The Weekly Sift

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.

We remain on indictment watch. Trump has received a target letter from Jack Smith, and has refused the invitation to tell his side of the story to the DC grand jury investigating January 6. An indictment could come any day. It’s tempting to speculate about what that indictment will say, and lots of commentators are giving in to that temptation. As I’ve often said before: Go ahead and speculate if that activity engages you, but you could also just wait and see.

Today’s two featured posts are sort of similar: They both involve me reading a document so you don’t have to. The documents are (1) the new Florida standards for teaching African-American history, and (2) the “Common Sense” booklet outlining the platform of the No Labels Party.

The Florida standards have gotten a lot of well-deserved criticism this week for a couple of egregious lines, but the real problem is in the document as a whole: It wants to tell a no-villains story of American history. So it presents racism as a vague, amorphous, impersonal force, against which heroic Americans of all races have been struggling for centuries. Who exactly they struggled against — other Americans? surely not! — is a big empty spot.

I’ll explain that in more detail in the first featured post, which should be out soon.

A lot of my readers will probably wonder why I’m wasting their (and my) time on No Labels. I believe most of you are on the progressive side of the progressive/moderate split in the Democratic Party, so you’re probably not tempted at all by a group that plans to run to Joe Biden’s right. But the false-equivalence argument that both parties are equally bad appeals to a lot Americans, and I think we’re going to need to understand it during the 2024 campaign.

So the second featured post dives into the No Labels proposals. My conclusion is that their target voter is a moderate Democrat who watches too much Fox News. So they have very real disagreements with MAGA Republicans (about gun control, global alliances, and immigration), and more-or-less imaginary disagreements (about things like the Twitter files, cancel culture, and voter fraud) with Biden. That should be out around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the actual news (as opposed to speculation) related to Trump’s legal situation, the culture-war skirmishes over “Try That in a Small Town” and the Barbie movie, and a number of consequential things happening in other countries: Russia attacking Ukraine’s wheat exports, Israel preparing to disempower its supreme court, and a few other things. That should be out between noon and 1.

On many Mondays, I complain in the teaser about how much news there is to cover. This week, though, I have a sense that we’re all waiting for something to happen.

Georgia is widely expected to indict Trump for tampering with its 2020 election, but not until next month. Jack Smith is looking at the same set of facts, but his timetable is unknowable. The standing indictments against Trump in New York and Florida won’t come to trial anytime soon. Meanwhile, the GOP presidential campaign is on, but the first debate won’t happen until late next month, and the first actual votes are half a year away.

Congress is about to come back into session, with lots to get done if it’s going to avoid a government shutdown in October. The Ukraine summer offensive is underway, but there have been no major swings on the battlefield yet. Climate change continues its inexorable grind, with record heat and flooding, but no city-destroying hurricanes at the moment. There are new stories of Clarence Thomas living the high life at the expense of rich “friends”, but when aren’t there?

It’s tempting to take the week off.

Instead, I’m going to write another article about judicial rulings. Last week, the Supreme Court gave me a lot to comment on. But while they’re out of session now, other courts continue to make news. Two rulings stand out, one positively and the other negatively.

The positive news is a remarkable protest against last year’s pro-gun Bruen ruling and the Supreme Court’s originalism in general, written by District Judge Carlton Reeves of Mississippi. Reeves protests the gun-rights ruling by applying it. The subtext of his ruling (dismissing a case against a former felon who owned a gun, in violation of a 1938 federal law) virtually screams “this is stupid, but it’s what I have to do to follow the precedent”. He ends with a plea for the Supremes to apply the same expansive standards to other constitutional rights (like voting) that they’ve applied to gun ownership.

The negative legal news is a Trump-appointed judge’s injunction ordering large swathes of the federal government to have no contact with social media companies. The ruling repeats a litany of alleged examples of the government suppressing conservative speech, with no fact-checking. It takes seriously various conspiracy theories about malign Biden administration intentions, and completely ignores the interest of the government in minimizing the spread of dangerous misinformation.

I’ll cover both in one article, which should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the hottest week on record, some things I learned from last week’s Moms For Liberty convention (which I didn’t attend), what a flap in Oklahoma points out about anti-CRT laws, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s exit from the Freedom Caucus, and a few other things. It should appear around 1.

I took a week off — to fly a kite, among other things — so I’ve got some catching up to do.

I don’t know about you, but “mercenary army marches on Moscow” wasn’t on my Bingo card. I totally didn’t see that coming.

It’s also been a bad couple of weeks for Republican conspiracy theories: John Durham was supposed to blow the lid off the Deep State conspiracy to smear Trump with Russia collusion, but his testimony to Congress went so badly for MAGA Republicans that Matt Gaetz accused him of being “part of the cover-up”. And a Trump-appointed prosecutor worked out a plea deal with Hunter Biden that includes none of the salacious things he’s supposed to have done — and also doesn’t include any jail time. The most reasonable interpretation is that Hunter really is accountable to the law, but he just hasn’t done that much.

But the featured posts look elsewhere. One of them is about Sam Alito, the latest conservative Supreme Court justice to be exposed living the high life on the dimes of billionaires who have business before his court. Alito defended himself by claiming that “no reasonable person” would find that suspicious.

I’m not the only person who disagrees with that judgment. The article should be out shortly.

The other featured post is somewhat longer and more detailed. I’ve been surprised to discover that some measurable fraction of Democrats believe that Biden should pardon Trump in order to “heal the country” and “reduce polarization”. So I did some thinking about the circumstances under which I’d be willing to show Trump mercy. There are some, but only if he does a few things I don’t expect him to do, like admit wrongdoing.

Anyway, I end up agreeing that we should suppress our desire to see Trump suffer if mercy works to the nation’s benefit, and I speculate about what kind of benefit we might hope for. But I question how likely those circumstances are.

I’ll try to get that out by around 10 EDT, and the weekly summary by noon.

The big news this week is that we won’t have a self-inflicted economic disaster after all. Biden and McCarthy were able to push their debt-ceiling deal through Congress before the Treasury ran out of cash.

This makes an opportune time to point out something that’s been flying under the mainstream media’s radar: Joe Biden is actually pretty good at governing. Part of his technique is to share credit for success and not humiliate his rivals, so he doesn’t do the kind of victory dances his predecessor would do (even when he hadn’t really won). If you’re not paying attention, you may not notice the amount of skill in Biden’s performance. And if you’re watching too much Fox News, you might even think he’s senile (while being totally confused by how he keeps getting things done).

So this week’s featured post lays it out: “Joe Biden is Good at Governing”. It should be out shortly.

The weekly summary discusses the debt ceiling, the reasons to think another Trump indictment is coming soon, a federal judge tossing out Tennessee’s anti-drag law, a survey on the decline of friendship, the Sacklers escaping with billions, and a few other things. It should be out before noon.