that John Durham has found that the Steele Dossier was a bunch of uncorroborated gossip and is indicting people for failing to say where they heard it when asked by the FBI. It’s being treated as a death blow to the entire Russia investigation and basically a vindication of Donald Trump.

The Washington Post’s Eric Wemple takes MSNBC and CNN to task for their credulous reporting on it and essentially let’s the rest of the media, including his own paper, off the hook saying they did credible reporting that makes up for it. (Actually there was a reason people were credulous. It’s because Trump’s 2016 campaign was crawling with Russians for some reason and Trump was openly telling them to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails…)

Wemple notes that the DOJ Inspector General’s Report and the Senate Intelligence Report debunked much of the Steele Dossier already so I’m not sure why anyone’s surprised, but the rehabilitation of Donald Trump seems to be ramping up in the press so perhaps this is just another data point in that dangerous project. He does point out that the Russia story itself was not a just the Steele Dossier, although I’m sure after all this it will be seen that way anyway.

Holes in the now-infamous dossier, however, don’t preoccupy the Senate report, which documents contacts between Trump aides and Russians. A damning takeaway relates to the activities of Paul Manafort, who served for a time as the chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign. Manafort had ties with Konstantin Kilimnik, a man that the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.” “On numerous occasions,” notes the report, “Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik. The Committee was unable to reliably determine why Manafort shared sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy with Kilimnik or with whom Kilimnik further shared that information.”

The Mueller report, which features extensive discussion of Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik, noted that the FBI assessed that Kilimnik had “ties” to Russian intelligence.The Senate Intelligence Committee report notes that it “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” Information following that passage is redacted.

The rot from Manafort spills all over the Senate document. It notes, for instance, that “Manafort worked with Kilimnik starting in 2016 on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.” Now that’s patriotism for you

There’s a great deal more in the document, and there’d better be: The committee spent three years on the project. The mere heft of the report acts as a rebuttal to the various attacks on mainstream media organizations for their sprawling investigations into “Russiagate” through most of Trump’s first term. The New York Times and The Washington Post, for instance, received Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 for their investigative work in chasing down various strands of the Russia story — something that Fox News host Sean Hannity found scandalous. “The Washington Post, the New York Times — believe it or not, they actually won Pulitzer Prizes for their lying coverage of the Russia collusion hoax. That is a disgusting disgrace and a dishonor to every person that deserved a real Pulitzer Prize,” roared the host in March 2019.

Russia-coverage shaming spiked upon the issuance of the Mueller report, which failed to establish that the Trump campaign had criminally conspired with the Russians. The Senate Intelligence Committee report also fell short of this documentary threshold, a point that the White House seized upon: “This never-ending, baseless conspiracy theory peddled by radical liberals and their partners in the media demonstrates how incapable they are at accepting the will of the American people and the results of the 2016 election,” said a statement issued from the White House on Tuesday. “They should stop wasting taxpayer dollars with partisan witch hunts and actually work to accomplish things for this country.”

Hannity, Trump and their ilk, however, are up against a towering stack of paper. The Senate Intelligence Committee report numbers nearly 1,000 pages of detail on all the ways that the so-called Russia collusion hoax was a bona fide story. Just because the activities in that plume didn’t qualify as criminal conspiracy doesn’t render them un-newsworthy.

And like most important stories, Russia-Trump is a complicated one. On one hand, there was a load of investigative stories — including the Pulitzer entries of the Times and The Post — that found corroboration in the reports of Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee.  On the other hand, there was credulous and irresponsible dossier boosterism, as practiced by certain outlets — a disgraceful chapter for which there has been little public reckoning.

Oh fuck that. Get back to me when there’s a public reckoning of “but her emails!!!” and then we can talk. That caused more damage than the Steele Dossier chapter in the Russia story ever did. In fact it may end up having finally destroyed the country when all is said and done. And they haven’t learned their lesson yet.

It’s their superpower:

The result of New Jersey’s election for governor will be “legal and fair” no matter the outcome, Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli said Thursday in his first comments since The Associated Press declared incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy the election’s winner.

Ciattarelli has not conceded the election.

New Jersey’s Murphy has won what the press portrays as a squeaker, almost illegitimate and certainly embarrassing, by a margin of 77,000 votes. The Great White Hope Glenn Youngkin, on the other hand, won his Virginia landslide victory of all victories by 79,000.

It must be nice not to care about hypocrisy or inconsistency. Maybe that’s what they all mean when they insist they are defending freedom —it’s freedom to have no principles. Sadly, I’m including much of the political press in that comment.

A relation last night talked about believers’ weak arguments for the existence of God.

“Look around,” they say.

I looked around the kitchen — from floor to ceiling to the clothes we wore — and said, “Everywhere I look, I see corporation.”

It’s the earth-threatening legal critter we invented, thought was cool at the time, and haven’t noticed is threatening to destroy the planet. It is lobbying really, really hard to stop us from stopping it.

But maybe coprorations fueled by AI (artificial intelligence) will destroy humanity before we jointly destroy the planet. It’s not just the external world being changed, but our interior landscapes, says Ayad Akhtar at The Atlantic:

Something unnatural is afoot. Our affinities are increasingly no longer our own, but rather are selected for us for the purpose of automated economic gain. The automation of our cognition and the predictive power of technology to monetize our behavior, indeed our very thinking, is transforming not only our societies and discourse with one another, but also our very neurochemistry. It is a late chapter of a larger story, about the deepening incursion of mercantile thinking into the groundwater of our philosophical ideals. This technology is no longer just shaping the world around us, but actively remaking us from within.

It’s a partnership made in hell, reducing our every action, every interaction, our every waking moment to digital information for making humans more suitable to mercantile interests. And it is as invisible to the naked eye as the corporations behind every floor tile, cabinet, plate, appliance, table and chairs in that kitchen.

Merchants of attention have learned that nothing adheres us to their traps like emotion, and that some emotions are stickier than others. The new and alluring, the surpassingly cute. The frenzied thrill at the prospect of conflict or violence. The misfortune of others. Perhaps most emblematically, the expression of our anger, rightful or hateful. All of this lights up a part of our brain that will not release us from its tyranny. Our fingertips seek it. To say that we are addicts does not capture the magnitude of what is happening.

What works best to keep you clicking, revealing your needs and desires to the AI? You know already.

Nothing quite does it like outrage. Moral outrage. Those we know are right to hate; those we love because we are united together against those we know are right to hate. This is the logic behind the viral campaigns leading to the slaughter of Rohingya in Myanmar. And the logic of the increasingly truculent divide between right and left in America today. Driven by engagement and the profit that it generates, each side drifts further and further from the other, the space between us growing only more charged, only richer with opportunity for monetization. The cultural clash in America today has more electrical engineering behind it than we realize.

For more than a generation, science-fiction writers and aficionados have speculated about the possibility and imminence of the singularity—that is, the moment when AI will finally eclipse human intelligence. To many, it’s meant the robot capable of thinking, and with an intellect surpassing our own. Let me suggest that digital problem-solving has already surpassed human capacity. Indeed, our advanced societies are now being ordered by a digital matrix of data collection, pattern recognition, and decision making that we cannot even begin to fathom—and that is happening every single successive millisecond. The synergy of data technology, computer-processing speeds and capacity, and an almost frictionless interconnectivity—all of this enables exchange; delivery of services; production of goods; growth of capital; and, most centrally, the endless catalog of our every interface, however glancing, however indirect, with this system’s sprawling and ubiquitous apparatus. The singularity is here—we could call it the era of automation—and its inescapable imprint on our inner lives is already apparent.

For far more than a generation, as I noted years ago:

The classic formulation of that warning comes from a one-page, short story by Fredric Brown, titled “Answer,” from Angels and Spaceships (1954). After finally networking computers from ninety-six billion planets, the lead scientist puts the first question to the new supercomputer: “Is there a God?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of single relay.

“Yes, now there is a God.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

Around the coffee urn at the NSA, they must think, “How cool is that?

The creature has no soul, no conscience. Only appetite and instinct. And already it is running us.

Is today the day?

A–n–d … INACTION:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats in the House appear on the verge of advancing President Joe Biden’s $1.85 trillion-and-growing domestic policy package alongside a companion $1 trillion infrastructure bill in what would be a dramatic political accomplishment — if they can push it to passage.

The House scrapped votes late Thursday but will be back at it early Friday, and White House officials worked the phones to lock in support for the president’s signature proposal. After months of negotiations, House passage of the big bill would be a crucial step, sending to the Senate Biden’s ambitious effort to expand health care, child care and other social services for countless Americans and deliver the nation’s biggest investment yet to fight climate change.

Alongside the slimmer roads-bridges-and-broadband package, it adds up to Biden’s answer to his campaign promise to rebuild the country from the COVID-19 crisis and confront a changing economy.

But they’re not there yet.

That AP report was earlier this morning (5:43 a.m. EDT).

And now (7:11 a.m. EDT)?

New York Times:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California had previously privately told her top deputies that she had hoped to hold a vote on the social policy bill on Thursday night, with the vote on the infrastructure measure Friday morning, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

But even after Mr. Biden and members of his cabinet worked the phones and Ms. Pelosi and her team spent much of Thursday buttonholing lawmakers on the House floor, the votes proved elusive.

[…]

A few centrists were also balking at supporting the package — which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, a four-week paid family and medical leave program, health care subsidies and a broad array of climate change initiatives — before evaluating the fiscal impact of the latest, hastily assembled 2,135-page version of the legislation.

And now (7:38 a.m. EDT)?

CNN:

And now? Republicans are trying to adjourn the House:

TPM (8:35 a.m. EDT):

The House convened at 8 a.m. ET this morning. Now the chamber is debating the rule on the reconciliation package on the floor, then House lawmakers will debate the bill itself if the rule passes, and then boom, then there’ll be a final vote on the bill.

If reconciliation passes, it’ll get kicked over to the Senate and face a final reckoning with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Both House and Senate are scheduled to be out of session next week.

It’s going to be a long Friday.

Like clockwork. I’d think that maybe they might have a point if it wasn’t for the fact that when Democrats win, the Times also thinks it’s a signal for them to tack right. Oh, excuse me, to the center.

This one’s from York, Pennsylvania:

The York Suburban School Board race was, by any measure, a messy affair. 

‘Parents are rising up’: York County school board races now a battlefield in culture war

Opponents of one candidate, Quentin Gee, brought up past social media posts expressing relief in the deaths of Republican Sen. Mike Reese and an Arkansas GOP county chairman – both against COVID-19 mask mandates – and posted a Facebook video of him receiving a lap dance at the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota. “I don’t think they really became an issue,” Gee said. “But I did not expect that to happen in a school board race.”

Another candidate, Cecilia Marie Clark, had her past criminal record, including a 2016 DUI, posted on Facebook by political opponents. Clark, in an email, acknowledged “the mistake I made over seven years ago” and wrote that she was “grateful I have corrected course through hard work and my faith in God.” 

Gee won a seat on the board. Clark did not. 

Conservative candidates benefited from a $10,000 campaign contribution from a PAC that opposes COVID restrictions placed on schools and the inclusion of critical race theory in the curriculum. (York Suburban does not teach critical race theory.) 

The voters spoke on Tuesday – selecting four members of the board and rejecting candidates who were most vocal in their opposition to mask mandates and critical race theory. 

Three incumbents will return to the board, led by Democrats Steven Sullivan and Ellen Freireich, who has served as a school director for 24 years. Democrat Gee came in third and incumbent James Sanders, a Republican who had teamed up with Nicole McCleary during the campaign, came in fourth. McCleary and Clark, finished out of the money.  

[…]

The Democratic candidates raised their campaign funds from the community – the only donations to come from outside the district were from a Suburban teacher who lives in Dallastown and an alum who lives in Washington, D.C. The Republican candidates received a contribution from the Back To School PA political action committee, which backed conservative candidates throughout the state. 

“My No. 1 concern was how these races were funded,” she said. “At the end of the day, money talks in terms of influence.” 

There are a lot of these school board CRT election stories bubbling up. I wonder if maybe the focus on Virginia, being the “home state” of so many DC reporters might just be slanting the coverage just a tad.

This is the Village in action: they believe they speak for America. They don’t.

One of the most horrific consequences of having this far right Supreme Court is going to be the expansion of gun rights even though the country is awash is bloody gun violence. It’s enough to make you sick:

The biggest surprise in Wednesday morning’s arguments in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. (NYSRPA) v. Bruen, a major Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court, is that conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared open to many of New York state’s arguments defending its restrictions on where individuals may carry a gun.

Even if Barrett does side with New York, however, her vote is unlikely to matter. Four justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh — left little doubt that they will read the Second Amendment expansively. And, while Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to disagree with most of his fellow conservatives about how the Court should approach Second Amendment cases, his disagreement appears to be largely academic. He also appears likely to strike down New York’s law.

NYSRPA, in other words, revealed methodological disagreements among the conservative justices, but those disagreements are unlikely to have much practical impact: The case is likely to end with the curtailment of states’ ability to regulate where people can carry guns.

The case involves a 108-year-old New York law that requires anyone who wishes to carry a gun outside of their home to demonstrate “proper cause” before they can obtain a license allowing them to do so. In practice, it’s relatively easy for New York residents to obtain a limited license permitting them to carry firearms, particularly in areas that are not densely populated — indeed, two of the plaintiffs in NYSRPA already have a license permitting them to carry a gun to hunt, for target practice, or while in areas not “frequented by the general public.”

But they want an unlimited license — a license that, as Barrett indicated, would allow them to carry a concealed gun into Times Square in the middle of New York City’s famous New Year’s Eve celebration. That possibility, at the very least, appeared to give Barrett some pause.

Yet while Roberts also expressed concern about reading the Second Amendment so broadly that it would allow civilians to bring a firearm literally anywhere, he also appeared skeptical of New York’s restrictions. The chief justice seemed committed to the approach the Supreme Court took in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), itself a precedent-setting case that undermined at least eight decades of Second Amendment jurisprudence and held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun for personal “self-defense.”

Roberts suggested that, under Heller’s framework, gun rights should be even more expansive in cities than they are in rural areas. As Roberts put it during an exchange with New York Solicitor General Barbara Underwood, “How many muggings take place in the forest?”

The bottom line appears to be that, while there is an off chance Underwood convinced Barrett that the Second Amendment should be read to permit greater gun regulation in cities, she does not appear to have convinced Roberts. And that means she is unlikely to find five votes to save New York’s law.

Get a load of Alito. He’s just …

Remember what I said about Alito’s quality of argument as belonging at a thanksgiving dinner with exasperated blood relatives in New Jersey? I rest my case. https://t.co/Q0i068cFU7

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) November 3, 2021

Vigilante America.

They’re going after the kids:

“If the anti-vaccine industry starts doing what we anticipate, with those very graphic and emotionally charged videos, and bringing out their supposed experts, I think it’s going to affect a new group of parents,” she said. 

Burgert and many other doctors, public health experts and misinformation researchers are anticipating a flood of anti-vaccine propaganda featuring younger children following last week’s vote by a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee to authorize Pfizer-BioNTech’s lower-dose Covid vaccine for children ages 5 to 11. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices unanimously recommended the Covid vaccines for 5 to 11-year-olds on Tuesday. CDC director Rochelle Walensky signed off on the approval later in the evening, opening the door for more than 28 million children to start receiving vaccinations on Wednesday morning.

Some fringe groups have already begun pushing the kinds of videos that the modern anti-vaccine movement was built upon: intimate, unverified videos and testimonies of children with alleged vaccine injuries that are visceral and effective, even while they give a false picture of the overall safety and importance of vaccines. These firsthand accounts present a challenge for platforms including TikTok, YouTube and Facebook and an opportunity for anti-vaccine activists to reach a new audience. 

Vaccine advocates are pointing to a recent example spreading quickly on social media as a harbinger for the kind of graphic misinformation that they fear most. 

The video, first posted to a fringe anti-vaccine website and then spread through mainstream sites including YouTube and Facebook, is only 30 seconds long, but devastating. In a carousel of vignettes, a young girl with a beaming smile digs in the dirt, dances on her front lawn and celebrates over cake with her family. It then cuts to a closeup shot of the girl’s face as she cries out in pain, her head wrapped in bandages and a tube through her nose. Later, three adults hoist her limp body into a wheelchair, then it quickly cuts to her hospital gown, an intravenous line in her hand and ends, lingering on a video of her legs as she shakes uncontrollably. 

The cause of the girl’s condition is unclear. Her mother said on a panel held Tuesday in Washington, D.C., hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., that she was injured by a Covid vaccine administered as part of a Pfizer trial at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. (Johnson has been widely criticized for spreading  misleading claims about the vaccines.) The family’s lawyer, Aaron Siri — who also represents the country’s largest anti-vaccine organization, the Informed Consent Action Network — claims the doctors investigating the case misdiagnosed her myriad injuries as unrelated to the vaccine then downplayed them as abdominal pain. In the meantime, anti-vaccine activists have made the girl a poster child for their cause.

The mother of the girl and the group behind the ad have not provided any evidence that the girl was diagnosed as harmed by a Covid-19 vaccine.

The ad was paid for by the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, an anti-vaccine group founded last month by veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, known for inventing the optical mouse, and more recently for advocating unproven Covid cures and against vaccines, which he calls “toxic.”

Burgert warned these tactics could be effective.

“They’re going to get their claws into a new group of hesitant families that otherwise have  got all of their vaccines on time,”  she said. “I’m concerned that they’re going to be able to use their manipulation tactics and psychological tactics to harness a new group of formerly pro-vaccine families into vaccine hesitancy.”

In a statement, the girl’s mother, Stephanie de Garay, said her entire family was “pro-vaccine” and that ads like the one featuring her daughter were necessary to “develop treatments for these harms.”

“It is unfortunate that ‘pro-vaccine advocates’ feel the need to dismiss those injured by vaccines in order to promote vaccines,” she said in an email.

Covid vaccine hesitancy among parents is already high, according to recent polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Twenty-seven percent of parents plan to vaccinate their children ages 5 to 11 “right away,” 33 percent will “wait and see,” and 30 percent say they “definitely won’t” get their children vaccinated. Five percent said they would only vaccinate their child to comply with a school mandate.

Vaccine injury or death is extremely rare, according to health experts. Yet narratives of  blood clots, heart attacks or deaths are wildly popular in some parts of the internet, racking up millions of mentions, according to data provided by Zignal Labs, which analyzes social media, broadcast, traditional media and online conversations about Covid. The mentions of vaccine injury and death have increased by at least 27 percent in the last four months, according to the data. 

There’s a reason that emotional, shocking anti-vaccine narratives often drown out fact-based ones. 

“The anti-vaccine industry playbook is effective. It works,” Burgert said. “And the success of vaccines is so quiet, so subdued, so commonplace.”

[…]

“Anti-vaccine groups often distort mainstream news coverage and official statistics about adverse events like unexplained deaths and side effects caused from receiving the vaccine, omitting important context and reframing isolated incidents as evidence of widespread harm,” the Virality Project reported in March. “Unverifiable personal stories of adverse reactions will proliferate; these stories have been leveraged for years in childhood vaccine misinformation, and have strong emotional appeal.”

These personal, unverifiable stories have already found wide appeal on social media. In January, as vaccines became available to a wider group of adults, videos began appearing on social media showing women convulsing. Fact-checkers were unable to confirm their accounts. 

More videos emerged, and the alleged harms caused by the vaccines ran the gamut. In videos that went viral, women claimed that the vaccines made them infertile, caused them to shake uncontrollably and turned their bodies into magnets.

The anti-vaccine movement has spent years honing its messaging on social media, and more recently developed strategies to avoid more aggressive platform moderation. People in anti-vaccine groups now often modify language, create code words and utilize features  such as hashtags, private groups and cross-platform posting to  circumvent moderation. 

On Facebook, anti-vaccine posters have utilized the #protectyourfamily hashtag to create and promote a running collection of testimonials. The hashtag has more than 200,000 posts.

While Facebook provides tools for organizing and connecting, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube seem to be the favored method of creating content, which is later cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is also home to many public and private groups organized around these unverified testimonials. One group, named RealNotRare, which has 2,000 members, utilized Facebook to plan what appears to be a small rally on the steps of the Supreme Court on Tuesday. 

And it’s not just social media. While the anti-vaccine community has long relied on unverifiable testimonies as propaganda, most notably in the documentary “Vaxxed,” the messages were usually confined to anti-vaccine media and social media. With Covid came an alignment of messaging from anti-vaccine activists who rebranded under the “health freedom” movement, which has been embraced by some conservative media. 

Pro-vaccine activists say they’ve seen this play out before. 

“This is going to look a lot like the mid-2000s autism vaccine wars,” said Karen Ernst, executive director of Voices for Vaccines, a national nonprofit group that advocates for vaccination.

“It was framed as a good versus evil battle,”  she said, recalling the outcry from parents like Jenny McCarthy, who, misled by now-discredited research by Andrew Wakefield, believed that the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccines caused autism. “On one side were the mama bears, the warrior moms, who would fight for their children. They were fighting against ‘the evils of Big Pharma who were clearly trying to damage and destroy their children with autism.’ We’re seeing the same moral battle play out that there are forces trying to harm children with a Covid shot now.” 

“There are zero social media platforms,” she added, “that are prepared for what’s about to happen.”

This is just … depressing.

Here’s a fair perspective on the CRT thing. Just because this issue is being leveraged by cynical right wing operators and too many people are happy to use it to excuse their racist impulses, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to think about:

some observations on the CRT discourse..

when Republicans like Youngkin talk about banning teaching CRT, they are saying among other things that they won’t support teaching that America is fundamentally racist, that some people are inherently disadvantaged/oppressed, advantaged, oppressive.

To @Nate_Cohn’s point — check out the section of Glenn Youngkin’s speech on critical race theory from his final campaign rally in Loudoun County, and how he frames it. This is basically what he always said on the stump in the race’s closing weeks: https://t.co/LfKDxL77Fi pic.twitter.com/EW9n8S8hxd

— Eric Bradner (@ericbradner) November 4, 2021

note here he claims he supports teaching ‘dark parts’ of U.S. history. (does he mean it? devil’s in detail of vague intimidating statutes) but should be noted that many progressives have responded to CRT attacks precisely by saying GOP wants to avoid teaching dark history.

so if you’re a parent and you’re hearing activists say “they want us to stop teaching about slavery and lynching and redlining” and Youngkin goes “of course we will teach about those things” — it’s a different terrain.

many have said, “but CRT isn’t even taught in K-12! it’s a *law school* level concept!” …but that doesn’t really hold water. and who actually thinks younger students are not capable of learning about racism being systemically embedded in society? not me & probably not you

a lot of this obfuscates is the real debate over how we teach about systemic racism in schools, and how much and relatedly, the question of how fundamental racism is to America’s story, past and present. these are not settled questions in K12 or in academia

i spent time over the summer digging into messaging guides on the left being developed to counter CRT attacks. I was sympathetic to their task, it’s a hard challenge. And I’m no PR expert. But I am pretty good at detecting *avoidance* in talking points https://theintercept.com/2021/07/27/critical-race-theory-education-history/

multiple things can be true at the same time

‘CRT’ — yes it’s being used as a dog whistle, exploited as a wedge, oft misconstrued from its original scholars’ vision

there’s also this very real tension right now in defining how race and racism will be taught in schools

i’m tired so I’m going to stop tweeting for now, and I’m still thinking this stuff through, but feels necessary to discuss after Virginia and people are trying to figure out what was appealing. exit polls with grain of salt, but this is a lot of people:

https://twitter.com/rmc031/status/1455946047243575297

going to clarify this since some have misconstrued. I don’t mean that law school CRT is being assigned. I’m saying that core tenets are taught (i.e. racism is not just prejudice) and many might argue should be taught more! (i.e social construction of race)

many have said, "but CRT isn't even taught in K-12! it's a *law school* level concept!" …but that doesn't really hold water. and who actually thinks younger students are not capable of learning about racism being systemically embedded in society? not me & probably not you /4

— Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) November 4, 2021

Originally tweeted by Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) on November 4, 2021.

Youngkin’s words could be the kind of speech that could lead to a better understanding. The fact that he weaponized this issue with that “Beloved” ad (and other racial dogwhistles) shows that he’s tring to have it both ways. While I think its understandable that a lot of people are just uncomfortable and confused by the cultural pressure to face the long overdue reckoning with racism in America, you simply cannot ignore the fact that this is also being manipulated by political actors to keep racism alive and well as an organizing principle — and that people who fall for it do have agency.

This has to be worked through regardless. The younger generation isn’t going to wait any longer. Racial minorities aren’t going to wait any longer either.