Month: March 2022

As we begin Day 3 of confirmation hearings for SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, it is clear that questioning in the Judiciary Committee by either party has little to do with interrogating a nominee’s record or judicial philosophy. But they are a test of her/his judicial temperament. Jackson has the patience of Job.

Even as I type this, Sen. John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, is whining that Democrats are choosing to use their time to editorialize on and debunk the wild allegations/suggestions made by Republicans speaking just before them. Republicans are using their time to pander to QAnon and to attempt to generate sound bites for Fox News. That’s the choice they’ve made.

Paul Waldman summarizes the GOP’s performance as “yet another forum for Republicans to claim victim status” (Washington Post):

As conservatives have learned well in recent years, in the right circumstances, adopting the stance of victimhood can be thrilling, particularly if you don’t have to suffer any actual victimization along the way. You can take the normal unpleasantness that comes with politics — having people disagree with you, or watching as a figure you admire gets criticized in ways you consider unfair — and turn it into something noble, profound, even epic.

Are people calling me a jerk for something repugnant I said? I’m not a jerk, I’m a victim of cancel culture, persecuted for my devotion to free expression! Are people opposing my legislation to ban books and target the families of transgender kids? I’m a victim of the woke mob! Proclaim yourself a victim and not only do you become the hero of the story, you can claim moral absolution for your own grimy choices.

It has been quite a circus by Republicans led by Sen. Lindsey Graham who assured Americans it would not be.

Ted Cruz makes “oleaginous” seem oleaginous. When the Texas senator brought out posters from children’s picture books during his questioning, I swore he was about to launch into another dramatic reading, à la “Green Eggs and Ham.“

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The violent Jan. 6 insurrection. White-male bluster about civil war. The efforts in Republican-controlled legislatures to render elections a sham. The fog of lies in which perhaps a third of Americans wrap themselves. The fringe-right defense of Vladimir Putin and his Ukraine invasion, and the fringe left’s parroting of Kremlin talking points to insist blame for his murdering civilians rests with the U.S., NATO, and the E.U.

A January poll found that 64% of Americans believe the U.S. is a democracy “in crisis and at risk of failing.” In another from December, 51% agreed with the statement that “U.S. democracy is at risk of extinction.” A year after Donald Trump’s failed coup attempt, Congress has failed to shore up the Voting Rights Act and failed to turn back efforts in the states to institute minority rule clothed as democracy. “Is this what it looks like when a democracy dies and nobody cares?” asked Zack Beauchamp at Vox months before the Ukraine invasion. Democracy needs defending and ours was missing in action last year.

All presage the slow death in plain sight of American democracy.* Democratic governance is at risk here and abroad from the rise of authoritarian movements. A report last year by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) found “the number of democracies backsliding into authoritarianism has doubled in the past decade, including EU states Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. People in those three countries are among the two-thirds of the world’s citizens living in backsliding democracies or under autocratic regimes.” Ours is among the backsliders.

And then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky and his Ukrainian army and irregulars stand now as democracy’s standard bearers while established democracies flail. Theirs is not a defense of democracy scripted in Hollywood, composed in Nashville, or splayed across self-described patriots’ tee shirts. It is not an abstract, intellectual defense. It is real. It is bloody. Three million people and counting have fled Ukraine.

A democracy booster shot

Anne Applebaum makes the case in The Atlantic that Ukraine’s defense of democracy is our own:

The Ukrainians, and especially their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, have made their cause a global one by arguing that they fight for a set of universal ideas—for democracy, yes, but also for a form of civic nationalism, based on patriotism and a respect for the rule of law; for a peaceful Europe, where disputes are resolved by institutions and not warfare; for resistance to dictatorship. Zelensky has urged Americans to remember Pearl Harbor. He appealed to the German Parliament with the phrase “Never again”—a mantra used to mean that no Hitler would be allowed to arise again—and told members that, in light of the brutal war in his country, those words are now “worthless.” He called on the European Parliament to “prove that you indeed are Europeans” and admit Ukraine to the European Union.

This language is effective because it evokes the principles that bind together the majority of Europeans, Americans, and many other people around the world, reminding them of how much worse the world was in the bloodier past, and how much worse it could be in the future if those principles no longer matter. The words Zelensky uses also reverberate because they are true. A victory for Ukraine really will be a victory for all who believe in democracy and the rule of law. Citizens of existing democracies and members of the democratic opposition in Russia, Cuba, Belarus, and Hong Kong will all be emboldened. “Their struggle is ours,” a Venezuelan acquaintance told me last week. The institutions protecting the states that embody those ideas, most notably the European Union and NATO, will be strengthened too.

At a moment when democracy needs defending in many countries, Ukrainians have no choice but to defend it where they live.

The democratic resurgence, if it comes, will be sparked not by a new infectious agent but a familiar one. Putin’s Russia could trigger a democratic immune response. If we refuse the booster, Russia means to reorder the global body politic. Russia’s foreign minister assures us the war in Ukraine is “a battle over what the world order will look like.” Applebaum offers a foretaste.

Already, the Russian occupation of some eastern-Ukrainian towns resembles the Soviet occupation of Central Europe at the end of World War II. Public officials and civic leaders—mayors and police but also members of Parliament, journalists, museum curators—have been arrested and not seen since. Civilians have been terrorized at random. In Mariupol, authorities report that citizens are being forcibly deported to Russia, just as Soviet secret police deported Balts, Poles, and others to Russia after the invasions of 1939 and 1945. In the case of a Russian victory, these tactics would be applied all over Ukraine, creating mass terror, mass violence, and instability for years to come. And, yes, if we accept that outcome, autocrats from Minsk to Caracas to Beijing will take note: Genocide is now allowed.

Precisely because the stakes are so high, the next few weeks will be extremely dangerous. Putin will do what he can to create fear. The extraordinary speech he made last week, describing Russian critics of the war as “scum,” “traitors,” and “gnats,” had exactly that purpose. He spoke of Russia’s need for “self-purification” using a word with the same root as purge, the term that Stalin used when ordering the liquidation of his enemies. Putin is deliberately evoking the worst and bloodiest era of Soviet history to avoid even a hint of domestic opposition. He has just thrown away 30 years of economic gains, 30 years of Russian integration with the outside world, 30 years of investment in order to turn the clock back to the era of his youth—an era that the majority of Russians no longer remember and few wish to see restored. He seems to believe that only elevated levels of fear will prevent them from protesting, once they understand what has happened to their country. He may be right.

The stakes are higher than just Ukraine at a time a significant faction of Americans have rejected democracy for flirtations with strong men.

Those of us who remember the Gulf of Tonkin hoax, the domino theory, and the Vietnam War grew up seeing the U.S. either as misguided, a militaristic aggressor, or worse. We watched George W. Bush invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 because he could. We let our leaders walk free after committing torture. We took actions that destabilized the Middle East, cost hundreds of thousands of civilians their lives, and made refugees of perhaps 4 million, internally and externally. Our hands are not clean. We may never repent, but have we learned?

Putin has not and will not. With our recent history, the U.S. is not exactly the defender of democracy we like to imagine. Right now, that’s Ukraine. If we expect democracy to endure, U.S. military supply is essential. Pray it won’t require more of us. France once aided our revolution. It is our turn to support Ukraine’s democracy if we expect to re-enliven our own.

New Zelensky: working on a visit by Pope Francis to Ukraine. Calls on Ukrainians to keep fighting. “We will not get tired. We rest when we win” pic.twitter.com/Fhl1XTJrSw

— Oliver Carroll (@olliecarroll) March 23, 2022

Under the circumstances, and given Russian crimes listed above, that will require violence. It is not inappropriate to find that abhorrent. I do. But here we are. Weeks ago, Ukrainians who had never fired a weapon were living lives as ordinary as ours. IT workers. Students. Academics. Now they carry Kalashnikov rifles.

I keep returning to a passage from “Perelandra,” the second book in the space trilogy British writer and lay theologian C.S. Lewis wrote during World War II. Protagonist Elwin Ransom is transported to Venus to find it an unpopulated second Eden. But not a biblical copy. The “King” is elsewhere. But Ransom finds a demonic Tempter, the Un-man, and the Lady, an innocent with one thing forbidden to her. Ransom is there to stop a second “fall.” But after days of debating (he is an academic), the Lady has resisted, Ransom is talked dry, and the Un-man, an unsleeping “managed corpse,” has not relented.

“This can’t go on,” Ransom tells himself. The Un-man will wear her down; it is a matter of time. But he has done all he can, Ransom, alone in the dark, says to the Silence:

Hullo! What was this? … His thoughts had stumbled on an idea from which they started back as a man starts back when he has touched a hot poker. But this time the idea was really too childish to entertain. This time it must be a deception, risen from his own mind. It stood to reason that a struggle with the Devil meant a spiritual struggle . . . the notion of a physical combat was only fit for a savage. If only it were as simple as that . . .

If the Lady were to be kept in obedience only by the forcible removal of the Tempter, what was the use of that? What would it prove?

Exhausted at last, Ransom asks, “Lord, why me?” But there was no answer. His presence on the planet was the miracle he was asking for.

“People remember when you get really basic life-and-death morality wrong, and will never trust you again,” Hullabaloo alum David Atkins warned last week. Until Jan. 6, we’d grown comfortable here seeing freedom and democracy as irreversible birthrights purchased by others, their defense an intellectual or political exercise. Many on the left have grown up seeing the U.S. only as a force for imperialism, and violence, in the words of Isaac Asimov’s protagonist, “the last refuge of the incompetent.” But it is the only refuge Ukrainians have left.

* The word itself appears nowhere in the text of the Constitution. In its many references to elections and voting, governance via democracy is implied. Republican senators interrogating Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would conclude from that absence that democracy is not constitutional.

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I was told that this pedophilia attack on Ketanji Brown Jackson was a silly sideshow that nobody takes seriously and we needn’t worry about it. A review of the wingnutosphere tells me that it means a great deal to the right. Dave Weigel gives the background about this strategy:

The White House dismissed it with a joke. A National Review columnist called it a “smear.” And the paid media campaigns against Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court have ignored it completely.

And yet, on Tuesday morning, the first accusation Jackson was asked to respond to was the one first made by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — that she had given sexual predators and people caught with child pornography the most “lenient” sentences she possibly could.

“These are some of the most difficult cases that a judge has to deal with,” Jackson said. “The statute doesn’t say, ‘look only at the guidelines and stop.’ The statute doesn’t say, ‘impose the highest possible penalty for this sickening and egregious crime.’”

Republicans haven’t settled on the best way to use this month’s hearings to damage Democrats, or to stop Jackson from becoming the first Black woman to serve on the highest court. 

But Hawley’s focus on sentencing requirements for child sex offenders comes straight from campaign trail, where cracking down on sexual predators and pornographers is a guaranteed winnerin general elections, especially in law enforcement and judicial races— even when there’s criticism of stings that capture people with no criminal records. 

“I haven’t been able to find a single case where she has had a child porn offender, a pedophile in front of her, where she hasn’t given him the most lenient sentence,” Hawley said in a weekend interview on Fox News. 

Republican politicians and activists have also, increasingly, used the language of child pornography crackdowns to pull sexually explicit books out of school libraries, asking whether the liberals who want this material available to children are “grooming” them for abuse. What might make some Republicans nervous in the Senate Judiciary Committee is a common topic in state politics.

“It’s not an argument supported by conservative elites, and politically it goes against [Mitch] McConnell’s light-touch, ‘keep it classy’ approach,” said Brian Fallon, the founder of Demand Justice, a liberal advocacy group that supported Jackson’s nomination. “It’s a sop to the QAnon element.”

Fallon was referring to a conspiracy theory that Hawley hasn’t endorsed — that political and economic elites, mostly Democrats, are engaged in child sex trafficking and even murder. By focusing on why Jackson did not pursue the maximum available penalty to child sex offenders, conservatives who agreed with Hawley’s strategy said that they were asking for documents from her term on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which could delay the final confirmation vote.

“Judge Jackson’s history of sentencing below guidelines, particularly in cases involving child exploitation, raises legitimate questions about her views on penalties for these crimes,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement on Saturday. At Monday’s hearing, Grassley said that the Sentencing Commission documents could also shed light on Jackson’s interactions with Fallon and his group. But the driving question is whether a judge who did not give the maximum recommended sentence to child sex offenders might have argued, in some document, that the recommendations are too harsh.

“Conservatives are simply asking that Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record at the U.S. Sentencing Commission be released,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the conservative American Principles Project. “Her judicial and public records suggest that she was working to reduce sentences for child porn offenders.”

Since 1990, when Congress first voted to make the possession of child pornography a federal offense, the law has moved toward stiffer penalties, and never toward relaxing them. (Making and distributing child pornography was made a federal crime 13 years earlier.) 

The criticism of Jackson has three components: She wrote a 1996 article on whether it was constitutional to retroactively add sex offenders to a registry, she gave convicts less onerous sentences than the sentencing guidelines allowed, and that her own stance on the guidelines deserves investigation.

“This is a 25-year pet project for Judge Jackson, and it is very, very alarming,” Mike Davis, the founder of the conservative Article III Project, said on a conservative podcast shortly before the hearing. “Of all the issues that she could have taken on in law school, as a sentencing commissioner where she’s setting policy, as a district court judge — why is going easier on people who possess child pornography one of her pet issues?” 

When voters have gotten their say, judges seen as stopping short of the sentencing guidelines have landed in political trouble. Emily Horowitz, an academic who’s written critically of pumped-up sex offender laws, pointed to the fate of Aaron Persky, a California judge who handed down a six-month prison sentence in a college rape case, and was recalled by voters within months. 

The discussion about sentencing guidelines has happened in public, with the U.S. Sentencing Commission studying its own standards and asking whether they should be more nuanced. In a 2012 paper, the commission suggested that “the current guideline produces overly severe sentencing ranges for some offenders, unduly lenient ranges for other offenders, and widespread inconsistent application.” 

That was published during Jackson’s term on the commission. A year later, she was confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and the sentencing guidelines around child pornography never came up. 

But it comes up now, in many ways, from Senate races to school boards to the hearing room. Just last week, after Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) talked to the New York Times about using TikTok to promote his U.S. Senate campaign, Republican candidate J.D. Vance suggested that Ryan was soft on child sexual abuse.

“I know Tim Ryan is backed by the Lincoln Project,” Vance wrote on Twitter, “but maybe he should avoid the Chinese pedophile app.” In 2021, Lincoln Project co-founder John Weaver resigned over sexually explicit messages he’d sent to young men; Ryan campaign spokeswoman Izzy Levy called the tweet “another pathetic attempt at relevance from Silicon Valley Vance.”

In the Senate race, the accusation was that one candidate was not taking child sexual exploitation seriously, and even giving a break to pedophiles. In this week’s hearings, the same sort of argument emerged. Hawley read the names and details of child pornography cases Jackson had ruled on, emphasizing that she had given some sentences far lower than the maximum, but not getting into details: One convict who had just turned 18 was not seen as a threat to children, but an older man who sent nude pictures of his child to an undercover FBI agent was. 

“You have stated publicly that it is a mistake to assume that child pornography offenders are pedophiles,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) during her opening statement. On Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) displayed the quote that Blackburn was talking about — a question about whether “people who may not be pedophiles” sometimes get trapped in the system.

“Do you agree with that sentiment, that there is some meaningful population of people who have child pornography, but are not in fact pedophiles?” asked Cruz.Advertisement

“Thank you, senator,” said Jackson, “for allowing me to address what appears to be a question in the context of a hearing on child pornography.” She was not on the ballot, but she might as well have been.

She has more intelligence, integrity and pure class than these Republican assholes have in their spindly pointer fingers.

This obsession with pedophilia is sick. And it says everything about the lurid imaginations of these people. I don’t know what screw is loose in their heads but it’s very, very loose. In fact it seems to have made its way to their nether regions.

Josh Hawley made quite a spectacle of himself today, going on and on about child pornography in great, lurid detail, accusing Ketanji Brown Jackson of being soft on pedophilia as a judge. It’s pretty sickening. Brown Jackson handles it very well, but it’s making an impression among the wingnuts. And it’s just gross.

He's really going for it, isn't he?

Jesse Watters: "That's a scary pattern. Because why? Why would you sympathize with people who possess child pornography?"

"I don't know if she's a left-wing loon or mainstream Democrat. These people hide their true character very, very well." pic.twitter.com/S5rY7siuk0

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 22, 2022

Cruz did it too, but Hawley is really invested in this. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about:

Me to Hawley: you reject that she was in line with other federal judges at the time?

Hawley: she’s well below the national averages …

Me: I’ve seen the data, it says the opposite… I’m saying in line w other judges.

Hawley; well let me see those stats, I haven’t seen those.

— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) March 22, 2022

Some time back, the NY Times reported this about Josh Hawley which is interesting in light of his apparently obsessive interest in child pornography:

On campus, Mr. Hawley wrote columns for the conservative Stanford Review and was active in student ministry groups. He described his worldview in gauzy phrases like “a proper sense of shared citizenship,” but drew a clearer line on at least one issue. Above his bed he hung a sepia-toned poster of a shirtless male model cradling a newborn; when asked by classmates, he said it reflected his fervent stance against abortion.

Here’s the story of that photo:

L’enfant, better known as Man and Babyis a 1987 photographic poster depicting a shirtless male model (Adam Perry) holding a young baby. The image, conceived by Paul Rodriguez was photographed by Spencer Rowell and published in the 1980s by British company Athena Posters. The photograph was said to herald the “sensitive but sexy New Man” aesthetic.

That strikes me as a little bit weird for a college boy, I don’t know about you. But whatever. He seems to have some issues. Here’s Hawley last November:

Sen. Josh Hawley: "Can we be surprised that after years of being told that they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games?" pic.twitter.com/cz1Hdxa8xO

— The Hill (@thehill) November 2, 2021

Ok.

Anyway,

Still in doubt that Josh Hawley’s questioning of #JudgeKetanjiBrown was purely driven by racism and misogyny?

You won’t be after watching this segment from @mehdirhasan: pic.twitter.com/CILvkpxVnl

— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) March 22, 2022

Update — Oh this is good:

What would have happened if Ketanji Brown Jackson had gone 'full Kavanaugh' on Cruz and Hawley today?

Well, just enjoy this video we at the @MehdiHasanShow
put together today of Judge Jackson vs Justice Kavanaugh.

Spot the difference, if you can:pic.twitter.com/X76YlaqEJ6

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) March 23, 2022

For those of you unable to watch the Brown Jackson confirmation hearings, here are a few highlights:

Lindsey Graham: It won’t be a circus pic.twitter.com/T7K8UCORBQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 22, 2022

Lindsey asks, “How important is your faith to you?” From a guy who attends church for performance reasons a couple times a year, and there is explicitly no religious test for public office in the constitution. Don’t suppose he ever asked Trump that either. pic.twitter.com/tHLBPc96Fm

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 22, 2022

What? 🤣 https://t.co/Mcz4vlzRkZ

— StevieSaid_JimHardingStan (@2020istrash2020) March 22, 2022

Cornyn seems to have an issue with SCOTUS's 2015 ruling that same-sex couples have a right to marry pic.twitter.com/zVTFJBquj7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 22, 2022

"Do you agree… that babies are racist?"

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) asks Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson whether she agrees with the book, "Antiracist Baby" by Dr. Ibrim X. Kendi, which is in the library at a school on whose board she sits. pic.twitter.com/rXynOyK0yN

— Forbes (@Forbes) March 22, 2022

Cruz's questioning time ends with him trying to smear Jackson as soft on child porn — allegations even the conservative National Journal has debunked. Really gross QAnon dogwhistling. pic.twitter.com/vpUD5nZLLq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 22, 2022

This is how they think:

REPORTER: "You would be okay with the Supreme Court leaving the issue of interracial marriage to the states?"

SEN. MIKE BRAUN (R-IN): "Yes. If you are not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you are not going to be able to have your cake and eat it too." pic.twitter.com/jiVTMOpC01

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) March 22, 2022

Check this out:

The chair of the House Democrats’ campaign arm and some of the vulnerable members he’s charged with re-electing are voicing support for a Republican-led mask mandate repeal bill.

This would set up a potential showdown with the White House, which recently issued a one-month extension on the federal mask mandate for public transit and airplanes.

The backing also illustrates how Democrats — especially those facing tough re-election fights — are trying to distance themselves from the pro-mask policies that defined their party for the past two years.

“I’m completely over mask mandates,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told Axios. “I don’t think they make any sense anymore. I’m for whatever gets rid of mask mandates as quickly as possible.”

“I think you’re safer on an airplane than you are in a restaurant or at the gym, so I don’t know why we’re wearing masks in the air.”

Some medical experts say masking on public transit still helps reduce community transmission, especially at international crossroads like airports, Axios’ Erin Doherty reported.

 The Senate voted 57-40 last week to pass a resolution to nullify the Biden administration’s public transit mask mandate after it was extended until April 18.

Eight Democrats voted for the resolution, including Sens. Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-Nev.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) — some of the most vulnerable incumbents this midterm cycle.

The others were Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), mostly centrists facing re-election in 2024.

Asked if the House will vote on the mask resolution, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, demurred. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said.

While the Senate is often a graveyard for liberal legislation, the same could be said of the House on measures rolling back pandemic restrictions.

A resolution to overturn a vaccine mandate on private businesses that passed the Senate in December with support from Manchin and Tester is currently languishing in the House.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office did not respond to questions about whether either resolution will be voted on.

 In the House, some vulnerable lawmakers support the bill or think the Senate bill should get a fair look in the House.

“I would vote for that,” Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.) told Axios. She argued that localities and airlines “can make that decision for themselves.”

“If, based on science, [airplanes are] just as safe as anywhere else, then we should be considering it,” said Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.).

“People are ready and are armed with the information they need to protect themselves,” said Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.). “I think we ought to consider it, the question is: when?”

The oBut other Democrats are leery of legislating on COVID-19 health precautions, after preaching for two years to follow science and with a new variant spreading through Europe.

“Eight of my colleagues came down with COVID in the last few days — it’s still around,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) told Axios.

“I think the House should stay out of issues of science, generally speaking,” he said.

“I think it should be based on what the CDC says,” said Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last cycle.

I have accepted that it’s now the law of the jungle and every man for himself when it comes to the highly communicable COVID-19 virus. I will be wearing my N-95 whenever I am among strangers for the time being because I am part of a vulnerable population and I don’t feel like dying, which is coming soon enough. I know that most Americans could give a shit about that and I am not questioning it anymore.

And while I understand that the air is ostensibly cleaner on an airplane than it is in other places, I also know that the seats are so close together than I can often smell the fetid breath of someone sitting next to me so there’s little doubt in my mind that if they are unmasked and have COVID, there is a risk. So, I’ll be keeping my N-95 on as tight as possible for all the hours I’m sitting there and won’t be taking it off for any reason. I would hate to inconvenience anyone who doesn’t like to even wear a surgical mask on the plane. It’s all about them, I know.

I don’t know what is happening with the Democrats and the pandemic but it’s not good. It appears that they are also just throwing up their hands on pandemic preparedness and public health which is really scary. What if the vaccines don’t protect us from a new variant or a new virus?

The Republicans and certain Democrats sabotaged the $15 million appropriation for pandemic preparedness in the Omnibus budget bill that just passed. The Democratic negotiators had gotten the Republicans who didn’t want to fund it at all to compromise by allowing it to be funded with unspent money from the American rescue Act in certain states. Democrats from those states objected and that was that. It’s astonishing that anyone would object to this spending for any reason but that’s where we are.

So what’s next? A stand alone bill which will almost certainly be cut down to nearly nothing in the Senate or more likely filibustered. But here is what they’re trying:

Earlier this month, the Biden administration released the Pandemic Preparedness Plan that would, finally, stand up a sustained and centrally managed national effort to protect the country against future pandemics. 

But like the Obama-era “pandemic playbook” before ilyt, this current plan won’t help the country if it’s left to sit on a shelf to gather dust. One in every 500 Americans has died from COVID-19. The overwhelming losses brought about by this pandemic should galvanize members of Congress to do everything in their power to prevent a global pandemic like COVID-19, or worse, from happening again. If not now, when?

If funded by Congress and implemented, this plan will deliver tangible national tools and capabilities that we need to save lives, jobs and money when we inevitably face future dangerous outbreaks. The pandemic defenses included in the plan are each important and indeed indispensable, such as a reliable ability to rapidly produce and distribute effective diagnostic tests, vaccines and therapeutics for unknown viral threats. Technologies to help detect and track the course of outbreaks with increased fidelity so that we can more effectively respond. A robust and technically equipped public health system to capably execute its leading role in protecting all of us, including vulnerable Americans, from dangerous diseases. A sufficient and dependable supply of effective masks and medical supplies, as well as cost-effective methods for improving indoor air quality to minimize unnecessary disruptions of school, religious services and workplaces. 

Even amid the political entrenchment we’ve all witnessed during this pandemic, few would contest that these capabilities are the no-frills elements of a comprehensive pandemic defense.

When the United States has felt at risk in the past — whether by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union during the Cold War, 9/11 terrorists, or North Korean saber-rattling — our country has enjoyed the almost unparalleled ability to make the necessary investments in defense to keep Americans safe. Now is the time for Congress to provide the means necessary to similarly bolster our defenses against catastrophic pandemics. If not now, when?

In August, SARS CoV-2 became the number one cause of death in the U.S. It has claimed over 660,000 U.S. lives and it’s not done with us yet. Within days, the American death toll from COVID-19 will exceed the estimated 675,000 lives lost in the U.S. during the 1918 pandemic influenza. By the beginning of December, COVID-19 deaths could climb to over 750,000. And, on top of that, the economic toll on the nation is no less mind-boggling with an estimated loss of $16 trillion.

The administration’s price tag for its comprehensive preparedness plan is $65 billion over a decade. Compared to the $170 billion per year devoted to preventing terrorism or the $20 billion per year that the U.S. spends on missile defense, preparing to better weather a catastrophic pandemic (which we know will come for us again) is a downright bargain. The $65 billion investment would reduce the risk of not only naturally occurring pandemics, but also the risks posed by high-consequence laboratory accidents involving pandemic pathogens and maliciously deployed biological weapons. These investments will protect us. 

The good news is that the United States is not starting from scratch. Thanks to the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act passed in 2006 and faithfully reauthorized since the country has the basic preparedness programs and structures in place that will serve as a solid foundation for the ambitious and integrated pandemic defense system set forth in the pandemic preparedness plan.

The administration has clearly indicated that $15 billion in the budget reconciliation bill would, for now, be an adequate down payment towards the $65 billion pandemic preparedness plan. We need the down payment. The House Energy and Commerce Committee agreed and they took the first vital step by including $16 billion for pandemic preparedness in their bill thanks to the leadership of Reps. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.). Recent public polling demonstrates that the American people expect nothing less.

The debate will move to the Senate, where a figure of only up to $8 billion for pandemic preparedness is being discussed in closed-door meetings. Over the past 18 months, Congress made much-needed emergency funding available for COVID-19 crisis response. Now Congress has an opportunity to be proactive and fund the defenses necessary to protect Americans from future pandemic threats by providing the seed money needed to start implementing the pandemic preparedness plan. If not now, when? 

Securing $16 billion for pandemic preparedness in the Senate budget reconciliation package would demonstrate that Congress understands the pandemic threat we’re facing and the ones in our future and is prepared to bring American ingenuity and resources to bear to meaningfully reduce the threat, if not eliminate it altogether.

Yeah, ok. Let’s hope it happens. But at this point I think everyone should get ready and put their hopes on boosters, easily obtainable N-95s, test-to-treat with Paxlovid (which is also hitting a funding wall, if you can believe that) and Hepa filters. I suggest you stock up on what you can. Anyone in a vulnerable population or who is close to someone who is, should also assume that they are going to be forced to curtail their activities, sometimes extremely, when the inevitable surges happen (although even healthy people are getting long-COVID and it can be very disabling, so those populations are going to grow.) Most people have decided they just don’t care if they expose you to this deadly disease or if the hospitals and morgues fill up with their fellow Americans. Godspeed.

By the way, we have lost almost a million people in the last two years, almost 1900 just yesterday. Just saying.

I can’t tell if he’s serious about Trump soliciting his advice on North Korea pic.twitter.com/kCCxq8JcBz

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 22, 2022

The fact that he was talking about dangerous, possibly classified information with this addle brained rocker is bad enough although not surprising. Trump had very, very loose lips about everything.

But ask yourself what in the hell is going on with Tucker Carlson in that clip? I know he is given to maniacal laughter, but this is truly demented. Is it even remotely plausible that he really thinks Kid Rock is awesome and that Trump showing him maps of North Korea is totally cool?

I guess anything is possible, but I’m going to have to guess that Tucker is just lost in his own world of contrarian celebrity and nothing has to make any sense anymore. He’s not alone, unfortunately.

Trump’s acting like he’s always been a big supporter of Ukraine, of course, strutting around saying that he’s the one who delivered them military equipment (even though we know what he wanted in return…) but the fact is that he actually loathes Ukraine. It’s well documented:

On Oct. 2, 2019, Trump said that while he wanted to help Ukraine, he resented all the money the United States gave the country.

“We give money to Ukraine, and it’s bothered me from day one,” he said.

Trump said that Ukraine had always been too corrupt for his liking, but that he was fine with the current president because Zelenskyy had denied that he pressured him to investigate Biden’s son.

Trump then relayed the story of releasing the aid to Ukraine, saying that America had long been a “sucker” for handing over money but that now, because of him, it was better:

[Portman] called up: “Please, let the money go.” I said, “Rob, I hate being the country that’s always giving money when Ukraine helps Europe and the European countries far more than they help us.”

They’re like a wall between Russia and Europe. They’re like a wall. They’re a big, wide, beautiful wall.

And he said, “You know what? But it’s important.”

And he — in fact, he came out and he said that. That was my only reason.

Because I don’t like being the sucker country. We were the sucker country for years and years. We’re not the sucker country anymore. But I gave the money because Rob Portman and others called me and asked. But I don’t like to be the sucker. And European countries are helped far more than we are, and those countries should pay more to help Ukraine.

This Washington Post story when the impeachment was going on tells the whole story:

Three of President Trump’s top advisers met with him in the Oval Office in May, determined to convince him that the new Ukrainian leader was an ally deserving of U.S. support.

They had barely begun their pitch when Trump unloaded on them, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the meeting. In Trump’s mind, the officials said, Ukraine’s entire leadership had colluded with the Democrats to undermine his 2016 presidential campaign.

“They tried to take me down,” Trump railed.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry, the senior member of the group, assured Trump that the new Ukrainian president was different — a reformer in Trump’s mold who had even quoted President Ronald Reagan in his inaugural address, for which the three advisers had been present.

But the harder they pushed in the Oval Office, the more Trump resisted.

“They are horrible, corrupt people,” Trump told them.

So far, a dozen witnesses have testified before House lawmakers since the closed-door impeachment inquiry began a month ago. One theme that runs through almost all of their accounts is Trump’s unyielding loathing of Ukraine, which dates to his earliest days in the White House.Rudy

“We could never quite understand it,” a former senior White House official said of Trump’s view of the former Soviet republic, also saying that much of it stemmed from the president’s embrace of conspiracy theories. “There were accusations that they had somehow worked with the Clinton campaign. There were accusations they’d hurt him. He just hated Ukraine.”

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump’s animosity to Ukraine ran so deep and was so resistant to the typical foreign policy entreaties about the need to stand by allies that senior officials involved in Ukraine policy concluded that the only way to overcome it was to set up an Oval Office meeting with Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Once the two presidents actually sat down together, President Trump would quickly conclude that President Zelensky is . . . a charismatic politician who enjoys the support of his people and is worthy of U.S. support,” Kurt Volker, who subsequently resigned as the special adviser on Ukraine, told Congress.

U.S. and Ukrainian officials would spend months in pursuit of a Trump-Zelensky meeting. In their fruitless attempts to make it happen, Perry, Volker and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, would encourage the Ukrainians to accede to demands by Trump and his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that they open investigations that would benefit Trump politically.

Ultimately, Trump, in a July 25 phone call, would press the Ukrainian president directly for dirt on former vice president Joe Biden.

“I would like for you to do us a favor,” Trump told Zelensky, according to a transcript of the call.

The roots of that request trace back to the earliest days of the Trump presidency, when Zelensky was still a Ukrainian sitcom actor and Trump’s top foreign policy advisers were trying to make sense of Trump’s distaste for Kyiv and map out a Ukraine policy.

In the fall of 2017, Trump was set to meet with then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at the United Nations in New York. At the time, U.S. officials were working to convince Trump that Ukraine, locked in a long war with Russian-backed forces, was worthy of American support.

Then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Volker that he would have about 45 seconds to brief Trump ahead of his meeting with Poroshenko. If Trump was interested in learning more, Tillerson said, the president would ask questions. Volker rushed through his pitch, according to former U.S. officials who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic topics.

Trump then peppered Volker with his negative views of Ukraine, suggesting that it wasn’t a “real country,” that it had always been a part of Russia, and that it was “totally corrupt.”

Inside the administration, Trump’s top advisers debated the origins of his ill-feeling. Some argued that Trump saw Ukraine as an impediment to better U.S. relations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, who was angry about U.S. sanctions imposed on Moscow for its annexation of Crimea and for the Kremlin’s ongoing support of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

At the time of Trump’s U.N. meeting with Poroshenko, U.S. officials were debating whether to sell antitank weapons to the Ukrainians. In the previous administration, President Barack Obama had decided against the sale, worrying that it would make the conflict bloodier.

Trump’s entire national security Cabinet unanimously supported it. But Trump hesitated. “He kept saying it . . . wasn’t worth pissing off Russia and what a bad country Ukraine was,” said the former senior White House official.

Trump told his top advisers that “everyone” was telling him not to do it because it would anger Russia, the former official said. In fact, his entire team was advising the opposite. After months of delay, Trump approved the sale of the weapons in December 2017.

His skepticism and dislike of Ukraine, though, did not abate but, if anything, seemed to deepen over time, U.S. officials said.

Some advisers, such as Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who oversaw Ukraine policy on the National Security Council, told lawmakers that “outside influencers were promoting a false narrative of Ukraine” to Trump that was “harmful to U.S. government policy.” Others wondered whether the president’s disdain had to do with his well-known dislike of all U.S. foreign aid.

Ukraine was weak, war-torn and desperate for U.S. support. It had little to offer Trump, whose foreign policy focus was reversing the U.S. trade deficit.

Sondland, a Trump campaign donor turned diplomat, blamed Giuliani, who had publicly accused Ukraine of corruption and interference in the 2016 election, for the hardening of Trump’s views. And he viewed Giuliani as key to reversing Trump’s hostility.

“It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the president’s mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani,” Sondland told lawmakers in October.

U.S. officials were also at odds over how best to convince Trump of Ukraine’s importance to U.S. policy. Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr., the acting chief U.S. diplomat in Kyiv, and many longtime foreign officials made an argument that was based on values and the principle of support for the international order. In testimony to House lawmakers, Taylor noted that by its assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty, Russia had “violated countless treaties” and “dismissed all the principles that have kept the peace and contributed to prosperity in Europe since World War II.”

In Congress, Republicans and Democrats cast support for Ukraine as a defense of American democratic principles. Ukraine was a fragile democracy battling both internal corruption and its powerful neighbor.

None of those lofty arguments worked with Trump. “Many Americans feel strongly about supporting Ukraine because it’s the little guy and is fighting for values we consider fundamentally American,” said Molly Montgomery, who served on Vice President Pence’s staff and now works for the Albright Stonebridge Group. “But it’s clear that Trump doesn’t share that empathy. He’s more attracted generally to the powerful party in any dispute.”

Since his first days in office, Trump has made clear that he has little patience for alliances or anything that commits the United States to defending a weaker ally. He has repeatedly questioned the utility of NATO and harangued Europeans for not contributing more to the common defense. U.S. officials describe Trump’s mind-set as short term and transactional. Instead of looking for allies, Trump is forever in search of a deal, they say.

This was the impulse that led him to see what he could squeeze out of the Ukrainians in exchange for an Oval Office meeting, officials said.

“The whole episode is sadly unsurprising,” said a senior U.S. official familiar with U.S. policy on Ukraine. “It’s the epitome of impulsive, self-serving decision-making at the top that has undermined American power.”

In the end, most U.S. officials agreed that Trump’s anger with Ukraine, like many of his grievances, was connected with the 2016 election and his feeling that Ukraine was responsible for the humiliating fall of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. Trump’s hatred, they concluded, was ingrained, irrational and possibly irreversible.

“Ukraine has always been problematic, from Day One,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a close Trump ally and Russia hawk, said in an interview. “He’s heard a lot about Ukraine from a lot of people.”

Trump says Putin would never have invaded if he were president. John Bolton says otherwise:

Bolton noted that when he served in the White House, Trump paid “very little attention” to Ukraine “until the summer of 2019 when [Trump] realized that he could have the possibility of holding up the obligation and delivery of substantial security assistance [to Ukraine] in an effort to get access to the Hillary Clinton computer server that he felt was in Ukraine, finding out about Hunter Biden’s income in Ukraine, and all of these things in this spaghetti bowl of conspiracy theories. That was the first time he really focused” on Ukraine. By this point, Putin had for years been backing pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine who were fighting government troops and Ukrainian militias. Yet Trump was more concerned with the nutty and unfounded notion pushed by right-wing conspiracists that the Democratic National Committee computer servers hacked by Russian cyber-operatives in 2016 were somehow whisked away to Ukraine to cover-up purported Ukrainian intervention in the election. According to Bolton, Trump really believed this Alex Jones-ish crap. 

Trump’s fixation on this bizarre conspiracy theory and his ravenous desire to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine, Bolton recalled, “made it hard for the rest of us who were concerned about the instability that we saw in Ukraine and eastern Europe generally because of the Russian threat to get anything much done on it.” He noted that during the NATO summit in the summer of 2018, Trump was close to announcing a US withdrawal from the military alliance. This disrupted the entire meeting and prevented a full discussion of one of the major topics on the agenda: Ukraine. 

When Trump looked at Ukraine, he only saw servers, Bidens, and schemes. This, Bolton said,  rendered it difficult “to get any focused presidential-level attention to the issue” of Ukraine’s security and its conflict with Russia. Moreover, Bolton recounted, he couldn’t even follow what Trump was saying about Ukraine and all this supposed skullduggery: “I had any number of conversations with Trump, with [Rudy] Giuliani, with others about these theories that frankly I never could understand. I couldn’t get to the bottom of them. They didn’t connect with one another. They were based on some guy who told some other guy something that the President was determined to track down… And you couldn’t really discuss the subject of Ukraine or the threat posed by Russia…without very quickly the conversation completely diverting to these other subjects.”

Bolton said that he believes Trump intended to pull out of NATO and blow up the alliance, if he were reelected: “Trump, I think, fundamentally didn’t like the NATO alliance.” Trump had pushed the NATO countries to increase their military spending “not to strengthen NATO but because he fundamentally believed nobody would do it.”

Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are underway this morning. Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ben Sasse of Nebraska made a point to invoke the “character assassination” of Judge Robert Bork in opening statements on Monday. Steve Benen reminds Maddowblog readers that Republicans’ memories of Bork’s rejection for a Supreme Court seat is a mite selective.

Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) and Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) invoked Bork during Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination in 2020. Lee alleged that senators (Democrats) “shamefully and slanderously defeated the nomination of one of the country’s most respected lawyers and constitutional scholars.”

How respected was he?

Benen reminds readers why Bork’s nomination raised such objections:

For those who may need a refresher, let’s revisit some of our earlier coverage. Justice Lewis Powell announced his retirement in 1987, and Ronald Reagan soon after nominated Bork. He was immediately seen as one of the most controversial choices in American history.

Indeed, shortly after the president’s announcement, Sen. Ted Kennedy delivered a famous condemnation on the Senate floor: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, school children could not be taught about evolution, writers and artist could be censured at the whim of government.”

It was a stinging indictment, based largely on fact. Bork, who developed an unfortunate reputation stemming from his role in Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973, was on record defending Jim Crow-era poll taxes, condemning portions of the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public accommodations, and arguing against extending the equal protection of the 14th Amendment to women.

If contemporary Republicans want to argue that the fight over Bork’s nomination was historically significant, that’s true. It was during consideration of Bork that senators largely decided it wasn’t enough to merely consider a Supreme Court nominee’s qualifications; they also had to consider whether he or she was ideologically and temperamentally suited for the bench.

In Bork’s case, it was a test he failed. When his nomination reached the Senate floor, 58 senators, including six Republicans, voted to reject him. (After the vote, Strom Thurmond, of all people, urged the Reagan White House to nominate someone less “controversial.”)

But for GOP senators to argue decades later that his bipartisan defeat somehow did irreparable harm to the confirmation process is difficult to take seriously. In fact, after Bork’s nomination faced opposition from both parties, Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed by the Democratic-led Senate, 97 to 0. Another nominee from a Republican White House — David Souter — was also confirmed unanimously a few years later by a Democratic-led Senate.

Three years after that, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed 96 to 3. Stephen Breyer was confirmed a year later, 87 to 9.

If GOP senators were right, and the Bork ordeal created new norms and fundamentally broke an important Senate function, these examples wouldn’t exist. But they do.

What’s more, let’s not brush past the fact that Bork was given an opportunity: The Democratic-led Senate held full hearings, heard directly from the nominee, and afforded him an up-or-down vote on the floor. Senators from both parties reached an obvious conclusion: Bork was simply too extreme.

In 2016, Republicans, including many of the members who were whining yesterday, denied all of this to Merrick Garland — not because he was a radical ideologue with an indefensible record, but ostensibly because considering a qualified nominee within eight months of an election was deemed impossible, even as GOP senators came to the opposite conclusion four years later.

The fight over Bork was important, just not in the ways Republicans remember.

Q.E.D.

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“Signs don’t vote” is campaign-ese for dismissing armchair partisans’ need for planting a candidate yard sign on their lawns. In recent cycles, national campaigns that once gave away the clunky advertising now charge money for them early and distribute the few free ones so late in the campaign that it makes partisans nervous that their favs’ campaigns are floundering.

The quantity of Trump signs sprouting outside city limits in 2016 so alarmed one early Bernie Sanders supporter here that he paid to create and distribute a couple of thousand small Hillary Clinton signs.

“Do you think Trump can win?” Democrats asked nervously as November approached.

Don’t worry, we said. Signs don’t vote.

We should have listened to H.L. Mencken‘s riposte about underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

In similar fashion, Andriy Yermak from Ukraine Ukrainian President Zelensky’s office warns against underestimating the brutality of the Russian army the way people underestimated Ukrainian bravery. Russian atrocities mount as the port city of Mariupol is “reduced to ashes.”

Russian attacks, Yermak writes in the Washington Post, have

… left hundreds of thousands of residents without food, clean water, electricity and communications. More than 1,200 civilians have been murdered. Russia violated an agreement on a humanitarian corridor almost before it began. This is how it wages wars. It did it in Grozny in 1999 and in Syria in 2015. Now, it is doing it in Ukraine. This is a scorched-earth campaign to wipe Ukraine — its people, its culture, its history — off the map.

What the two tales have in common is our tendency to misread opponents until it is too late. Clinton did. (I did.) Or else not to learn our lessons. See: Grozny and Aleppo.

Dan Pfeiffer in his newsletter this morning cautions that the American far right’s fondness for Vladimir Putin “is closer to mainstream GOP thinking than many would have you believe.” He proposes four reasons the right cannot quit Putin:

1. Addicted to Strength: The concept of strength is the axis on which Republican politics has long rotated. Every Republican political campaign is about portraying the GOPer as strong and the Democrat as weak. This is why so much hay was made of Michael Dukakis’s tank photo op. Republicans worked hard to undermine John Kerry’s military service, and pushed false narratives about the health and cognitive abilities of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. The type of strength and how it is used is irrelevant. When strength at all costs is emphasized at the expense of empathy, compassion, and morals, Putin can become the ideal leader for a morally bankrupt political party.

2. An Apocalyptic Mentality: The public tends to gravitate towards strongman-like figures out of fear. And fear is a central feature of Republican messaging. Watch any GOP campaign ads or consume Right Wing media and experience a constant stream of apocalyptic imagery. America is under ceaseless assult from immigrants, terrorists, criminals, and an array of non-White bogey men and women. Partly, this is a political strategy designed to keep the shrinking, mostly White GOP in a rabid state. According to a January NPR/Ipsos poll, 47 percent of Republicans strongly agree that “America is in crisis and at risk of failing” compared to 29 percent of Democrats
The driving force in the politics of fear is that before too long White people will represent a minority of Americans and the dominant political position that many believe is their birthright is at risk. Putin’s restorative nationalism is appealing to this segment of the population. His death grip on power and aims to restore the Soviet Union is essentially a platform to Make Russia Great Again. Supporting Trump doesn’t necessarily equate to becoming a political apologist, but the sentiments driving the very Far Right to embrace Trump above all else are the same sentiments causing the folks to side with Putin right now.

3. White Power: There is something grossly ironic about the America First movement idolizing a former KGB agent trying to reestablish America’s greatest adversary. But “America First,” really means “White America First.” As Emily Tamkin wrote in the New York Times: “Many of the admirers of the world’s strongmen on the American right appear to believe that the countries each of these men lead are beacons of whiteness, Christianity and conservative values… The white nationalist Richard Spencer has referred to Russia as ‘the sole white power in the world.’” Matthew Heimbach, a founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, told The Times in 2016, “I see President Putin as the leader of the free world.” As the nomination of Trump indicates, the White nationalist fringes of the Republican Party are the tail that wags the dog. If you are skeptical about the central role of race, ask yourself why the Far Right loves Putin and Orban but disdains Xi Jinping of China? Pay close attention to what they are saying today in order to be prepared for tomorrow.

4. The Perverse Incentives of the Internet Attention Economy: Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson have a lot in common. One of these commonalities is an inherent understanding of how to get and maintain attention in a media ecosystem powered by outrage. There is financial and political incentive to say outrageous things that generate backlash. You get attention for what you said and then you get to scream “cancel culture” when people get mad. The anger and outrage fuels the algorithms pushing your content to even more people, lining your pocket and increasing your political power. So, if you are looking for someone to blame, feel free to add Mark Zuckerberg and other tech folks to your list.

Maya Angelou is perhaps over-quoted on believing when people show you who they are. Mencken’s quote is often forgotten. Trumpism and Jan. 6 and vote-rigging legislation and Putin-philia have shown us again and again who many of our neighbors are and we fail to believe them. That’s on us. Like Russia, they keep waving it in our faces.

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