Month: January 2022

Tim Miller made the ultimate sacrifice and listened to Steve Bannon’s podcast for a whole week. I’m surprised his brain is still functioning enough to write about it:

For three hours every day, the Republican coup plotters who inspired the domestic terror attack at the U.S. Capitol last year gather to discuss their next move. On their January 6th anniversary program, the Dead Cops Society beseeched their great patriotic listeners to “Seize The Day. We’re ashamed of nothing. We’re proud of the work we did on January 6th.”

Their scheming does not take place in caves in the Hindu Kush mountains. Nor in a vacated Florida flophouse with an acid-filled bathtub. In fact, it doesn’t happen in secret at all.

You can find these enemies of democracy livestreaming across multiple platforms for your convenience. Dish channel 219. Samsung TV Plus Channel 1029. Roku. Apple TV. Pluto TV. Amazon Fire! You can livestream the proceedings on the web at AmericasVoice.com or catch clips on Rumble. Or listen through IHeartRadio.

If you are a regular working American who wants to overthrow the regime but can’t sneak away from your day job, not to worry, Apple Podcasts is platforming daily mutiny discourse for your convenience 24/7. And as it turns out, Insurrection Radio does big numbers. Last I checked it was the #9 News Podcast in America on Apple. According to the hosts—and these guys would never lie, obvi—the show has gotten an eye-popping 125 million downloads.

Insurrection never paid so good.

The host of Forever One Six radio is the former Trump administration chief strategist and twice-indicted “Sloppy” Steve Bannon. His show is called WAR ROOM PANDEMIC. In the week leading up to the first anniversary of Jan. 6th, I dove into the War Room to see how the OG “Stop the Stealers” were processing the fallout from their botched putsch.

What I found was that their effort to overthrow the government has been undeterred by the initial setback of Joe Biden being inaugurated. While Republican elites try to minimize the events of Jan. 6th, the War Room and their minions have continued to take the coup both literally and seriously. In their view the Biden “regime” is illegitimate and the regime’s medical establishment has covered up nearly a half a million deaths from the COVID “vaccines.”

In 2022 they aim to put so many of their people in positions of power throughout state and local governments that next time there will be nothing anyone can do to stop their quest for power. And this crusade is infused with an unmistakable religious fervor and appeal to a quasi-Christian nationalism that calls it devotees into action.

As crazy as their show may sound on its face—and let me tell you it seems very crazy—anyone who cares about American democracy should take that prospect very seriously indeed.

There’s plenty to criticize about Steve Bannon. He’s sloppy—looking like a regular at the local Pizza Hut who wears the same stained multilayered black shirts every day—narcissistic in the extreme, and a habitual liar. He’s a necrotizing confidence man who allegedly robbed the very people he claims to fight for in order to enrich himself. He was partially responsible for engineering a riot that resulted in the death and imprisonment of some of his loyal listeners. Deadly sins, he has a few. Greed, gluttony, vainglory, wrath. Check. Check. Check. Check.

But one thing you cannot say about Bannon is that he’s slothful. The dude is absolutely prodigious. In an interview with Michael Lewis during the Trump years, Bannon described his approach to dealing with a hostile media as “flood the zone with shit.” And he’s still doing exactly that: The brown river emanating from the War Room overfloweth.

Over the course of the last week there have been appearances by: a doctor who has diagnosed 30 percent of the country with a mass psychosis (not the people you might think!); a lobotomized Mr. Kruger-looking fellow who upped the percentage to 70 percent; a European correspondent with a flavor savor and a bucket hat; a man who wore Oakleys on air and fashions himself a John McAfee expert; Rudy Giuliani slurring before noon; Peter Navarro in a very tight t-shirt; several Republican elected officials and aspiring electeds; and a superfan calling in from what appeared to be a Bannon shrine in Wisconsin.

You have to see this thing to believe it.

In the outro to every single commercial break Bannon plays bumper music about . . . well . . . taking down the CCP. It’s like a downmarket Nickelback and it haunts my dreams. And again, you have to see it to believe it.

The music video for the song features a montage of Miles Guo, Bannon’s foppish late-middle-aged Chinese billionaire sugar daddy, shadowboxing in a sweatsuit, smoking a cigar on a yacht near the Statue of Liberty, and walking down an ornate hallway in a white suit whilst carrying a small fluffy Pomeranian (the second-highest-ranked “adorable little fluff ball,” according to Woman’s Day). Imagine if your WWG1WGA-loving uncle saw “I’m On a Boat” and didn’t realize it was a joke.

After the war with China bops, Bannon moves to ads, which are largely limited to niche products for MAGA fanatics and preppers. Among the merch being moved: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA Bible (Only $59.99), Gettr (which Bannon must have some kind of stake in, given how relentlessly he pushes it), gold and other precious metals, and of course the world’s only fraud-busting pillow which may very well come stuffed with palladium.

Like every good radio man, Bannon has a sidekick, the most recent of whom is a balding, poor-man’s Bobby Baccalieri named Boris Epshteyn. Boris was previously a Sinclair news “reporter” who was too biased even for them. Sinclair dropped him so that he could be a Trump staffer full-time. In the interest of candor, I must say that Boris is not a particularly dynamic or insightful figure. He’s got the sense of humor of a prep-school C-student, peppering in bons mots about how Pete Buttigieg is “still trying to breastfeed his kids.” This limited skill set made me wonder whether his role in the War Room is related to the content, or to other business with the head man.

For example, Boris and Bannon have teamed up on a new FJB (get it?) crypto that aspires to be the “currency for the MAGA movement.” According to an appearance on last Wednesday’s program, Boris believes that FJBcoin “represents a primal political scream and a growing absolutely powerful movement” and he encourages listeners to “let your feelings, your primal disapproval, your primal disgust with Biden be heard” by shoveling more money across the table to the same guy who allegedly took their money to build a pretend wall a couple years ago.

If it weren’t for the domestic terrorism and the threat to democracy, the whole thing would be an over-the-top laugh riot. They literally featured a correspondent in an America First t-shirt on an oxygen tank reporting live from his hospital bed about Antifa and BLM!

If Adam McKay put scenes from this podcast in Don’t Look Up, mainstream conservatives would use it to dismiss the film as smug, out-of-touch twaddle. But beneath the absurdist theater is a beating refrain about how the audience is made up of brave warriors who are doing battle against incipient authoritarianism, with terrifying implications.

Bannon understands the maxim that constant repetition carries conviction. Like a NXIVM life coach he reminds viewers over and over about his watchwords for the year: Commitment. Engagement. Empowerment. He tells them that they are victims, but also are feared by the most formidable forces in the world if only they will exercise their power. And he has several catch-phrases that he reiterates throughout the show.

–“Elections have consequences. Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.”

–“100 seats for 100 years” meaning how a 2022 election landslide could strip Democrats from power for good.

–“There are no conspiracies but there are also no coincidences”—a motto which is helpfully framed and placed over Bannon’s shoulder, next to icons of the Holy Trinity: a picture of Jesus, a picture of Our Lady of the Assumption, and a red Gettr hat.

Put it all together and what you have is a show that offers Trump supporters a fascistic MAGA cosplay where they are the main characters, and the aggrieved victims, and also the all-powerful heroes. In this story reality is inverted to suit their purpose. Anyone who punctures the narrative must have an ulterior motive and be in league with the powerful (((shadowy))) forces who are conspiring to take them down.

From this vantage, the uprising that led to the Jan. 6th riot is not a thing of the past but an exercise to be learned from in their ongoing effort to ensure that they gain enough power so that next time the Democrats, and the establishment Republicans, and the Never Trumpers won’t be able to deny them total victory. And it’s part and parcel with their broader effort to tear down not just the government but any American institution that might threaten their ability to control the levers of power.

To truly understand how radical, threatening, and comically unhinged the content is, here are some highlights from the Jan. 6th anniversary week.

You can click over to see those highlights. They are doozies.

He also makes the point hatt his radical incitement is carried on all the podcast services where millions and millions of people are listening. It’s taken up where Limbaugh left off. It’s not just Facebook and Twitter, people.

Steve bannon is a freak but don’t underestimate him. He’s proved himself to be a survivor and he has some very big ideas he’s spewing to millions of people.

It’s a very bad time to have to go to the hospital. This is why it’s so wrong to adopt the “let ‘er rip” philosophy. Maybe you are young and healthy and Omicron probably won’t be worse than a cold for you. Maybe you are older but triple vaxxed and you won’t get much sicker than a case of the flu. In both cases you will probably not land in the hospital so maybe you think it’s just better to carry on with life as if nothing is happening because we all need to get back to normal. Sure, all those kids in school might bring COVID home, but we’ll all get through it just fine, right?

Well, there is a much bigger problem.

COVID isn’t the only thing that might send you or a loved one to the hospital. Heart attack? Car accident? Appendicitis? These things happen. And right now they may just have to delay your care or turn you away because the hospital is full of COVID and half the staff is out because they got it.

We can pretend that COVID is gone and “go back to normal” all we want, but it isn’t normal right now and spreading this virus willy nilly is self-defeating —- it’s going to cost a lot of people’s lives who don’t deserve it.

Here’s an op-ed from the front lines in NY:

As the Omicron tsunami crashes ashore in New York City, the comforting news that this variant generally causes milder disease overlooks the unfolding tragedy happening on the front lines.

As an emergency room doctor fighting this new surge, I am grateful that vaccines and a potentially less lethal variant have meant that fewer of my patients today need life support than they did at the start of the pandemic. In March 2020, nurses and doctors rushed between patients, endlessly trying to stabilize one before another crashed. Many of my patients needed supplemental oxygen and the sickest needed to be put on ventilators. Many never came off them. Our intensive care units filled beyond capacity, and yet patients kept coming.

Thankfully, this wave is not like that. I haven’t needed to put any Covid-19 patients on a ventilator so far. And the majority of patients haven’t needed supplemental oxygen, either.

We also have good treatment tools: cheap, widely available medications like steroids have proved to be lifesavers for Covid-19 patients. We now know that administering oxygen at high flow rates through the nose substantially improves patient outcomes. Although currently in very short supply, oral antivirals are highly effective at reducing Covid hospitalizations. The greatest relief has come from the vaccines, which keep people out of the hospital regardless of the variant.

Yet these tools are still not enough to slow the rapid influx of patients we’re now seeing from Omicron, and the situation is bleak for health workers and hospitals.

In New York City, hospitalizations have tripled in the past few weeks alone. New Jersey is seeing its highest number of hospitalizations of the whole pandemic. In all, nearly every state and territory is seeing Covid admissions on the rise.

For most people — especially the vaccinated — Omicron presents as a sore throat or a mild inconvenience. But among the many patients in our hospital, the situation is serious. On a recent shift, I still saw “classic” Covid-19 patients, short of breath and needing oxygen. All of them were unvaccinated. I also saw elderly patients for whom Covid rendered them too weak to get out of bed. I treated people with diabetes in whom the virus caused serious and potentially fatal complications.

And even though nearly all of my patients are experiencing milder illness compared with March 2020, they still take up the same amount of space in a hospital bed. Right now, all patients with the coronavirus require isolation, so they don’t infect other patients, and the laborious use of personal protective equipment by health workers. Yes, there’s a fraction of patients who are incidentally found to have the virus — for example, a person needing an appendix removed who tests positive on screening. But entering the hospital with the virus versus for the virus isn’t a relevant distinction if the hospital doesn’t have the beds or providers needed to care for its patients.

This influx of coronavirus-positive patients is also creating another source of infection for health care workers, who are being sidelined in numbers I’ve never seen before. In March 2020, we clamored for critical supplies like masks and gowns. When patients piled up, we built makeshift treatment centers in tents, sports stadiums and floating ships. What’s in critically short supply now is health care providers, and qualified staff members are significantly harder to scale up than supplies or space.

Thankfully, nearly all my colleagues on the front line are now vaccinated, so I am not worried that I will see them coming into the E.R. as patients or dying, as some did in 2020. But many hospitals are seeing their highest levels of employee infections of the pandemic. Some hospitals in the United States have lost 15 percent of their work force or more.

When a health care worker falls ill, another steps in to cover the shifts. But there are only so many of us. Updated guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that shortens isolation time after testing positive for the virus allows health care workers to return to work earlier. This may help. But in some places, like Rhode Island and California, severe staffing shortages have led to contingency plans that allow providers still testing positive to return to work. Sending potentially contagious nurses or doctors to treat patients seems inconsistent with the principle of “first, do no harm.” But the alternative is that patients wait longer for care, or worse, there isn’t a provider to care for them at all. These are awful decisions to make two years into the pandemic.

The harsh reality is this: Fewer providers means fewer available beds because there are only so many patients a team can treat at a time. This also means treatment is slower and people will spend more time in the E.R. And the longer these patients stay in the E.R., the longer others remain in the waiting room. The domino effect will affect all levels of the health care system, from short-staffed nursing homes to ambulances taking longer to respond to 911 calls.

It’s understandable that people are tired of Covid-19. Health workers are, too. But leaning too heavily on us and our hospital beds is foolhardy. A highly contagious variant like Omicron, even if it causes milder illness, can still risk precipitating the failure of our health care system. Collective actions over the coming weeks — the distribution and use of high-quality masks, staying home if not feeling well and getting vaccinated or a booster if eligible — could help prevent hospitals and health care workers from sliding into crisis. It’s not March 2020. But it shouldn’t have to be for us to take this seriously.

I am thankful every day for the vaccines and the N95s and the fact that I have enough freedom to pick and choose whether I’m going to be around a lot of people right now. I know that’s a lot tougher for many people. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about the fact that we have many millions of unvaccinated people, including kids, and this thing is spreading so fast and so widely that it’s on the verge of collapsing the health care system. Even if you think the unvaccinated deserve what they get, the other people who are sick and can’t get care certainly do not.

If things go well, this thing will flame out quickly and we really can resume a more normal existence. In the meantime we all have to do our part to ensure that there are fewer unnecessary deaths. One of them could be yours.

What. An. Unmitigated. Asshole:

There are a number of things that make Donald Trump happy when he thinks of Jan. 6, and the long-term consequences of the riot. But it’s the anguish and trauma that has really sparked his joy.

In the full year since the deadly, Trump-inspired assault on the U.S. Capitol, several lawmakers, police officers, and reporters who were there have publicly opened up about the lingering distress they still feel stemming from the anti-democratic violence and body count of the day.

According to three people with direct knowledge of the matter, the twice-impeached former president has noticed the emotional accounts, particularly that from Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Some he has found annoying. Others, however, have become targets of mockery and casual hilarity for him.

In several conversations with close allies over the past 12 months, Trump has repeatedly made fun of the idea that certain legislators, police, or journalists were traumatized by the violent events of the day, according to these sources. There are moments when the ex-president has speculated that his critics are “faking” their trauma and anxiety, for attention. Other times, he’s done poor, whining impersonations of perceived enemy lawmakers crying about the riot.

Trump’s callousness toward his real and perceived enemies, no matter the level of trauma inflicted, is standard fare for Trump: a man who built much of his political legacy and appeal by demagoguing and viciously smearing those who speak out against him. For example, despite his frequent claims about “backing the blue,” Trump privately referred to some of the police officers who were at the Capitol that day as “pussies, The Daily Beast previously reported.

This guy:

By contrast:

Dr. Eric Topol says we need to count our blessings. It could be a lot worse:

Now into the third year of the Covid pandemic, it’s beyond disheartening. But there’s another way to look at it that’s far more upbeat, not losing sight of good fortune, invoking the Pollyanna principle: the tendency for people to remember pleasant items more accurately than unpleasant ones.

That it took 10 months from having the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to development of mRNA vaccines and completion of large scale trials with over 70,000 participants —no less with 95% efficacy against symptomatic infections—is historic. For reference, from 1880 to present, the average time it has taken to develop a successful vaccine is nearly 10 years. That’s a best case scenario since for many pathogens, like HIV, we still don’t have a vaccine after many decades. The 95% mRNA vaccine efficacy is a veritable standout as very few vaccines have achieved such a high level.

We’ll never know precisely how many hundreds of thousands of deaths and perhaps millions of hospitalizations that have been prevented by vaccines, but many modeling reports have suggested that to be sizeable.

Already, there’s been more than 9.4 billion doses of vaccines administered throughout the world with remarkable safety, yet quite unevenly distributed among 7.9 billion people. Yes, the “lucky” qualifier applies only to upper and upper middle income countries. Hopefully we’ll see far improved production and distribution in 2022 to achieve the global vaccine equity that must occur to achieve containment and endemicity.

But to continue with the lucky streak, the original vaccines were targeted to the Wuhan ancestral strain’s spike protein from 2019. The spike protein, no less the rest of the original SARS-CoV-2 structure, is almost unrecognizable now in the form of the Omicron strain (see antigenic drift from prior post). While there’s naturally been much focus on the extraordinary number of mutations in the receptor binding domain and the rest of the spike protein, over 50 mutations are spread out throughout Omicron, making the prior major variants of concern (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta) lightweights with respect to changes in structure that are not just linear or uni-dimensional. Each mutation can interact with others (epistasis); any mutation or combination of mutations has the potential to change the 3D structure of the virus. In this sense, Omicron is an overwhelming reboot of the ancestral strain.

So why are we “lucky” with respect to Omicron? Clearly the immunity wall that has been built by vaccinations, boosters, and prior infections has lessened the hit. That does not appear to be playing out nearly as well in the United States as it has in Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Israel, and the United Kingdom to date because vaccination and booster rates are much lower.

Beyond the immunity wall, there is now abundant evidence from both clinical and experimental studies that Omicron infections are less severe. That does not mean this strain is incapable of killing or inducing severe disease. It can and does. But the aggregate evidence so far suggests the immunity wall and intrinsic properties of the virus are associated with about 50-70% less severe disease. With all the mutations, it certainly would have been possible for Omicron to be more virulent and induce more severe disease.

It’s not just the fastest development of highly effective and safe vaccines, not just the less severity of the hyper-mutated Omicron that we should consider ourselves lucky. There’s another big reason. Our vaccines, with a third shot, are holding up remarkably well. In 2020, the original mRNA vaccines had 95% efficacy vs symptomatic infections at 2 months of follow-up, and a similar efficacy vs hospitalizations and deaths. Now in 2022, with such a substantially distinct strain of the virus, a 3rd shot of mRNA vaccine restores the waned effectiveness across all age groups from 52 to 88%. And also from the United Kingdom Health Security Agency new data that shows in the high risk group of people age 65+, the vaccine effectiveness at 2 months from the booster vs hospitalizations was 94%. The decline at more than 10 weeks was to 89%, which is in keeping with the original vaccine attrition over time. These are of course point estimates and the 95% confidence intervals can be found in the links. Nevertheless, this level of effectiveness of 3-shots of the original vaccine vs Omicron, in consideration of its extensive evolution, is nothing short of extraordinary. And lucky.

If there were enough vaccines for everyone around the world to get the protection equivalent of 3-shots, and people took them, the pandemic would be over now. That’s indeed the unfortunate part—that in countries such as the United States the uptake of vaccination and boosters has been so profoundly disappointing and has even led to anti-vaxxers and many others claiming the vaccines don’t work. When in fact their protection from the biggest challenge we’ve had to date—the strain with the outlier immune escape property—is still quite powerful.

A major explanation for why the vaccines with a 3rd/booster shot have held up so well has little to do with vaccine ingenuity, but rather our immune response, with broadening recognition by our on-demand, memory T cells and specialist B cells, as explained previously.

To recap, the list of luck:

✓ Highly effective and safe vaccines achieved at the highest velocity in history

✓ Omicron has less clinical and experimental severity

✓ A third shot vaccine provides equivalent very high protection vs Omicron as 2-shots did against the original strain vs hospitalizations and severe disease

✓ The human cellular immune response is remarkable

To add to this list, I go back to the development of Paxlovid, the first pill/drug specifically designed to attack SARS-CoV-2. This complex small molecule, which blocks the virus’s main protease and its replication, moved through development to successful placebo-controlled clinical trials in less than 2 years. That, in itself, for a new molecular entity, is parallel to the unprecedented velocity of the success of Covid vaccines. A reminder that most new molecular entities fail in clinical trials—when they work so well and are this safe there’s some element of luck involved. I called it a “just-in-time” breakthrough because, in the context of Omicron, unlike vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, it does not rely on our immune system at all. The problem we have now is its very short supply, which could have been pre-empted had there been large orders made last summer when it wasn’t known whether the drug would work or be safe. Nevertheless, its production and availability will ramp up in the next few months and the drug likely will fulfill its promise as the second most important medical advance after vaccines for the pandemic. For that we also need global pill equity.

We’re all weary and sick of Covid. Omnipresent infections from Omicron have added a rough chapter to this ordeal. But let’s not forget there’s a lot to be thankful for. And that we will eventually prevail over the virus.

I think we needed to hear this today, don’t you?

Everyone surely remembers Donald Trump’s appeals to “law and order” going all the way back to his infamous full-page ad condemning the (innocent) Central Park Five titled “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Policetroops .” When he ran for office he sought out law enforcement at all levels as a discrete constituency, promising to let them take the gloves off and encouraging them to not “be so nice” to suspects. During the George Floyd protests during the summer of 2020, he told federal law enforcement and military leaders he wanted them to “crack skulls” and “beat the shit out of” the protesters. At one point he said, “just shoot them.” Luckily, they didn’t do that. It took a devoted Trump-loving vigilante named Kyle Rittenhouse to execute that order.

Until the January 6th insurrection, Trump was the nation’s most vociferous defender of police. But on that day he was strangely reserved, tepidly tweeting that the rioters should be respectful but pretty much remaining hands-off for hours as his rabid followers stormed the U.S. Capitol and assaulted hundreds of police who were trying to keep the mob from attacking members of Congress. That night he said the violent horde that did the following was very special and that he loved them.

New video of the Capitol assault, obtained by @CBSNews from the body cam of D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, shows him being pulled into a crowd of rioters before being tased and beaten unconscious. He suffered a heart attack and brain injury. pic.twitter.com/9daa15dPTX

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) June 24, 2021

You would have thought that this abject betrayal of Trump’s supposed fealty to the men in uniform would have shaken their faith in him. But according to this new profile of former D.C Metropolitan police officer (and Trump voter) Michael Fanone by Molly Ball of TIME, most of his former colleagues on the force remain devoted to Trump. Fanone came forward to publicly speak out about what happened in order to stand up for the police who were attacked that day. It didn’t occur to him that the police themselves wouldn’t back him:

Maybe officers like him and Dunn, who wanted Trump held accountable, were the exception. Watching the body-cam footage again, he noticed how many cops were standing around, kibitzing with the rioters. He thought of his MPD colleagues: out of more than 3,000 on duty, about 850 had responded to the Capitol. What about all the others?

Ball continues: 

Where was his backup? Where was the police union, which rushed to the defense of any officer criticized by left-wing politicians? The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020, had issued a lukewarm statement on Jan. 6 urging “everyone involved to reject the use of violence and to obey the orders of law enforcement officers to ensure that these events are brought to a swift and peaceable end.” Numerous active-duty FOP members have since been charged in connection with the riot. In at least one case, the union is trying to keep an accused rioter from being fired by his department…

Colleagues he’s known for decades don’t talk to him anymore. Guys who never called to check in when he was in the hospital send him taunting memes about his liberal-darling status.

Fanone thought he was speaking for his fellow officers. But he wasn’t. And he asks himself today, “the vast majority of police officers—would they have been on the other side of those battle lines?”

That is the question, isn’t it? The police on duty that day were protecting members of Congress from a violent mob that was trying to stop the transfer of power. And there is ambivalence among cops about whether that was the right thing to do? That’s chilling.

And it isn’t just the police. Trump’s love for men in uniform wasn’t confined to law enforcement. He saw the military as a constituency too and was very popular among the troops. In fact, he was so popular that a number of active duty military were among the rioters on January 6th. Many are also members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right group of former and current military and law enforcement.

Last month the Pentagon released new guidelines on how to deal with extremism in the ranks, which they now realize is a growing problem. The Washington Post reported that the University of Maryland consortium “released a report last month showing that since 1990, 458 crimes tied to extremism involved veterans or active-duty U.S. troops.” In fact, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil before 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, was carried out by a military veteran who had been radicalized while on duty and later joined a far-right militia group.

The military really doesn’t have any idea how widespread this problem is.

When you consider that someone like former Gen. Michael Flynn, a far-right conspiracy theorist and Trump’s first national security adviser was in charge of Military Intelligence just a few years ago, it’s clear this problem is not confined to the rank and file. There are probably quite a few extremists among the active duty brass as well.

So once again this raises the question, what if it happens again? Three retired generals wrote an op-ed recently asking that very question. They note the participation of active duty and retired personnel in the January 6th insurrection as well as a number of retired flag officers who have signed on in support of Trump. And they offered this hair-raising scenario as a possibility:

The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad level — is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the “rightful” commander in chief cannot be dismissed…

All service members take an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution. But in a contested election, with loyalties split, some might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.

The prospect of members of law enforcement agencies and the military breaking off into rogue commands seems like something out of a political thriller. And it’s probably not very likely. But then the election of Donald Trump was unlikely as was the insurrection of January 6th. I would have thought it unlikely that police officers would defend a vicious mob beating other cops with flagpoles or that active duty military would boldly participate in it. We all should recognize by now that anything can happen. 

Salon

Customers arriving at closing time is rarely welcome for restaurant workers. (I know.) But arriving in the suburbs, hungry, after a late flight, and in the middle of a pandemic is no fun for travelers either. Jason Steinhauer found himself among the latter just before Christmas in Nashville. A Thai restaurant with its lights still on re-opened its door and offered to cook one last entre for him.

The pandemic had been tough on them, they said. The closures. The delayed deliveries. But the worst was finding help: servers, cooks, sushi chefs. Steinhauer had heard the same story in Miami, in Washington, D.C., and in Philadelphia and New York. People are dropping out of the labor force.

In November, 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs (Business Insider):

The new data shows that the need for workers stuck around in November, as people left low-paying work at a record rate. Eight months of elevated quits shows that labor shortages and the reshaping of the labor market might be a permanent feature of the post-vaccine economy. The quitting spree says that Americans want better conditions, better pay, and more fulfillment from their jobs.

Steinhauer writes at the Hollywood Progressive:

Anecdotes and media reports cannot fully diagnose such a complex issue. I don’t pretend to know all the answers, and I’m certainly not an economist or a sociologist. Yet, in beginning to wrap my mind around this phenomenon, I couldn’t help but think about my own experience. For four years, I worked at an institution that showed little concern for its employees. Mold in offices went un-remediated. Water leaking into people’s work spaces went un-repaired. Harassment, abuse and anti-Semitism festered. During the pandemic, before a vaccine was available, some staff were told to report to work and sign waivers stating that if they contracted COVID-19 they would not pursue legal action against the employer. After years of such treatment, my wife and I decided 2020 would be my final year. The pandemic had made it crystal clear to us: why should I work endlessly and tirelessly, risking my health and well-being, for an institution that cared so little about me?

I’ve heard similar refrains from people in many walks of life over the past two years. Harassment and abuse seem to be common in academia, government, hospitals, schools, law firms, tech companies, construction firms and service jobs. Employees are constantly mistreated and released by management seemingly without compunction. When the pandemic hit and people were told to stay home, receiving unemployment checks and stimulus payments to do so, many decided not to return. Some pundits have dubbed this the “Great Resignation.” But I suspect something more profound may be going on.

“America’s unrelenting capitalism” is what’s going on:

People have been working more and earning less. Union protections have been degraded (see previous History Club newsletter). Wages have been stagnant. Health insurance has become more expensive. Increased housing costs, increased student loans and increased medical bills have diminished people’s abilities to save, invest and retire. All the while employees are asked to work longer hours and produce more. Meanwhile, CEOs and venture capitalists flaunt $1 billion dollar valuations and record-breaking IPOs. Amazon workers fought tooth-and-nail to earn $15 an hour; meanwhile Jeff Bezos spent more than $500 million per year to blast celebrities into space. Something isn’t adding up.

The American Dream has become an American scam. In support of the lie, conservative pundits will complain that government supports are to blame. Stop coddling these slackers! We need to apply the invisible backhand of the marketplace to people worried that their work will make their children orphans. Cut ’em off! Institute means-testing! Drive workers back into the labor force so the entrepreneurs can thrive!

What’s next? Forced labor? If it’s what the money wants. The last thing “unrelenting capitalism” wants is to treat and pay employees better.

The Great Resignation adds noise to economic signals, especially regarding unemployment, that under Joe Biden the economy is going gangbusters. Eric Boehlert at PressRun:

The U.S. economy just set the record for the most jobs created in one year, but you’d never know it from the continuing doomsday economic coverage under President Joe Biden.

The new jobs report, released Friday, offered the latest evidence of the purposeful disconnect the media maintain, and specifically how journalists rely on consistently unreliable “expectations” for job report numbers in order to portray the results as “disappointing,” and to paint a picture of a faltering U.S. economy even as it shatters growth records.

The U.S. economy just posted 199,000 new jobs in December, during a pandemic surge. That sounds like a good thing, right? Especially considering that in December 2020, under Trump and during another wintertime pandemic surge, the U.S. lost 140,000 jobs. Instead, the press was uniformly pessimistic about Friday’s news.

It was a “major disappointment,” CNN announced, despite the fact employee wages hit record heights and the unemployment rate tumbled to 3.9 percent. (Last winter, the CBO predicted it would take five years for the U.S. to reach an unemployment rate that low.) NPR stressed the US added “only” 199,000 jobs. Hiring had “faltered” the New York Times reported. All because the key number failed to meet estimates.

What’s missing are acknowledgements that experts’ predictions that were always iffy are even more so amidst a global pandemic. Economic reporting and government accounting have not adjusted.

It’s a one-two combo: The BLS is regularly undercounting jobs, which is bad news for the White House, and economists are regularly overestimating what the monthly BLS jobs number will be, which is also bad news for the White House. Then when the BLS revises the monthly gains, the media are nowhere to be found.

Even the Great Resignation is a kind of good news … for workers. But except for the MAGA-hatted, disgruntled rural diner crowd, workers earn fewer column inches than captains of industry.

There’s also the lingering suspicion that the press simply likes to tell bad economic news — and hide upbeat newsflashes — during the Biden years. Just look at this pretzel-logic headline from the Washington Post yesterday, “2021 Shattered Job Market Records, But It’s Not as Good as it Looks.”

Bad News Bearers gonna bear bad news.

“Political obsessives” is colorful enough. Ezra Klein cites the description from “Politics Is for Power” (2020) by Eitan Hersh. They are people who refresh-refresh their Twitter feed and flip over to Facebook to see what’s popped up there in the last few minutes, then run to the kitchen to tell the family what’s happened in the last hour.

Hersh calls it “political hobbyism.” Real politics is something else, Klein agrees:

Real political work, for Hersh, is the intentional, strategic accumulation of power in service of a defined end. It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage. This distinction is on my mind because, like so many others, I’ve spent the week revisiting the attempted coup of Jan. 6, marinating in my fury toward the Republicans who put fealty toward Donald Trump above loyalty toward country and the few but pivotal Senate Democrats who are proving, day after day, that they think the filibuster more important than the franchise. Let me tell you, the tweets and columns I drafted in my head were searing.

But fury is useful only as fuel. We need a Plan B for democracy. Plan A was to pass H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Neither bill, as of now, has a path to President Biden’s desk. I’ve found that you provoke a peculiar anger if you state this, as if admitting the problem were the cause of the problem. I fear denial has left many Democrats stuck on a national strategy with little hope of near-term success. In order to protect democracy, Democrats have to win more elections. And to do that, they need to make sure the country’s local electoral machinery isn’t corrupted by the Trumpist right.

And by elections he does not mean federal ones, the marquee races that earn coverage on broadcast and cable news networks. The ones that need the most attention are the unsexy races at the state and local level. If for no other reason than that while progressives flail about and throw money at doomed, high-profile races, Republicans, as they’ve done with school board races, look for the easy pickups where real power lies. Potentially, with the power to corrupt future elections.

There are people working on a Plan B. This week, I half-jokingly asked Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, what it felt like to be on the front lines of protecting American democracy. He replied, dead serious, by telling me what it was like. He spends his days obsessing over mayoral races in 20,000-person towns, because those mayors appoint the city clerks who decide whether to pull the drop boxes for mail-in ballots and small changes to electoral administration could be the difference between winning Senator Ron Johnson’s seat in 2022 (and having a chance at democracy reform) and losing the race and the Senate. Wikler is organizing volunteers to staff phone banks to recruit people who believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers, because Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers.

I’ve written before that every other new activist who wanders into our local headquarters wants to do messaging. They’re going to write the white paper that will remake Democratic politics nationwide. Some never return when they find out the real work is grunt work: knocking doors, making phone calls, organizing a fundraiser. Klein cites a quote often attributed to Gen. Omar Bradley: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. 

I suppose that makes me a professional. I’m working now to get out the 4th edition of my get-out-the-vote (GOTV) primer for county committees.* No strategy, no targeting, no messaging. It’s the nuts-and-bolts mechanics behind assembling a coordinated, countywide GOTV and electioneering effort, especially for the kind of under-resourced small counties Wikler’s obsessing over.

Granted, ours is one of the ten largest counties in the state: 660 square miles, 270,000 residents, 200,000 registered voters, 80 Election-Day precincts, 15-20 early voting sites open for 2-1/2 weeks, and perhaps 36 Democrats on a presidential-year ballot. Over two-thirds of the vote is cast before Election Day. We put two volunteers on two-hour shifts outside each early-voting location (over 2,000 shifts) to greet voters, answer questions, hand out sample ballots, and report problems. Those volunteers have to be recruited, trained, scheduled, supplied, resupplied, and sometimes debriefed. That’s not strategy. That’s logistics. And we’re damned good at it.

Who in the whole friggin’ country trains inexperienced county committee leaders how to do all that? You’re reading him.

“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results.

Those first-time candidates Litman supports rely on county committee infrastructure — if it exists — to support her candidates. One of her campaigns might have to compete for resources in my county with 35 others. Having that local support is the difference between winning and losing.

“Democratic major donors like to fund the flashy things,” Litman told me. “Presidential races, Senate races, super PACs, TV ads. Amy McGrath can raise $90 million to run against Mitch McConnell in a doomed race, but the number of City Council and school board candidates in Kentucky who can raise what they need is …” She trailed off in frustration.

Yup. And those local races matter. Ask Lina Hidalgo, age 30:

Lina Hidalgo ran for county judge in Harris County, Texas, after the 2016 election. Trump’s campaign had appalled her, and she wanted to do something. “I learned about this position that had flown under the radar for a very long time,” she told me. “It was the type of seat that only ever changed who held it when the incumbent died or was convicted of a crime. But it controls the budget for the county. Harris County is nearly the size of Colorado in population, larger than 28 states. It’s the budget for the hospital system, roads, bridges, libraries, the jail. And part of that includes funding the electoral system.”

If you heard about Hidalgo fighting state Republicans over drive-in voting in Harris County in 2020, it is clear: those small races matter.

Wikler knows:

“If you want to fight for the future of American democracy, you shouldn’t spend all day talking about the future of American democracy,” Wikler said. “These local races that determine the mechanics of American democracy are the ventilation shaft in the Republican death star. These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20 percent. That means people who actually engage have a superpower. You, as a single dedicated volunteer, might be able to call and knock on the doors of enough voters to win a local election.”

My state representative retires at the end of this month after 18 years. Under state law, members of the local executive committee of her political party and from her district name someone to fill the remainder of her term. That’s roughly 60 people out of about 70,000 registered voters in her district. Last Thursday night, we elected a former Peace Corps volunteer to recommend to the governor for appointment. He won with 43 votes. Showing up is a superpower.

*Look closely at the gray counties on the map above. Except for a couple of New England states, they represent counties either lacking Democratic committees or else having no discernable web presence.

UPDATE: I just caught this related post about the future plans of “Stop the Stealers” from Tim Miller at The Bulwark:

In 2022 they aim to put so many of their people in positions of power throughout state and local governments that next time there will be nothing anyone can do to stop their quest for power. And this crusade is infused with an unmistakable religious fervor and appeal to a quasi-Christian nationalism that calls it devotees into action.

As crazy as their show may sound on its face—and let me tell you it seems very crazy—anyone who cares about American democracy should take that prospect very seriously indeed.

It set the narrative and now people can’t see this:

The signal amidst the inflation hysteria noise (https://t.co/WgJcz4dun7).

It's nearly impossible to overstate how good this news is, or how insane the obsession over modest inflation that may last two years is for such a remarkable & total labor market recovery this time around. https://t.co/Ac2trQQd9A pic.twitter.com/YwSh1EzvqJ

— Mark Copelovitch (@mcopelov) January 7, 2022

Referring to the front page above James Fallows explained why this is so pernicious:

The parts in red illustrate the amount of above-the-fold coverage—ie, most of it—given to a jump in inflation rates. This mirrored the emphasis in most other papers and in broadcast outlets and discussion shows.

Below, from December 10, one day earlier, are the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the lead business page of the Times. Again, the part in red is about inflation worries. The headline over two related NYT stories is, “Inflation Gut-Punches Millennials.”

And that little below-the-fold box highlighted in blue, on the Journal’s front page? That’s a story on the lowest U.S. unemployment filings in more than 50 years. The headline reads, “Tight Labor Market Sends Jobless Claims to New Low.”

The placement, emphasis, and “play” of stories is how people in the media signal what they consider most important. I’m not offering these pages as precise scientific proof. But I contend that they fit a general recent pattern of emphasis from the “serious” media: placing vastly more stress on the threat of inflation, which indeed is getting worse, than on the evil of unemployment, which is getting much better. (For more about this pattern of coverage, see Eric Boehlert among others.)

As a reminder: current U.S. job prospects are not simply “better” when judged on the historical curve, with these record-low unemployment claims. They are almost unbelievably better, in light of the sudden loss of more than 20 million U.S. jobs in just one month last year, as the pandemic took hold. After the April, 2020 jobs report came out, a university research center issued a report headlined “U.S. job losses due to COVID-19 highest since Great Depression.” That’s what the news was like less than two years ago.

If you were a future historian, assessing what economic trends the leading media in late 2021 felt should command attention, it would be an easy call. The media of our time are telling us to worry more about inflation. I think they are wrong.

Why does it matter that worsening inflation gets so much more play than dramatically improving job prospects?

—There’s an obvious national-politics answer, which is that this emphasis makes people “feel worse” than they should about overall economic trends. This in turn makes them feel more cynical and fatalistic about the chance of progress on any policy front. It’s related to the long-term pattern of U.S. crime rates going down, but fear of crime going up.

—For those in economist-land, there’s the intensifying discussion about the “transitory” versus the “persistent” nature of this moment’s inflation. And about how the relationship between unemployment and inflation rates has changed, since the era when I learned about the Phillips curve in grad-school economics courses long ago.

But to me, the “human” importance of the mismatch matters most, and it spills over into the media-related, political, and economic dimensions. The over-emphasis on inflation numbers, relative to employment trends, blurs the fact that while both are problems, for the people living through it unemployment is much worse.

Inflation erodes a family’s purchasing power. Unemployment eliminates it.

That makes a huge difference.

It’s not just about purchasing power, as important as that is. It’s also about worker power, personal power. People have choices right now. After years of worker insecurity in the wake of the financial crisis, they finally have some options. It should be a good news story and it would be if the mainstream media would look at the big picture instead of following the lead of right wing propaganda.

This is the state of the eduction system. Let’s just say that a couple of weeks of virtual learning is the least of our problem:

Indiana state Sen. Scott Baldwin said he wasn’t clear when he said a bill he filed at the Indiana Statehouse would require teachers to be impartial in their teaching of all subjects, including during lessons about Nazism, Marxism and fascism.

During a committee hearing Wednesday about Senate Bill 167, a wide-ranging bill inspired by the national discourse over critical race theory, history teacher Matt Bockenfeld raised concerns about what the bill would require of teachers. He gave what he thought was an extreme example.

“For example, it’s the second semester of U.S. history, so we’re learning about the rise of fascism and the rise of Nazism right now,” Bockenfeld said. “And I’m just not neutral on the political ideology of fascism. We condemn it, and we condemn it in full, and I tell my students the purpose, in a democracy, of understanding the traits of fascism is so that we can recognize it and we can combat it.”

Bockenfeld said that, even if it wasn’t the intent of the bill, he was afraid it would require teachers to be neutral on all topics.

“Of course, we’re neutral on political issues of the day,” he said. “We don’t stand up and say who we voted for or anything like that. But we’re not neutral on Nazism. We take a stand in the classroom against it, and it matters that we do.”

Baldwin, a Republican from Noblesville, said that may be going too far.

Baldwin said he doesn’t discredit Marxism, Nazism, fascism or “any of those isms out there.”

“I have no problem with the education system providing instruction on the existence of those isms,” he said. “I believe that we’ve gone too far when we take a position on those isms …  We need to be impartial.”

Baldwin said that even though he is with Bockenfeld “on those particular isms,” teachers should “just provide the facts.”

“I’m not sure it’s right for us to determine how that child should think and that’s where I’m trying to provide the guardrails,” Baldwin said.

He later said that he meant to ensure teachers are being impartial when discussing “legitimate political groups” which would mean that he thinks Marxism, Nazism and fascism are legitimate political groups in America. He mentioned them specifically.

Basically, he believes that teachers should teach toxic ideologies for young people to evaluate on their own without context or common sense. What a good idea.

MAGA isn’t just an old people’s movement by any means. This woman went “undercover” at MAGA events over the last year and this is her main takeaway:

Moore’s main takeaway after her time undercover was that “there’s a rise of right-wing populism among the under-30 crowd that’s incredibly alarming to me… I really worry about it.

“I really just can never stress enough, like the rise of like the younger populist fascists. And like I said, everybody, under 35, I met who was at the Capitol says, ‘We did it. That was us.’ And they accept it and they’re like, ‘It would’ve been cooler if we had gotten further.’ And, like, ‘The Founding Fathers would be proud of us.’”

Sure, let’s be “neutral” about Nazis. Good idea. Just don’t let anyone teach about slavery. That would be wrong.

Sad!

After a disastrous day in court on Thursday, the company behind Arizona’s chaotic Maricopa County election “audit” is disbanding, and now some rightwing fans are furiously wondering if it was all just a big scam.

Cyber Ninjas, a small Florida-based cybersecurity firm, was always a controversial choice to handle Maricopa County voters’ ballots. The company had no elections experience and its founder, Doug Logan, was involved in promoting 2020 election fraud hoaxes online. When it finally released its findings this fall, Cyber Ninjas found President Joe Biden did indeed win the election. But the group did not turn over court-ordered materials, and on Thursday a judge ordered Cyber Ninjas to pay $50,000 for every day it continues to withhold the documents. That night, the company announced its disbandment, reportedly laying off all employees.

“Cyber Ninjas is shutting down,” spokesperson Rod Thompson told NBC on Thursday. “All employees have been let go.” The group’s lawyer, Jack Wilenchik, also told the Associated Press that the company had laid off all its employees and was now insolvent.

The move comes as a blow to audit dead-enders who have long insisted that Cyber Ninjas secretly has proof of Donald Trump’s 2020 victory—but who are now smearing the group as “grifters.”

Since the audit’s launch this spring, Cyber Ninjas claimed to run the operation with radical transparency, sharing live streams of auditors as they flipped through stacks of ballots. The livestreams attracted an online community on messaging platforms like Telegram. Some of those Telegram channels were less than pleased with Cyber Ninjas’ dissolution on Thursday.

“FAKES,” complained one member of an Arizona audit channel. “SOAB [son of a bitch], all they care about is $.”

Cyber Ninjas did rake in the cash over the course of the months-long audit. In July, the company disclosed more than $5.7 million in donations from fans. Meanwhile, the group’s audit was a mess, going millions over budget and months over deadline, during which time audit managers appeared in conspiracy documentaries about the election and were accused of ignoring sexual harassment.

But the group also made a costly error when they refused to turn over court-ordered records, which the newspaper the Arizona Republic sought via a public information request. During a contempt of court hearing on Thursday, the Republic requested a $1,000-per-day sanction until Cyber Ninjas handed over the documents. Maricopa Superior Court Judge John Hannah called $1,000 “grossly insufficient” and upped the sanction to $50,000 a day.

“It is lucidly clear on this record that Cyber Ninjas has disregarded that order,” Hannah said on Thursday.

Hannah also cast doubt on the notion that a newly defunct Cyber Ninjas would be unable to produce the documents. “The court is not going to accept the assertion that Cyber Ninjas is an empty shell and that no one is responsible for seeing that it complies,” Hannah said.

Wilenchick told the AP that the group would not produce the documents because it could no longer afford to retrieve them. Hannah, however, warned that the $50,000 sanctions would begin on Friday, and were applicable to individuals, not just the now-defunct company.

Some Cyber Ninjas fans expressed confusion over the group’s lack of transparency.

“Why won’t they release their documents?” one wrote on Telegram, when others bemoaned the $50,000-a-day sanction.

Another audit-watcher noted that the money Cyber Ninjas supposedly needs to retrieve the documents would be “a drop in the bucket compared to the amount they’ve spent fighting having to produce these records, in court. But then, ‘give us more money to show you how we spent your other money’, is an entirely predictable grift.”

Other fans urged caution. “We really do not have all the facts, though, do we?” one wrote. “If we do get a hold of the fact, and their actions do turn out to be those of grifters, then, by all means, call them grifters.”

They are grifters, kids. Now go back and take a look at your Dear Leader’s incessant lying about this audit and ask yourself if you’ve really been had.

But they won’t…

Diehard fans of Cyber Ninjas and the Arizona audit have long maintained that the group could prove Trump won Maricopa County. Although Cyber Ninjas’ final audit report ultimately found that Biden won more Maricopa County votes than Trump, its leaders implied that their audit had revealed alarming voter fraud. They later alleged 77 instances of supposed voter fraud, 76 of which were debunked by Arizona officials on Thursday. (The final, an instance of a small ballot double-count, was upheld.)

Following Cyber Ninjas’ disastrous court appearance on Thursday, some conspiracy theorists took to the airwaves to claim that the Maricopa County audit found fraud, but that incompetant audit officials had bungled their report.

In a Thursday night web broadcast, election conspiracy promoter Shiva Ayyadurai blasted Jovan Pulitzer, another conspiracy theorist and alleged failed treasure hunter, who claimed to find “kinematic artifacts” that proved fraud in Maricopa County ballots.

“There’s no kinematic artifact detection. It’s purely a regurgitation of the Maricopa report,” Ayyadurai lamented of Pulitzer’s report. He still clings to the idea that there was voter fraud in Maricopa County, but trashed Pulitzer’s involvement in the audit as a scam.

“If you’re funding this, I feel that you’re being victimized,” he said.

Audit records show that Ayyadurai twice worked on the Maricopa County audit: once in the employ of Cyber Ninjas, and once for the Arizona State Senate. Ayyadurai, who has blamed his own election loss on supposed voter fraud, went on to accuse Pulitzer of souring state officials’ opinions of the audit.

“If they get crap like this, they’re going to think this entire audit was just garbage,” he said.

It was garbage.