Monthly Archives: August 2023

Blossoming Seeds

August 28, 2023 – 12:28 pm

Inverting power relationships — casting the powerless as a looming threat and the powerful as beleaguered — is a primal feature of reactionary thinking, the very seed that blossoms into fascism.

– David Roberts

This week’s featured post is “Republicans think they’ve found a way to pitch abortion bans“.

The David Roberts quote above is in response to this social-media exchange:

Rod Dreher: Trump is rich, but he is totally not the ruling class. It’s about culture.

Radley Balko: Trying to think of a definition of “ruling class” that includes Oberlin social justice activists, Black Lives Matter, and drag queens, but not the billionaire real estate mogul who was literally just president, appointed 1/3 of SCOTUS, and is even odds to be president again.

This week everybody was talking about Fulton County Inmate #P01135809

Trump surrendered to authorities in Fulton County Thursday evening. He was booked, photographed, and then released. He returned to Twitter (for the first time since his post-insurrection banning) with a post of his mugshot and the slogan “Never Surrender!” — as if he hadn’t just surrendered. That image and slogan is now available on a wide variety of Trump merchandise, in case you believe a self-described billionaire needs your money more than you do. (BTW, I thought “Never Surrender” was done better in Galaxy Quest.)

Did you wonder what was going on with Trump’s expression in his mugshot? It turns out the look he gave has a name.

“The Kubrick Stare” is one of director Stanley Kubrick’s most recognizable directorial techniques. A method of shot composition where a character stares at the camera with a forward tilt, to convey to the audience that they are at the peak of their derangement

The other amusing thing about the booking was his height-and-weight listing: 6’3″, 215 pounds. That turns out to be a fairly typical set of measurements for NFL quarterbacks. To me, this just underlined something I’ve believed for several years: This guy can’t tell the truth about anything. I mean, we’ve all probably shaved a few pounds off our weight at one time or another, but at some point you’re just insulting people’s intelligence.

Legally, of course, these indignities are meaningless. The other three jurisdictions where Trump was indicted didn’t mugshot him or report his weight, and yet I’m sure police will easily recognize him if he goes on the lam.

Nonetheless, I suspect this ubiquitous mugshot will end up mattering politically. Until now, low information voters who favor Trump have been able to tell themselves that his legal troubles are all meaningless political shennanigans, kind of like the “scandals” on Fox News that rage for a weekend and then come to nothing. (Biden is banning gas stoves! ) They ignored his impeachment hearings (where his guilt was proved for anyone who bothered to watch) and the January 6 hearings (ditto), and felt justified in doing so, because ultimately there were no consequences.

But the mugshot sends a different message: This is really happening. It’s different from the usual partisan mudslinging.

A new poll from Politico underlines this point: 61% of the country wants to see Trump’s election-subversion trial happen before the 2024 election. 51% believe he’s guilty, and only 26% believe he’s innocent. 50% believe he should go to prison if convicted, while only 18% said he should go unpunished.

The upshot is that about a quarter of the country hasn’t paid enough attention to have a definite opinion. That number is going to shrink as the trials take place. And since the evidence against him is compelling, a lot of those people are going to shift into the guilty/prison columns.

and Putin’s revenge

Russian officials have now verified that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s DNA is in the wreckage of the plane that crashed between Moscow and St. Petersburg Wednesday. The number of Putin opponents who have had fatal “accidents” is long and not worth reviewing.

I haven’t yet seen any persuasive analysis of what Prigozhin’s death means for Putin, for Russia, or for Ukraine. University of Colorado Professor Sarah Wilson Sokhey is tentative, but makes sense to me:

What the historical context best tells us in this case is that when you have a coup attempt, and when you have generals being demoted and you have a failing military campaign, there are a lot of cracks in the system. It’s very difficult for people to predict how that power struggle will play out, but violently and chaotically is one way that has played out in the past. And that’s something we should be concerned about.

and the Jacksonville race shooting

Saturday afternoon, a White gunman with swastikas on his AR-15 killed three Black people in a Dollar General store before killing himself. Reportedly, he had previously stalked the historically Black college Edward Waters University, and left behind a manifesto expressing his hatred of Black people.

[The shooter] legally purchased his guns despite having been involuntarily committed for a mental health examination in 2017, the Associated Press reported.

This shooting follows last summer’s shooting in a Buffalo supermarket, where a White racist gunman targeted Black people, killing ten of them. In 2019, a White gunman targeted Hispanics at a WalMart in El Paso, killing 23. He also left a manifesto citing the Great Replacement theory that White people in America are at risk. I could go on.

If young Muslim men were entering places with a lot of Christians and shouting “Allah Akbar!” before opening fire, they would be portrayed in the media as Muslim terrorists, independent of their state of mind at the time. But due to White privilege, that’s not how these shootings have been covered. Instead, each shooter is described as “mentally ill”, rather than as a representative of a dangerous ideology.

In this instance, for example, Governor DeSantis acknowledged that the killings were racially motivated, but denounced the shooter mainly in individual terms as a “deranged scumbag” and “lunatic”.

But these are not random lone-wolf attacks. It’s time we start linking these killings together as a White supremacist terrorist movement, and addressing what the government and the public can do about this dangerous violence.

and the Republican debate

I covered the abortion part of the debate [transcript] in the featured post. But that was not the only important topic. By far the most significant moment of the debate was when the moderators posed this question from a young Republican:

Polls consistently show that young people’s number one issue is climate change. How will you as both President of the United States and leader of the Republican Party calm their fears that the Republican Party doesn’t care about climate change?

Moderator Martha Maccallum then asked for a show of hands: “Do you believe in human behavior is causing climate change?”

No hands were raised and the young man’s question was never answered. Vivek Ramaswamy declared that “the climate change agenda is a hoax”, and claimed that “more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”

No one contradicted him. Various candidates obliquely recognized the issue, but made excuses for doing nothing. Nikki Haley said:

We also need to take on the international world and say, okay, India and China, you’ve got to stop polluting. And that’s when we’ll start to deal with climate.

Tim Scott pointed his finger at the whole developing world:

America has cut our carbon footprint in half in the last 25 years. The places where they are continuing to increase Africa, 950 million people, India, over a billion, China over a billion. Why would we put ourselves at a disadvantage, devastating our own economy? Let’s bring our jobs home.

No one presented an idea that would have any effect on the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, other than to increase them.

To me, everything else about the debate was trivial. My takeaway from the debate is this: If you care at all about climate change, there is no Republican you can support.

That’s why I agree with Beau of the Fifth Column: The winner of the debate was Joe Biden.

The climate change quote was far from the only outrageous thing Vivek Ramaswamy said during the debate, and over the weekend he was on virtually every talk show saying even more outrageous things.

There’s something broken in our media, and it intersects badly with what’s broken in the Republican Party. In our media, saying ridiculous things gets you more attention than saying wise or sensible things. And a sizable chunk of the Republican base yearns to break free from the constraints of Reality, so a potential leader shamelessly spouting nonsense — heedless of the criticism of “elites” who are still attached to Reality — appeals to them.

Ramaswamy has been taking full advantage of that sad configuration, and no doubt the next set of polls will show him moving up, at least as a second choice for Trump voters.

Consequently, I’m not going to repeat all the craziness he spouted on the talk shows. However, I did take a look at his biography, and I’m having a hard time figuring out why anyone thinks he should be president.

Ramaswamy, at 38, is an entrepreneur in the pharmaceutical industry, and he’s made quite a bit of money in that role. But it’s hard to tell whether his career has actually benefited anyone. His fundamental idea is to buy up patents for unproven drugs that the large companies are giving up on, then form small companies focused around getting those drugs through clinical trials and onto the market.

Does that strategy work? Hard to say, at this point. His main company, Roivant, got its first drug onto the market in 2022; it’s a cream for treating plaque psoriasis. A dozen or so other drugs are in various phases of clinical trials and may or may not ever be approved for use. At the moment, the testing and development process is burning cash faster than the one marketable drug can earn it, so the company is losing money. A lot of start-ups do that, and some of them eventually turn into Facebook. But most don’t.

So 10-20 years from now, Ramaswamy could be Elon Musk, or he could be (barely) remembered as a guy who sucked in a lot of investor cash and blew it.

Personally, I’d like to see more definite results from his first career before I consider him for a second career as a political leader.

and you also might be interested in …

Today is a significant day in Trump’s trials. Mark Meadows has a hearing before a federal judge in Georgia, trying to get his trial moved from Georgia state court to federal court. The issue is whether what Meadows did to further Trump’s conspiracy was part of his job as White House chief of staff. If so, he’s entitled to move the case to federal court.

Ordinarily that hearing would mostly have procedural significance, but both sides have upped the ante: Meadows is testifying in favor of his motion, and Fani Willis has called Brad Raffensperger. So this hearing is a preview of the overall case.

In a different courtroom, Judge Tanya Chutkan picked a trial date for the federal case against Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election: March 4, a date much closer to Jack Smith’s January 2 proposal than Trump’s April, 2026 offer. If this date holds up, the trial will begin the day before the Super Tuesday primaries.

Sarah Palin is the latest Republican to suggest “civil war” as a proper response to the Trump indictments.

“Those who are conducting this travesty and creating this two-tier system of justice, I want to ask them what the heck, do you want us to be in civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen,” Palin told Newsmax on Thursday night.

“We’re not going to keep putting up with this.”

It’s important to recognize this talk for the admission of guilt it is. If Trump supporters really believed what they say — that the charges are politically motivated nonsense — they’d want a quick trial so that a jury could laugh the case out of court. The only way that “civil war” makes sense is if you believe that a jury of ordinary American citizens who sees the evidence against Trump will find him guilty, and so violence is the only way to keep him out of prison.

and let’s close with something photogenic

Past Chronicles picks out a few dozen of the most creative ways people have incorporated statues and prominent architecture into their photos.

As several of the photos suggest, kids do this spontaneously.

Sometimes you can repurpose a statue completely: With the right staging, an applause can become a spanking.

And a baseball swing becomes an assault.

Apparently, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is a popular target for photographic abuse. Here, it tops an ice cream cone.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Republicans think they’ve found a way to pitch abortion bans

August 28, 2023 – 9:52 am

Abortion bans are unpopular, unless their advocates can demonize the opposing position and distract voters from what they really want.

Since the Dobbs decision last year, abortion has been a winning issue for Democrats. Whenever the issue of abortion has been put in front of the voters, the abortion-rights side has won, even in red states like Kansas, Kentucky, and (most recently) Ohio. Abortion was clearly a factor in liberals gaining the swing vote on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and in Democrats seizing complete control of state government in Michigan.

Pre-election polling by the Epic-MRA pollster Bernie Porn also highlighted how this year’s abortion rights initiative benefited Dems. Asked what single issue was motivating them to vote, 43% of respondents said abortion, which topped inflation by about 14 points.

“Abortion, abortion, abortion,” Porn said. “This proposal drove women and younger voters to the polls … and if Democrats in other states have a mechanism to put an abortion ballot proposal on the ballot in 2024, then they should consider that.”

A pragmatic Republican politician, then, should want to play this issue down. The no-abortion-at-all, life-begins-at-conception position is the Republican equivalent of defund-the-police: A segment of the base is strongly committed to it, but it’s an almost certain loser if you put it in front of the general electorate.

Democratic candidates, for the most part, have handled defund-the-police like this: They express sympathy for the concerns of the activists (i.e., police violence against people of color), but change the subject whenever specific proposals come up, and run away completely if they are asked to say “defund the police” in public.

So far, though, Republicans have not been able to do anything similar with abortion. Their anti-abortion base is too large and feels too entitled to primacy. Taking over the Supreme Court was the work of decades, and now that the Court no longer stands in their way, they want action. At the state level, they’re getting it, at least in red states that leave legislating to their gerrymandered legislatures and keep abortion propositions off the ballot. But those new laws are producing horror stories that motivate women around the country to vote for Democrats.

What to do?

This week’s Republican presidential debate gave us a look at the current state of play. Everyone on the stage identified themselves, in one way or another, as “pro-life”. But no one volunteered their support for the kind of complete-ban proposals that used to be at the center of the anti-abortion movement.

The one who came closest was Mike Pence, who called out abortion as a “moral issue” and pledged to be a “champion of life” in the White House. But even he could only offer that “A 15-week ban is an idea whose time has come”. [1]

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (who signed a 6-week ban in his state) held out for leaving the issue to the states. And I can’t find a debate quote from Chris Christie, but elsewhere he also has also said abortion should be a state matter. But everyone else coalesced behind a federal 15-week-ban, with some hand-waving in the direction of exceptions for rape, incest, and (possibly) maternal health. [2]

N weeks. The basic framing is rarely stated explicitly, but it goes like this: There is some point in every pregnancy where the government’s judgment becomes better than that of the people who are actually involved. So while (up to some point) the government may allow women to consult with the people they trust and decide whether or not to go forward with a pregnancy, beyond that point the government’s decision prevails. Ditto for doctors: Up to some deadline, a doctor may decide whether or not the best thing to do for a patient is to perform the abortion she is asking for, but past that point the decision belongs to the government.

Once you accept that framing, the only decision to make is when the government takes control. There’s going to be an N-week ban, except for a few special situations the government recognizes. So the only issues left to discuss are what N should be and what exceptions should be allowed.

Under the Roe v Wade framework, women had a complete right to choose abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. In the second trimester, states could impose restrictions narrowly tailored to protect the woman’s health. In the third trimester, the potential viability of the fetus outside the womb allowed states to impose more-or-less complete bans. The Casey decision of 1992 mostly reaffirmed Roe, but shifted the focus more to viability: When could a fetus survive outside the womb? The viability standard depends on a number of factors, including the progress of technology, but generally it set N at around 24 weeks.

So in proposing a 15-week federal ban, the Republican candidates are framing themselves as moderates willing to compromise (at least until they have more power): Their base would like N to be zero, but they’re willing to settle on 15. The real radicals, they claim, are those who reject the N-week model altogether: They support “abortion up to the moment of birth”, a phrase that seems to have been well tested in focus groups.

Ron DeSantis (who signed a 6-week ban shortly after he was reelected and didn’t have to defend it to Florida voters) laid it out like this:

What the Democrats are trying to do on this issue is wrong: to allow abortion all the way up to the moment of birth. … We’re better than what the Democrats are selling. We are not going to allow abortion all the way up till birth and we will hold them accountable for their extremism.

Martha McCallum, a debate moderator, teed up a similar question for Burgum:

What do you say about the states, there’s about five of them, including New Jersey, I think a few others, that allow abortion up until the time of birth. Now if you were president, would you be able to abide that?

Tim Scott also invoked the phrase:

We cannot let states like California, New York, and Illinois have abortions on demand up until the day of birth. That is immoral. It is unethical, it is wrong. We must have a President of the United States who will advocate and fight for at the minimum a 15-week limit.

And Nikki Haley went on offense: Democrats who don’t like 15 should be pushed to specify what number they do support.

What I would love is for someone to ask Biden and Kamala Harris: Are they for 38 weeks? Are they for 39 weeks? Are they for 40 weeks? Because that’s what the media needs to be asking.

Jen Psaki summed it up:

This wasn’t just some throw-away line for applause on the debate stage. This is a talking point.

The demonized image. It’s not hard to see why “abortions on demand up to the day of birth” polls so badly. It invokes the image of a healthy woman who carries a healthy fetus for nearly nine months, and then, on a whim, decides to kill her baby rather than let it be born and given to some deserving childless couple eager to provide a loving home. By refusing to stop her from performing such a heinous act, you and I and the nation as a whole are “allowing” it to happen.

But once you draw that scenario into the foreground of your awareness, it should be obvious that it literally never happens, not in New Jersey, California, New York, or anywhere else. Abortions after 21 weeks (still well before birth) were already rare, even under Roe. [3] They get rarer with each week of gestation.

Nearly every one is a special case of some sort. That stands to reason: Who is going to endure months and months of pregnancy if they plan not to have a baby? Women who get late abortions are almost all women who decided not to get early abortions. Overwhelmingly, they wanted to have a child, and then something unexpected happened. Maybe the woman has cancer, and doesn’t dare wait until after the birth to start chemotherapy. Maybe the fetus has failed to develop in some way that dooms it to a short and pain-filled life. Maybe the fetus is already dead.

A million things can go wrong in the final months of pregnancy. Good luck anticipating all of them and writing all the appropriate exceptions into a law, much less making sure that law is applied compassionately in emergency situations.

So while Mike Pence is right that abortion is “a moral issue”, it is the height of arrogance to imagine that we, while sitting on our sofas watching a debate, can decide those complex moral issues better than the people who are actually there and know all the special circumstances.

State governments that opt out of the N-week framework are not “allowing” heartless moms to kill healthy babies about to be born. Instead, they are yielding to the judgment of people who are in a better position to weigh the complicated moral questions a late-term abortion invariably involves.

Restoring the rights protected by Roe. So OK, I have just defended a position that a hostile adversary could smear as “allowing abortion up to the moment of birth”. But a second point is worth making: Despite what the debaters repeatedly claimed, I’m an outlier. The vast majority of elected Democrats aren’t willing to go that far.

The best evidence of what most Democrats want is the bill they tried to pass last year: the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022. That bill passed the then-Democratic House before getting derailed by a Republican filibuster in the Senate. It had President Biden’s support. The WHPA eliminated prohibitions on abortion “at any point or points in time prior to fetal viability”, and also prohibitions “after fetal viability when, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health”.

In other words, it put the law back more or less to where it had been before Roe was reversed last summer. Nothing in it allowed “abortions on demand up until the day of birth”.

Polls. In every poll or election where it has been tested, restoring the pre-Dobbs configuration of reproductive rights is an extremely popular position. So anti-abortion advocates are trying very hard to pretend that this option doesn’t exist. If you watched the debate, you would never have guessed that anyone, much less President Biden, wants to restore precisely the rights the Supreme Court took away.

Mike Pence claimed at one point that a 15-week ban is “supported by 70% of the American people”. When challenged on this, his staff pointed to a poll conducted on behalf of an anti-abortion group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

In fact, Pence understated the poll’s result: 77% wanted either a 15-week ban or something even more restrictive. But here is the question the respondents were asked:

Which of the following best describes your position on the abortion issue?

  • Abortion should be prohibited throughout pregnancy, with exception for the life of the mother, rape, and incest. (26%)
  • Abortion should be prohibited after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected at 6 weeks of pregnancy, with exception for the life of the mother, rape, and incest. (20%)
  • Abortion should be prohibited after a baby can feel pain at 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exception for the life of the mother, rape, and incest. (31%)
  • Abortion should be allowed throughout all 9 months of pregnancy, without any restrictions. (15%)
  • I’m totally unsure. (8%)

There’s so much wrong with this question I don’t know where to start. First off, respondents are asked to respond to “facts” that are not facts. Embryos (not babies) don’t have a heartbeat at 6 weeks. And the idea that fetuses (also not babies) can feel pain at 15 (or even 20 or 25) weeks is highly speculative and not the current medical consensus. [4]

But perhaps worse than the biased wording is that no option corresponds to the rights women had 15 months ago. If you aren’t for banning abortion at 15 weeks or earlier, the only other choice is essentially “abortions on demand up until the day of birth”.

A similar poll was conducted by Cygnal, with a headline result that “Majority support abortion ban”, fleshed out in the press release to “56% of voters support a federal abortion limit of 15 weeks (23% oppose; 21% unsure), including a plurality of Democrats.”

How did they come up with that? The same way Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America did, but with even fewer options. The question they asked respondents was:

Do you support a federal 15-week ban on abortions with an exception for rape, incest, and life of the month or support allowing abortion up until the point of birth?

Can Republicans “go on offense”? That’s the advice from Kellyanne (“Alternative Facts“) Conway in a WaPo column the morning after the debate. “If they want to win, Republicans need to go on offense on abortion“.

If you probe into the column, “go on offense” means what it usually does with Conway: bury voters in bullshit. She repeats the 6-week-heartbeat and 15-week-pain canards, and claims

Democrats are making a radical push for abortion on demand throughout pregnancy and will try to put some version of that question on the ballot in the coming election.

An obvious way to back this point up would be to point to some abortion-until-birth ballot proposal Democrats are gathering signatures for in some state or another. But Conway doesn’t, because there is none.

She quotes the Cygnal poll (whose biased question I just quoted) claiming that a majority support a 15-week ban. She advocates pushing Democrats the way Nikki Haley did, with “Is there any abortion they find objectionable?”, as if refusing to usurp a woman’s decision is the same as agreeing with every decision a woman could conceivably make (even if no women are actually choosing whatever hideous option Republicans might imagine).

So that’s what’s coming: an avalanche of anti-abortion bullshit. Get your wading boots ready for it.

[1] Pence rooted his position in his religion:

After I gave my life to Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I opened up the book and I read, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” and “See, I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life.” And I knew from that moment on the cause of life had to be my cause.

Here Pence demonstrates the back-flips you have to do if you want to claim that the Bible denounces abortion: He takes two quotes out of context and smushes them together so that they seem to say something neither one says.

The two verses are Jeremiah 1:5 and Deuteronomy 30:19. In Jeremiah 1, God tells Jeremiah about his longstanding plan that Jeremiah be “a prophet to the nations”. The focus is on God’s foresight and Jeremiah’s special destiny. The text says nothing at all about any fetus in a womb today.

Deuteronomy 30 centers on those “blessings and curses”: God promises to make a great people of the Israelites if they obey the laws he has just given them, but threatens to wipe them out otherwise. (Moses had to talk God out of such a genocide in Exodus 32 after the golden calf incident. After some coaxing, God was satisfied with three thousand deaths rather than the whole nation.) Read in its proper context, “choose life” means “Don’t disobey and make me kill you.” Again, it’s got nothing to do with abortion.

Invariably, when I make a point like this, someone will object that we shouldn’t argue Biblical interpretation in a political arena, because the Bible plays no legal role in governing the United States. And that’s true: The US Constitution is an entirely secular document. The Founders were almost all Christians of one stripe or another, but they were well aware of the wars of religion that had plagued England and wanted to avoid anything similar happening here.

That said, though, I think that when a politician or a party makes an argument that is invalid in its own terms, it’s worth calling out — even if those terms have no legal standing. So when I see it, I call out bad religion in the same way that I call out bad science.

And politically, I don’t want to see the abortion issue framed as Christians vs. non-Christians or Bible-believers vs. everyone else. Anti-abortion is unrelated to the Bible, except through speculative interpretations that no one would put much stock in if they read the text without prior convictions.

[2] As we’ve seen in the states, these exceptions often are not all they’re cracked up to be. Even if your case seems to fit an exception, you still may not be allowed an abortion.

[3] In 2019, the CDC counted 4,882 abortions after 21 weeks in the whole country, or slightly less than 1% of all abortions. Normalizing for the handful of states that didn’t report, I’ve seen estimates that the number of post-21-week abortions could be as high as 6,000 a year.

[4] The short version of the argument against pain-at-15-weeks is that the nerve clusters that would report pain are not yet hooked up to the brain centers that would recognize it.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (12)

The Monday Morning Teaser

August 28, 2023 – 8:37 am

Wednesday, even I couldn’t make myself watch the Republican presidential debate. But I did eventually read the transcript, and what struck me was how the candidates are struggling to dress up their most unpopular position: banning abortion. They actually have a strategy, and it could work if nobody confronts them with the facts. So this week’s featured post will be “Republican candidates think they’ve found a way to pitch abortion bans”. It should be out between 9 and 10.

The weekly summary has to cover what was everywhere this week: Trump’s mug shot, the first one his career of crime has produced. The week’s other big story was in some sense the most predictable: Putin rival Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash. I don’t pretend to know what that portends for Russia’s future, but I’ll link to some people trying to figure it out.

Then there was the Republican debate in general, where a number of topics other than abortion were covered. This led to the bizarre ascent of Vivek Ramaswamy, who was on all the talk shows this weekend, saying all manner of absurd things. Ramaswamy is a challenge to our news system: He’s intentionally saying outrageous things to get attention, and it’s working. I’ll try to tell you what you need to know about him without falling into that trap. (Wish me luck.)

Also, a number of significant things are happening in the Trump trials this week, and especially today.

This week’s news calls for a goofy closing, so I found one: an amusing collection ways people have posed with statues and other famous landmarks. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, for some reason, is especially popular.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)

Knowing and Willful

August 21, 2023 – 12:04 pm

Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.

– The State of Georgia vs. Donald John Trump et al

This week’s featured post is “Why I’m Optimistic about 2024“.

This week everybody was talking about the weather

It’s hard to keep up with Climate Change Summer. Last week we were still digesting the burning of LaHaina. Friday, Canada was evacuating Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, as wildfires approached. Yesterday, a tropical storm hit Los Angeles, something that literally never happens. Las Vegas is expecting heavy rain and strong winds. Most of the towns and buildings in the path of Hilary were built under the assumption that this can’t happen.

As usual, I won’t try to keep up with breaking news. But I do want to make two observations:

  • It’s time to stop arguing about climate change. Anyone who won’t admit what we can see with our own eyes is not worth talking to.
  • For years we’ve been hearing that computer models of the climate were unreliable and could be inaccurate. Such doubts have been spread by people who want to deny the problem. But it’s just as likely that the errors in the models make them too conservative. We need to think about the possibility that climate change could be worse than scientists’ predictions.

The usual suspects are trying to connect aid to Ukraine with the federal emergency response to Maui, as if Hawaii were being ignored and cutting Ukraine aide would help Hawaians. Beau of the Fifth Column covers the Maui aid process pretty well.

As for Ukraine, it’s as if Democrats said, “Why are we spending money on Trump’s secret service detail rather than helping people in Maui?” These decisions should all be made on their own merits.

and the Trump trials

The Fulton County indictment, Trump’s fourth, dropped Monday night. It covers some of the same actions as Jack Smith’s January 6 conspiracy indictment — Trump’s “perfect phone call” to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger figures in both, for example — but Fani Willis has written a much more sweeping narrative. While Smith’s is laser-focused on Trump, leveling four charges and leaving his co-conspirators unnamed, Willis’ indictment charges 19 people with 41 crimes. Trump and Rudy Giuliani are charged with the most crimes, 13 counts each.

What structures the indictment is a RICO charge, a claim that Trump led a corrupt enterprise that committed a number of individual crimes in service of a single illegal goal:

Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.

Smith’s indictment, unlike Willis’, is streamlined to get to trial quickly. Smith has requested a January 2 trial date, while Trump’s lawyers produced the laughable suggestion of April, 2026. Judge Chutkan is expected to announce the real trial date by August 28.

A number of other issues will come before Chutkan soon: What to do about Trump’s direct defiance of her order not to make “inflammatory statements” about the case that could be construed as threatening witnesses or trying to taint the jury pool.

And a different federal judge will have to decide Mark Meadows’ motion to move his trial from Georgia state court to federal court and then dismiss the charges. Even if Meadows gets his way about removing the case from Georgia courts, the trial will still take place under Georgia law, and presidential pardons would still be off the table. Dismissing the charges seems unlikely.

Trump will likely file similar motions. Lawrence Tribe et al explain why they should fail.

Several detailed summaries of the Georgia indictment are out there. Here’s Lawfare’s.

The 98-page indictment itself is a bit dull to read, largely because it endlessly repeats a number of phrases that I assume have significance in Georgia law. For example, the RICO charge is split into 161 individual acts, not all of which are illegal in and of themselves. Each one concludes with some version of “this was an overt act in futherance of the conspiracy”. Each of the 41 charges gets its own section, which ends with “contrary to the laws of said State, the good order, peace, and dignity thereof.”

By the end, I was amusing myself by picturing a liturgical performance of the indictment, with the acts and charges as a call-and-response: A cantor chants the content, and the congregation responds “this was an act in furtherance of the conspiracy” or “contrary to the laws of said State, the good order, peace, and dignity thereof,” as appropriate. At every mention of an unidentified person (Individual 24, say), a background choir intones “whose identity is known to the grand jury”.

If you want to stage such a performance, feel free to take the idea and run with it. Just mention my name in the program and send me a YouTube link.

The Georgia indictment goes into detail on several incidents that are barely mentioned in the federal indictment. For example: trying to bully election worker Ruby Freeman into confessing to fictitious election fraud, and illegally gaining access to voting machines and voting-machine software in Coffee County.

I had heard about both of these incidents before, but did not appreciate how they fit into the larger conspiracy. The woman who offered Freeman “protection” if she confessed was not just a rogue actor inspired by Trump’s lies; she conspired with Harrison William Prescott Floyd, who was director of Black Voices for Trump; Robert Cheeley, who participated in Rudy Giuliani’s presentation to Georgia legislators, the one in which Freeman was originally slandered; and Scott Graham Hall, who was also involved in the Coffee County voting-machine break-in.

The Coffee County incident also involved Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, fake elector Cathy Latham, and a number of other conspirators.

Acts like these may not have the scope of the fake-elector plot or pressuring Mike Pence to violate the Constitution, but they are the kind of building blocks RICO cases are built on, because they are clearly criminal. There’s no other way to spin the video of Trevian Kutti telling Ruby Freeman she needs to be “moved” within 48 hours to avoid some unspecified consequence. “I cannot say what will specifically will take place. I just know that it will disrupt your freedom and the freedom of one or more of your family members. … You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up.” Terrorizing a public official is classic racketeering.

There’s a legal debate going on about whether the 14th Amendment bars Trump from ever serving as president again. I won’t comment because I haven’t done enough research to have an opinion worth sharing.

Sadly, Trump has cancelled the press conference today that was going to introduce “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia”. This REPORT was going to completely exonerate him from the charges in the Fulton County indictment.

I say “sadly” without irony, because I welcome any development that commits Trump to a fixed position. Rhetorically, Trump is at his strongest when he can float above the discussion, making loose references to a hazy collection of theories that he never quite commits to. While any single claim is probably absurd and easily refuted — Fox News, for example, paid $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems rather than try to defend his rigged-voting-machine lies in court — the entire cloud is hard to get a handle on. Supporters can acknowledge the obvious problems with this claim or that one, while still believing that some other unspecified Biden-stole-the-election theory is true.

Trump fears going to court and is desperately trying to delay his trials because court processes are designed to cut through such fog. His lawyers will have to tell the jury a single coherent story, and he doesn’t have one.

I wish he’d produce a similar “Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT” about the Mar-a-Lago documents. At various times he has implied that he declassified the documents, suggested the documents were planted by the FBI, and claimed “I had every right to have these documents” even if they were classified. These claims contradict each other and are all absurd, but when one is refuted his supporters can simply shift to another. By the time they come back around to their original excuse, they’ve forgotten why it’s false.

So I’d love to see him commit to a single narrative, whatever it is. By all means, Mr. Trump, tell us your side of the story. Write a legal affadavit and sign your name to it — preferably under penalty of perjury. Your cultlike followers may refuse to read the indictments against you, refuse to watch the January 6 hearings, and in general cover their ears against any unwelcome information, but I promise you this: I will read any REPORT you put out there. If you have exculpatory evidence, I want to see it.

Trump may not be announcing his first-and-best stolen-election claims, but Mike Lindell is, and it’s the same old crap that has been debunked many times.

and Hunter

For almost a year, Republicans have complained that the US attorney investigating Hunter Biden wasn’t given special-counsel status. Now he has been, and they’re complaining about that too.

I seldom discuss Hunter Biden on this blog, for a simple reason: Until whatever Hunter is supposed to have done can be credibly connected to something his father did, I don’t care. I don’t need to see absolute proof before I get concerned, but give me something beyond MAGA wishful thinking. Hunter has never held a government office (unlike, say, Jared Kushner), and he appears to have had no direct influence on US policy.

He appears to have done some illegal things — hence the plea deal that fell through — though exactly what those are is never quite clear. He has also traded on his name, which is unsavory but annoyingly common and not illegal. Whatever he has or hasn’t done, he should be treated like anyone else would be — no better and no worse. If he ends up going to jail, I’m sure that will make his father sad. But that means nothing to me, because I care about the US government, not the Biden family.

Democrats would do well to write a broad anti-corruption law, one that would apply to future actions like the ones Hunter, Jared, Clarence Thomas, and Ginny Thomas are alleged to have committed. Holding high office should put restrictions and reporting obligations not just on the officeholder, but on close relatives as well. Republicans would of course oppose the law, and it wouldn’t pass, but it would be a good issue to run on in 2024.

and you also might be interested in …

The ten states with the lowest age-adjusted suicide rates are all blue states. The ten with the highest are nine red states and New Mexico. This probably has something to do with the availability of guns. [As a commenter points out below, I missed Colorado on the highest-suicide list. So it’s eight red states and two bluish-purple states.]

Kat Abu examines Fox News’ persistent attacks on the very idea of being educated.

and let’s close with something inevitable

Epic Rap Battles had to do a Barbie vs. Oppenheimer.

By weeklysift | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (5)

Why I’m optimistic about 2024

August 21, 2023 – 10:14 am

If Biden and Trump face off again in 2024, Biden will win again.

Democrats, at least in recent years, tend to be pessimists.

Some of us were probably born with a pessimistic nature, while others were scarred by 2016. That year, even hours after all the votes had been cast, it still seemed impossible that Donald Trump could become president. The polls had said said so, though not as convincingly as many of us remember. (The Real Clear Politics final polling average had Clinton ahead by 3.2%, and she won the popular vote by 2.1%. The too-late-to-poll news had broken badly that final weekend — the second James Comey email scare — and the votes still had to fall almost perfectly for Trump to pull off an Electoral College victory.)

But independent of any data-driven expectations, how could it have happened? How could Mr. Grab-em-by-the-Pussy have beaten one of the best-qualified candidates ever?

In every election since, I’ve had to talk my friends and readers off the ledge. 2018 was a blue-wave election, but we watched the returns come in with tension. In 2020, no poll could be comforting enough. Hillary had led in the polls, and look what happened to her.

Even in early August of 2020, the what-if-Trump-refuses-to-leave worries were so widespread that I had to address them, in a post that I think holds up very well to hindsight.

Here’s something I have great faith in: If the joint session of Congress on January 6 recognizes that Joe Biden has received the majority of electoral votes, he will become president at noon on January 20 and the government will obey his orders. Where Donald Trump is at the time, and whatever he is claiming or tweeting, will be of no consequence.

If Trump’s tweets bring a bunch of right-wing militiamen into the streets with their AR-15s, they can cause a lot of bloodshed, but they can’t keep Trump in office. They are no match for the Army, whose Commander-in-Chief will be Joe Biden.

So if Trump wants to stay on as president, he has to screw the process up sooner; by January 6, it’s all in the bag, and probably it’s all in the bag by December 14. Even stretching out the process with legal proceedings won’t help him: The Constitution specifies that his term ends on January 20. If at that time there is no new president or vice president to take over, the job devolves to the Speaker of the House, who I believe will be Nancy Pelosi.

Even so, Democrats watched Trump’s post-election machinations with worry. No matter how ridiculous his lawsuits were, what about the Supreme Court? Why wouldn’t his court appointees just declare him president?

In 2022, we all trembled before the Great Red Wave that never materialized. Nearly all the MAGA extremists went down to defeat.

And still, the ghost of 2016 haunts us.

It shouldn’t. There are a bunch of reasons to be optimistic about 2024, beginning with 2020.

Biden beat Trump in 2020. It really wasn’t that close. The fact that it took so long to count the votes created the impression that the 2020 election was much closer than it actually was.

In the popular vote, it wasn’t close at all: Biden won by more than 7 million votes, or 4.5%. Compare that to 2012, when Obama beat Romney by just under 5 million votes, or 3.9%.

In the Electoral College, Biden won 306-232, which is sort of close, but not historically close. In 1976, Carter beat Ford 297-240, and that has never been considered a photo-finish. It’s nothing like 2000, when Bush beat Gore 271-266 and carried Florida by a mere 537 votes (according to the official count).

The only way that 2020 seems close is if you imagine Trump able to target votes in precisely the states where he needs them. Unlike 2000, one state wouldn’t do. The path to a 2020 Trump victory would mean “finding” him not just the 11,780 votes he needed in Georgia, but also 10,458 in Arizona and 20,683 in Wisconsin.

My point isn’t that those are unassailable margins, but that they are clear margins. It’s not a rounding error that depended on some small pile of ballots with hanging chads. To be elected, Trump didn’t just need to get the breaks. He got the breaks; a 7-million-vote margin should imply an Electoral College landslide. In order to win in 2024, Trump has to get more votes.

And that’s what the rest of my argument focuses on: Not the continued allegiance of the MAGA faithful, but the opinions of the people who picked Biden over Trump in 2024. What has happened in the last four years that would change their minds? It looks to me like all the tides are running in the other direction. [1]

Demographics continue to work in Biden’s favor. The 2020 results were strongly skewed by age: 50-and-older voters favored Trump 52%-47%, while 18-24-year-olds voted for Biden 65%-31%.

Not to be morbid (I’m 66 myself), but a non-negligible number of over-50 voters die in the course of four years, and are replaced in the electorate by people who were 14-17 in 2020. That matters. And Republicans have their usual plan to solve the problem of voting blocs that oppose them: take away their right to vote. That’s why Vivak Ramaswamy wants to raise the voting age to 25. [A quick aside: If you couple this proposal with a GOP no-exceptions abortion ban, in a few cycles there will be kids in junior high whose moms aren’t old enough to vote.]

A lot has been written about young voters and their distrust of politics-as-usual. Yes, they tend to be skeptical of both major parties and less willing than past generations to incorporate a political label into their identities. Even if they voted or rooted for Biden (or against Trump) in 2020, they’re not going to be swayed by Democratic Party loyalty in 2024. So their votes can’t be taken for granted.

All the same, they will get to election day and see two candidates. Both will seem unimaginably old. (The difference between a 78-year-old and an 81-year-old is meaningless when you’re in your 20s, and Biden is noticeably more spry than Trump. Trump also has much more of an old-man speaking style, focusing on past grievances and demanding credit for what he deems are his past successes rather than talking about the future.) But when it comes to the issues they care about, they will see a strong contrast between those men.

  • Biden has not done enough to stem climate change. But he has at least done something, while Trump still denies the problem exists and wants to roll back the progress Biden has made.
  • Biden wants to protect reproductive rights, while Trump’s Supreme Court has taken them away, and Trump’s party wants to finish the job.
  • Biden hasn’t had enough support in Congress to do much to stop gun violence and prevent school shootings, but Trump denies the problem.
  • Biden is anti-racist, while Trump is racist. (Trump and his supporters claim otherwise, but they’re not fooling anyone.) Gen Z is a minority-majority generation.
  • Biden wants to protect LGBTQ people, while Trump targets them. Even if they are not LGBTQ themselves, literally everyone in Gen Z has LGBTQ friends. Few see those friends as immoral or believe in a God who rejects them.

Granted, there are young fascists who are inspired by Trump’s authoritarian vision. But go back to my main theme: Has Trump done anything to change the minds of the majority who opposed him in 2020? When you put yourself in the place of a typical 20-something, the answer is clearly no.

Swing states have trended blue and anti-MAGA since 2020. In Arizona, the Republican Party went all-in for MAGA candidates, and got swept in all the statewide races. In Georgia, a MAGA candidate lost a Senate race, while the Trump-resisting Republicans (Brian Kemp, Brad Raffensperger) won the state offices. In Wisconsin this April, a liberal judge won the race for a seat on the state supreme court with a 10% margin. Those are the Biden states Trump needs to flip.

Looking at other flip-from-Biden-to-Trump possibilities, the situation is even less promising: Democrats won unified control of the government in Michigan. In Pennsylvania, a Democrat whose stroke prevented him from campaigning much won a 5% victory over a MAGA Republican in the Senate race, while a Democrat beat a MAGA Republican for governor by 15%.

The issues favor Biden. Abortion has been a huge issue for Democrats since the Dobbs decision last year, and figures to be huge again in 2024. The reason the Dobbs decision happened at all is that Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices, so there’s no way for him to wriggle out of that responsibility.

I could be wrong about this, but I believe this summer’s disaster-filled weather will mark an inflection point in the climate-change debate. I don’t think climate change will be an issue Trump can ignore in 2024, and I don’t think denial is a viable position any more. LaHaina burned to the ground. Smoke blotted out the New York City skyline. A tropical storm hit Los Angeles. Climate change isn’t theoretical any more; voters can see it happening with their own eyes.

In foreign policy, Trump vs Biden is a proxy for Putin vs Zelenskyy. I’ll take Zelenskyy.

What’s been holding Biden back in the polls is that his excellent economic record hasn’t registered yet with the public. But give it another year.

Biden has a better story to tell. One of the few criticisms the other Republican presidential candidates have been willing to launch against Trump is that he didn’t get much done. He didn’t build his wall, and Mexico didn’t pay for what little progress he made. He didn’t pass a plan to rebuild American infrastructure. He didn’t get US troops out of Afghanistan. He didn’t shrink the trade deficit.

What he did manage to do was cut rich people’s taxes while refusing to show us his own tax returns. He increased the deficit every year, from the $0.59 trillion deficit of FY 2016 to the record $3.13 trillion of FY 2020.

Biden has made good on many of his priorities, and along the way has done some of the things Trump promised to do, but couldn’t get done. Biden passed an infrastructure package. Withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan was an ugly process, but he got it done. He reinvested in American manufacturing. The Inflation Reduction Act is helping shift our economy away from the dying industries of the past and towards the growing industries of the future.

And it’s working. Reversing a decades-long trend, wage growth has been strongest for low-income workers. Inequality is shrinking.

Trump still represents the old Republican trickle-down economics. Biden’s vision to build the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up” is both better economics and better politics.

On election day in 2020, Trump hadn’t tried to overthrow democracy yet. While the majority of Republicans seems to have accepted Trump’s version of January 6 as either a patriotic exercise or an enthusiastic crowd that spontaneously got out of hand, a significant number of them were rightfully horrified that Trump would launch such an attack on his own country.

From his 2016 candidacy all the way through 2020, people who had happily supported Romney and McCain told themselves that Trump really wasn’t that bad. Even after he started pushing the Big Lie, they thought he just needed time to accept the reality of his defeat. On November 9, 2020, the WaPo reported this:

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” said one senior Republican official. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

Such “senior Republican officials” found out they were wrong. He was plotting to prevent Biden from taking power. He really was that bad. I have to wonder what that guy thinks about Trump now.

It’s hard to say just how many Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will reject Trump’s 2024 candidacy on those grounds. Even if they don’t cross over and vote for Biden, maybe they’ll just stay home. Maybe it won’t be that many, but remember: He needs to gain votes, not lose them.

Trump’s trials will take a toll. It is undeniably amazing that Trump’s support in the Republican Party has remained so solid, even after evidence of his criminality has been widely available. (As I explained two weeks ago, Trump has not seriously challenged the evidence in any of his four indictments. If it weren’t for threats, insults, and ad hominem attacks, he’d have nothing to say.)

But even among Republicans, the number who say he has “done nothing wrong” is dropping, and the number who believe he has committed a crime is growing.

Until recently, it was possible for Republicans to stick their heads in the sand and insist Trump’s legal problems were all politics. After all, they knew that their Benghazi hearings had been political BS, and their Hunter Biden hearings were going to be BS as well, so why shouldn’t they assume Democrats were doing the same thing?

So they didn’t watch the January 6 hearings, and didn’t notice that the witnesses against Trump were nearly all Republicans and officials from his own administration. They haven’t read the indictments, so they don’t appreciate the depth of the evidence against him.

The trials — at least some of which are bound to start before the election — will be harder to ignore. And guilty verdicts reached by juries of ordinary people will be harder yet. When people like Mike Pence and Brad Raffensperger are called to testify against Trump, or his fellow defendants start to flip against him, the cognitive dissonance will be intense.

As the trials get underway, even the MAGA faithful will be shaken by Trump’s sheer impotence. Even judges he appointed won’t buy his legal arguments. He won’t dare take the stand in his own defense. All his claims that “the American people won’t stand for this” will be proven wrong. And he will suffer a long series of small indignities that he will be helpless to prevent. (When he surrenders in Georgia later this week, for example, we may find out his actual height and weight — which I suspect are nothing like the figures he’s been claiming.) He won’t even slightly resemble the godlike figure his cult imagines.

Some Republicans will never admit they were wrong about Trump, but many will reach a point where they just don’t want to think about him any more. By election day, Republican turnout may lag. And again, we’re talking about him losing votes. Where is he going to gain votes? Among the people who didn’t vote for Trump in 2020, how many are seeing the evidence against him and thinking “That’s who I want as my president”?

But what about the polls? The current RCP polling average has Biden up by a miniscule 0.4%, and two recent polls that are part of that average say the race is tied. Biden’s approval rating is 13 points underwater.

How can I not be worried about that?

Well, let’s start with the fact that Trump’s approval is 17 points underwater. Also recall that this point in 2011 marked a low in President Obama’s popularity. His approval rating was 12 points negative that September, but he went on to a 332-206 Electoral College victory the next year.

Political pundits tend to underestimate how many low-information and low-attention voters we have in the US. The political class may be obsessed with Trump and Biden, but tens of millions of Americans have not even thought about their 2024 vote yet. Millions of women have not processed yet that a vote for Trump will surrender their reproductive rights for good. Millions of young people have not understood yet that reelecting Trump will doom their future to climate change.

A few of them never will think things through like that. But the ones who do will provide a sizeable margin for Biden.

[1] A worthy question is: What happens if the Republicans somehow don’t nominate Trump? Well, if you imagine them nominating an actual moderate, the kind of Republican who can win a blue-state governorship like Maryland’s Larry Hogan or New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu, then Biden is probably in trouble. But I think I can pretty much guarantee that’s not going to happen.

A Ron DeSantis or Tim Scott will have the same issue problems as Trump: What about abortion? What about climate change? What about gay rights? Isn’t your economic plan just to keep cutting rich people’s taxes and giving corporations more freedom to poison us?

But any non-Trump Republican has an even bigger problem: What happened to Trump? Did he magically disappear? Did he accept his primary defeat gracefully and endorse the victor?

Again, that’s not going to happen. If Trump isn’t the nominee, most likely he has stomped away mad and is accusing the candidate who defeated him of fraud. I don’t think the GOP can win in that scenario.

By weeklysift | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (14)

The Monday Morning Teaser

August 21, 2023 – 8:27 am

Last week Maui was the target of this summer’s apocalyptic weather. This week it’s Southern California. A tropical storm hit San Diego and Los Angeles yesterday, and it’s raining hard in Las Vegas. This never happens. Also this week, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territory had to be evacuated due to wildfire.

Climate change isn’t something to debate about any more. You just have to open your eyes and see it.

As usual, though, I don’t cover breaking news. So this week’s featured post will take a step back from the Trump-indictment soap opera and look at the larger picture. Lots of Democrats are anxious about the 2024 election, but I’m optimistic. The featured post will explain why. It should be out around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will point to stories about the weather, review the recent developments in the Trump trials, explain why I haven’t been paying much attention to the Hunter Biden investigations, and cover a few other things. It should be out a little after noon.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (6)

Normal Order

August 14, 2023 – 12:27 pm

He is a criminal defendant. He is going to have constraints the same as any defendant. This case is going to proceed in a normal order.

– Judge Tanya Chutkan

This week’s featured post is “How did Frederick Douglass become a conservative spokesman?“

This week everybody was talking about the fires in Maui

They’re still finding bodies in burned-out buildings in Lahaina, the main city in Maui. As of this morning the toll was up to 96 deaths. As you can see in the picture above, people stuck in traffic had to abandon their vehicles and try to escape on foot.

The wildfire had two main causes: dry grass and high winds. One recent theory is that the winds blew over some power lines, which sparked the grass. Extreme dryness and wind are two symptoms of climate change, and the Maui disaster is just the latest event in our Climate Change Summer, which has also included smoke from Canadian fires blanketing the Northeast, extreme rain and flooding in Vermont and Pennsylvania, and record heat in the Southwest and Florida.

Politicians who deny what we can see with our own eyes, or who want to ignore the whole issue, are not worth arguing with any more. They just need to be voted out.

and Trump’s trials

Fulton County DA Fani Willis will seek a Trump indictment this week. The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Tamar Hallerman lays out what to expect from this indictment, which might appear as soon as tomorrow. As I keep saying, I could speculate about the content, but in a few days I can just read it.

Most of the Trump-trial news this week concerned Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the DC trial for the January 6 conspiracy. In a hearing Friday, she issued a protective order barring Trump from using material the government is sharing in the discovery process to badger or intimidate witnesses against him. She also warned that she would be watching Trump’s public statements closely.

The fact that he is running a political campaign currently has to yield to the administration of justice. And if that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say in a political speech, that is just how it’s going to have to be.

It’s worth noting that Americans cannot be deprived of their rights “without due process of law”. Trump temporarily faces a judge’s restrictions because a grand jury of American citizens has found sufficient evidence to indict him for several serious crimes. That’s due process of law.

If Trump does appear to be trying to intimidate witnesses or taint the jury pool, Judge Chutkan has a number of possible responses, which include revoking his bail and putting him in jail until the trial is complete. But there has been speculation that Trump would welcome such a move, because he could make political hay out of the “persecution” he had brought on himself. (I doubt this; I think Trump is terrified of jail.) So Friday Chutkan made a novel threat: If Trump won’t behave himself, she might have to move the trial along faster to protect witnesses, prosecutors, and everyone else involved (including herself).

Given that Trump’s whole strategy has been to delay the trial until he becomes president again — as I explained last week, he doesn’t seem to have any other viable defense — that threat might have some teeth.

What the people Trump targets might need protection from was underlined last week when the FBI tried to arrest a Utah man who had made detailed threats against President Biden (and other Trump enemies like Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg). A judge deemed these threats credible, so an arrest warrant was issued. The man was armed when agents arrived, and was killed when (according to the FBI) he pointed a weapon at the arresting agents.

Naturally, the man is now considered a martyr by the violent Right. These same people would respond to reports of police killing a person of color with “Why didn’t he just comply?” But the laws are supposed to work differently for them.

This is far from the first time an avowed Trump supporter has repeated Trump’s rhetoric before threatening or carrying out violent acts.

It’s worth remembering how normal American politicians respond to such situations. In 2017, a Bernie Sanders supporter brought a gun to a baseball practice for congressional Republicans and began shooting, badly wounding Rep. Steve Scalise and several others. Afterwards, Sanders made this statement:

I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign. I am sickened by this despicable act. Let me be as clear as I can be: Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only come about through nonviolent action, and anything else runs against our most deeply held American values.

Trump has never made any similar statement, and it is difficult to imagine him doing so. More typically, he makes excuses for his violent supporters, lauding how “passionate” they are. On January 6, Trump explained to Kevin McCarthy that the rioters who had invaded the Capitol and were chanting “hang Mike Pence” were just “more upset about the election” than McCarthy was. When he did eventually ask the rioters to go home, he told them “We love you. You’re very special.“

So if you belong to Trump’s personality cult and you want him to love you, you know what to do.

Trump’s apparent approval of violence continues. Saturday at the Iowa State Fair, Rep. Matt Gaetz told a crowd that “we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.” Trump was standing right there, and made no attempt to distance himself from Gaetz’ rhetoric.

Merrick Garland has taken a lot of criticism lately. Andrew Weissmann, formerly a top assistant to Robert Mueller, put it like this:

We [should] not forget that the predicament Jack Smith is in, racing to get and keep trial dates pre-election, is [be]cause Garland was so slow to pursue a top down investigation.

The conventional wisdom says that Garland didn’t want DoJ to prosecute Trump because he was already wary of the weaponization-of-justice cudgel the Right was going to beat him with. But the House January 6 Committee so clearly demonstrated Trump’s criminality that Garland’s see-no-evil position became untenable. So that’s how we got here, but arrived more than a year late.

Jay Kuo, however, makes an interesting counter-argument: No matter how obvious it might be to the casual observer that January 6 was a great crime against America, the laws were not written with January 6 in mind. So no matter how DoJ proceeded, it was going to have to apply laws in new ways, using interpretations that had never been tested in court.

Making Donald Trump the test case was bound to be fraught. So Garland started at the bottom, with the foot-soldiers who invaded the Capitol. Sure, they were trespassing, but wasn’t there more to it that that? What else could they be charged with? Some had attacked police, but what about the ones who hadn’t (or at least weren’t on video doing so)?

There’s a law against obstructing an official proceeding, but the main thrust of that law is about forging official documents, and whether the clause about obstructing a proceeding “otherwise” applied here hadn’t been tested. And was the joint session of Congress on January 6 an “official proceeding” under this law? What did disrupting it “corruptly” mean?

So Garland’s DoJ went about establishing these points in cases that didn’t have to carry the emotional and political baggage of a case against Trump. Appeals of some of those cases did challenge those interpretations, and those appeals weren’t resolved until April of this year. One (the meaning of “corruptly”) is still pending.

So maybe DoJ was always fated to race against the 2024 election. And maybe Attorney General Garland knew what he was doing.

and the pro-reproductive-rights vote in Ohio

Sometimes politics gets so ridiculous that only a comedian can describe it. Here’s Trae Crowder, a.k.a. the Liberal Redneck.

Ohio Republicans found out that the people of their state were likely to pass an amendment that would protect abortion rights in Ohio. And when they heard that, Ohio Republicans said, “The people of Ohio must be stopped.” So they tried to pass another law before that which would require 60% of the vote instead of the usual simple majority. So basically they went to the people of Ohio and said “Hey y’all. We want y’all to vote on whether or not your vote should count for shit.” And the people of Ohio went, “Uh, I think I’m gonna vote for my vote should count for shit.”

And Ohio Republicans just started stomping their feet and making a shocked Pikachu face. Like, I don’t know what they expected. Like what do they think? People are gonna line up around the block to disenfranchise themselves? What did they think was gonna happen, you know?

But this is their playbook now, y’all. This is what they do, because they’ve finally come to understand that they are not actually popular. Right? It took ’em a long time. For years and years they were alienating and demonizing women, Black people, gay people, Mexicans, minorities, immigrants, smart people, poor people, and everybody in between. They’ve been years doing that, and now they’re like “Why don’t anybody like us?”

Oh, I don’t know, truly a mystery for the ages, that one. But either way, they understand it now. They realize that, generally speaking, the American people do not agree with them on things like abortion, gay rights, civil rights, the economy, healthcare — none of it.

They’ve come to realize that and they’ve arrived at this conclusion: If hearts of the people cannot be won, then the will of the people must be quashed. That’s right. They understand that in a functioning democracy, their policies would be relegated to the impotent fringe, and have decided that therefore, from this point forward, this democracy should no longer properly function.

That’s what all this is about, y’all, the gerrymandering laws, voter restriction laws, and January 6 and the Big Lie — all of it.

And it’s not just in Ohio. In Wisconsin, Republicans have managed to gerrymander their way into a supermajority in the Senate, in a state where Democrats have been winning statewide races, including a race in April that gave liberals control of the state supreme court.

Now the map that gerrymanders Republicans into power is coming before the supreme court, and Republicans are threatening to use their illegitimate supermajority to impeach the new liberal justice if she doesn’t recuse herself.

The people of Wisconsin must be stopped!

and education in Florida

When Governor DeSantis got his Don’t-Say-Gay and Stop WOKE Acts through the Florida legislature, the doom-saying of many liberal pundits was written off as “alarmist”. Surely when it got down to cases, reasonable interpretations would prevail and it wouldn’t be that bad. But developments in recent weeks have shown that in fact it’s worse.

One DeSantis priority is that schools stop cooperating with kids who want to try out a different gender identity without their parents’ explicit permission. So if Timmy wants to be known at school as Tammy, Timmy/Tammy’s teachers are supposed to notify the parents, even if doing so violates the child’s trust.

But who’s to decide the gender implications of a nickname? Maybe Samantha wants to be Sam not because she’s experiencing a crisis of femininity, but because she thinks it sounds cooler. So, do her parents need to be notified? Schools don’t want to take responsibility for making such judgments. Hence this email to parents in Seminole County:

If you would like for your child to be able to use a name aside from their legal given name on any of our campuses, we will ask for you to complete the consent form titled “Parental Authorization for Deviation from Student’s Legal Name Form.”

Orange County announced a similar rule. And yes, it does mean exactly what it says.

The rule would impact everyone from students who prefer using a shorthand nickname (“Tom” versus “Thomas,” for instance), to those who prefer a different name altogether, including transgender students

All my life, I’ve gone by Doug rather than Douglas, the name on my birth certificate. And my parents never had to fill out a form to make that OK.

Last week, I reported on the controversy over whether the College Board’s AP Psychology course could be taught in Florida schools. As of last week, the state Department of Education was saying it could be taught “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.” Nobody knew what that really meant, so several school districts announced they still wouldn’t teach the course.

And in a phone call Tuesday, a spokesperson for Brevard Public Schools, a district about 50 miles east of Orlando, said it was also abiding by the Education Department’s initial guidance, referring NBC News to a statement from the district last week.

“In essence, if we don’t teach all of the content, our students will not receive AP credit. If we do teach all of the content, our instructors will violate the law,” the statement said. “Therefore, we will not offer AP Psychology at any of our high schools this year.”

Wednesday, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. tried to make the state’s position clearer:

It is the Department of Education’s stance that the learning target, 6.P ‘Describe how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development,’ within Topic 6.7, can be taught consistent with Florida law

But even with that explicit permission, some school districts are not willing to take the chance that the way they do teach AP Psych will match Diaz’s official view of how it can be taught. So the class won’t be reinserted into their course catalogs.

This week something similar happened with Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet may be a classic, but fundamentally it’s about two teens who have sex despite their parents’ disapproval. And sure, it’s a tragedy and (spoilers!) they both wind up dead. But still, the whole love-and-death saga is kind of glorious somehow, especially from an emo-adolescent perspective. (According to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” they’re “together in eternity” and “we can be like they are”.) Is this “age appropriate” for high school students? In Ron DeSantis’ Christo-fascist Florida?

So, citing the bard’s overall “raunchiness”, Hillsborough County announced that it would only teach excerpts of Shakespeare, not whole plays, and several other counties were considering following that example. The bad press from those decisions caused FDoE to issue another explicit permission:

The Florida Department of Education in no way believes Shakespeare should be removed from Florida classrooms.

So R&J is back in sophomore English, and all’s well that ends well, so OK then. But still, these episodes underline something I find disturbing: In practice, Florida schools have become a place where everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden. So what happens to literature less canonized than Romeo and Juliet or topics that don’t have the College Board lobbying for them? As the vagueness of Florida’s new laws causes schools to steer clear of anything that might fall into the enormous gray zone those laws have created, how many valuable works — full of ideas that might engage teens, make them think, or spark meaningful discussions — are being swept out the door without making headlines?

Plutarch once wrote (more or less): “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” But teachers are never fired for failing to kindle young minds. Being dull and demonstrating to your students that education is pointless can be the safest course — especially in Florida.

But the development that best displays the Orwellian nature of DeSantis’ “Freedom from Indoctrination” slogan is Florida’s approval of Prager University videos for use in the public schools. That’s discussed in the featured post.

and you also might be interested in …

The ongoing war between red states and their blue cities has claimed a new victim: Houston school libraries. Houston schools have been taken over by the state, leaving locally elected school boards with little say.

In Houston, Texas, dozens of public schools won’t have librarians and traditional libraries when classes start later this month. It’s part of a controversial reform effort in the state’s largest school district. The new superintendent says schools in working-class areas need good teachers more than they need librarians.

While we continue to worry about inflation, China is experiencing deflation. This can be an even more serious problem, because it can lead to cascading bankruptcies: As money gains value, debts become harder to repay. So people and businesses sell assets to raise cash, depressing prices further.

What an inflating West and a deflating China means for the world economy is hard to predict.

Using government power to make “woke” corporations toe the conservative line isn’t just a DeSantis thing, it’s catching on in Republican circles generally. Here, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham warns Apple and Disney that when Republicans regain power “everything will be on the table — your copyright and trademark protection, your special status within certain states, and even your corporate structure itself”.

Recall that Mussolini’s definition of fascism was the merger of state and corporate power.

I can’t explain why the Montgomery dock brawl went viral the way it did, but it inspired some great creativity, including this version using the theme to “Good Times” and ending with some white folding chairs painted into a Harlem Renaissance artwork.

If you’re not following Kat Abu on social media, you should be. She watches Fox News so you don’t have to, and summarizes it in a way that will usually make you laugh rather than fume.

I sometimes picture a gaggle of blond Fox News hosts watching Kat and saying, “Girl, if you just used more make-up and changed your hair, you could get a job here.”

and let’s close with something artificial

If there’s one thing AI is perfect for, it’s producing stereotypes. Most of the time that’s a problem. If you’re trusting AI to write your term paper on Transylvania, for example, you’ll need to make sure you aren’t repackaging a bunch of vampire mythology as fact. But somebody used AI to create images of the most stereotypical person from each of the 50 states.

They aren’t intended to be funny, just stereotypical. Here’s the Californian.

By weeklysift | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (2)

How did Frederick Douglass become a conservative spokesman?

August 14, 2023 – 10:20 am

History gets a remake in Florida schools.

As Ron DeSantis’ Florida continues its descent into authoritarianism, you may have missed one of the summer’s developments: In late July, Florida approved PragerU Kids videos for use in Florida public schools.

What is PragerU? You can be forgiven for not knowing what PragerU Kids is. Prager University is well known among conservatives, but nearly invisible to the rest of us (until recently). Like the fraudulent and now defunct Trump University, it is not actually a university, as its FAQ admits:

No, PragerU is not an accredited university, nor do we claim to be. We do not offer degrees. However, we are the most accessible and influential online resource for explaining the concepts that have made America great.

That right there is a clue to the Prager style: It creates misperceptions, but takes no responsibility for them: We’re not a university, we just call ourselves one. If you jumped to the conclusion that we’re a reputable academic institution, that’s on you.

Elsewhere, it describes itself more explicitly:

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Prager University Foundation (“PragerU”) offers a free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education.

It spends about $20 million a year, and its funding comes from a variety of sources, including a long list of conservative family foundations, like the Bradley Foundation ($1.6 million), Dunn Foundation ($315K), Chillemi Charitable Fund ($316K), Leven Family Foundation ($300K), Mitchell Foundation ($1.2 million), Morgan Family Foundation ($470K), Thirteen Foundation ($3.25 million), and so on. It also gets money from other conservative groups like Turning Point USA ($500K) and National Christian Foundation ($1.7 million). Several millions come via organizations supervising what are called donor-advised funds (which are basically foundations for people who can’t afford the legal overhead of foundations — I have one myself) like Fidelity Charitable Gift Funds ($4.3 million).

In short, while Prager U has some big donors, it also has a fairly wide appeal among conservatives. Its pitch is that “left-wing ideology” is so “dominant” that an alternative conservative voice is needed. It’s pro-fossil-fuel, anti-anti-racist, pro-Christian-exceptionalist, and promotes a number of myths about American history, like soft-pedaling America’s role in the history of slavery. (Soft-pedaling slavery, as we’ll see, is a persistent theme. This is probably a big reason it appeals to DeSantis’ people.)

In short, if you’re arguing the conservative side of just about any culture-war issue, you can add some intellectual trappings to your case by citing a PragerU video. Your friends and family will probably be fooled into taking the “university” thing seriously. (But that’s their fault, not Prager’s.)

PragerU Kids, as the name suggests, is the same thing aimed at children. If you’re a conservative home-schooling your kids, or an explicitly conservative private school, you probably use a lot of these videos. They’re propaganda, but like all the best propaganda, they usually don’t explicitly lie. PragerU Kids videos cherry-pick sources, conveniently overlook events that don’t fit their chosen narrative, and frame facts in deceptive ways, but they’re usually based on something. (If pressed, I suspect most PragerU folks would claim that they’re just using the same deceptive tactics liberals use.)

Just to be clear where I’m coming from, I think PragerU has every right to do what it does, and anybody who wants to view their videos (or show them to their kids) should be allowed to do so. I could even see a public-school system making some of these videos available to older children in a multi-viewpoint class that has the time and resources to provide and discuss the videos’ missing context. But for a public school teacher to show third-graders one of these videos and then send them home (as I imagine will frequently happen in Florida) is educational malpractice. It is precisely the kind of indoctrination that Governor DeSantis claims to oppose.

How does Frederick Douglass get into this? Two of PragerU Kids’ most popular characters are Leo and Layla, a brother and sister who somehow have a time-travel app on their phone. To a certain extent the app has a mind of its own, so when the kids are wondering about something in the present, they frequently get zapped back in time so that some famous historical figure can teach them the proper conservative culture-war lesson.

In one video, they are watching the news on TV, and seeing events that are clearly meant to evoke the demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis policeman. The murder, however, is one of those inconvenient details best omitted, so the kids see only TV commentators making excuses for “violence and destruction by some of our angrier activists” who want to “abolish the police” and “want the US system torn down” for no apparent reason.

Wondering what “abolish” even means, the kids go back in time to explore abolitionists, and meet Frederick Douglass in 1852.

Now, you might wonder why a conservative organization would want kids to talk to Douglass, who said some pretty radical things. For example, when asked to speak at a Fourth of July celebration in Rochester, New York in that very year of 1852, he questioned whether the holiday should mean anything at all to a Black man.

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the ‘lame man leap as an hart.’

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

The Frederick Douglass who made that speech fits right into a class Florida would ban as “critical race theory”.

But that’s not what he says to Leo and Layla. The reason 1852 matters is that Douglass split with his former mentor, White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in 1851. So in this video, Garrison (who is briefly portrayed when Douglass talks about him, but doesn’t get a speaking role) represents the violent extremists and Douglass the activists who patiently work within the system.

So Prager-Douglass opposes slavery, but repeats the soft-pedaling line that Prager and DeSantis favor: “The sad fact is that slavery has existed everywhere in the world for thousands of years.” (In a different video, Christopher Columbus tells the kids that “Slavery is as old as time, and has taken place in every corner of the world.”) In fine PragerU fashion, Douglass says something misleading that is carefully worded enough to be arguably true: “There was no real movement anywhere in the world to abolish slavery before the American founding. Slavery was part of life all over the world.”

Of course, France would abolish slavery in 1794 and the British Empire in 1831. Mexico’s version of the Emancipation Proclamation came in 1829, and was a major reason Texans sought independence. (The Texas Revolution was a fight for slavery, not freedom.) So the video’s assertion about 1787 (when the Constitution was adopted) might pass muster, assuming that you don’t consider the English Quakers a “real” movement. But waiting until 1865 to renounce slavery put the US near the end of the abolition process, not the beginning. Brazil would be the last major country to abolish slavery in 1888.

Prager-Douglass goes on: “Our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong” and “They wanted it to end. But their first priority was getting all 13 colonies to unite as one country.” So they tolerated slavery as “a compromise to achieve something great. … Our founders created a system they thought would have slavery end gradually.” And yes, slavery still hadn’t ended by 1852, but “complicated problems take time to solve.”

And that brings us to Prager-Douglass’ disagreement with Garrison. He says that Garrison “refuses all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.” (What Garrison set on fire was a copy of the Constitution, which you can recognize in the video if you already know that story. If you jumped to the conclusion that he did actual property damage, like the violent demonstrators the kids had seen on TV, that’s on you, not Prager.) Prager-Douglass says he wants to work within the American system, but that Garrison wants to overturn it.

Layla tells Douglass that his way is definitely better, and says that in our time Douglass is an American hero “and that other guy isn’t really known”. (The picture shows Garrison’s statue in Newburyport, Massachusetts.) The kids are triumphalist about the present-day US: All Americans have equal voting rights, and a Black man was even elected president! (There is, of course, no point in mentioning that his administration was followed by a racist backlash, or that people might still be protesting about racial grievances.)

Prager-Douglass asks if we still have the same Constitution, and then says “I knew the US Constitution would survive and allow for positive change.” Prager-Douglass closes by advising the kids to seek change within the system, and to avoid “radicals” like Garrison (and presumably Black Lives Matter).

Who is this guy? You may have a hard time recognizing the PragerU cartoon character as the Frederick Douglass you know from history. After all, by late 1860, Douglass was promoting far more than just gradual change within the system. Speaking on the first anniversary of John Brown’s execution, he endorsed violence: “We need not only to appeal to the moral sense of these slaveholders; we have need, and a right, to appeal to their fears.”

I rejoice in every uprising at the South. Although the men may be shot down, they may be butchered upon the spot, the blow tells, notwithstanding, and cannot but tell. Slaveholders sleep more uneasily than they used to. They are more careful to know that the doors are locked than they formerly were. They are more careful to know that their bowie-knives are sharp; they are more careful to know that their pistols are loaded. This element will play its part in the abolition of slavery.

And his endorsement of the Union was conditional.

My opinion is that if we only had an abolition President to hold these men in the Union and execute the declared provisions of the Constitution, execute that part of the Constitution which is in favor of liberty, as well as put upon those passages which have been construed in favor of slavery, a construction different from that and more in harmony with the principles of eternal justice that lie at the foundation of the government — if we could have such a government, a government that would force the South to behave herself, under those circumstances I should be for the continuance of the Union. If, on the contrary — no if about it — we have what we have, I shall be glad of the news, come when it will, that the slave States are an independent government, and that you are no longer called upon to deliver fugitive slaves to their masters, and that you are no longer called upon to shoulder your arms and guard with your swords those States — no longer called to go into them to put down John Brown, or anybody else who may strike for liberty there.

That doesn’t sound at all like the PragerU cartoon character. So are they lying to the kids?

Not exactly. The PragerU Douglass seems to be based on a particular aspect of Douglass’ thinking during a particular point in his life. During the 1850s, Douglass and Garrison had a very public argument that centered on whether to give up on the American experiment in democracy.

Garrison saw little hope for it. Slavery, in his view, was part and parcel of the Union from Day 1. The word slave may not appear in the Constitution, but the shadow of slavery darkens many of its provisions, from the 3/5ths compromise to the requirement that states return those who were “held to Service or Labor” in another state. The Constitution, in his view, was a “covenant with death” and “an agreement with Hell”. Consequently, he refused to participate in electoral politics and wanted free states to secede. “No Union with Slaveholders” was his slogan.

Douglass explained his contrary view in a speech he gave in Scotland.

I, on the other hand, deny that the Constitution guarantees the right to hold property in man, and believe that the way to abolish slavery in America is to vote such men into power as well use their powers for the abolition of slavery.

Douglass held that the Constitution had been given a pro-slavery interpretation, and the US government had implemented pro-slavery policies, but he denied that the Constitution itself was at fault. In the Scotland speech, (given in March, 1860, a mere seven months before the John Brown speech I quoted earlier), he insisted that free states should stay in the Union precisely so that they could fight against slavery.

This is why today Douglass can be turned to the service of conservatives, particularly the ones like DeSantis, who want to deny that racism played (and continues to play) a structural role in the US. By cherry-picking, Douglass’ words can be put to use in much the same way that Martin Luther King’s famous quote that people “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” is regularly trotted out in opposition to affirmative action (which King supported).

Restoring the context. The video would have you believe that history has proven Douglass right and Garrison wrong, because the Constitution and the Union have both survived, but slavery hasn’t.

However, that result didn’t happen through ordinary Constitutional processes, i.e., by convincing voters and electing abolitionist candidates, as Douglass envisioned. Instead, change came about through violence: The Southern states seceded, the North conquered them, and then in the aftermath of the war, the North imposed abolition, essentially ratifying the 13th Amendment at gunpoint.

The election of Lincoln, which precipitated the crisis, was more the result of slaveholder miscalculation than a groundswell of abolitionist feeling among American voters. As historian Douglas Egerton described the unlikely outcome of 1860 election in his book Year of Meteors, the Democratic coalition of slaveholders and Northern industrialists that had controlled the White House in 1852 and 1856 was well set up to do it again in 1860. But pro-secession Southerners revolted against nominating Northerner Stephen Douglas, split the party, and virtually guaranteed Lincoln’s victory with 40% of the popular vote in a four-candidate field.

If abolition had waited for an anti-slavery voting majority, we might still be waiting.

So history proved neither Douglass nor Garrison right, because neither of their strategies worked. In the end, the slaveholders were not outplayed by their opponents; they simply overreached and lost everything.

If you can find a Black-Lives-Matter lesson in this, you’re cleverer than I am.

Conclusion. So I, an adult with a college education and the time and interest to pursue the matter, was able to find the kernel of truth behind the PragerU Kids video and put it in some proper context. But can we really expect kids Leo’s age — the target audience of the Leo & Layla videos — to do the same?

Florida either thinks we can, or it’s content to let its children be indoctrinated.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (8)

The Monday Morning Teaser

August 14, 2023 – 8:50 am

This week downtown Lahaina, which I visited many years ago, burned to the ground in a wildfire that started in dry grass and was driven by hurricane-force winds. It was the most devastating event yet in our Climate Change Summer, emphasizing yet again that we cannot simply go on this way.

The Sift leaves breaking news to organizations that have the resources to cover it, and information about the disaster is still coming out. (And the death toll is still rising.) So if I don’t say a lot about Maui, that doesn’t imply I don’t see the seriousness of the situation there.

Instead, my attention was caught this week by something that may seem trivial by comparison. In July, the Authoritarian State of Florida approved videos by the right-wing non-university Prager University for use in public elementary schools. PragerU Kids videos constitute precisely the kind of “indoctrination” Governor DeSantis claims to be against. They are slickly produced and probably quite effective at distorting kids’ views of history and the world we live in today.

One video in particular stood out for me: Two time-traveling kids from the present go back to 1852 to talk to Frederick Douglass about abolition, and come back with a negative view of Black Lives Matter protesters today. The Douglass in the video seemed nothing like the Douglass of history, and yet I know the Prager style: They cherry-pick and deceptively reframe history, but seldom lie outright. So how did they do this?

Via the internet, I took my own trip back to the 1800s so I could listen to Douglass (or at least read his speeches). What I found emphasizes (at least to me) how tricky the Prager people really are, and why it’s so dangerous to give them this kind of access to American children. The post “How Frederick Douglass became a conservative spokesman” should appear before 10 EDT.

That leaves the weekly summary a lot to cover: Maui, of course, but also developments in Trump’s various trials, a victory for reproductive rights in the red state of Ohio, other disturbing things we’re learning about Florida education as the new school year approaches, that viral brawl in Montgomery, and a variety of other news. That post should appear before 1.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (3)

Conspiracies

August 7, 2023 – 12:14 pm

The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election. Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew they were false. … Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results. In so doing, the Defendant perpetrated three criminal conspiracies.

– The United States of America v Donald J. Trump

This week’s featured post is “The Evidence Against Trump is Unchallenged“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s January 6 indictment

Tuesday, Donald Trump was indicted for his plot to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election. The indictment was widely covered in the media, so I’ll try not to rehash things you’ve undoubtedly seen many times.

The indictment is only 45 double-spaced pages, so if you don’t want somebody else’s interpretation to get in your way, you can easily read it yourself. If you do want to read somebody’s summary, let me me recommend Marcy Wheeler and Jay Kuo.

The indictment tells a simple story: Trump lost the election. He knew he had lost the election, but wanted to stay in power anyway. So he invented and spread lies about election fraud, which he used to justify a series of illegal actions:

  • pressuring election officials either to baselessly refuse to certify the legitimate election results or to change the results in his favor (as in his famous call urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”).
  • pressuring Republican state legislatures to illegally overrule their state’s voters and instead award Trump their electoral votes.
  • enlisting Republican officials in eight states he lost to falsely claim to be the state’s electors and cast electoral votes in his favor.
  • pressuring Vice President Pence to exceed his constitutional authority and recognize the fake Trump electors.
  • taking advantage of the January 6 riot to push Republicans in Congress not to certify the votes cast by legitimate electors.

The previous indictments were all vulnerable to the criticism: “You’re indicting him for this because you can’t nail him for what you really want.” This one isn’t. The central thing I want Trump to answer for is his attempt to stay in power after losing an election. What’s more, this indictment goes to the heart of why Trump can never be allowed to wield power again: He was a danger to the republic in January 2021, and his possible return to power represents a fresh threat to the republic.

Jack Smith appears to have gone to some trouble to streamline this indictment, so that he has a chance to get a trial done before the election. That’s why the six co-conspirators are not named or indicted (though they may be later). It’s also why Trump isn’t charged with inciting a riot, because that would raise Supreme-Court-level issues about the limits of free speech.

John Eastman (a.k.a. “co-conspirator 2”) is not waffling any more: He’s defending the January 6 riot as a justified attempt to overthrow the government.

Klingenstein asked Eastman whether he would have acted in the same way in 1960 as he did in 2020, referencing the belief on the right that John F. Kennedy stole that year’s election from Richard Nixon.

Eastman replied no, and added that the stakes of 2020 represented an “existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world.”

The Trump 2020 lawyer went on to reference the Declaration of Independence, saying that “our founders lay this case out.”

“There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable,” he said. “At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”

“So that’s the question,” he added. “Have the abuses or the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?”

The January 6 indictment has overshadowed other important recent developments, like the superseding indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, or the states that have been going after local conspirators. In addition, Fani Willis’ indictment in Fulton County will probably drop sometime in the next two weeks.

and Israel

Two articles I found worthwhile: “What Israel Has Already Lost” by Yair Rosenberg and “I don’t recognize the intolerant, illiberal country that Israel is becoming” by Max Boot. The gist I draw from these essays is that the battle for democracy is far from over, but it’s not going well.

Rosenberg points to a new willingness to demonize opponents, which he calls “an utter collapse of shared solidarity”. Boot’s column is an elegy to “the nation I fell in love with” 40 years ago. The current Israel, Boot says, “remains freer than its neighbors”, but he “simply cannot support it as unreservedly as I once did.”

but you should pay attention to this Republican vision

The Heritage Foundation has spearheaded Project 2025, a collaboration of many conservative groups that has produced Mandate for Leadership 2025. This is sets out to be a handbook for the next Republican administration, and will likely have a considerable influence on the any Republican who wins in 2024, whether it’s Donald Trump or not.

There are two main things to know about Project 2025:

  • It would make the executive branch a more perfect instrument of the President’s will by expanding the power of political appointees and making more government employees fireable.
  • It would eliminate any consideration of climate change from US government policies.

The intro to the “Taking the Reins of Office” section says:

When it comes to ensuring that freedom can flourish, nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state. Political appointees who are answerable to the President and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task. The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan “experts,” who pursue their own ends while engaging in groupthink, insulated from American voters.

So the next time there’s a pandemic, Heritage wants a CDC committed to the president’s agenda, not public health. It wants an EPA whose top loyalty is to the president, not the environment. This harmonizes with Trump’s Agenda 47, particularly with its plans to “crush the Deep State”.

The NYT summarizes Project 2025’s energy provisions:

The plan calls for shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels — the burning of which is the chief cause of planetary warming.

If you want to dig into the details, look at the chapters on the Department of Energy and the EPA. Anything related to climate change is ripped out root-and-branch: Repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, eliminate subsidies for sustainable energy, scuttle standards for energy-efficient appliances, and go full-speed-ahead on fossil fuel drilling, mining, and pipeline-building (in a quest for “American energy dominance” in the world).

These policies are laid out without ever stating an opinion about the reality of climate change or its consequences. It’s as if whatever inadequate climate-change-mitigating programs Biden has managed to install are just some irrational fad that it’s time to be done with.

Bear this plan in mind if you start thinking that the 2024 election is just about Trump. Project 2025 is the consensus of conservative thinking. If you vote for any Republican for any office, this is what you’re voting for. If you decide to stay home or vote third-party because the Democrats aren’t inspiring enough, this is what you’re acquiescing to.

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When a state legislature is as gerrymandered as Ohio’s, a ballot initiative is really the only chance the People have to make their will known. In an election tomorrow — one specially scheduled to get a low turnout — Ohio Republicans are trying to shut that avenue down.

Issue 1, which Ohio Republican legislators put on the ballot, would make future ballot measures to change the state Constitution harder to pass in two key ways. If it’s approved, citizens who hope to put amendments to the voters would first have to collect signatures in each of the state’s 88 counties, up from 44 now. And to pass, constitutional ballot initiatives would need to win 60 percent of the vote, rather than a simple majority.

The measure’s import may not be immediately clear to voters, but it’s meant to thwart a November ballot initiative that will decide whether reproductive rights should be constitutionally protected in Ohio, where a sweeping abortion ban is tied up in court.

Republicans know they can’t win this vote on the merits, so instead they’ve launched a confusing campaign implying that this measure has something to do with protecting your children from “trans ideology“.

Remember Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, the two Black lawmakers who were expelled by the Tennessee legislature in April? They were each reinstated by local councils until a special election could be held. Those elections were held Tuesday, and both won reelection. Jones got 78% of the vote in his Nashville district, and Pearson got 90% in his Memphis district.

Is the Gulf Stream about to collapse, as The Guardian reports? Well, no. Some system related to the Gulf Stream might stop working, but not the Gulf Stream itself. Skepchick explains: The report results from a confusion between the Atlantic meridional overturning circuit, which is slowing and could conceivably stop, and the Gulf Stream, which isn’t in danger of stopping.

Now, the AMOC stopping would have serious consequences. But it’s not the Gulf Stream.

Another skirmish in Florida’s fight against education: It briefly looked like AP Psychology courses would have to be withdrawn from the state.

According to the College Board (which created the curriculum and administers the test for AP credit) “how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development” has been part of the course for 30 years. But the Florida Department of Education had told superintendents that “teaching foundational content on sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal under state law”. The College Board announced that if the whole course couldn’t be taught, any mention of “AP Psychology” would have to be dropped from student transcripts.

Friday, Florida backed down, sort of.

The future of the course appeared to be in jeopardy until, late Friday, Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr., informed school superintendents that students will be able to take the class “in its entirety” but only if the course is taught “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.”

Nobody knows yet what that means, but it seems to me to place the onus on Florida teachers, who will have to stake their careers on their interpretation of this vague guidance.

Grist examines the downturn in the plant-based meat market. Not so long ago, beef-like patties from Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat seemed like the next big thing. But rather than exploding, sales fell 8% in 2022.

Several factors are in play here: high costs (compared to actual beef), whether or not the taste is convincing (opinions vary), and an increased focus among health-conscious consumers on avoiding ultra-processed foods (plant-based meat derives as much from labs as from farms).

Personally, I experimented with imitation beef exactly once: I used it to replace the ground beef in a spaghetti sauce. I knew I was in trouble when I started browning the “meat”, and my housemates’ dog didn’t come over to investigate.

About those ultra-processed foods: The New Yorker’s Adam Gropnik paints a more ambiguous picture: He agrees that a lot of what we buy in the store includes unhealthy ingredients, but “processing” is largely in the eye of the beholder.

The history of humanity is the history of processing foodstuffs—by fire, by smoke, by pounding and pulverizing—and it can be hard to find a boundary between those ever more hallowed traditional kitchen practices and the modern ones that we are asked to condemn.

Many of the substances that look suspicious on an ingredient list are as close to “natural” as ones that we instinctively trust.

why is guar gum, extracted from one seed, any more artificial than cornstarch, extracted from another (originally by means of a method patented in the eighteen-fifties by a British industrialist)? Some version of carrageenan, which comes from the seaweed Irish moss, has been used in cooking for centuries; Great-Grandmother certainly used the lecithin from egg yolks, if not from soy oil, to emulsify her sauces.

and let’s close with something oracular

This game has been around for a few years, but I just noticed it. You can get your “Florida man horoscope” by googling “Florida man” and your birthday. Here’s what I get for mine: “Florida man wearing nothing but cowboy hat attacks woman with machete: police“.

Like the positions of the planets when I was born, I’m sure this says something important about my character and life course.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (6)