The Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings this week were an embarrassment for the Senate, as Republican senators pandered to Q-Anon with specious claims that Jackson was somehow pro-pedophile. But they also served a valuable purpose: The senators’ concerns pointed to the issues the Court’s culture-warrior majority will pursue after it overturns Roe v Wade in June.
Same-sex marriage, access to birth control, interracial marriage, and many other currently recognized rights are all based on the same constitutional interpretation as Roe, a doctrine called “substantive due process”. Reversal of Roe will call substantive due process into question, and bring these other rights into the Court’s crosshairs. This week’s featured post “Where Does the Religious Right Go After Roe?” explains how Roe fits into the web of other rights not explicitly listed in the Constitution, and how Roe’s reversal might ripple outwards.
That post should be out shortly.
The weekly summary covers the week’s developments in Ukraine, the Jackson confirmation hearings, the dangerous “grooming” rhetoric of anti-gay and anti-trans extremists, the Ginny Thomas texts, Trump’s crazy new lawsuit, and the apparent bottoming out of Covid case numbers. That should post before noon EDT.
Early on, everyone took for granted that Russia’s military superiority over Ukraine meant that of course they would eventually overrun the entire country, just as the US had overrun Iraq. The question then would shift (as it did in Iraq) to whether Russian occupation forces could pacify the country well enough to install a friendly government and keep it in power for the long term.
And they still might get to that point; maybe that’s still the most likely scenario. But the resilience of Ukrainian resistance, Russian military incompetence, and the unity NATO’s determination to keep Ukrainian fighters well supplied, have combined to raise the question: What if Russia can’t overrun Ukraine? How long can Russia sustain these kinds of losses before their army’s best option is to turn around and go home? And facing that situation, would Putin lash out in some desperate way with chemical or nuclear weapons?
in the absence of substantive progress on the ground and given the scale of the losses being inflicted on its ranks, Russia’s military campaign could soon become unsustainable, with troops unable to advance because they lack sufficient manpower, supplies and munitions, analysts and officials say.
President Zelensky gave a virtual speech to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday. Zelensky had a narrow path to walk: He wanted to express gratitude for the help the US and NATO have given his country, but he also wanted to challenge us: “I call on you to do more.”
He asked for some very specific things:
air defense. He’d like NATO to defend Ukrainian airspace directly by declaring a no-fly zone. But he seemed to realize he won’t get that commitment. “If this is too much to ask, we offer an alternative. You know what kind of defense systems we need, S-300 and other similar systems.” S-300s are Soviet-era air-defense missiles that three NATO countries (Bulgaria, Greece, and Slovakia) field. Slovakia has offered to provide S-300s to Ukraine if other NATO allies would replace them with some equivalent system. Russia has said it “will not allow” such a transfer, whatever that means. Presumably Zelensky specified S-300s because Ukrainians already know how to operate them.
broader sanctions. “We propose that the United States sanctions all politicians in the Russian Federation who remain in their offices and do not cut ties with those who are responsible for the aggression against Ukraine, from State Duma’s members to the last official who has lack of morale to break this state terror. All Americans’ company must leave Russia from their market, leave their market immediately because it is flooded with our blood. All American ports should be closed for Russian goods.”
800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 100 drones, “over 20 million rounds of small arms ammunition and grenade launcher and mortar rounds,” 25,000 sets of body armor, 25,000 helmets, 100 grenade launchers, 5,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns, 400 shotguns, as well as “2,000 Javelin, 1,000 light anti-armor weapons, and 6,000 AT-4 anti-armor systems.”
The US will specifically provide Switchblade drones to Ukraine, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. The small, portable, so-called kamikaze drones carry warheads and detonate on impact. The smallest model can hit a target up to 6 miles away
The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths. I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.
A report from the Institute for the Study of War indicates that a purge may already be going on within the military and intelligence services. Some officials are being fired, while others are being arrested.
Putin reportedly fired several generals and arrested Federal Security Service (FSB) intelligence officers in an internal purge. UkrainianSecretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov stated on March 9 that the Kremlin has replaced eight generals due to their failures in Ukraine, though ISW cannot independently verify this information.[21] Putin additionally detained several personnel from the FSB’s 5th Service, which is responsible for informing Putin about the political situation in Ukraine. The Federal Protective Service and 9th Directorate of the FSB (its internal security department) reportedly raided the 5th Service and over 20 other locations on March 11. Several media outlets reported that 5th Service Head Sergey Beseda and his deputy Anatoly Bolyukh are under house arrest on March 11.[22] Independent Russian media outlet Meduza claimed the 5th Service might have provided Putin with false information about the political situation in Ukraine ahead of his invasion out of fear of contradicting Putin‘s desired prognosis that a war in Ukraine would be a smooth undertaking.[23] Putin is likely carrying out an internal purge of general officers and intelligence personnel. He may be doing so either to save face after failing to consider their assessments in his own pre-invasion decision-making or in retaliation for faulty intelligence he may believe they provided him.
Everyone is focused on the war’s effect on the world’s energy production. (See the featured post.) But a more serious problem might be the effect on food production: Not only are Ukraine (where the next crop is not getting planted) and Russia (whose exports are sanctioned) top grain-exporters, but Russia and Belarus are important suppliers of potash, one of the key ingredients in fertilizer. Crop yields far from the battle zone may be affected.
And like the oil price rise, the expected rise in food prices will come at a time when prices are already high. This will be an annoyance to most Americans, and we may fight political battles over whether to offer some special food subsidy to the poor. But the world’s less well off countries could face real shortages.
There have been a lot of dark jokes about the apocalypse these last two years, as the world has faced Pestilence, Death, and now War. But soon the fourth horseman, Famine, may make an appearance.
and the pandemic
I feel like we’re in the eye of a storm. Here in the US, case numbers have been falling almost everywhere since January. We now average fewer than 30K new cases per day, a level not seen since July. Deaths are still over 1100 per day, but that also is lower than we’ve seen since a very brief period around Thanksgiving, and before that you have to go back to August.
So: great news. But there are also ominous signs: A new subvariant is out there (BA.2 where Omicron was BA.1). Europe, which experienced the original Omicron surge before we did, is currently having a BA.2 surge. And wastewater testing, the earliest warning signal of a new outbreak, is finding more Covid in many parts of the US.
It’s also hard to know how much trust to put in the case-number statistics these days. A lot of the less serious cases might never appear in the stats. (People I know personally have tested positive at home and dealt with their symptoms without telling the medical establishment.) It’s tempting to shrug off those easily managed cases. But the virus is the virus; you may or may not do as well as the person who infected you.
Hospitalizations and deaths are more reliable numbers, but they lag in time.
So deciding what risks to take is tricky right now. Maybe you should seize this chance to go to a concert or take a trip. Or maybe the new surge has already started, but we won’t notice it for a week or two.
Both Pfizer and Moderna have asked the FDA to approve a fourth vaccination shot. My advice: Trust your doctor on this. If the FDA approves it and your doctor recommends it, get it.
and the culture wars
Kim Davis is back in the news. She was the county clerk in Kentucky who in 2015 refused to process wedding licenses for same-sex couples who were legally entitled to them. She eventually got voted out, but two couples that she refused to serve are suing her. Friday, a judge ruled that as a matter of law, she did violate their civil rights. Now a jury has to decide what damages to award.
Davis is offering the usual defense: Because her bigotry arises from her “Christian” beliefs, discrimination laws don’t apply to her. I find it impossible to imagine this argument being taken seriously if you substitute a different faith. What if a county health commissioner refused to approve new steakhouses because of his sincerely held Hindu beliefs?
Davis’ lawyers say the case “has a high potential of reaching the Supreme Court”. Given the current Court’s record of inventing special rights for Christians, she may win.
Paul Waldman explains why the Republican plan to double down on unpopular culture war positions can make short-term political sense.
[T]o engineer a political backlash, you don’t actually need to win converts to your cause. Often, all you need is to persuade the people who haven’t changed their minds as the world changes around them to get more upset.
Which is what we’re seeing right now. Particularly at the state level, Republicans have successfully convinced their base that their entire way of life is under dire threat from a trans girl who wants to play on her middle school softball team or from the books that are sitting in school libraries.
Speaking of which: When USA Today included HHS Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine in their Women of the Year list, conservatives couldn’t take that lying down, because she’s trans. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted “Rachel Levine is a man”, and National Review wrote a whole article to protest the choice. NR quoted Levine’s message to people questioning their gender identity:
I think you have to be true to yourself and I think that you have to be who you are. You have tremendous worth just for who you are, no matter who you love, no matter who you are, no matter what your gender identity, sexual orientation or anything else, and to be, be true to that. And then everything else will follow.
and commented “This is terrible advice.” Don’t be who you are; be who we say you are.
There was something absurd in the spectacle of conservative politicians who have never shown any interest in supporting women’s sports, which are chronically underfunded and underexposed, moralizing about the sanctity of collegiate women’s swimming.
The Cleveland Browns gave up three first-round draft picks to get Watson from the Texans, and then signed him to a five-year contract for $230 million that sets an NFL record for the most guaranteed money. The contract is structured so that he’ll lose the minimum amount possible when the NFL gets around to suspending him for the start of next season. Given the way the NFL works, Cleveland has mortgaged the franchise for Watson; if he doesn’t work out, they can’t draft his replacement and they’ll have no money available to offer a free agent.
Just about any NFL team occasionally puts somebody on the field who is hard to root for, and like most football fans, I’ve adjusted by not thinking about it too hard. But I wouldn’t be able to stretch this far. Quarterbacks are so central in the NFL that rooting for the Browns next season means rooting for Watson. I couldn’t do it.
Yahoo sports columnist Shalise Manza Young makes the comparison to Colin Kaepernick: Kneeling during the national anthem to protest racism got him (unofficially) banned for life. Watson will probably be suspended for a few games, and then will be the public face of the NFL in Cleveland.
and you also might be interested in …
When Texas was passing its latest voter-suppression law, critics said its main effect would be to screw up people trying to vote legally. And guess what? That’s exactly what has happened.
As Texans’ ballots were cast and tallied across the Lone Star State last week, Monica Emery received multiple letters from county election officials saying that her attempt to vote by mail had failed.
The problem, she learned, stemmed from SB1, Texas Republicans’ restrictive new voting law that not only requires an ID number on voters’ absentee ballots and applications, but also that the type of ID number match the number that a voter originally used to register.
That law, signed by Governor Greg Abbott (R) last year, has now caused a massive spike in rejected applications to vote by mail. And for absentee voters in last week’s primary election, many of whom are elderly or disabled, it added an extra hurdle to what was once a simple process.
Apparently, the number Emery wrote on her ballot — she thinks it was her driver’s license number — was not the one she used when she registered to vote. Other options include various state ID numbers and the last four digits of her Social Security number. Any of those numbers could be a voter’s ID number, it’s a question of which one a voter provided when they first registered.
“I did that 40 years ago,” Emery told TPM of her voter registration. “I just put a number down.”
When law-makers are warned that a law has unfortunate consequences, and they pass it anyway, you have to assume those consequences are intended.
One characteristic of an effective smear is that the charge is easier to grasp than an explanation of what really happened. For those who really want to understand, Ian Millhiser goes through the details. Other writers simply observe that Judge Jackson’s sentencing practices are in line with most other judges. Sentencing guidelines in child porn cases are widely believed to be out of whack, particularly in their inability to distinguish more serious cases (i.e., professional producers of child porn) from less serious ones.
Senator Hawley has already voted to approve judges whose sentencing practices are similar to Jackson’s.
Other Republicans looking for ammunition against Judge Jackson are joining this attack.
I’m not grasping the reasoning behind the push to make daylight saving time permanent. I can see not wanting to change clocks twice a year, but why not standardize on the original time system, rather than move it by an hour?
As someone born into the era of big tail fins and bumpers with breasts, it’s not news to me that we Americans get irrational about our cars.
So of course we also obsess about gas prices. If the rent or the cable bill goes up, we’ll grumble and pay it. If the price of beef skyrockets, we’ll eat more chicken. When there was no toilet paper on the shelves, the most common response was frantic desperation, not anger. But high gas prices bring out the pitchforks and torches: This has to be somebody’s fault, and we’re going to make them pay.
How bad is it? Various commenters had already been talking about “record gas prices” for several weeks, but prices didn’t actually start breaking records until March 7. Even then records were not being broken by much, and only if you didn’t adjust for inflation. In July of 2008, national average gas prices hit $4.11. Cumulative inflation in the last 14 years has been 32%, so gas prices won’t equal 2008 prices in inflation-adjusted dollars unless they hit $5.42. AAA’s current national average price is $4.25.
The price a year ago, when Covid was keeping most people close to home, was an unusually low $2.89. So there’s been a steep increase since then, but not to off-the-charts levels.
Rockets and feathers. The apparent reason for the increase was that the price of oil went up. But oil prices crashed back down this week, and gas prices are still high. (Though they are trending somewhat downward. AAA reports a drop from $4.33 in the last week.) This is the main reason people give when they blame the oil companies for price gouging.
The following chart was on the Trending Economics web site Saturday morning.
So a year ago, the world price of oil was about $60 a barrel. It started creeping upward as economies recovered from the Covid emergency, reaching $90 by late February, when the Ukraine crisis began to get serious. Post-invasion and post-sanctions, it jumped up to $123 on March 8. Then it fell back below $100, and ended last week at $104.70.
The complaint is that gas prices go up immediately when the price of oil rises, but they don’t fall immediately when it drops. This is not your imagination.
The trend is called “rocketing and feathering,” according to oil industry analysts. Gas prices rocket up and then they come down slowly like a feather in the wind.
Think about how this works: Suppose you run oil tankers back and forth between, say, Nigeria and the United States. A trip takes weeks, maybe a month, depending on conditions. So the oil you loaded in Lagos was worth about $90 a barrel, but by the time you get to America, the price has risen to $120. So what do you sell for?
The way a lot of people’s economic intuition works, you ought to sell for $90 plus a reasonable profit on your expenses; say, $93 or $95. (Those numbers are based on several minutes worth of googling, so don’t use them for anything other than illustration.) This way of thinking is called “just price economics“, and it was popular in the Middle Ages.
But the world doesn’t really work that way. Of course you sell for $120, making a $30-a-barrel windfall profit. On other trips you might have windfall losses, so you’d better take the money now.
That’s how rocketing works, all the way up and down the path from oil well to gas pump: Increases get incorporated into the price immediately. Imagine you own a local gas station. Your last delivery arrived when you were selling gas for $3.50 a gallon, so in theory you could still sell for $3.50 and make a profit. But your next delivery is going to cost $4 a gallon. So why would you sell something for $3.50 when it’s going to cost you $4 to replace it?
But now picture what happens when prices fall: You paid $4 a gallon for the gas in your tanks now, so you’re going to be reluctant to sell it for less than that, even if you can replace it for $3.50. You’ll lower your price when you have to, i.e., when the gas station across the street lowers its price.
How fast prices fall depends on how much competition there is. If there are bottlenecks in the market — say, a small number of refineries producing gas for a large region — the businesses that control that bottleneck are in a position to insist on getting at least a just price. And they will. You would too.
The conclusion I draw from all this is that no one in the rocketing-and-feathering scenario is particularly villainous. Price drops would happen faster if markets were more competitive, as in the classic Adam Smith model. But this situation is very different from monopoly pricing, where sellers are only restrained by consumers’ inability or unwillingness to keep paying. (True monopolists don’t need an excuse to raise prices or to keep them high.) Supply-and-demand is working, albeit with a little sluggishness.
Why is oil so high? Oil is an unusual commodity, because in the short term, neither supply nor demand have much elasticity. An oil field isn’t like a car factory that can run longer shifts, pay overtime, and deliver more cars to the dealers in a matter of days. In the medium term, an oil company can drill more wells, and reopen wells that weren’t economical to run at lower prices. Longer term, it can explore for new oil fields. But none of that increases supply immediately.
Similarly, when the price goes up by 10-20%, you still have to get to work, and you’re probably not going to cancel your vacation plans. Airlines aren’t going to cancel flights. It takes time to arrange a carpool, replace your gas-guzzler with an electric, or move closer to your job.
The result of that lack of elasticity is that oil prices swing more wildly than most commodities. It goes way up and way down because that’s what it takes to change people’s behavior. (Remember what a market price is: The price at which buyers want the exact quantity that sellers are offering. So price moves that don’t cause people to enter or leave the market aren’t big enough.) So when demand crashed at the beginning of the Covid lockdowns, the price on the most volatile oil markets briefly went negative. (Imagine the grocery paying you to take away their excess milk.) Here’s the 25-year version of the graph above.
Not a lot of other prices relevant to your life went up 7 times between 2002 and 2008, only to crash all the way back by 2020.
I learn a few things from this graph.
If you just look at the 2020-2022 part, the price is skyrocketing. But if you take a longer view, you see a lot of zigging and zagging within a wide range. It’s a mistake to imagine that the Covid-lockdown price of $20 was “normal”.
I’m not surprised that oil production doesn’t instantly ramp up in response to a high price. If I’m deciding whether to drill a well that I expect to be productive over 5-10 years, how can I be sure the price won’t be much lower for most of that time?
The price increase didn’t start with the Ukraine War. Oil prices went up because the world economy was recovering (and speculators anticipated further recovery). The effect of war and sanctions sits on top of that rise.
Is Biden to blame? Mostly no, but there are hooks you can hang that argument on if you really want to.
First, there’s inflation in general. Like many other governments, the US policy response to the Covid lockdowns focused on avoiding a depression, which was a real possibility. So the Federal Reserve pumped a lot of money into the economy, and the government distributed money directly to individuals and businesses. Both policies started under Trump, but Biden continued and even increased the depression-avoiding spending with his American Rescue Plan.
Two consequences come out of that: the intended one of keeping the economy afloat, and the unintended (but somewhat expected) one of inflation. So unemployment is now at 3.8%, down from 6% a year ago and 15% two years ago. It’s close to the pre-Covid 3.5% that Trump claimed as evidence of “the greatest economy ever”.
The price of those jobs is inflation, which was up to 7.9%before the Ukraine invasion and the sanctions against Russia. Personally, I think that’s a price worth paying. But other people may disagree, and many more will argue in bad faith, criticizing Biden for the inflation without crediting him for the jobs.
Second, we come to the sanctions, which again are a trade-off. Getting Russian oil off the market leaves a production gap, which raises prices. I don’t have a good explanation for why oil has almost returned to its pre-invasion level, but I wouldn’t count on it to stay there.
It’s possible that a President Trump might have been able to call his good buddy MBS and get the Saudis to produce more to make up the gap. (Of course he won’t do that now, because a larger oil supply would just benefit America, and not Trump personally.) Other possible sources of increased oil production would be the other sanctioned countries: Iran and Venezuela. (Iranian oil might not be sanctioned at all if Trump hadn’t scrapped the Iranian nuclear deal.) But none of that has worked out either.
Finally, there’s the question of American production. And here is where the case against Biden is flimsiest. The accusation is that American oil production would be much higher if Biden weren’t so hostile to the oil industry. If he had only kept building the Keystone XL pipeline, or opened more federal land to drilling, or not rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, or maybe had just smiled more at oil executives — then we’d have so much production the world wouldn’t need Russia.
This is nonsense, and I can’t explain it any better than Jen Psaki did.
Keystone XL wouldn’t be operating yet anyway. It wasn’t scheduled to open until 2023.
Pipelines don’t produce oil, they just move it. The Canadian oil Keystone XL would move is getting to market by other means.
Psaki claimed (and I have no way of checking) that the oil companies have 9,000 unused drilling permits. It’s not that they have nowhere to drill.
US production went down when the price of oil went down, but it is ramping back up. Next year the US should produce more oil than ever before.
Some of the points here are related to the next blame-object, environmentalists.
Are environmentalists to blame? As Fox News reporter Peter Doocy put it (in a question to Psaki): “How high would [gas prices] have to get before President Biden would say ‘I’m going to set aside my ambitious climate goals and just increase domestic oil production, get the producers to drill more here, and we can address the fossil fuel future later’?”
The unstated assumption behind that question is that climate change isn’t really that big a deal. Global warming is the liberal version of made-up conservative issues like critical race theory and cancel culture. So in the face of a real threat like Russia, and a real consequence like $4 gas, why can’t liberals just get off it?
But the vast consensus of scientists who study this issue is that climate change is a big deal, and will have catastrophic consequences (some of which are already apparent) if humanity continues to burn fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate. There will always be competing problems that present more obvious short-term dangers. If we let those problems delay action on climate issues, we will never take action, with dire results.
Breathing is more of a short-term necessity than eating, but if we are to survive, we must envision a future where we can do both. In the same way, we have to find a path into the future where we deal with both aggressive autocrats and climate change.
Right now, Germany’s decision to close its nuclear plants makes it more dependent on Russian natural gas. (The proper role of nuclear power in limiting carbon emissions is a debatable issue that I haven’t studied.) That choice has certainly made the current situation more difficult.
But in a longer view, the faster we get to a sustainable-energy future, the less dependent we will be on fossil-fuel exporting countries, many of whose governments are repugnant. The price of wind energy has not increased at all in the last few months, and Vladimir Putin cannot affect it.
In conclusion, higher gas prices have two main causes: The general inflation that comes from choosing to stimulate job creation as we come out of the Covid economic downturn, and the reduced supply of oil as Russian oil is pushed off the market. Those are both policy decisions that were made for good reasons.
Other Biden decisions, like canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, have had little to no effect. Anything the US government could do now to stimulate oil production wouldn’t produce results for many months or even years. Meanwhile, market forces are raising US oil production without any new government encouragement.
Oil companies are gaining windfall profits as the price of oil rises, but I don’t see anything sinister going on there. They could altruistically decide to charge less, but none of the rest of us do that. If those profits are a problem, they could be taxed.
And in the long run, the pain caused by the current high gas prices is one more reminder that we need to become less dependent on fossil fuels. Trying to get out of the present crisis by finding more oil somewhere is just trading one problem for another.
We may be glued to our TVs watching Ukrainian President Zelensky speak to Congress, but the war really starts to affect most Americans’ lives when we go to the gas station. Gas prices hit a record about a week ago, and haven’t fallen much since, even as the price of oil dropped back near pre-invasion levels.
Cars have a special place in the American psyche, so gas prices produce emotional reactions out of proportion to their practical impact. Rather than grumble and pay, as we do when other prices rise, we want to blame someone and take revenge when filling the tank costs more than we think it should.
So this week’s featured post looks at gas prices: How high are they really? What caused the increase and what (if anything) can be done about it? That post should be out a little after 9 EDT.
The Ukrainian War produces such a big chunk of notes for the weekly summary that I was tempted to break it out into a second featured post, but decided not to. The pandemic regains some of the attention I didn’t give it the last two weeks: Case numbers continue to drop, as if we were about to beat Covid for good. But at the same time, a new surge is mounting in Europe and China, and there are a few ominous signs emerging here.
Hearings on Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson start tomorrow, and we can expect to hear any number of scurrilous attacks from Republicans like Josh Hawley.
Other notes include Georgia Senate candidate Hershel Walker saying one of the dumbest things ever about evolution, the Cleveland Browns deciding that 22 sexual-predation lawsuits aren’t really a big deal for a franchise quarterback, and a few other upsetting things. After writing them up, I decided we could all use something soothing, so I’ll close with a video of an otter getting combed. Nobody can yawn like a comfortable otter.
Is there somehow Putin can back off from this? I mean, in poker terms, he has gone all in. So he either wins or he loses. And I think, for us, Putin has to lose this war.
This week’s featured post is “How did Christianity become so toxic?” It’s the most Christian Weekly Sift post ever, but I doubt everybody will see it that way.
If the Ukraine War were a mini-series, we’d all be complaining that the plot moves too slowly. Just like last week and even the week before, Russia has an overwhelming advantage in nearly every factor of war: more airplanes, more tanks, more trained and experienced soldiers. And yet, like last week and the week before, the Ukrainians are doing much better than anyone expected. They’re slowing the Russian forces down and making them pay a huge price, but they can’t push them back. Little by little, Russia is advancing towards Ukraine’s major cities, including Kyiv. As hope for a quick victory fades, the invaders get more indiscriminately destructive. So we see more refugees, and more scenes of urban devastation.
“OK, I get it,” I keep saying to the TV. “Can we move this along a little?”
Putin, though, has one major advantage over Biden: It’s a lot easier for him to ignore his people’s suffering, and there’s a lot less they can do to challenge him. So the Russian people can be forced to endure economic devastation, but we still don’t know whether the American people have the stomach for a recession. It’s one thing to put a flag decal on your truck and talk about how willing you are to die for freedom. But how long will such patriots be willing to spend over $100 to fill their trucks’ gas tanks?
Stay tuned. It may be several episodes before that question gets answered.
President Zelensky will address Congress (virtually) on Wednesday.
Would the owner of this $700 million yacht please step forward? Otherwise we’re going to think it belongs to Putin.
A professor of strategic studies at Scotland’s St. Andrews University has a fascinating interpretation of the Russian advance: They have enough fuel trucks to supply their army as long as it’s within 90 miles of supply depots. And that’s about how far they’ve advanced into Ukraine. “Logistics Rule,” he says.
Russia and Tucker Carlson have been claiming that the US is funding mysterious bio-weapons labs in Ukraine. The NYT fact-checked and characterized the claims as “baseless”.
And as he so often does, Carlson snuck in another piece of Russian disinformation in an off-hand remark:
In 2014, [Undersecretary of State] Toria Nuland engineered a coup in Ukraine
You remember, that was the Revolution of Dignity that sent Putin’s corrupt puppet (and Paul Manafort’s former client) Viktor Yanukovych running back to Russia, where he still lives in his $52 million house. A central piece of Russian propaganda is that this was an American plot rather than a popular uprising. Carlson buys this, because of course he does.
The Purdue Pharma bankruptcy settlement finally got approved. Unlike a previous version, the Sackler family isn’t immunized against future criminal charges.
For months I was on the Trump mailing list to keep track what he was up to. Often there were fund-raising gimmicks, where contributing would enter you to win something-or-other. It turns out that sometimes he just takes the money and nobody wins the prize. Who could have imagined that the founder of Trump University would con his fans like that?
Last week, the NYT devoted way too much space to University of Virginia student Emily Camp’s complaints about being made to feel uncomfortable when she expresses her beliefs, as if this is a new thing that never happened to anybody but White conservatives.
And that’s what is at the heart of so many of these ‘cancel culture’ complaints; conservatives don’t just want to be bigots, they want to be bigots with friends. They want to say terrible things and still get swiped right on; they want to support legislation that puts people’s lives in danger and somehow still get invited to parties.
But here’s the thing: Expressing unlikeable views often makes you unlikeable. That’s not censorship, it’s life.
What people call cancel culture is really just run-of-the-mill social and moral consequences—which have been around forever. A society decides what kind of values they find important, and which they find intolerable. You are more than welcome to be on the wrong side of history, but it certainly doesn’t entitle you to friends.
and let’s close with something artistic
Check out John Atkinson’s webtoons, many of which are somewhat drastic abridgements of classic books.
Six ways conservative theology undercuts the teachings of Jesus.
If you devote much of your time to trying to make the world a better place, you’ve probably noticed a paradox.
On the one hand, some of your most dedicated co-workers are church people. You may not have realized it right away, because they’re not the kind of Christians who say “Praise the Lord” whenever something good happens. Rather than preach at you or try to lead the group in prayer, they just show up and share the work: ladle the soup, stuff the envelopes, hammer the nails, make the phone calls. Only after you spend some down time talking do you start to understand what motivates them: They think some guy named Jesus had some pretty good ideas about healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger.
But at the same time, when you look at the bigger picture, it’s hard to escape the idea that Christianity is your enemy. The loudest, best-funded, and best-organized groups working to make the world harsher, crueler, and less forgiving are the ones waving the cross. There’s nothing subtle about it. All their rhetoric is about what God wants, what God hates, and the “Christian values” that the law should impose on Christians and non-Christians alike.
And strangest of all, those “Christian values” seldom have anything to do with healing the sick, feeding the hungry, or welcoming the stranger. These followers of the Prince of Peace aspire to be “spiritual warriors“. They revere a man whose self-sacrifice brought forgiveness to the world, but their focus is on punishment.
The name of Jesus shows up in every paragraph of their rhetoric; his teachings, not so much.
The value of cruelty. Pretty much any time you want, you can pull examples out of the headlines. Recently, the people Christians want to punish have been kids who express the wrong gender identity or sexual orientation, as well as the adults who support them.
I know what the law says. And yet it is terrifying to have a [Child Protective Services] worker come into your home and threaten to take your children away for doing nothing more than loving them unconditionally.
Florida’s new Don’t Say Gay law will stop kids who are uncertain about their sexual orientation from confiding in teachers or school counselors: By law, school employees have to break their students’ trust and out them to their parents; otherwise, the school district could be sued. And if you’re a teacher or principal who sees elementary-school kids being bullied because of their gender expression, you can’t start a conversation about that without risking a lawsuit, because such topics are not “age appropriate”.
As soon as you picture either law in practice, the cruelty is obvious, and it’s hard to see who benefits. But if you ask the people behind these efforts what motivates them, one answer almost always comes up: their Christian values. The Tennessee version of Don’t Say Gay includes this in its list of justifications:
WHEREAS, the promotion of LGBT issues and lifestyles in public schools offends a significant portion of students, parents, and Tennessee residents with Christian values” …
Where on Earth did these “Christian values” come from? Not Jesus.
Did Jesus have “Christian values”? If you’ve never read the gospels, but you’ve listened to the people who invoke his name, you might think Jesus talked about sex and gender constantly. But in fact you’d be wrong. Homosexuality never comes up in his sermons and parables, and Jesus never rebukes his followers for getting their gender roles confused.
If you believe that Jesus defines Christianity, then persecuting gay and trans people isn’t a Christian value at all.
Other Christian values. Those are recent headlines, but these last few weeks have been nothing special. If I’d written this article in a different month, I might have talked about the Christians who were doing their damnedest to help a deadly virus spread freely and kill as many people as possible.
“Religious liberty” now includes churches’ right to host superspreader events, which many of them have been eager to do. Rather than thank God for the scientists who found and tested a vaccine so quickly, many Christians spread lies and conspiracy theories about the vaccines (“For those of you who say you are Christians, what will your life review look like at the end of your life? Will the Lord say to you: ‘You coerced people into being injected with this gene-modification technology that irreversibly disrupts your chromosomes?’”). Wearing a mask in church became evidence that you didn’t trust God’s protection. (But if you really trusted God, wouldn’t you jump off a tall building?)
Making women bear their rapist’s child is a Christian value. (“As plain as day, God spoke to me. … And I said yes Lord, I will. It’s coming back. It’s coming back. We are going to file that bill without any exceptions.”) But miscarriage-inducing herbs have been part of women’s folklore since the beginning of time. Isn’t it strange that Jesus never mentioned them?
The Bible warns us not to bear false witness. But Christian churches have become the prime breeding ground for the most vicious and baseless conspiracy theories.
You know who’s also a Christian hero these days? Vladimir Putin. A Republican candidate for the Senate praised Russia as a “Christian nationalist nation” and told CPAC
I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.
As far back as 2014, Franklin Graham was lauding Putin for the even harsher Russian version of Don’t Say Gay:
Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue — protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda — Russia’s standard is higher than our own?
How did this happen? You might imagine that the teachings of Jesus would be a pole star for Christians, and that any time they started to drift away, the Sermon on the Mount would guide them back.
Clearly that’s not happening. But why not?
The reason is simple: Jesus told stories and gave advice, but he never laid out a systematic theology or worldview. He used imagery that was designed to upend the way his disciples were thinking, but he never told them step-by-step how they should think.
Jesus hinted that you’re not really supposed to understand right away. The Kingdom of God, he said, is like yeast; it works on you invisibly. His images and stories are supposed to sit in the back of your mind and ferment, not proceed logically from axioms to theorems.
And while that’s a fine guru-to-disciple teaching technique, it leaves an opening for people who do lay out systematic theologies and worldviews, and do tell people what to think. Over the centuries that’s what’s happened. A conservative worldview has built up around Jesus’ teachings and almost completely sealed them off.
Here’s a simple example: According to John, Jesus once made this enigmatic statement: “The Father and I are one.” But he never explained exactly how that worked. The result has been centuries and centuries of theological battles about the precise nature of the Trinity, arguments that have occasionally erupted into gruesome executions or even warfare.
In short: People got lost in the mystery of that one line, and wound up on the other side of the world from loving their neighbors.
How conservative theology leads people astray. Today, when you come to an Evangelical church, the main thing you are met with is a worldview that contains simple answers about what’s going on in the world and how you should respond to it. Sometimes those answers are proof-texted back to something Jesus said (though more often they point back to Paul or Leviticus or some verse in Revelation that could mean just about anything). But invariably the logic only works one way: After the idea is presented to you, you can squint at one of Jesus’ more puzzling statements and say “Oh, that’s what he meant.” But you can’t walk that path in the opposite direction; what Jesus said would never lead you to the idea if some community-endorsed authority hadn’t already put it in your head.
I’m not claiming this is a complete list, but here are six ways that a conservative theology and worldview tilts Evangelical thinking in directions that eventually put a wall around Jesus and his teachings.
Focusing on the Devil opens a person to conspiracy theories.
Believing that we’re in the End Times justifies suspending normal reasoning.
Traditional religion values tradition more than religion.
A focus on individual souls and individual salvation makes systemic or social reasoning heretical.
Fundamentalism promotes bad-faith reasoning.
Christian imagery and rhetoric tilts towards autocracy.
1. The Devil is the prime conspirator. The conventional wisdom isn’t always right, and occasionally powerful people do conspire for nefarious purposes. But the problem with conspiracy-theory thinking is that it’s too easy: You can always come up with some way to fit current events into whatever story you want to believe. No matter what actually happens, you can make it prove that whoever you like is the hero and whoever you hate is the villain.
So if you want to live in the real world rather than some dramatic fantasy of your own choosing, you need some standards that filter out the crazy conspiracies. The most important standard is to realize that conspiring is hard. People all have their own motives and purposes, so keeping a large number of them on the same page is difficult, especially if you have to do it secretly.
So the first questions a rational person asks about a conspiracy theory are: How many people would have to commit to this, and why would they? What keeps them all pulling in the same direction? Why don’t they rat each other out?
Those questions sink most conspiracy theories. Take the central Q-Anon theory for example: that the world is run by a ring of child-sex traffickers, and has been for a long time. Now picture yourself as a rising star in the world of money and politics. At what point would the conspirators reach out to you? And what if child sex wasn’t your particular kink? It just seems really hard to make this work.
But now imagine you believe in the Devil. (Satan does show up in Jesus’ stories, but those references are easy to misread. Our current picture of the Devil stitches together diverse Biblical characters with different names, and didn’t fully congeal until a century or so after Jesus. Neil Forsyth described the process in The Old Enemy.) The Devil doesn’t need a motive to launch some evil plot, because for the Devil, evil is its own reward. Minions of the Devil, likewise, do things just for the sake of being evil.
If you can imagine a core of people like that, who don’t need the conspiracy to bring them wealth or power or status or any other visible benefit beyond the simple opportunity to do evil, then just about any conspiracy becomes feasible. The door to believing whatever you want is wide open.
2. Strange things happen during the End Times. In the summer of 2013, 77% of Evangelicals told the Barna Group that they agreed with this statement: “The world is currently living in the ‘end times’ as described by prophecies in the Bible.” Evangelicals not only believe this, they seem to enjoy thinking about it: The Left Behind series of novels (based on a literalistic interpretation of the Book of Revelation) has sold more than 80 million books and inspired six movies.
Paradoxically, a belief that the world is ending soon has always been prominent in Christian circles. As far back as the first or second century AD, St. John could close his Book of Revelation with
He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
That’s Jesus’ second coming he’s talking about, the one Christians are still waiting for. Nearly two thousand years later, John’s “soon” has still not turned into “now”.
But in spite of this extended delay, the persistence of the end-times belief is not hard to understand. Basically, it’s a form of self-aggrandizement, because it makes our lifetimes special. Nobody, apparently, wants to believe that they live in a humdrum era.
Now think about the everyday significance of that belief: More than three-quarters of conservative Christians approach the evening news the way the rest of us approach the final chapters of a novel. They expect diverse plot threads to start coming together. Connections that would ordinarily be wild coincidences are almost required. (Of course the serving girl with amnesia is the Duke’s long-lost niece! I should have seen that a mile away.)
What’s more, as the final battle of Good versus Evil approaches, the participants should become easier to identify. So of course there’s an international conspiracy of blood-drinking child molesters. How could there not be?
3. Traditional religion is more traditional than religious. Religious teachings are one of the prime ways that a community maintains its institutions and passes down its folk wisdom. The practices in one part of the world may be completely different than those somewhere else, but you can be pretty sure that in both places, some local deity wants things to work that way.
New empires often bring new religions (which usually complete the circle by justifying the new imperial order). But community practices change much more slowly than military or political power structures. So old practices get woven into the new mythology and the new belief system, as if they had been part of the new religion all along. The annual fertility rite of a pagan deity continues, but instead is blessed by a Catholic saint. And no matter how many Islamic scholars say that the Quran does not endorse honor killings, many common people in Muslim countries keep on believing that it does.
In 21st century America, “traditional values” and “Christian values” are often used interchangeably, but they ought to be very different concepts. Countless varieties of bigotry are traditional in America: racism, sexism, antisemitism, anti-gay prejudice, and many others. Like any dominant religion, Christianity has often been co-opted to justify abusing “outsiders” (however that term has been defined at different times in different places). But custom shouldn’t turn prejudices into Christian values.
4. Bias towards individuality. One of Jesus’ most mysterious phrases is “the Kingdom of God”. He said it a lot, and anyone who claims to know exactly what he meant by it is kidding somebody, most likely himself. Sometimes it sounds like a vision of an ideal future. Other times it seems more like a metaphor for the state of consciousness Jesus had achieved and was trying to teach. Once in a while it resembled an afterlife.
Nobody really knows. It’s even possible that Jesus meant different things at different times, or that the gospels occasionally misquote him.
But in the conservative theology I was taught growing up, the Kingdom of Heaven was a literal place that I could hope to reach after death. I’d get there as an individual, because we all have individual souls, which will be judged at the end of time. There’s no such thing as a collective soul (except in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walter Wink’s creative reimagining of angels).
My teachers never admitted that all this stuff about souls is speculative. It’s not really spelled out anywhere in scripture. (If the sheep and goats story is supposed to be a description of literal events, it’s just about the only parable that is.) Heaven is speculative also, and (like the Devil) has meant different things in different eras.
Once you’ve made that speculative leap, though, any kind of social thinking is going to give you problems. If good and evil are only accounted for in judgments about individuals, then good and evil must only exist in individuals.
Systemic racism, then, can only be a heresy. If racism is evil, then that evil has to be accountable to individuals, not to systems. If stealing is a sin, then the man who steals a loaf of bread is guilty, and not the society that left him no other way to feed his family. If enslaving people is evil, then George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and many other people we might want to admire were evil. Slavery can’t be blamed on society, because society will never stand before St. Peter and be sent to Heaven or Hell. So maybe slavery wasn’t really so bad.
Theologians created these problems by going too far out on a limb. They’ve constructed a semi-logical structure around some hints in scripture, and that structure leads them into absurdities and injustices.
5. From apologetics to bad-faith denial. Apologetics is the art of using rational argument to support positions that originate in faith. It often looks like philosophy, but it isn’t, because practitioners aren’t reasoning in order to find truth. Instead, they believe they’ve already found truth through their faith, and are now just trying to persuade others. So apologists start with their conclusions already established, and try to tie them to convincing first principles via logic.
Apologetics can be an honorable practice if the apologists are open about what they’re doing. (And philosophy can even benefit if the arguments are sharp enough. Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae proudly claims to be apologetic, but philosophers still read it.) The practice goes back at least as far as the Middle Ages, and is still taught in seminaries.
But for most of its history, apologetics was an esoteric field of study. Parishioners in the pews might believe what they were taught or doubt it, but they didn’t really care whether St. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God was sound.
That all changed in the 19th century, when geologists discovered a world far older than Genesis described, and biologists developed a theory of human origins very different from God shaping Adam out of dust. Science was now invading turf that had previously belonged to religion, and many religious people believed they had to fight back.
That was the origin of fundamentalism.
But a problem soon became apparent: If you restrict yourself facts and logic, Genesis is just wrong. If you’re going to argue that it’s right (without invoking faith), you have to cheat. You have to make bad-faith scientific arguments and hope you can sell them. So fundamentalists did that. They’re still doing it.
The result was that fundamentalist churches encouraged their members to reason badly, and to accept any kind of nonsense if it supported a literal interpretation of the Bible. In essence, they built a back door into their members’ reasoning processes. But in the long run, that kind of corner-cutting always has unforeseen consequences. In the subsequent decades, self-induced gullibility has made fundamentalists prey to intellectual hackers and conmen of all sorts.
Evolution denial established the notion that if enough people don’t want to believe some true thing, it’s OK for them to support each other in denying it. That genie is out of its bottle now, and it will work ever-greater mischief in conservative churches until they recognize the problem they have made for themselves.
The Divine Monarchy. When monotheism replaced polytheism, the Universe began to be viewed as a vast autocratic system. You can see the transition happening already in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, written in the fifth century BC. There are still many gods at this point, but the sky god is sovereign to the point of tyranny. In the opening scene, the personification of Power explains to Hephaistos why he must complete the disagreeable job of chaining Prometheus to the mountain: “Zeus alone is free.”
Jesus often talked about the Kingdom of Heaven, but St. Paul supported worldly kings in Romans 13:
Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.
If we know that Heaven is a kingdom, then maybe Earth should be a kingdom too. Maybe we should find the godliest man we can (of course it has to be a man), and do whatever he says. (And by the way, have I told you about the lying, womanizing, unrepentant, Bible-illiterate conman all the other Christians are voting for? Maybe he’s the guy.)
Today, Christians talk about “Christ the King” and say “Jesus is Lord!” with the enthusiasm of football fans saying “We’re #1!” But again, Jesus never laid out his political theory. If you think you know what kind of theocracy Jesus wants you to establish, or even who Jesus thinks you should vote for, you’re standing at the end of a long chain of speculation.
I can’t tell you what Jesus would think, but I can tell you what I think: If that long chain of speculation has you supporting cruelty, and if it gets in the way of healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger, then you probably did it wrong.
This week I’m releasing a post that has been sitting unfinished in my draft pile for months: “How did Christianity become so toxic?”, subtitled “Six ways conservative theology undercuts the teachings of Jesus.”
I started writing this piece to explain what I see as a paradox: Any time you’re out there working to make the world better in some way, chances are that you’re elbow-to-elbow with somebody who goes to church and is trying to live by the Sermon on the Mount. But at the same time, organized Christianity is your biggest enemy. The people who are either creating the problem you’re working to solve, or making it worse, claim to be championing “Christian values”.
How the Hell did that happen?
My answer is that Jesus’ enigmatic, person-to-person teaching style left room for subsequent generations to build a structure around his teachings, one that offers simple answers rather than mysteries and challenges. By now, the structure that got built in Evangelical churches has Jesus completely walled off.
I pick out six particular ways that works, like “Focusing on the Devil opens people to conspiracy theories.” I also explain how denial of evolution blazed a path for denial of climate change, of Covid, of systemic racism, and just about anything else people don’t want to believe. Stuff like that.
Anyway, this article that started with a paradox is itself a paradox: It’s simultaneously a denunciation of Christianity and the most Christian thing I’ve ever written. Go figure.
I’ll try to get it out by 10 EDT. The weekly summary should follow noonish.
Communications in which a “client consults an attorney for advice that will serve him in the commission of a fraud or crime” are not privileged from disclosure.
I pushed all my Ukraine notes into the featured post. But even if you’re not following the war, you should see this little girl entertain the other people in the shelter by singing “Let It Go” in Ukrainian.
I think we can all agree that President Biden is not the orator President Obama was. But at least he’s not the bullshitter that Trump was. He has a good story to tell, and he needs to get more help telling it:
Biden deserves credit for re-unifying NATO after the demoralizing Trump years. The international response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes a sharp contrast with Trump’s go-it-alone trade war against China, which accomplished nothing.
Thanks to the fact that 75% of American adults are now vaccinated, we can start getting our lives back to some semblance of normal. The vaccines were developed during the previous administration, but Biden can take a bow for getting shots in arms. (That’s precisely the kind of detailed organizing the previous administration was bad at.)
Thanks largely to the American Rescue Plan, the economy is bouncing back quickly from its Covid slump. As Biden pointed out: “unlike the $2 trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefitted the top 1 percent of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people and left no one behind. And, folks — and it worked. It worked. It worked and created jobs — lots of jobs. In fact, our economy created over 6.5 million new jobs just last year, more jobs in one year than ever before in the history of the United States of America.”
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan is actually going to rebuild America in ways that Trump talked about, but never delivered on.
Biden took some credit for Ford and GM’s decisions to invest billions developing and building electric cars in the US; and for Intel’s decision to invest $20 billion outside of Columbus. He quoted Intel’s CEO (who was present) saying that they could invest $100 billion if the Innovation and Competition Act passes.
Much of the rest of the speech was about proposals stalled in Congress: cutting the cost of prescription drugs, combating climate change, subsidizing child care, insisting that corporations pay taxes, cracking down on monopolies and oligopolies, giving Dreamers a path to citizenship, protecting abortion rights and voting rights, and more.
It’s a balancing act: taking credit for what’s been done while holding out hope that we can do more. And this is where Biden’s rhetorical failings hurt him. It’s too easy to lose sight of what’s been done in the face of what hasn’t been done, or to write off what hasn’t been accomplished yet as pie in the sky.
At least one poll shows Biden getting a bounce from the SOTU/Ukraine combination.
The February jobs report came out, and continued to show the progress Biden pointed to. The economy added 678K jobs in February, as unemployment fell to 3.8%. It was 3.5% when Trump proclaimed “the best economy ever“.
The Boebert/Greene heckling of Biden was a new low in SOTU behavior: Boebert heckled Biden (about the 13 servicemen who died during the Afghanistan withdrawal) just as he was talking about the death of his son Beau, whose brain cancer may have been caused by pollution from military burn pits.
Previous congressional heckling incidents, like Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” directed (falsely) at President Obama in 2009, were violations of decorum and showed disrespect for the presidency as well as Congress. But Boebert violated basic human decency. You don’t heckle a guy who is talking about his dead son. I don’t care if it’s the president speaking to a joint session of Congress or a drunk sitting next to you at the bar. You just don’t do it.
and Trump’s crimes
John Eastman, the author of the Mike-Pence-can-overturn-the-election theory, is fighting to keep his papers and emails away from the January 6 committee, claiming they are covered by attorney/client privilege. This week the committee submitted its rejoinder to that claim.
Much of their filing concerns the nuts and bolts of attorney/client privilege. Specifically, Eastman has not documented that he had such a relationship with Trump or the Trump campaign at all, and if he does, he will still need to show how that relationship applies to each of the requested documents, rather than claiming a blanket privilege. (Example: My nephew is a lawyer. But conversations we have during family dinners are not privileged unless I have engaged him professionally and he is giving me legal advice at the time. And even in that case, he could still report to a grand jury that I did indeed eat the brussel sprouts.)
But that’s not the most interesting part of the filing, because even if Eastman could establish all that (the burden of proof being on him in this situation), that’s not the end of the story.
Communications in which a “client consults an attorney for advice that will serve him in the commission of a fraud or crime” are not privileged from disclosure.
The committee goes on to outline the crimes Trump and Eastman might have been plotting together. Particularly noteworthy is that what the committee is asking for — the judge to review the documents in question before deciding whether the privilege applies — doesn’t require the committee to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime occurred. It only requires
factual basis adequate to support a good faith belief by a reasonable person that in camera review of the materials may reveal evidence to establish the claim that the crime-fraud exception applies.
The possible crimes in question are
obstructing an official proceeding
conspiracy to defraud the United States
common law fraud
The basic conspiracy here is one you have undoubtedly already heard about: Trump and his associates attempted to prevent Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty to count the electoral votes that had been certified by the states. They did this by
trying to convince Vice President Pence to illegally claim the power to refuse to count certified electoral votes
promoting a false narrative of a stolen election, which induced multiple people to perform actions based on their belief of the false narrative
A key point here is that we’re not just talking about a difference of opinion: Trump knew that what he was saying was false.
the President and Plaintiff engaged in an extensive campaign to persuade the public, state officials, members of Congress, and Vice President Pence that the 2020 election had been unlawfully “stolen” by Joseph Biden. The President continued this effort despite repeated assurances from countless sources that there was no evidence of widespread election fraud. On November 12, 2020, CISA issued a joint statement of election security agencies stating: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” At around the same time, researchers working for the President’s campaign concluded that several the claims of fraud relating to Dominion voting machines were false.
In December, Attorney General Barr publicly announced that there was no widespread election fraud. By January 6, more than 60 court cases had rejected legal claims alleging election fraud. The New York court that suspended Giuliani’s law license said that certain of his allegations lacked a “scintilla of evidence.” On multiple occasions, acting Attorney General Rosen and acting Deputy Attorney General Donoghue told the President personally that the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigations had found no evidence to substantiate claims being raised by the President. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger likewise rebutted many of the President’s allegations of fraud in Georgia. Despite these refutations and the absence of any evidence to support the allegations he was making, the President and his associates continued to publicly advance the narrative that the election had been tainted by widespread fraud.
The filing then goes into detail about one particular false claim: that “suitcases of ballots” were pulled from under a table in Georgia. It lists all the ways that both Georgia election officials and local media had debunked this claim, only to see Trump repeat it in Facebook ads.
On what Trump knew about his election-fraud claims, Bill Barr now says, “I told him all this stuff was bullshit.”
authored a legal opinion declaring that providing gender-affirming care to minors is “child abuse” according to existing state law. Governor Greg Abbott then directed the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), the state’s child welfare agency, to comply by investigating any reports of parents providing gender-affirming care to their children.
has also declared that teachers, doctors, and the general public are all required, on pain of criminal penalty, to report to DFPS any person who provides or is suspected of providing medical treatment for gender dysphoria, a recognized condition with well-established treatment protocols.
Meanwhile, Florida is about to pass its Don’t-Say-Gay law. The bill has already passed the House and made it to the floor of the Senate, where it is expected to pass. Gov. DeSantis has said he will sign it.
Like so many red-state bills to control what can be said in schools, the law is vague and will have a chilling effect on any discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation, whether it is specifically violates the law or not. Like the Texas abortion bill, parents can enforce it by suing their child’s school, something no teacher wants to risk.
The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill. If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity.
Like the anti-Critical-Race-Theory laws, Don’t Say Gay is based on fear-mongering about things that aren’t actually happening. Where is the evidence of some statewide epidemic of pedophile grooming based in the public schools? It’s crazy.
SNL’s Kate McKinnon on Don’t Say Gay: “I’m trying to make sense of all this. Does this Don’t Say Gay law have a purpose? … If the 90’s were right and ‘gay’ means ‘bad’, then this is the gayest law I’ve ever seen.”
The outlines of Republican resistance to Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson are becoming clear: She’s too liberal, and her experience as a public defender makes her soft on crime.
I expect dog whistles about race, but no explicit racial attacks. One tactic seems obvious: Find a really bad Black man that Jackson defended, and try to associate her with his crimes. Ideally, she got him off, or got him a light sentence, and then he committed worse crimes later. Nobody will say “Black”, but his picture will be everywhere, as Willie Horton’s was.
Mitch McConnell is trying to make a thing out of her refusal to denounce proposals that would add justices to the Court. Since the Court plays no role in deciding such things, she has no reason take a position — or even form one, for that matter. McConnell might as well ask her opinion about NATO establishing a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
Tucker Carlson is demanding to see Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT score, a request he didn’t make for any previous Supreme Court nominee. This is a standard racist tactic: When a Black person is up for promotion, suddenly there are issues nobody cared about before. For example, nobody ever cared about a president’s birth certificate until we had a Black president.
Inventing some new requirement is a way of making a Black job-seeker prove things that White applicants can take for granted, and implying that their candidacy is uniquely questionable. Demanding Judge Jackson’s LSATs (or then accusing her of hiding them) is a way of implying doubts about her intelligence. And if she releases her score, what then? Unless it’s a perfect 180 (which only 1 in 1,000 tests are), then Tucker can find a White guy who scored higher and ask why he’s not the nominee — as if LSATs were now the sole criterion. If she got a 179, she’s an affirmative action hire.
One of the fundamental motifs of horror is to literalize some disturbing metaphor. So Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula literalizes the metaphor that aristocrats suck the blood of the productive classes. Mary Shelley’s worries that technologists might metaphorically be playing God, together with her fears that our Creator might be no better than we are, become literal in Dr. Frankenstein. The savagery of middle school becomes literal in Lord of the Flies.
Severance continues that tradition. The Lumon Corporation has developed a procedure that severs work memories from personal memories, so you forget whatever you did at work when you go home (to the extent that you don’t even recognize co-workers if you meet them on the street), but you also forget your personal life when you’re at work. (Do you have a family? You don’t know.) The result is that the work-selves are entirely at the mercy of the corporation: In their experience, they never leave the office. Only the outside-selves can quit, but those personas don’t know any reasons why they should. (You might imagine that Lumon would take advantage of severance to have its workers do horrible things, but the show doesn’t go there: The work we see appears entirely meaningless.)
Several metaphorical fears are being literalized here: that we become different people at work; that the compartmentalization of our work lives is psychologically toxic; that our apparent autonomy is an illusion, because we’re denied the information we need to make prudent decisions; that while we may put the victims of capitalism out of our minds, they are not actually different from us; and a number of others.
and you also might be interested in …
This week I’m down-grading the pandemic to just another short note. New cases are back where they were in July, before the Delta surge, averaging 45K per day. Deaths are still running at 1500 per day, but are dropping at a rate of 31% over the last two weeks. Since cases are falling, deaths should continue falling for some time yet.
and let’s close with a reminder that anybody can be criticized
McSweeney’s imagines negative classroom reviews of Jesus: “Feels like a class for farmers. Hope you like talking about seeds. Wheat seeds. Mustard seeds. Seeds, seeds, seeds.”
“I asked him to sign my accommodations form from the Disability Services Office, and he spit on the ground and rubbed the dirt in my eyes. I can see now, but it was still rude.”
[This is really a collection of short notes rather than a coherent article, but there are so many of them I decided to split them off into their own post.]
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is in its second week now. Plan A was blitzkrieg: Occupation of the major cities, capture of Zelensky and the rest of the government, and NATO unable to get its act together on sanctions in time to matter. That plan failed due to fierce resistance from Ukrainians, poor planning and execution by the Russian army, and effective coordination between President Biden and the other NATO heads of state.
Plan B is the Grozny/Aleppo approach : bludgeon Ukraine into submission by knocking out utilities and shelling civilian areas. In the words of Tacitus: “They make a desert and call it peace.” That strategy will take longer, the Ukrainians might have too much spirit for it, and meanwhile the Russian economy is collapsing and oligarchs fear for their yachts.
Targeting of civilians appears to be deliberate. Negotiated evacuation corridors for refugees have failed.
In the country’s southeast, hopes that a second attempt to open up safe evacuation routes for civilians in Mariupol and Volnovakha might succeed — after a first effort failed on Saturday — were dashed within hours.
The governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on Facebook on Sunday that the planned “evacuation convoy with local residents was never able to leave Mariupol today: the Russians began to regroup their forces and heavy shelling of the city. It is extremely dangerous to evacuate people in such conditions.”
So far, Russian forces have been so preoccupied in other parts of the country that they have not targeted the arms supply lines, but few think that can last.
Cargo planes are big slow targets. I’m not sure how the American public will react when we lose one.
Maybe the best single piece of advice for observing this war comes from Isaac Saul on the Tangle blog: “Don’t lose the plot.” There are a million ways to sidetrack discussions of Ukraine, and a million different rabbit-holes you can go down. And free people should be able to pursue any of those rabbits if they want to. But don’t lose the plot.
An authoritarian leader has invaded a country that posed no threat to him because he believes that country, and its 40 million innocent citizens, belong to him. He told his soldiers they’d be greeted as liberators, and instead they are rightly being greeted with guns and Javelin anti-tank missiles. NATO did not make Putin launch this war. Biden did not. Trump did not. Ukraine did not.
Putin did.
Nobody is being de-nazified and nobody is being liberated. Civilians are being slaughtered. Children are being slaughtered. Watch the extremely graphic videos of what’s happening if that is what it takes to understand it.
Some guy on the internet (Igor Sushko, apparently a Ukrainian race-car driver) claims to be posting a translation of an analysis he got from an analyst in the FSB (i.e., Russian intelligence). Authentic? I have no idea. But it is a fascinating view of the current situation.
The analyst claims that nobody at the FSB knew a Ukrainian invasion was in the works, so they thought the contingency planning was “only intended as a checkbox”. They skewed their analyses to come out well for Russia, because that’s what higher-ups wanted to hear. But now the invasion is really happening and sanctions have been imposed, so the nation is depending on these fantasy scenarios.
We have no analyses, we can’t make any forecasts in this chaos, no one will be able to say anything with any certainty
He paints a gloomy (for Russia) picture both of dealing with Western sanctions and of the logistics of maintaining a force big enough to occupy Ukraine.
The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to the President. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military
President Zelensky is asking for NATO to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine. I understand why he wants that, but I also understand why NATO doesn’t want to do it.
A no-fly zone would mean that NATO planes patrol Ukrainian airspace and shoot down Russian planes that dare to go there. Russia has the world’s second-largest air force and might not back down easily, so maybe that works and maybe it doesn’t. But suppose it does. Russia’s next move is to shoot surface-to-air missiles at the NATO planes. Some of our planes will be shot down, and some NATO pilots will become prisoners of war.
Then NATO has to decide whether or not to defend its planes by targeting SAM launch sites. Now we’re directly killing Russian soldiers on the ground.
The question no one can answer is where this escalation pattern would stop. LBJ couldn’t answer it when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Eisenhower couldn’t answer it when the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956. And Biden can’t answer it now.
Two NATO presidents most likely to be targeted by Putin the future — Gitanas Nauseda of Lithuania and Alar Karis of Estonia — look at the no-fly-zone proposal differently. Nauseda is for it, but he hopes Putin won’t call NATO’s bluff and force NATO to shoot down Russian planes. “If we are decisive, maybe this is the best way to achieve peace.”
Karis is more skeptical: “You probably understand what that means: It means the Western world is going into a war with Russia, and that means NATO is not a defensive organization anymore. This is against our understanding of what NATO is.”
Both of them would welcome US troops being permanently based in their countries, which was not being considered before the Ukraine invasion.
Two articles about the effectiveness of Putin’s propaganda within Russia, especially among older Russians who get their news from official sources.
The NYT talked to several Ukrainians who have relatives back in Russia about how their relatives simply don’t believe them when they talk about the war. Misha Katsurin wondered why his father in Russia didn’t call to find out how he was doing in a war zone, so he called instead.
“He started to tell me how the things in my country are going,” said Mr. Katsurin, who converted his restaurants into volunteer centers and is temporarily staying near the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil. “He started to yell at me and told me, ‘Look, everything is going like this. They are Nazis.’”
“My parents understand that some military action is happening here. But they say: ‘Russians came to liberate you. They won’t ruin anything, they won’t touch you. They’re only targeting military bases’.”
One constant theme in the #Ukraine Twitter feed is a series of tweets and memes comparing Ukraine to Palestine, and calling out Western hypocrisy.
There is some racism and anti-Muslim prejudice involved in the different responses to Ukrainians and Palestinians, as I discussed last week. But the analogy only works up to a point: I see Ukraine/Russia as a much less morally ambiguous conflict than Palestine/Israel. I could discuss this at length, but the biggest difference is this: The Ukrainians are shooting at invading soldiers, not blowing up coffee shops in Moscow. If this conflict drags on for 75 years, Ukrainians may by then be blowing up coffee shops, but the morality of their cause will have become less clear-cut.
Last week a commenter pointed out that I had ignored the story of racism against Afro-Ukrainians and foreigners of color as they try to escape the war. I found an informative podcast on the topic, which begins with how many Afro-Ukrainians come to be there: When the USSR was trying to promote Communism in Africa, Soviet universities accepted a large number of African students, some of whom stayed. Their children have never known any other home.
The Ukrainian comedy Servant of the People that made made Volodymyr Zelensky famous is available (with English subtitles) on YouTube.
Zelensky and Trump have switched places: Zelensky is a player on the world stage, while Trump has become a comedian.
Former president Donald Trump mused Saturday to the GOP’s top donors that the United States should label its F-22 planes with the Chinese flag and “bomb the s–t out of Russia. And then we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.”
That proposal “was met with laughter from the crowd of donors, according to a recording of the speech obtained by The Washington Post.”
Wednesday, Gov. DeSantis segued from talking about Ukraine to gratuitously insulting France. This is why the current generation of Republicans can’t lead alliances. Trump nearly killed NATO, and DeSantis would be no improvement.
And where in American society do you think pro-Putin disinformation might take root? In anti-vax groups. And in the “freedom convoy“:
The conspiracy theory, which is baseless and has roots in QAnon mythology, alleges that Trump and Putin are secretly working together to stop bioweapons from being made by Dr. Anthony Fauci in Ukraine and that shelling in Ukraine has targeted the secret laboratories.
I wonder how long it will be before fringe MAGA politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz start dog-whistling to this segment of their base, and how long before Ron DeSantis et al start following them.
For now, though, Republicans are trying to cover up their long-standing love affair with Putin. The Daily Show would like to recommend medication to help them forget: Tyranol.
This week the news seemed scattered to me: Lots of things are happening, but I’m not able to fit them together into some larger narrative. So this week I’ll post a lot of short notes rather than a long featured post.
Standing in for a featured post are all the notes I have about the war in Ukraine, which is happening on multiple fronts: the military fronts in Ukraine itself, but also the economic front in Russia, and the information/disinformation fronts around the world. That post should be out between 9 and 10 EST.
The weekly summary has a lot else to cover: Biden’s first State of the Union address, the anti-gay and anti-trans laws being pushed in various red states, the continuing effort to hold Trump accountable for his crimes, the racism Judge Jackson is going to have to overcome to make it to the Supreme Court, and a number of other things. That should be out by noon.
The Weekly Sift 