“The 1776 Restoration Movement, formerly the People’s Convoy, has descended on highways around the D.C. area and are now blocking three lanes of traffic on 95 north and 95 southbound.” Zachary Petrizzo @ZTPetrizzo, 8:45 AM ET · Jul 4, 2022.
There's a convoy of right-wing protesters blocking lanes on the I-95 near DC 🤡pic.twitter.com/yIPADqMy1E
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) July 4, 2022
“Are the police in full riot gear and shooting tear gas at them?” SpeakerofTruth @Speaker71111280
As the right-wing anti-vax protesters block a total of six lanes of traffic in both directions, local drivers are getting increasingly frustrated, honking their horns and flipping them off.
Southeast Portico inscription, Jefferson Memorial.
Even the usually upbeat E.J. Dionne is unsettled this July Fourth. The United States built itself on ideals of self-governance in its founding documents, not on ethnicity, race, blood or soil, he writes:
Yet thanks especially to this term’s Supreme Court rulings on abortion, guns and the climate, this July Fourth finds us riven about how to read our own founding and the documents the Founders bequeathed us. We are torn about what we love most about our country.
It is a national habit to insist that whatever we happen to be asserting about politics is consistent with what the Founders envisioned. Just listen to how often members of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Donald Trump’s lawbreaking have spoken of the Constitution and its obligations.
Even now, when we are increasingly aware of how racism and sexism afflicted the founding generation, most Americans still prefer to be on the side of Jefferson and Madison, Adams and Hamilton. Not for nothing is “Hamilton” a smash hit.
Until recently, postwar generations (not postbellum, mind you) saw progress as inevitable as the next annoying software update.
Slowly, however, the kind of conservative reaction to progress that postbellum America saw after the Civil War has emerged since the latter 20th century. Fueled once again by racial animus and status anxiety, backlash against social and demographic change, exacerbated by globalization and economic uncertainty, has cast underlying historic tensions in the country into sharp, sometimes violent relief.
Dionne writes that in the progressive view, “the Constitution is not a straitjacket designed to keep the country where it was in 1789 or 1868 or whatever other date a nostalgic conservatism might point to.” The conservative majority on the Supreme Court, however, has fallen into constitutional doctrinal error, originalism, “an effort to invoke the Constitution to tether the country to the past.”
Uneasy with cultural change? Give us that old-time Constitution, conservative justices sing, making up lyrics as they go. Lower courts packed with ideological jurists harmonize from the wings. They insist their regressive reading of American scripture is historical, traditional. “The majority’s gun ruling used the words ‘historical tradition’ a dozen times,” Dionne reminds.
This is what “originalism” as a doctrine really comes down to. If the progressive view of the American experience focuses on the changes needed to live up to our aspirations, the conservative imperative is to preserve — and in many cases move back to — what made the country, well, “great” at some earlier juncture.
“Historical tradition” being in the selective eye of interpreters who, like biblical literalists, claim not to interpret at all.
If Jefferson, Madison, Adams and Hamilton are the Four Evangelists of the republic, perhaps a few words of wisdom about the heresy of originalism are approporiate this morning.
For his part, Jefferson believed the new republic must change, evolve, and progress:
“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” -Excerpted from a letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816.
Some human minds do not wish to progress. The conservative court majority, would jam the land of the free into the coat of the slave.
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For some reason the New York Times did a long profile of young anti-abortion women this weekend, after doing a long profile of anti-abortion “abolitionists” who want to punish women for having abortions a couple of day ago. I think it’s good to know what these people are up to but this is obsessive. It’s reminiscent of the endless forays into the wild of Pennsylvania to take the temperature of the Trump voters during the first years of his term. It’s some kind of over-compensation.
In any case, today’s article focuses on a group they think is left wing when it’s actually just a typical right wing troll group using lefty tropes:
Kristin Turner started a chapter of a youth climate group in her hometown, Redding, Calif. Her Instagram bio includes her pronouns (she/they) and support for Black Lives Matter. She describes herself as a feminist, an atheist and a leftist.
At 20, she is also the communications director for Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, whose goals include educating the public about “the exploitative influence of the Abortion Industrial Complex through an anti-capitalist lens.”
What utter bullshit. Here’s an example of what this ridiculous group is really about, which the NY Times forgot to mention:
An anti-abortion group that is facing previous federal charges said it took 115 fetuses from a medical waste company and buried 110 of them at an undisclosed location.
Washington, D.C., police, which originally said it found five fetuses in one of the group members’ apartments, is continuing to investigate the case.
At a news conference Tuesday, two members of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, Terrisa Bukovinac and Lauren Handy, said they got the fetal remains from a medical waste company employee who gave them the box from his truck.
The two women saw the medical waste truck, from Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services, outside Washington Surgi-Clinic, which performs medical procedures such as abortions. The women saidthey then took the box to Handy’s apartment. In total, they claim there were 115 fetuses in the boxes.
Bukovinac said in the news conference that she asked the driver of the truck if he would get in trouble if they took one of the boxes. She says he was shaken when they told him what the contents of the box were. The two women apparently told the driver they would bury the fetuses.
“The driver thought for a second and he said, ‘OK,’ ” Bukovinac said.
Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services told WUSA9 that it does not transport fetal remains and denied that any package was handed over to the anti-abortion group. The Baltimore-based company did not respond to NPR’s request for comment.
They’re just nuts.
I will never understand the NY Times’ compulsion to present right wing extremists as some sort of legitimate movement. This buying their BS that they’re actually left wing is a new one but it’s all of a piece. They seem to think it’s important to normalize right wing lunacy for some reason.
A Wisconsin school board decided against allowing high school students to read a book about the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in the US during World War II.
Julie Otsuka’s 2002 book, “When the Emperor Was Divine,” was set to be part of an advanced 10th-grade English curriculum at Muskego High School, located in Muskego, Wisconsin, and a part of the Muskego-Norway School District.
The historical fiction book — based in part on the author’s own family history — highlights a Japanese internment camp in Utah.
After Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Americans were forcibly placed in internment camps amid national racial discrimination so the US could prevent spying, according to a post by The Washington Post. While no spies were ever found, some of the prisoners who survived the camps returned to damaged homes.
Anti-Asian hate persists today, with hate crimes skyrocketing against the Asian community throughout the pandemic.
The book is among a number of other pieces of literature on race and sexuality that conservatives have pushed to remove from schools and libraries.
Nearly 200 community members, including teachers, parents, and students of the high school, signed a petition urging board members to allow the book to be taught.
“I’ve never felt so under attack for just doing my job or doing my duty to teach kids about others and their world. At one time this would have been college and career readiness; now it’s ‘indoctrination,'” an anonymous teacher wrote in the petition.
“The anti-diversity sentiment that the school board is supporting leaves me feeling scared and uncomfortable teaching. It is my ethical responsibility to grow global citizens–I cannot do that without exposing them to a diverse populace,” another anonymous teacher wrote.
The board denied pushing forward with adding the book from the curriculum at a meeting on June 13, but the meeting was not recorded and its minutes were not published, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Ann Zielke, a parent of a student in the district, told NBC News that School Board Vice President Terri Boyer claimed the book offered an “unbalanced” account of historical events.
“What she said to me was that we actually need an ‘American’ perspective,'” Zielke said, adding that the people in the internment camps were Americans.
“She clarified and said that she felt that we needed the perspective of the American government, and why Japanese internment happened,” Zielke added. “And so then again, we had raised voices at this point. I told her specifically, I said, ‘The other side is racism.'”
Otsuka’s editor Jordan Pavlin wrote a letter to the Muskego-Norway board saying that “When the Emperor Was Divine” has been “course adopted in hundreds of schools throughout the country, where it has become a staple of high school English classes.”
Do school boards require that members be educated? At all?
A group of Texas educators have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should be taught as “involuntary relocation” during second grade social studies instruction, but board members have asked them to reconsider the phrasing, according to the state board’s chair.
“The board — with unanimous consent — directed the work group to revisit that specific language,” Keven Ellis, chair of the Texas State Board of Education said in a statement issued late Thursday.
The working group of nine educators, including a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is one of many such groups advising the state education board to make curriculum changes. This summer, the board will consider updates to social studies instruction a year after lawmakers passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms. The board will have a final vote on the curriculum in November.
The suggested change surfaced late during its June 15 meeting that lasted more than 12 hours. Board member Aicha Davis, a Democrat who represents Dallas and Fort Worth, brought up concerns to the board saying that wording is not a “fair representation” of the slave trade. The board, upon reading the language in the suggested curriculum, sent the working draft back for revision.
“For K-2, carefully examine the language used to describe events, specifically the term ‘involuntary relocation,’” the state board wrote in its guidance to the work group.
“I can’t say what their intention was, but that’s not going to be acceptable,” Davis told The Texas Tribune on Thursday. In 2015, Texas attracted attention when it was discovered a social studies textbook approved for use in the state called African slaves who were brought to the United States, “workers”
In this case, the group proposing these second grade curriculum revisions was given a copy of Senate Bill 3, Texas’ law that dictates how slavery and issues of race are taught in Texas. The law states that slavery can’t be taught as part of the true founding of the United States and that slavery was nothing more than a deviation from American values.
We don’t want little white Johnnie and little white Janie to feel any “discomfort” about slavery. But their little Black classmates will just have to learn to endure it. As usual.
Trying to telegraph a conservative argument against rigging the 2024 election
Luttig tweeted out a conservative argument against the plaintiffs in Moore v Harper. From what I can tell, it doesn’t reject the Independent State Legislature nonsense but rather argues that it’s irrelevant because the state legislature has already incorporated judicial review into it’s “prescription” for how elections are to be held. He says it would be a violation of the 10th Amendment, which is something of a sacred cow for “states’ rights” wingnuts.
This is unsatisfying to those of us who aren’t so enamored of this conservative view of the 10th Amendment. And we’d like to see this Independent State Legislature BS blown out of the water. But it appears that Luttig is looking at 2024 and has come up with an argument that might sway one or two not to use this case to rig the election for Donald Trump in 2024. It’s a stop-gap:
The argument from the constitutional text of the Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4, Clause 1) that the North Carolina Supreme Court properly interpreted the United States Constitution in its decision in Moore v. Harper rejecting the state General Assembly’s congressional map is as follows whether or not the Supreme Court of the United States ultimately embraces the “independent state legislature” theory of constitutional interpretation. [my emphasis]
The Elections Clause of the Constitution provides that, “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections . . . shall be prescribed in each State . . . by the Legislature thereof.”
Where, as in North Carolina, the legislature has “prescribed” the “Manner” in which the federal congressional “Elections” shall be “held” to include judicial review of the legislature’s own elections and congressional districting decisions, “the Legislature [has] prescribed the Manner of holding Elections” to incorporate judicial review of the legislature’s elections and congressional districting decisions — within both the letter and intendment of the Constitution.
Any eventual conclusion by the Supreme Court of the United States otherwise would entail an unconstitutional commandeering of the powers “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. Interpreting either the Elections Clause of Article I or the Electors Clause of Article 2 to authorize such commandeering would offend not only the fundamental structural command of the Tenth Amendment, but also the essential design of the Constitution of the United States.
I’m no constitutional scholar so maybe I’m totally wrong about this.
I imagine Luttig has a better insight into the worldview of the Supreme extremists than most, so maybe he’s got a good idea of what might persuade them. In any case, he’s making the attempt. Good for him.
Kristina Karamo, GOP nominee for Michigan Secretary of State: "Having intimate relationships with people who are demonically possessed or oppressed — I strongly believe that a person opens themselves up to possession. Demonic possession is real."https://t.co/m0WCMEfzyTpic.twitter.com/a6YdpxYnAm
It’s tempting to assume that nuts like this can’t be elected so hurrah, the good guys win. I do not know why any of us should do that after all we’ve seen. There is a good chance that some of them are going to win. After all, the country elected Donald Trump. Anything can happen:
Before becoming the Trump-backed Republican nominee for Michigan secretary of state, Kristina Karamo said that abortion is “child sacrifice” and a “satanic practice.”
“Abortion is really nothing new. The child sacrifice is a very satanic practice, and that’s precisely what abortion is. And we need to see it as such,” Karamo, a community college professor, said in an October 2020 episode of her podcast “It’s Solid Food,” which CNN’s KFile reviewed.
“When people in other cultures, when they engage in child sacrifice, they didn’t just sacrifice the child for the sake of bloodshed,” Karamo said later in the episode. “They sacrificed the child cuz they were hoping to get prosperity and that’s precisely why people have abortion now. ‘Because I’m not ready. I don’t wanna have a baby. I don’t feel like it. I don’t have time. I wanna make more money. I want my freedom.’ So you’re sacrificing that child hoping to get something out of their death, which is your freedom, your happiness, your prosperity.”
In another comment, Karamo called abortion the “the greatest crime of our nation’s history.”
Karamo and her campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment by CNN.
Karamo, a devout conservative Christian who has served on the board of Michigan’s Right to Life organization and on the board of an anti-abortion pregnancy crisis center affiliate in Detroit, reiterated that belief in another episode from July 2020, in which she said humans have sacrificed other humans, including their own children, for “thousands of years, just packaged differently.”
“[People] were sacrificing them to these deities, which were really demons,” she said.
Karamo went on to say in a later episode of her podcast reviewed by CNN’s KFile that demonic possession is real and can be transmitted through “intimate relationships.”
“If a person has demonic possession — I know it’s gonna sound really crazy to me saying that for some people, thinking like what?!” Karamo said in September 2020. “But having intimate relationships with people who are demonically possessed or oppressed — I strongly believe that a person opens themselves up to possession. Demonic possession is real.”
Karamo has repeatedly touted to her followers that left-leaning elites are trying to push their own values, including pro-abortion views, on America. In a video she posted on her website in 2018 that CNN’s KFile accessed and reviewed, Karamo suggested a conspiracy in which left-leaning political operatives who now have business relationships with Netflix — including prominent philanthropist and Democratic donor George Soros, former national security adviser Susan Rice and former President Barack Obama — were taking over the streaming service to push pro-abortion content.
“Is abortion funny to you? I would argue that it is nothing funny about abortion whatsoever, but apparently Netflix found it quite all right to air episode of Michelle Wolf’s show or season,” Karamo said, describing the comedian’s short-lived Netflix show that aired in 2018 in which Wolf addressed having an abortion.
“Why is Netflix putting out a series like this?” she said. “All these people with these interesting political motives, all teaming up to create content for you to consume.”
The political newcomer rose to prominence in Michigan politics after she claimed she had witnessed fraud as a poll challenger during the 2020 election and baselessly claimed widespread voter fraud occurred in the state, signing on to an unsuccessful lawsuit. Karamo’s promotion of election denial and other conspiracy theories earned her Trump’s endorsement last fall. If elected to Michigan’s top election post, she would oversee the 2024 presidential election in which Trump is weighing a run.
Karamo’s embrace of conspiracy theories has also led to her association with QAnon, a conspiracy theory that posits that Trump was working to take down a shadow cabal of Democratic politicians and elites running a child sex-trafficking ring and that one day soon cabal members will face arrests, tribunals and mass executions. Last year she spoke at a QAnon conference in Las Vegas featuring prominent Q influencers.
She previously called for a “citizenship arrest” of Soros and said he “needs to be in jail” and spread the Clinton Kill List conspiracy, a baseless conspiracy theory that alleges former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have had dozens of people assassinated.
CNN previously reported some of Karamo’s beliefs and rhetoric, including her attacks against premarital sex and the LGBTQ community, such as that it will lead to the “normalization” of pedophilia; her anti-vaxxer comments; and her election denialism. Karamo frequently attacks those she disagrees with as being instruments of Satan or “demonic,” including the Democratic Party and the LGBTQ community.
just go while these two young Black folks are pulled over out here in the middle of dang nowhere. I will be staying until they are either arrested or on their way." The officer was pissed. Yelled at me to get out of my car until backup arrived. "I have done nothing wrong and 2/?
The young couple and I were all on our ways about 5 minutes after the supervisor arrived. Shit could've went the other way, but today in the middle of nowhere Kansas, it did not.
Abbeynormal@abbynormal2020 : It is scary. I did that one night in the parking lot of my hotel in St Louis. 4 cops had a young black man pulled over and you’re right. The cops do not like it.
StaceyC.inKS@StaceyCKs1: I do it, too. Cops HATE that shit. I sat on the hood of my car recording a police officer shaking down a Black kid on a bike in a Starbucks parking lot a few weeks ago. The cop was FURIOUS. I asked the kid if he wanted me to call his mom. He did. She was there in 5 min.
George@MrGeorgeJaxson: Summer 2021, in rental w/ east coast tags. Stopped on I-70 in KS & MO on the same day on BS “following 2 close”. KS demanded 2 know why I hadn’t flown instead of driving, & @MSHPTrooperGHQ made me go sit in cop car while questioning my passenger. No tickets given but scary AF.
Lots of thank-yous and blessings in the replies, pretty much coming down to this:
Grumpy Ouldwan@asheflynn: How can Americans live like this, always having to watch your back even from the “law”. Everyone is hostage to fear. That’s no way to live.
God bless America.
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This day may be why the Equal Rights Amendment struggled for ratification. Opponents needed to keep it from becoming an obstacle to overturning Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe is an atrocity for women’s equality. By intention.
The American fringe right has longed to return to the halcyon days of the 1950s that never were. Of barefoot and pregnant and poodle skirts, but without all that bother about strong unions, a muscular middle class, and Brown v. Board. “Gee our old LaSalle ran great,” sang Archie and Edith.
What Dobbs will do for men anxious about their preeminence in a world of working women and brown-skinned immigrants is take half the population back there without needing a plutonium-fueled DeLorean. All it took were some Supreme Court justices nominated by a president who lost the popular vote in both his elections and attempted an insurrection.
If Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has his way, we’ll return to those days, too, by restricting access to contraception. The economic impacts on women will resemble the effects of red-lining on the generational net worth of Black families.
The concept of providing support for working parents through paid family leave and affordable child care is already controversial. “We don’t support families. We don’t support people who are bearing children,” Khiara M. Bridges, a professor of law at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, told me. Restricting access to contraception would “exacerbate inequality that already exists. The wealthy will be able to control the timing and spacing of their children, and those who are poor and working class will not. It’s folks who are unprivileged who will be forced to resort to unsafe methods of avoiding pregnancy or terminating pregnancy. Or be forced into a state of constant childbearing.”
Access to contraception was established by rulings in two Supreme Court cases, Griswold v. Connecticut, in 1965, which found that states could not restrict access to birth control for married couples, and Eisenstadt v. Baird, in 1972, which extended that same right to unmarried people. The contraceptive choices available then were somewhat different from what’s available now, but they gave women greater control over when they became pregnant and with whom, and that change had undeniable economic benefits. In the first major study of how the dissemination of the birth-control pill affected young, single women in college, Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, also an economics professor at Harvard, found that the education and career choices of women changed dramatically, and the average age of marriage jumped up, after the pill became widely available. In 1970, for example, women comprised ten per cent of first-year law-school students; in 1980, they made up thirty-six per cent. And almost fifty per cent of college-graduate women born in 1950 got married before age twenty-three; fewer than thirty per cent of women born in 1957, who would have reached adulthood several years after the Eisenstadt v. Baird decision, were married by age twenty-three. All of these factors contributed to greater earning power and financial resources for the women involved. A later study credited the pill with helping to narrow the gap in pay between men and women, decreasing it by ten per cent in the nineteen-eighties, and then an additional thirty-one per cent in the nineties.
Conservative legislators have already tightened access to contraception in several states. Science has nothing to do with why. The religious beliefs of a minority of Americans have replaced facts in law, says Wendy Parmet, the co-director of the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University:
“I don’t think whatever gains women have made in the workplace and in political representation are guaranteed. If the Court moved us back to the nineteen-fifties in terms of access to contraception and abortion, well then, I think we would have some of the same social and economic consequences we had then.”
One woman’s consequences are another man’s economic and social advantages. In Africa, in Asia, and in the Arab world, women still walk “two steps behind” men economically.
“There is no doubt that culture and religion play some role, but the fact remains that over the past 30 years, and particularly in the last decade, we have seen the rising tide of very conservative forces in [the Arab world] – largely supported by regional governments themselves – that are promoting a regressive agenda towards women,” says Sanam Anderlini, co-founder of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) and a senior fellow at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Here as well. Those suffering status anxiety support a revanchist movement intent on keeping this a man’s world. They now hold a super-majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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