The Weekly Sift

I should have waited a week to sum up what we know about the Trump coup plot. Last week was the one-year anniversary of his mob invading the Capitol, but two significant new chunks of the story came out this week: An indictment describing the Oath Keepers’ plans to hold the Capitol after the mob seized control, and the fraudulent documents by which Trump’s defeated electors attempted to certify themselves to Congress.

Michigan’s attorney general has referred the Electoral-College-fraud case to the Justice Department, and we don’t know what they’ll do with it. But the Oath Keeper plan came out in the first DoJ indictment that puts January 6 in its political context: The charge is seditious conspiracy, not trespassing, assaulting an officer, or some other offense that could have been committed by an impulsive mob.

I’ll describe all that in “Merrick Garland Starts Getting Serious”, which I’m hoping to post by 11 EST.

Before that, though, I’ll cover the Supreme Court’s pair of vaccine-mandate decisions, which are no less bizarre because they were expected. Roberts and Kavanaugh switched sides between the two cases, and so were in the majority both times as Biden’s OSHA mandate was struck down, but his HHS mandate upheld. The issues were virtually the same in the two cases, and only minor editing could have turned the majority opinion in the HHS case into a dissent in the OSHA case.

That will be the subject of “The Court and the Vaccine Mandates”, which should be out around 9.

The weekly summary still has the Senate’s failure to protect voting rights to cover, as well as the apparent top of the Omicron surge, Matt Gaetz’ legal woes, Novak Djokovic, Prince Andrew, and a few other things, before closing with a mash-up showing that six country-and-western hits are really the same song. That should appear between noon and 1.

Having gotten the pessimism out of my system last week, I’ll start 2022 with an upbeat featured post: “Democracy Returns to Michigan”.

Since the 2011 redistricting, Michigan’s legislature has been so blatantly gerrymandered that the state has arguably not had the “Republican form of government” that Article IV of the Constitution guarantees to every member of the Union. But in 2018 the voters rose up and passed a ballot initiative establishing a non-partisan redistricting commission. In some states, gerrymandered Republican legislatures have managed to circumvent anti-gerrymandering ballot initiatives, but this one seems to have worked. So in November, the voters of Michigan should finally get to decide which party controls their legislature.

That post should be out by 9 EST.

The weekly summary will look at the Omicron surge, the upcoming anniversary of the January 6 coup attempt, the New Year, Betty White, and a few other things, before closing with an ethical dilemma that not even gingerbread people can escape. It should be out before noon.

An eventful week: Build Back Better looks dead. The Mark Meadows text messages show that major conservative voices were panicking in private on January 6 while they publicly said something very different. Omicron is spreading. Central banks are starting to respond to inflation. The NYT exposes what the Pentagon knew about the civilian casualties from its bombing raids. And the War on Christmas enters its 17th grim year.

The featured post isn’t about any of that. A conservative article in Atlantic got under my skin, and I tried to figure out why. That led to “The Emotional Roots of Political Polarization”, which should be out between 9 and 10 EST.

The weekly summary does cover the stuff I mentioned above, and also promotes an article calling for “platform socialism” as a solution to the problem of Big Tech monopolies. I haven’t decided whether I agree, but I do want to widen the range of debate on this issue. Then the summary closes with Stephen Colbert’s Lord of the Rings rap. That should appear before noon.

These last two weeks saw two significant developments: The Omicron variant of Covid was announced, and the Supreme Court heard arguments on a case it might use to overturn Roe v Wade.

The featured post will focus on Roe. In particular, I went back to read Roe, which impressed me more than I expected. Justice Blackmun wrote an excellent discussion of the issue, and anticipated many of the criticisms that people are making today. I’ll also comment on the extensive gaslighting by the conservative justices, which started in their confirmation hearings and continues to the present.

That post “The Roe v Wade Death Watch” should be out a little after 10 EST.

The weekly summary will cover what little we know about Omicron and how uncertainly we know it. I’ll also discuss the Michigan school shooting, and go back to comment on the Arbery and Rittenhouse verdicts. In other news: Bob Dole died. Congress managed to fund the government until February, but there’s still a debt ceiling crisis scheduled for later this month. Chris Cuomo got fired. A Russia/Ukraine crisis is brewing. And a few other things. I’ll try to get that out around noon or so.

Steve Bannon got indicted this week. The legal battle over Trump’s ex-presidential executive privilege continued. The Kyle Rittenhouse and Ahmaud Arbery murder trials raised questions about white privilege in the legal system. The New York Times finally recognized the Republican Party’s growing acceptance of political violence. The Glasgow climate conference came to a less-than-ringing conclusion. New Covid cases turned up again. And SNL gave us an episode of “Ted Cruz Street”, which appears on NewsMax Kids as a lead-in to “White Power Rangers”.

I’ll cover all that in the weekly summary, which I’ll try to get out between noon and one EST.

I might spin the Republican-violence note out into its own article, but there definitely will be a featured article about a more tangential concern: The announcement of the new University of Austin by a collection of anti-cancel-culture intellectuals. U of A President Pano Kanelos touched a lot of my educational sympathies with the rhetoric in his announcement essay, but I can’t shake my impression that his new institution will wind up being a safe space for traditional biases that the other universities are finally confronting. A lot of things are wrong with currently popular models of higher education, but giving previously oppressed groups the freedom to talk back isn’t one of them.

“Does America Need an Anti-Cancel-Culture University?” should be out before 10.