Please pass this on to any jackass who claims that Trump did a good job with the pandemic. Aside from the inability to even get masks and gowns to NY City in the early days and his insistence that people take snake oil or inject disinfectant, there was his desire to stop testing people because it made him look bad that we had so many case. It is one of the most important low points no one should be allowed to forget it. Ever.
Jamelle Bouie on Kellyanne Conway’s lame attempt to paper over the GOP’s problem on reproductive rights:
Republican strategists are well aware that abortion is an albatross around the party’s neck. Their advice? Find new language.
“If it took 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade, it’s going to take more than 50 minutes, 50 hours or 50 weeks to explain to people what that means, and more importantly, what it doesn’t mean, and to move hearts and minds,” said Kellyanne Conway, a former adviser to Donald Trump, at Politico’s Health Care Summit on Wednesday. During the conversation, she advised Republican candidates to focus on “concession” and “consensus” and to turn the conversation toward exceptions. She also urged Republicans to avoid ballot initiatives on abortion, for fear that they could mobilize voters against them.
I have no doubt that Republicans will take this advice; they are desperate to neutralize the issue. But the Republican abortion problem isn’t an issue of language, it’s an issue of material reality. The reason voters are turned off by the Republican position on abortion has less to do with language and more to do with the actual consequences of putting tight restrictions on reproductive rights. Countless Americans have direct experience with difficult and complicated pregnancies; countless Americans have direct experience with abortion care; and countless Americans are rightfully horrified by the stories of injury and cruelty coming out of anti-abortion states.
No amount of rhetorical moderation on abortion will diminish the impact of stories like that of K Monica Kelly, who had to travel from Tennessee to Florida to end a potentially life-threatening pregnancy, thanks to Tennessee’s strict post-Dobbs abortion ban. Nor will it obscure the extent to which the most conservative Republicans are gunning for other reproductive health services, from hormonal birth control to in vitro fertilization.
Good luck Kellyanne. I don’t think this one’s going to fly. What do you plan to do about zealots like Speaker Mike Johnson who wasn’t exactly helpful:
“We need to look at the ethics surrounding that issue, but it’s an important one,” Johnson told “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil on Thursday. “If you do believe that life begins at conception, it’s a really important question to wrestle with.”
Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, made clear his support for the “sanctity of life” as well as IVF. But he then said there’s an “ethical handling” of the issue that must be considered by states.
“In some states, like in Louisiana, there’s a limit on the number of embryos that can be created because they’re sensitive to that issue,” he said. “But it’s something that every state has to wrestle with and I think Alabama has done a good job of it.”
Yeah. This is going great for them.
Michael Tomasky runs down all the roadblocks, delays, ratfucks and manipulations being used by the Trump team (which is a D-List team at best, which says something) to ensure that Trump does not go to trial on any of his criminal cases before the election. It’s depressing, but it’s true and you should read the whole thing if you haven’t seen it all put together.
His conclusion is absolutely correct:
When we talk about what’s wrong with our democracy, we talk about our political structures and processes. We talk about the Senate. We talk about the Electoral College. We talk about gerrymandering. And of course all these problems are real.
We don’t talk about our legal system. We should. The American legal system doesn’t uphold the values of democratic rule like equality. It far more often corrupts and perverts them. Rich people like Trump twist the system into a pretzel and win delay after delay after delay. Corporations pay fines, usually not that large when considered against their bottom line, and they admit no wrongdoing, even after their practices have killed people. Poor people, meanwhile, get pushed around by the system constantly.
There is no such thing in this country as equality before the law, and everyone knows it. And I would argue that this legal inequality does more damage to democracy than all the political inequities for the simple reason that they’re more visible. And they’ve never been more visible than they are now with Trump. If he is able to push all these cases back past November, or at least three of them (the Bragg case should proceed this summer), and then especially if he wins the White House and pardons himself, that will constitute the biggest failure of the rule of law in the history of the country.
When we talk about what’s wrong with our democracy, we talk about our political structures and processes. We talk about the Senate. We talk about the Electoral College. We talk about gerrymandering. And of course all these problems are real.
We don’t talk about our legal system. We should. The American legal system doesn’t uphold the values of democratic rule like equality. It far more often corrupts and perverts them. Rich people like Trump twist the system into a pretzel and win delay after delay after delay. Corporations pay fines, usually not that large when considered against their bottom line, and they admit no wrongdoing, even after their practices have killed people. Poor people, meanwhile, get pushed around by the system constantly.
There is no such thing in this country as equality before the law, and everyone knows it. And I would argue that this legal inequality does more damage to democracy than all the political inequities for the simple reason that they’re more visible. And they’ve never been more visible than they are now with Trump. If he is able to push all these cases back past November, or at least three of them (the Bragg case should proceed this summer), and then especially if he wins the White House and pardons himself, that will constitute the biggest failure of the rule of law in the history of the country.
None of that takes into consideration that after what we’ve seen happen with the Fanni Willis case it’s entirely possible the whole thing could blow up into a mistrial or even a dismissal or an acquittal. There are no guarantees on any of this.
As Tomasky says:
The lesson? We can’t count on the legal system to stop Trump. We have to stop him ourselves. One conviction would be nice; two would probably be quite helpful. But we can’t count on the broken legal system to do a job that we ourselves have to do at the polls.
Honestly, I don’t even think this is such a bad thing. I believe Trump should be held accountable for his crimes. It would be a travesty if they didn’t at least try. But at the end of the day this is a political problem and to the extent we still have a democracy politics is the only way to stop him. This isn’t just about Trump it’s about a political party that has become an authoritarian movement because it’s losing popular support. The only way to stop it is to defeat it, otherwise they’re just going to keep going, with Trump or without him.
Are you better off?
Yes you are better off. That was a historic horror show.
How about 5 years ago when the economy under Trump was supposedly the greatest the world has ever known:
Yep.
So how are people feeling right now?
So Quinnipiac is doing swing-state polls that among other things ask people both about the state of the economy and their personal finances. Here’s Michigan, but you see the same disconnect elsewhere
I keep seeing claims that never mind the macro data, people’s lived experience is of a bad economy. But consumer sentiment isn’t a lived experience; it’s a narrative, and one that is actually at odds with people’s personal lives
Why?
In March 14, the Kentucky Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve HB 5, the “Safer Kentucky Act.” The legislation will now head to the Senate floor for a vote, and it will almost certainly pass. The 78-page bill criminalizes homelessness—and decriminalizes the use of deadly force against individuals engaging in “unlawful camping.” Under this law, if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is attempting to commit a felony or attempting to “dispossess” them, they can shoot the homeless person.
Notably, The Bluegrass State found it necessary to make the language of existing related statutes more inclusive by changing his to his or her, and he to he or she. But shoot to kill. It’s fine.
The dispossess language is subsection a.
“[W]e are entering a time of vast restratification,” Chip Elliot wrote in Esquire in September 1981. “The United States is becoming more European…but it is a Europe of a different century. We are moving toward a culture in which we’ll have cooks, chauffeurs, maids, carpenters, brewmasters, vintners, industrialists, bankers, machinists, hat makers, shopkeepers, and kings and queens of a sort. And, of course, we’ll also have highwaymen, cutthroats, and thieves.” A time when people “wore swords and pistols whenever they went anywhere.”
1981. In response to a commentary on the shooting of John Lennon. What was “the social structure in America of the past three or four decades … has collapsed,” Elliot wrote over 40 years ago. It’s gotten worse since then, and since the widespread access to semiauto versions of military assault rifles. Oh, and the election of the nation’s first black president.
Ironic that these medieval “stand your ground” laws and their variants are a product of the ALEC-promoted “Castle Doctrine.”
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Mike Pence has got righteous down. Just needs the anger. How many GOP allies are waiting for the signal to jump Trump’s ship? And Pence is just slipping out the door?
Pence: Donald Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda…. I cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump.
<YAWN>
This from the guy targeted for hanging by Trump’s Jan. 6 mob, egged on by Trump himself.
How fitting that Pence picked Friday, Marcy Wheeler tweets:
If Mike from Pennsylvania is auditioning for Pence’s anger translator, he’s got the idea. He needs to work on his delivery. But it’s a start.
Mike from Pennsylvania: Donald Trump cares the hell out of me…. He really scares me to death…. Donald Trump is mentally unfit for the office.
For your MAGA relatives:
Now with video!
In you missed it, Mike, the boss you gave puppy-eyed looks to wanted to deploy troops to “shoot Americans in the street.”
Mike? Nothing?
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
The sloth:
This made my day!❤️ pic.twitter.com/4vwuuGmtGA
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) March 15, 2024
Just snoozing…
Mama sloth holding on to a tree with her legs for a nap pic.twitter.com/ByLxS3dDk3
— Apurv Anand (@apurv_anand) March 15, 2024
Sloths—the sluggish tree-dwellers of Central and South America—spend their lives in the tropical rain forests. They move through the canopy at a rate of about 40 yards per day, munching on leaves, twigs and buds. Sloths have an exceptionally low metabolic rate and spend 15 to 20 hours per day sleeping. And surprisingly enough, the long-armed animals are excellent swimmers. They occasionally drop from their treetop perches into water for a paddle.
It is my spirit animal.
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser watched Trump’s rally last weekend and her mind was blown. If only we could get everyone to do this at least once:
[L]ike so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to defeat him.
This is partly a category error. Though we persist in treating the 2024 election as a race between an incumbent and a challenger, it is not that so much as a contest between two incumbents: Biden, the actual President, and Trump, the forever-President of Red America’s fever dreams. But Trump, while he presents himself as the country’s rightful leader, gets nothing like the intense scrutiny for his speeches that is now focussed on the current occupant of the Oval Office. The norms and traditions that Trump is intent on smashing are, once again, benefitting him.
Consider the enormous buildup before, and wall-to-wall coverage of, Biden’s annual address to Congress. It was big news when the President called out his opponent in unusually scathing terms, referring thirteen times in his prepared text to “my predecessor” in what was, understandably, seen as a break with tradition. Republican commentators grumbled about the sharply partisan tone of the President’s remarks and the loud decibel in which he delivered them; Democrats essentially celebrated those same qualities.
Imagine if, instead, the two speeches had been covered side by side. Biden’s barbed references to Trump were all about the former President’s offenses to American democracy. He called out Trump’s 2024 campaign of “resentment, revenge, and retribution” and the “chaos” unleashed by the Trump-majority Supreme Court when it threw out the decades-old precedent of Roe v. Wade. In reference to a recent quote from the former President, in which Trump suggested that Americans should just “get over it” when it comes to gun violence, Biden retorted, “I say: Stop it, stop it, stop it!” His sharpest words for Trump came in response to the ex-President’s public invitation to Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to nato countries that don’t spend what Trump wants them to on defense—a line that Biden condemned as “outrageous,” “dangerous,” and “unacceptable.”
Trump’s speech made little effort to draw substantive contrasts with Biden. Instead, the Washington Post counted nearly five dozen references to Biden in the course of the Georgia rally, almost all of them epithets drawn from the Trump marketing playbook for how to rip down an opponent—words like “angry,” “corrupt,” “crooked,” “flailing,” “incompetent,” “stupid,” and “weak.” Trump is, always and forever, a puerile bully, stuck perpetually on the fifth-grade playground. But the politics of personal insult has worked so well for Trump that he is, naturally, doubling down on it in 2024. In fact, one of the clips from Trump’s speech on Saturday which got the most coverage was his mockery of Biden’s stutter: a churlish—and, no doubt, premeditated—slur.
He’s a pig and a lot of people have forgotten just how gross he really is. And yet, as Glasser points out, Karl Rove tok to the WSJ to complain that Biden had “lowered himself” by criticizing his predecessor. Maybe he should have insulted him personally, perhaps over his garish hair and make-up, which is now considered to be perfectly normal. As she says, the right completely ignores this (and the mainstream media does little better.)
Biden obviously met the low bar that Trump and the wingnuts had set for him and then high jumped over it. However:
Trump’s appearance in Georgia, by contrast, reflected a man not rooted in any kind of reality, one who struggled to remember his words and who was, by any definition, incoherent, disconnected, and frequently malicious. (This video compilation, circulating on social media, nails it.) In one lengthy detour, he complained about Biden once being photographed on a beach in his bathing suit. Which led him to Cary Grant, which led him to Michael Jackson, which led him back to the point that even Cary Grant wouldn’t have looked good in a bathing suit at age eighty-one. In another aside, he bragged about how much “women love me,” citing as proof the “suburban housewives from North Carolina” who travel to his rallies around the country. He concluded that portion of his speech by saying:
But it was an amazing phenomenon and I do protect women. Look, they talk about suburban housewives. I believe I’m doing well—you know, the polls are all rigged. Of course lately they haven’t been rigged because I’m winning by so much, so I don’t want to say it. Disregard that statement. I love the polls very much.
Makes perfect sense, right?
Glasser notes Trump’s infuriating “I know you are but what am I” habit of accusing the other side of what’ he’s doing. In this case it was the man whose inauguration speech was called “American Carnage” attacking Biden for giving an “angry , dark, hate-filled.” But this is where Glasser sees something that I hope everyone would see if they watched one of his rallies:
Get past the unintended irony, though, and what’s striking is how much of Trump’s 2024 campaign platform is being built on an edifice of lies, and not just the old, familiar lies about the “rigged election” which have figured prominently in every speech Trump has made since his defeat four years ago.
Trump’s over-the-top distortions of his record as President—“the greatest economy in history”; “the biggest tax cut in history”; “I did more for Black people than any President other than Abraham Lincoln”—are now joined by an equally flamboyant new set of untruths about Biden’s Presidency, which Trump portrayed in Saturday’s speech as a hellish time of almost fifty-per-cent inflation and an economy “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin,” with rampaging migrants being let loose from prisons around the world and allowed into the United States, on Biden’s orders, to murder and pillage and steal jobs from “native-born Americans.” Biden, in Trump’s current telling, is both a drooling incompetent being controlled by “fascists” and a corrupt criminal mastermind, “weaponizing” the U.S. government and its criminal-justice system to come after his opponent. His campaign slogan for 2024 might be summed up by one of the rally’s pithier lines: “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit. Everything.”
Indeed, Trump’s efforts this year to blame Biden for literally everything have taken on a baroque quality even by the modern-day standards of the party that introduced Willie Horton and Swift-boating into the political lexicon. Consider their latest cause célèbre, the tragic recent death of a young woman, Laken Riley, in which the accused is an undocumented migrant. Trump explicitly blamed Biden and his “crime-against-humanity” border policies for her death. “Laken Riley would be alive today,” he said, “if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United States and set loose thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals into our country.” Against such treachery, Trump offers a simple, apocalyptic choice: doomsday if Biden is reëlected, or liberation from “these tyrants and villains once and for all.” Wars will be ended at the mere thought of Trump retaking power; crime will cease; arrests will be made; dissenters will be silenced.
I recognize that a speech such as the one that Trump delivered the other night is hard to distill into the essence required of a news story. His detours on Saturday included complaints about Jeff Zucker, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martha Stewart, Megyn Kelly, “the big plagiarizer from Harvard,” Ron “DeSanctimonious,” the Washington Post, “Trump-deranged judge” Lewis Kaplan, “the fascist and racist attorney general of New York State,” “corrupt Fani Willis,” Merrick Garland, and the F.B.I., which, Trump claimed, “offers one million dollars to a writer of fiction about Donald Trump to lie and say it was fact where Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was Russian disinformation.” What was he talking about? I don’t know. The man has so many grievances and so many enemies that it is, understandably, hard to keep them straight.
But whether or not it’s news in the conventional sense, it’s easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself. Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times. The condemnation of his critics, up to and including the current President, can sound shrill or simply partisan. The fact checks, while appalling, never stop the demagogue for whom the “bottomless Pinocchio” was invented.
She concludes with this piece of advice: Watch his speeches. Share them widely. Don’t look away.
She’s right. I know they’re horrible. I feel like I need to bleach my brain after watching them. But you owe it to yourself to see at least one. When I have shown them to friends(often against their will) they are once again galvanized to put a stop to this.
He claims that Trump isn’t planning to follow the “conservative agenda” he followed during their first term but that’s obviously nonsense. He’s gotten more fascist but he was fascist to begin with. But Pence not endorsing is a real rebuke to some of the other cowards like McConnell and Sununu who have decided to keep boot licking for no good reason. He was Trump’s adoring VP for four long years and he’s found the courage to just say no.
Congratulations Mike. After much soul searching and attempts to rationalize helping with the coup attempt, you finally did the right thing. And I guess you liked how that felt. Or maybe you just understand that your political life as a MAGA cultist is over so you might as well let your normal flag fly. Either way, welcome to the Resistance, You may find that it feels good to be able to look yourself in the mirror every morning.
I just read Barb McQuade’s new book. Attack from Within. How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. I had planned to go see her in person at the Commonwealth Club and ask her some questions, but it was sold out, plus I knew what would happen, the first person at the mic would say, “I don’t have a question so much as a 3 part comment ” and talk for 5 minutes.” (I’m guilty of that myself, I even used that phrasing as a joke line with my friend Cory Doctorow and Annalee Newitz at his book reading for Red Team Blues. )
My goal when asking book authors questions is to help them amplify the parts I see as important in a memorable way. Especially for an audience that needs to hear it, but will likely never read the book.
So when I heard Barb was going to be on the Nicole Sandler show I wrote Nicole and said, “I think the most important point Barb makes in the book is that with social media our old metaphors of speech & debate are out of date and they are being used against us. Please get Barb to repeat this, with examples! Go right to Chapter 5, Why America is Particularly Vulnerable to Disinformation”
Well, as it turned out there was a scheduling issue with Barb on Tuesday, so I called in and got to repeat some of her important insights and talk about what Barb identified as failures in law enforcement, legislation and business and her proposed solutions.
I’m a slow writer but fast talker, here’s a link to me calling into the show talking about all this, in my piece below I just cover a couple of key points.
This quote from Chapter 5 is the set up I still hear from people on the left. I call it the 1st Amendment, “Free Speech” platitude line.
First, our constitutional commitment to free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment and regarded by the left and the right with a near religious reverence. As a result, many of us embrace the view that we would defend the right of our neighbors to express even the most offensive ideas, because their right to express them is essential to democracy. And so with few exceptions people are free to say anything, even if their statements are factually incorrect or, worse, intentionally deceptive.
Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America, by Barb McQuade. Chapter 5
It’s the old, “I don’t like what they have to say, but I’ll fight to the death their right to say it!” line.
Very noble! But does that mean you’ll defend to the death the “right” of 5,000 bots out of Russia to amplify intentional lies about our election? What if your “neighbor” is in Lubbock Texas and calls for the killing of election officials AND THEIR KIDS, who live in Arizona? (True story. Texas man sentenced to 3½ years for threatening Arizona election workers, officials)
In the book Barb talks about how disinformation can lead to political violence. She also gets into WHY actions aren’t taken by law enforcement in the section, titled, “Our Reluctance To Investigate”
This was something that I knew about, from the great work by Reuters’ reporters Linda So and Jason Szep.
U.S. election workers get little help from law enforcement as terror threats mount
McQuade points out how the history of the FBI abuses, as revealed by the Church Committee, led to the Domestic Investigation Operations Guide (DIOG) and how that led to FBI’s failure to investigate Jan 6th insurrectionists, EVEN THOUGHT THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN monitoring them on social media.
“The FBI’s shameful history of infringing on civil liberties, with its counterintelligence operation of the 1960s and ’70s that targeted civil rights leaders in Vietnam War protesters, makes the agency reluctant to investigate crimes that touch on Free Speech or assembly. “
Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America, by Barb McQuade. Chapter 5
If I was interviewing her I’d ask her to explain why serious criminal threats to judges, prosecutors, witnesses and jurors, as well as public health and election officials, aren’t prosecuted. I’ve read the excuses used by state & local law enforcement, as well as prosecutors. I’ve been writing about this for a long time. I wouldn’t just accept the standard answer I hear from the FBI or former prosecutors.
In the book she gives the excuse used by the FBI to NOT identify the January 6th threat online, despite social media posts openly indicating it was coming. Then she quotes the head of the FBI INCORRECTLY saying to the January 6th Committee that the FBI was “not allowed… to just sit and monitor social media and look at one person’s posts to see if maybe something would happen just in case That we’re not allowed to do.”
Barb CORRECTLY says BUT THEY ARE! And she links to AG guidelines on assessments for protective purposes, for special events.
(BTW, the other group that failed here was the Secret Service. THEY were in charge of evaluating the groups at the January 6th event and they did NOT list The Proud Boys as a threat, despite a history of violence. )
As an activist and blogger I’ve learned over the years to follow up on the author’s suggested solutions, so I’d ask Barb:
1) Who is fighting against any positive change?
2) Who is spending big bucks and lobbying against change?
3) Do the people who WANT change have any political power? Leverage?
4) Who is fighting to BLOCK change from WITHIN?
5) What can the public do?
Barb’s book answered one of my questions: Who is fighting positive change from WITHIN? The FBI.
And she explains some reasons why.
1) They are clinging to their old metaphors of who are the domestic terrorists. They don’t want to investigate cases of threats from the right wing, so they lump them all into “1st Amendment issues” and “protected political speech.”
2) They are under RW political pressure. When school boards were getting death threats, and school boards asked the FBI to investigate, the right wing LIED and said “The FBI is going after us for a difference of opinion!” Jim Jordan spread that disinformation by holding a bogus government weaponization committee. He subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray about the FBI’s “misuse of federal criminal and counterterrorism resources” to target parents at school board meetings.
3) They are overwhelmed by the scale and scope of the disinformation and threats. If it’s not a priority and they don’t have the budget, they ignore the cases.
I get tired of “documenting the atrocities” as Atrios likes to say, so if I was interviewing Barb I’d get her to give some examples of her proposed solutions working.
BTW, when I coach book authors to prepare them for the media, I have them tell a story that illustrates a problem and a solution. Since Barb wasn’t on my call with Nicole I gave an example I knew of her solutions working.
Since I’m an election worker, I looked into what was being done about threats to election workers. Did you know that in 2021 the Justice Department set up an Election Threats Task Force? They help local and state election officials investigate and prosecute people who made threats to election officials on social media. Here’s a list of successful prosecution from August 2023. Just this week the DOJ announced a Massachusetts man was sentenced to three years and six months in prison for sending a communication containing a bomb threat to an election official in the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.
The task force having the resources and the priority of prosecuting the case is great, and it helps with a change in attitude from law enforcement about what they CAN and SHOULD be doing. But of course the huge orange elephant in the room is the lack of action taken about the threats and harassments of elected officials made by Donald Trump.
I know that Barb has been asked many times, “Why can’t we do anything about the biggest spreader of disinformation and threats, Donald Trump?” It’s the same question I ask weekly to Glenn Kirschner. So instead I’d ask her about Chapter 9, how do we “Mitigate The Harms to Public Safety and National Security.”
She tells the story of the prosecution of the men who plotted to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. On the Sister’s In Law podcast she talked about working in national security at the US attorney’s office in Detroit. There she learned that the FBI refers to the time before an attack as, “left of boom.” The phrase connotes a visual image of a timeline, on which “boom” is the attack itself’ any point left of boom is a time before the attack.
What surprised me about that story was how there is no domestic terrorism statute that would allow “the FBI to act left of boom by using the same tactics they use in international terrorism cases.” This sounds like a good idea, help the FBI to investigate threats. But when I read that my mind jumped to “The FBI will use this power to go after LEFT wing groups! They will keep ignoring RIGHT wing groups!”
And this is where people on the left are blocking change, and the reasons are related to old metaphors and current history. Oregon passed a law that targeted the far right, but civil rights groups pointed out it is open to misuse against climate and racial justice activists. As, Natasha Lennard wrote in the Intercept.
THERE ARE ALREADY ample laws on the books and tools available to police should they wish to take on extremist violence overwhelmingly perpetrated by the far right. But it is not for lack of capacity or resources that police in the state have regularly ignored these groups; there is a well-established pattern of police support for, and indeed membership of, civilian far-right organizations, including the Oath Keepers militia.
Oregon Domestic Terrorism Law Targets the Far Right. Here’s How It’ll Backfire., Natasha Lennard. April 24, 2023 The Intercept
So it’s more than just having laws on the books, it’s about how we define terms, categorize people and groups and then who is actually prioritized for investigation and prosecution.
Think about how the right wing media and politicians are calling convicted insurrectionists hostages. The FBI has prosecuted people in right wing groups that clearly are domestic terrorists. There are hundreds of convicted insurrectionists with ties to known domestic terrorism groups. The FBI needs to keep an eye on these people with a history of threats and actual violence. It’s a threat to public safety if they don’t.
But if everyone is REPOSTING that phrase hostage, under the guise of reporting on Donald Trump, we are spreading that disinformation about who those people are and what those groups they belong to are doing.
So, since I always like to end on what we in the public do. I made a graphic to illustrate the point I learned from Marcy Wheeler about spreading disinformation, “Don’t be a Data Mule for Disinformation!“
