The Weekly Sift

The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.

– Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor
dissent in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health

This week’s featured posts are “Three Supreme Court decisions with long-term consequences” and “The January 6 hearings are accomplishing more than you think.“

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

Friday’s announcement that the reversal-of-Roe that leaked in May is indeed the decision overshadowed all other developments. But it was not the only radical and consequential thing the Court did this week: It blew a hole in the wall between church and state in Carson v Makin, and it further restricted states’ power to control guns in NY State Rifle & Piston v Bruen.

I discuss the opinions themselves in the first featured post. Here I want to consider consequences. All three of these decisions look like the first of many: As sweeping as the Dobbs decision is, it sets up a reconsideration of all rights based on a legal doctrine known as substantive due process (which I explained in March): the right to access contraceptives, to marry a person of the same sex or a different race, and for consenting adults to choose their own sexual practices. Carson will make it difficult to deny government funding to religious organizations in a wide variety of settings. Bruen calls a long list of gun regulations into question.

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Planned Parenthood provides an interactive map that allows you to see the current abortion restrictions in any state. Abortion is already illegal in the black states, and severely restricted in the dark red states (many of which will probably ban it entirely before long).

Exactly what illegality means is still being worked out in many states. Mother Jones raises a good question: “If Abortion is Illegal, Will Every Miscarriage Be a Potential Crime?” If it is, who is the criminal — the woman, or just the doctor? What if the abortion takes place in a different state, where it is legal? My social media is full of people in blue states offering to help women come to their state for abortions. Will they be accessories, who dare not show their faces in Texas or Mississippi for fear of arrest?

What if a miscarriage (or a birth defect) results from negligence rather than intent? Is that manslaughter? As Dana Sussman of National Advocates for Pregnant Women puts it: “You can’t add fetuses to the community of individuals who are entitled to constitutional rights without diminishing the rights of the person carrying that fetus.”

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The impact this decision will have on the midterm elections, or on all future elections, is hard to gauge. In particular, what happens to educated suburban women, the “soccer moms” who supported Bush and Romney but had trouble stomaching Trump? Will they turn out in force and vote Democratic, or will their generally conservative leanings on economic issues keep them voting Republican?

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A brief message to pro-choice women: Make sure the men in your life know how seriously you take the Court’s decision, and the new laws that it will inspire.

I say this because my 65 years of male experience have taught me something about how men think. A man, even one who ought to know you better than this, is likely to imagine that losing reproductive rights isn’t that big a deal to you because (1) you want to have a child anyway; or (2) you’re unlikely to get pregnant; or (3) you’re past childbearing age. He may not grasp that you take this assault on your rights personally, or be able to imagine why. But he may listen if you tell him. (If he won’t listen, you might want to reconsider his role in your life.)

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Susan Collins now feels she was “misled” by Brett Kavanaugh and possibly other justices during their confirmation hearings. Of course, everyone in the world was telling her at the time that she was being a gullible fool, but she still doesn’t own up to that. I am reminded of her vote for the Trump tax cut, which Mitch McConnell got in exchange for promises that turned out to be worthless. But Collins dismissed criticism of her gullibility as sexist.

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I didn’t cover this in the featured post, but a fourth important decision limited the consequences police will face if they don’t give suspects a Miranda warning before questioning them.

And just this morning, the Court launched another attack on the separation of church and state by siding with a high school football coach who led prayers at the 50-yard-line after games. The coach is, of course, Christian. No one from any other religion would imagine that he had such a right.

and the continuing revelations of the 1-6 hearings

This week the 1-6 Committee held its fourth [video transcript] and fifth [video transcript] public hearings.

Both were gripping hearings. The fourth hearing centered on Trump’s pressure on state and local officials to change the election results. As always, most of the witnesses were Republicans who wanted Trump to win, but wouldn’t cheat for him.

Rusty Bowers is the Speaker of the House in Arizona. He testified about how Trump and Rudy Giuliani pressured him to call a special session of the legislature, so that Arizona could decertify its Biden electors. They promised him evidence of massive voter fraud, but never delivered any. Bowers gave an emotional statement about how his Mormon faith teaches that the Constitution is divinely inspired, and that he would never go against the Constitution just “because somebody asked me”.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told the story of the famous phone call where Trump refused to listen to his refutation of Trump’s election-fraud claims, and urged him to “find” enough votes for Trump to win the state. His subordinate Gabriel Sterling explained why he publicly warned Trump that “somebody’s going to get killed” if he kept pushing his election-fraud deceptions.

But the heart-wrenching moment of the fourth hearing was the testimony of Shaye Moss (supplemented by the taped testimony of her mother), who was a Georgia election worker that Trump targeted falsely as a perpetrator of the “election fraud” that kept him from winning Georgia. Trump had to know, if he bothered to think about it at all, what his followers would do.

Moss testified about the impact Trump’s lies had on her life, including telling about a panicked phone call she got from her grandmother:

I received a call from my grandmother. This woman is my everything. I’ve never even heard her or seen her cry ever in my life. And she called me screaming at the top of her lungs, like, “Shaye, Shaye, oh my gosh, Shaye.” Just freaking me out saying that there are people at her home and they, you know, they knocked on the door and of course she opened it seeing who was there, who it was.

And they just started pushing their way through, claiming that they were coming in to make a citizen’s arrest. They needed to find me and my mom. They knew we were there. And she was just, like,screaming and didn’t know what to do. And I wasn’t there. So, you know, I just felt so helpless and so horrible for her.

Both Shaye and her mother (who also was an election worker and also was targeted by Trump) said that they were still afraid to go out in public, and afraid to let anyone know who they are. It was easy to see the signs of depression in her testimony.

I felt horrible. I felt like it was all my fault, like if I would have never decided to be an elections worker, like, I could have — like, anything else, but that’s what I decided to do. And now people are lying and spreading rumors and lies and attacking my mom, I’m her only child, going to my grandmother’s house.

I’m her only grandchild. And — and my kid is just — I felt so bad. I — I just felt bad for my mom, and I felt horrible for picking this job and being the one that always wants to help and always there, never missing not one election. I just felt like it was — it was my fault for putting my family in this situation.

The President of the United States did this. We’ve gotten used to Trump falsely and baselessly attacking political rivals or well-known journalists or even non-political celebrities like LeBron James. But this was him picking out an ordinary American who did nothing wrong, and just ruining her life.

The fifth hearing centered on the Justice Department, and Trump’s effort to get DoJ officials to back up election-fraud claims that they had investigated and knew were lies. This effort culminated in a January 3 meeting at the White House, in which Trump proposed replacing Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen, who wouldn’t make false claims on his behalf, with Jeff Clark, who would.

Ultimately it fell apart not because anyone convinced him the scheme was wrong, but because it wouldn’t work. The entire DoJ leadership would resign, including Office of Legal Counsel head Steven Engel. Engel warned Trump:

look, all anyone is going to sort of think about when they see this — no one is going to read this letter [that Clark wanted to send to leaders of the Georgia legislature, falsely claiming that the DoJ had found evidence of fraud]

All anyone is going to think is that you went through two attorneys general in two weeks until you found the environmental guy to sign this thing. And so, the story is not going to be that the Department of Justice has found massive corruption that would have changed the result of the election. It’s going to be the disaster of Jeff Clark.

Video was shown of the committee asking Clark about these events: He repeatedly pleaded the Fifth and executive privilege (which are contradictory claims; if no crime is involved, the Fifth doesn’t apply; if a crime is involved, there’s no executive privilege).

And the grand finale of Thursday’s session was the list of GOP congresspeople who sought pardons from Trump: Mo Brooks, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert, Scott Perry, and Marjorie Taylor Green.

What did they think they had done, that they would need a pardon for?

and whether the hearings are changing anything

They’re accomplishing more than you think. That’s the topic of the second featured post.

and gun legislation

Any other week, this would be a big story. Today, it’s hard to find space for it.

Two weeks ago a bipartisan group of senators announced that it had settled on a framework for legislation to do at least something in response to the Uvalde school shooting and the surge of other mass shootings. Last week it looked like the agreement might blow up as they tried to write a bill based on that framework. This week it passed both houses of Congress and is awaiting President Biden’s signature.

The bill is simultaneously an accomplishment and a disappointment. Here’s what the bill does:

• requires enhanced background checks for young adults 18-21 to buy a gun, and gives authorities ten days (up from three) to perform the checks;
• gives states $750 million in incentives to implement red-flag laws, which temporarily take guns away from people a judge deems dangerous;
• appropriates money for mental health and school safety;
• extends federal law that stops domestic abusers from buying guns, so that it now covers dating partners as well as spouses, live-in partners, and co-parents;
• makes certain kinds of interstate gun trafficking a federal crime.

What it doesn’t do is ban assault weapons or high-capacity magazines, establish universal background checks on gun purchases, prevent assault-weapon purchases by young adults 18-21, or enact a federal red-flag law.

As small as these steps are, the bill is the first tightening of gun laws since the Clinton administration. The fact that 15 Republican senators and 14 Republican representatives were willing to vote for it — in spite of heated opposition from the NRA and some wild attacks from Fox News — is significant. The next few elections will be tests of the gun lobby’s power: If these senators are ousted in Republican primaries by pro-gun challengers, this might be the last federal gun-control legislation for another few decades. If they aren’t, the NRA’s stranglehold on the GOP might be broken.

and you also might be interested in …

The pandemic keeps chugging along at the level of about 100K new cases per day. Deaths are increasing slightly, running around 350 per day.

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The European Union has formally accepted Ukraine as a candidate to join the Union.

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Herschel Walker stories just get weirder and weirder. Somebody found a tape of him claiming his mulitiple personality disorder isn’t a mental illness. He offers this interesting theological notion:

Do our Lord Jesus Christ have a mental illness because he said he’s the father, the son and the Holy Spirit? To me, those are 3 different personalities.

I thought I had heard every possible explanation of the Trinity, but that one is new to me. Georgia Republicans must be so proud, particularly the Christian ones.

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I don’t like to read too much into what are obviously slips of the tongue, because we all have them, and a harsh standard of judgment would hurt everybody. But this is hard to ignore: Appearing with President Trump Saturday in Mendon, Illinois — not far from where I grew up; the rally was at the county fairgrounds, where I remember seeing a talent show and a tractor pull and eating cotton candy — Rep. Mary Miller said:

I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday.

Apparently she meant to say “right to life”, not “white life”. But according to NBC, the crowd — which had no way of knowing that something different was in her script — cheered. “Victory for white life” sounded good to them.

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Q appears to be back.

and let’s close with something musical

Here’s proof that anything is musical if you have an ear for it. The Floppotron 3.0 orchestra uses 512 floppy disk drives, 16 hard drives, and four flatbed scanners to play the Imperial March from Star Wars. Somebody had to hear all those noises and imagine what could be done with them.

You don’t have to be that gung-ho on trans rights to realize that a world where girls’ genitals need to be inspected before they can play any sport is worse for girls than a world where once in a while there’s a trans girl on a girls’ team.

– Evan Urquhart

This week’s featured post is “America’s guns have changed in my lifetime.“

This week everybody was talking still talking about guns

Because the mass shootings won’t stop. A gunman killed four at a hospital in Tulsa on Wednesday. Three died and 11 were wounded in a multi-party shoot-out in Philadelphia Saturday. Three died Sunday morning in a shooting in Saginaw. Also on Sunday, three died and 17 were injured in a shooting near a bar in Chattanooga.

The Senate is under pressure to “do something”, but if anything gets done, it will be small. Perhaps there will be some expansion of red-flag laws that prevent some criminals and mentally ill people from buying guns, perhaps an expansion of federal background checks that would still leave loopholes. But no universal background checks, no assault weapon ban, nothing remotely on the scale of the problem.

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This week’s featured post examines my own history with guns, and concludes that the apparently stable level of gun-ownership in America over the decades has masked a huge increase in the destructive potential of our civilian arsenal.

Yes, I grew up in a gun-owning household. But no, the guns (and the gun culture) of America in the 1960s and 70s bears no resemblance to what we see today.

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In discussions of the Second Amendment, gun advocates often ignore the phrase “well regulated Militia”, and gun-control advocates correspondingly call attention to it. But both sides usually forget that the Constitution uses the word “Militia” elsewhere, so the word is not an impenetrable mystery to be interpreted however we see fit. The constitutional context paints a pretty clear idea what the Founders meant a militia to be.

Article I, section 8 gives Congress the power “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States”

Article II, section 2 says that the President “shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”.

So it’s clear that self-appointed groups of guys playing war games in the woods are NOT militias in the constitutional sense. They are not organized, armed, and disciplined by Congress, and they picture themselves BEING the insurrection, not responding to a call from Congress to submit to the command of the President and put down an insurrection.

The only organizations today that fit the constitutional uses of “Militia” are National Guard units.

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Michael Fanone, a 20-year DC policeman who testified about the 1-6 riot and now works for CNN, explains why the AR-15 should be banned.

If banning them outright seems like too extreme a solution to be politically palatable, here’s another option: Reclassify semi-automatic rifles as Class 3 firearms.

That would mean that someone wanting to purchase an AR-15 would have to go through a background check, fingerprinting and review by an official from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — a process that takes anywhere from 12 to 16 months. And since Class 3 weapons can’t be purchased by anyone younger than 21, it would solve the issue of emotionally unstable 18-year-olds buying them.

A Class 3 firearm reclassification would also make those who are approved to purchase these weapons subject to an annual check that they are complying with federal regulations regarding secure storage of the firearm, and to confirm their licensing and other paperwork is up to date. All of these hoops and hurdles are sure to reduce the civilian demand for these weapons.

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in his Substack blog, Michael Sifry discusses the role of money in making the gun-control movement “a monoculture” that employs only the most vanilla tactics.

Faced with the same confluence of events that we had in 2018, even worse since now we’re reeling from the racist massacre in Buffalo along with the insanity in Texas, all the wings of today’s “stay on message” gun violence prevention lobby, from the youngest to the oldest, are not just singing from the same songbook, they’re following the same theory of change: trying to convert momentary public attention into successful lobbying of legislators, plus calling occasional big marches and walkouts aimed at converting attention into the successful lobbying of legislators. To be followed by the inevitable electioneering for candidates who are almost all Democrats. When media attention fades, as it will, this lobby has no plans to create attention on its own beyond “vote harder.” …

It’s as if we’re living in the 1950s and the only groups leading the charge for civil rights are the NAACP and the Urban League, and the only strategy they’re willing to try is polite protest and lobbying.

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A Florida school-shooting survivor asked Marco Rubio if he would reject NRA contributions. The question got a standing ovation. Rubio could not say yes. “That is the wrong way to look,” he explained.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

but we need to shift the focus to January 6

The House committee’s televised hearings start Thursday evening. I’m getting disturbed that I’m not hearing more buzz about that. We’re going to see in detail the story of how an American president almost overthrew democracy so that he could stay in power. It’s a big deal.

Fox News still hasn’t committed to covering Thursday night’s hearing.

I can already predict the Republican response: It’s all just a rehash of the second impeachment hearings. But it’s not. Those hearings happened mere weeks after the insurrection, and spent most of their time recounting what happened at the Capitol on 1-6 itself.

The Committee now knows a great deal more about Trump’s conspiracy to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. They have sources inside the Trump White House, and can trace the plot through the fake electors and the attempt to induce Vice President Pence to break his oath of office. We’ll hear just how many people told Trump explicitly that his stolen-election narrative was bullshit, and that his scheme to disrupt counting the electoral votes was illegal. I expect the hearings to reveal connections between the White House and the right-wing paramilitary groups that planned the Capitol assault. We’ll find out if Republican congressmen were involved. We’ll hear from executive-branch officials who Trump tried to pressure to go along with the plot, and get testimony about how Trump responded as events unfolded on January 6.

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One indication that the Committee has the goods on Trump is just how hard his people have tried to obstruct its investigation.

Friday, Trump economic advisor (and proponent of the election-nullifying plot he called “the Green Bay sweep“) Peter Navarro was arrested for contempt of Congress. He’s pretty obviously guilty: He was subpoenaed by the 1-6 committee and just blew them off. He has tried to claim that executive privilege prevents him from testifying. However, it didn’t prevent him from writing about the same topics in his book or discussing them on television. It isn’t the world that’s not supposed to know, just Congress.

“In any event, you must appear to assert any executive privilege objections on a question-by-question basis during the deposition,” the committee wrote.

Navarro seems deeply offended about being treated like a criminal just because he broke the law.

“Who are these people,” Navarro said. “This is not America. I mean, I was a distinguished public servant for four years and nobody ever questioned my ethics. And they’re treating me in this fashion.”

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert railed against the deep injustice of enforcing the laws Republicans break:

It actually puts an exclamation point on the fact that we have a two-tiered justice system. If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you. They’re gonna bury you. They’re gonna put you in the D.C. jail and terrorize and torture you and not live up to the Constitution there.

Josh Marshall couldn’t resist getting snarky:

you murder one person and suddenly ev’body’s like LAW LAW LAW

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Remember: the Benghazi Committee was precisely the kind of partisan witch hunt Republicans claim the 1-6 Committee is. But Hillary Clinton testified to them for 11 hours, because she was confident she had answers for all their questions. Trump and his people, on the other hand, know that they’re guilty, so they want to prevent the American people from finding out what they did.

Can you imagine Trump showing up for hours of testimony under oath? He knows he couldn’t go five minutes without either babbling or committing perjury.

meanwhile, the pandemic continues

The trends of the past few weeks continue: Case numbers are drifting downwards, particularly in the Northeast. (In my Massachusetts county, new cases per day per 100K were running in the high 50s a few weeks ago; it’s 35 now.) Hospitalizations are well below their January peaks and deaths (now around 270 per day) never really did spike during this wave.

To put the death number in perspective, compare to the flu:

According to data collected by the CDC from 2010 to 2020, the agency estimates that the flu has caused 12,000–52,000 deaths annually.

Dividing by 365 gets you to 33-142 deaths per day. So right now Covid deaths are running about double the rate of a bad flu year. (That’s assuming we could maintain this rate for a whole year. If deaths shoot up again in the fall and winter, we’ll be much higher than double a flu death-rate.)

In Atlantic, Yasmin Tayag examines how this wave feels different from previous ones: It’s a much longer but shallower wave.

The recent omicron variants have gotten better at evading the vaccines’ protections against infection, but deaths among the fully vaccinated-and-boosted are still rare. I’ve noticed this in my own social circle, which is almost entirely vaccinated: More people I know have gotten sick lately, but none seriously.

and the Ukraine War

It’s been 100 days since the Russian invasion began. Russian forces occupy about a fifth of the country, mostly in the east. The Russian offensive in the east has turned into a war of attrition, with each side making claims that the battle is turning in its favor.

It gets harder and harder to imagine how this war might end. Neither side is likely to give up, and there is no obvious settlement that both could accept.

Meanwhile, a debate is rising about America’s and NATO’s long-term commitment. The NYT’s Ross Douthat expresses one side of that debate:

[G]iven the state of the war right now, the more likely near-future scenario is one where Russian collapse remains a pleasant fancy, the conflict becomes stalemated and frozen, and we have to put our Ukrainian policy on a sustainable footing without removing Putin’s regime or dismantling the Russian empire. … [I]f Kyiv and Moscow are headed for a multiyear or even multi-decade frozen conflict, we will need to push Ukraine toward its most realistic rather than its most ambitious military strategy.

Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum the other:

The West should not aim to offer Putin an off-ramp; our goal, our endgame, should be defeat. In fact, the only solution that offers some hope of long-term stability in Europe is rapid defeat, or even, to borrow Macron’s phrase, humiliation. In truth, the Russian president not only has to stop fighting the war; he has to conclude that the war was a terrible mistake, one that can never be repeated. More to the point, the people around him—leaders of the army, the security services, the business community—have to conclude exactly the same thing.

… Only failure can persuade the Russians themselves to question the sense and purpose of a colonial ideology that has repeatedly impoverished and ruined their own economy and society, as well as those of their neighbors, for decades. Yet another frozen conflict, yet another temporary holding pattern, yet another face-saving compromise will not end the pattern of Russian aggression or bring permanent peace.

and you also might be interested in …

Dr. Oz will be the GOP’s Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, after David McCormick conceded in the photo-finish primary. Oz got just over 31% in a multi-candidate race and won by less than 1,000 votes out of 1.2 million.

The Democratic candidate, John Fetterman, is still recovering from a stroke suffered just before the primary, which appears to have been caused by an underlying heart condition. He is said to be walking several miles a day.

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Elon Musk buying Twitter still isn’t a done deal.

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A couple of Republican conspiracy theories blew up this week.

A jury took only six hours to acquit Michael Sussman of lying to the FBI. After three years of investigating the origin of the Trump/Russia investigation, this was Special Counsel John Durham’s first indictment, and it was a pretty flimsy one. The main point of the indictment seems to have been to fan pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the Clintons, not to get a conviction.

Another long-running conspiracy theory has been the “unmasking” of Michael Flynn. WaPo’s Aaron Blake summarizes the theory:

The idea was that Obama administration officials deliberately targeted Donald Trump associates — and particularly Flynn — by requesting the disclosure of their names in intelligence reports before Trump took office, doing so for political purposes. This fed into long-running allegations of the government “spying” on Trump, who chose Flynn as his national security adviser.

The Trump Justice Department investigated that claim and found nothing. BuzzFeed released the previously classified report (by then-US Attorney John Bash) last Monday:

“My review has uncovered no evidence that senior Executive Branch officials sought the disclosure of” the identities of US individuals “in disseminated intelligence reports for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons during the 2016 presidential-election period or the ensuing presidential-transition period,” Bash’s report says.

In particular, unmasking had nothing to do with the scandal that eventually got Flynn convicted of lying to the FBI (which Trump pardoned him for).

A central focus of the probe was the leak showing that Flynn had been in communication with then–Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak prior to Trump’s inauguration, and whether Flynn’s involvement was revealed through an unmasking request from a government official.

But Bash’s review of unmasked intelligence reports about the calls found that the FBI did not in fact disseminate any that contained Flynn’s information, and that a single unmasked report that did contain Flynn’s information did not describe the calls between him and Kislyak. “For that reason, the public disclosure of the communications could not have resulted from an unmasking request,” Bash’s report concludes.

Both of these attempts to come up with a nefarious origin story for the Trump/Russia investigation ignore the fact that there were perfectly good reasons to investigate, and that the public still has not heard the full story of what went on between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Let me summarize at the highest level:

• During the 2016 campaign and into the Trump/Obama transition, there were an unusual number interactions between Trump’s people and Putin’s people.
• When asked about these interactions, the Trump people invariably lied about them.

No innocent explanation of these facts has ever been offered.

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Ron DeSantis continues his Orban-like tactics to use government power to punish corporations that don’t support him. This time the target is the Tampa Bay Rays, who recently spoke out against gun violence and made a contribution to a gun-control organization.

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Ohio’s legislature has passed the “Save Women’s Sports Act”, which bans transgender girls from playing sports in public schools. Reason summarizes:

So, to be very clear here, no evidence is needed that a particular athlete is trans or not a biological female in order to demand that she prove her sex. The athlete must then go to a physician and either subject herself to a physical inspection of her sexual organs or arrange for hormone or genetic tests. And no, the bill does not fund the costs of such tests. … News 5 in Cleveland notes that there is currently only a single trans female student competing in high school sports in Ohio.

Evan Urquhart comments:

You don’t have to be that gung-ho on trans rights to realize that a world where girls’ genitals need to be inspected before they can play any sport is worse for girls than a world where once in a while there’s a trans girl on a girls’ team.

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Yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene really did say “peach tree dish“. But it was funnier when Sarah Silverman said it to Conan O’Brien in 2010.

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Brynn Tannehill reports that her friend’s husband is a retired police officer who does police trainings. He finds that young officers are soaked in right-wing propaganda, to the point that they just don’t believe FBI statistics about right-wing domestic terrorism.

Follow up. Spoke with his wife last night. The first responders also didn’t believe that police were attacked on January 6th. Or if they were, it was Antifa. These are the people that will be propping up our post-democracy government. They’re true believers. We’re f****d.

and let’s close with something religious

George Carlin seems to be having a comeback lately, in spite of having been dead since 2008. The streaming channels I subscribe to keep recommending his videos, and he’s been coming up more often on my social media feeds. In addition to just being funny, Carlin generally gave you something to think about, like this attempt to edit the ten commandments down to a more manageable list.

Take any horrible thing the right wing is doing, call it X. Go back in time two years and publicly predict: “the right wing is going to do X.” You will be dismissed as a partisan crank. This has been reliably, consistently true throughout the entire right-wing escalation. Still true today.

– David Roberts

This week’s featured post is “A reluctant defense of Bill Cassidy“.

This week everybody was talking about primaries

Pennsylvania was last Tuesday, Georgia tomorrow.

The headline result in Pennsylvania was that a radically Trumpy candidate won the Republican primary for governor. State Senator Doug Mastriano attended the January 6 rally — there’s some dispute about how close the violence he got — and still doesn’t recognize Joe Biden’s victory. He introduced a bill for the Pennsylvania legislature to award the state’s 19 electoral votes to Trump, despite Biden getting 80,000 more votes than Trump. Governors have to sign presidential election certifications, so there is serious doubt that a Governor Mastriano would certify a Democratic victory in 2024, no matter what the voters said.

He also supports a complete abortion ban, without exceptions.

What we do know scientifically is that baby in the womb is a distinct individual — it’s not a clump of tissue. The argument, it’s 60-year-old science, is we know that’s a distinct individual with a distinct DNA. That baby deserves a right to life, whether it was conceived in incest, rape or whether there are concerns otherwise for the mom.

He is frequently identified as a Christian nationalist, though I haven’t found any example of him claiming that label explicitly.

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Speaking of Christian nationalism, Trump has endorsed Jacky Eubanks for the Michigan legislature. She was interviewed by Michael Voris of the Church Militant digital media service.

“You cannot have a successful society outside of the Christian moral order,” she claimed, insisting that “things like abortion and things like gay marriage are outside the Christian moral order.” Eubanks added: “They lead to chaos and destruction and a culture of death; we’ve abandoned the Christian moral order as a nation and we are reaping that destruction.”

When Voris suggested to Eubanks that her political opponents are likely to paint that as extreme, Eubanks countered: “I don’t see what we believe as extreme at all. We need to return to God’s moral order. That’s not radical. God’s morality is for everybody,” she said. “You cannot have happiness outside of God’s moral order.”

As I recall, there’s a group in Afghanistan that also wants to return to God’s moral order.

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John Fetterman easily won the Democratic nomination for the Senate, despite suffering a stroke a few days before the primary. He spent about a week in the hospital, but has been released. He claims to expect a full recovery, but everyone will watching him closely when he starts campaigning again.

On the Republican side, the Senate race is still too close to call. As of Friday, Dr. Oz held a .08% lead over David McCormick. A recount is expected, so the race may not be decided until June 8. It’s been amusing to hear Republicans talking about counting ballots that they considered fraudulent in 2020.

Oz has not, so far, taken Trump’s advice and claimed victory, seeming to trust the election system in a state that the ex-President claimed was corrupt two years ago. Aides to McCormick, who has previously raised doubts about electoral integrity in the state, argue that uncounted absentee ballots — the very outstanding votes that Trump falsely claimed in 2020 were proof of fraud — will put him over the top.

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Neither senate primary in Georgia is expected to be close: the Herschel Walker/Raphael Warnock match-up seems set. Likewise, Stacey Abrams seems assured of the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

The Republican side of the state-office primaries has been called “Trump’s revenge tour“. He’s trying to oust Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Rafensperger, the Republican officials who did their jobs in 2020 rather than “find” the votes he needed to win. (Trump’s famous call to pressure Rafensperger is still the subject of an election fraud investigation.) So far it seems not to be working: Kemp held a 32-point lead in a recent poll.

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There does seem to be a bottom: Madison Cawthorn lost the Republican primary to defend his House seat.

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A Republican candidate for governor in Colorado proposes that the state adopt its own version of the Electoral College for gubernatorial elections, one that would boost the power of rural counties and diminish urban centers like Denver.

Under Lopez’s plan, [the 2018] governor’s race would have been a runaway win for Republicans, who lost the actual race by double-digits when each vote was weighted equally.

Right now, anybody who predicts Republicans will actually do such a thing would be dismissed as a partisan crank, in accordance with the David Roberts’ principle stated at the top.

and replacement theory

When I started writing last week’s featured post, I thought the point I was making — that White Replacement Theory was becoming central to the Republican message — was not necessarily original, but wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. Apparently, though, I was one of a number of people having the same thought at the same time.

Rolling Stone’s Talia Lavin got there a day ahead of me, and also with a sense of I’m-just-figuring-this-out:

Once you understand an obsession with racial composition and white fertility to be the driving engine of Republican politics, a number of seemingly disparate movements begin to fit together into an ugly whole. Some aspects are obvious: The anti-immigrant movement that has seen U.S. refugee admissions at historic lows and asylum seekers marooned in purgatorial camps in Mexico continues to dominate the right-wing airwaves. Historic levels of gerrymandering are ensuring that a diversifying populace remains beholden to the views of a white minority — alongside openly antidemocratic restrictions on voting and changes in election administration.

Other aspects are more veiled, but no less vitriolic. Years of fearmongering about transgender rights, and in particular their influence on youth, are linked to fears of waning fertility: anti-trans demagogues like Abigail Shrier describe trans bodies as “maimed and sterile,” and, as such, a chief motivation for the legion of anti-trans laws passed by state legislatures is the future fertility of trans children born female. The violent antifeminism of a far-right movement that sees women principally as vessels for breeding a new white generation expresses itself in a fixation on a return to “traditional” gender roles. And the culmination of generations of right-wing activism, which will secure the “domestic supply of infants,” as Justice Samuel Alito memorably put it, is poised to arrive in the form of the dissolution of Roe v. Wade. Payton Gendron, and those like him, are listening: like Brenton Tarrant, the mass shooter at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, Gendron opened his manifesto with a screed on the supposedly apocalyptic consequences of “sub-replacement fertility rates” among white women.

Kathleen Belew in the NYT:

Immigration is a problem because immigrants will outbreed the white population. Abortion is a problem because white babies will be aborted. L.G.B.T.Q. rights and feminism will take women from the home and decrease the white birthrate. Integration, intermarriage and even the presence of Black people distant from a white community — an issue apparently of keen interest in the Buffalo attack — are seen as a threat to the white birthrate through the threat of miscegenation.

Matt Schlapp, the head of the Conservative Political Action Conference, also sees the connection between replacement and abortion:

If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,. You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.

Like me, Ryan Cooper rejected the isolated-crazy-guy explanation of the Buffalo shooting:

the alleged shooter was just taking the conservative “replacement” rhetoric seriously. If one really believes that the white race is the foundation of American society (a disgusting lie in its own right), and that wealthy Jews and liberals are conspiring to drown that race in a tide of bestial subhuman immigrants, then mass murder is a logical conclusion

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Vox’ Zack Beauchamp looks at Hungary, where Replacement Theory has become the governing ideology. In that context, the connection between racism and anti-feminism becomes clear: If the white race (or the Hungarian ethnicity) is in danger of diminishing to extinction, then its women have to be induced to have more children. Similarly, non-childbearing LGBTQ relationships threaten the race’s survival.

The Guardian reports on the CPAC conference held in Budapest this weekend. (Try to imagine US Democrats holding a conference in Havana.)

Viktor Orbán spoke on Thursday. American speakers have included Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, Ken Paxton, and Kristi Noem, all building up to a climactic video speech by Donald Trump.

The conference also hosted Zsolt Bayer

a notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people

Birds of a feather.

---

The editorial board of the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison challenged Senator Ron Johnson to “renounce replacement theory”.

Debating immigration policy is fine. The United States has adjusted its flow of newcomers for 2½ centuries, creating a “melting pot” of people and cultures that defines the American experience.

But granting any credence to the racist and absurd “great replacement theory” should disqualify politicians from public office.

The editorial notes that many of Johnson’s past statements have “sounded eerily similar to the theory’s proponents”.

He told a conservative radio host in Minneapolis last month: “I’ve got to believe [Democrats] want to change the makeup of the electorate.”

The editorial brings Johnson back to the reality of his home state:

Wisconsin needs more immigrants — not for any political purposes, but because our population is graying fast and doesn’t have enough young people to take over the jobs of retirees, much less fill the new positions that growing businesses create. Wisconsin is suffering a workforce shortage, something a manufacturer such as Johnson should understand. The birth rate is declining, and the working-age population fell in every Wisconsin county except Dane and Eau Claire from 2007 to 2017. That’s an enormous challenge to Wisconsin’s economy.

Those needed immigrants may choose to favor the political party that helped them “find freedom and opportunity in America”, but

Many Cuban and Vietnamese Americans favor Republicans. It’s difficult to predict how the immigrants of today might vote tomorrow.

Especially if Republicans stop fanning racial prejudice against them.

---

I’m in the middle of reading The Rising Tide of Color, a 1920 book that is sometimes cited as the origin of Replacement Theory. It’s available for free at Project Gutenberg, but you need a strong stomach to read it, because it’s unapologetically racist in a way you seldom see today. It’s reminding me that some large number of Americans once viewed world history the same way Hitler did, as a story whose main characters are the various races. (Tom Buchanan speaks approvingly of a very similar book in 1925’s The Great Gatsby.)

A too-obvious-to-state assumption in RToC is that of course you identify with your (presumably white, preferably Nordic) race. A future in which your descendants aren’t white, but rather are some darker-skinned mixed race, represents a catastrophic defeat. The defeat isn’t that you won’t have descendants, but that they won’t be white.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that point of view. The only similar identification I can find in myself concerns culture: I am filled with a profound sense of loss if I envision a future where no one performs Shakespeare or reads Plato or studies geometry texts descended from Euclid. But a future where no one is white doesn’t bother me.

and abortion

States continue to tee up ever more restrictive abortion laws in anticipation of the Supreme Court overturning Roe next month.

Oklahoma is banning abortions after “fertilization”. The law, HB 4327, is sweeping, but is also better thought out than some. They’ve explicitly avoided some obvious sticking points.

Abortion … does not include the use, prescription, administration, procuring, or selling of Plan B, morning-after pills, or any other type of contraception or emergency contraception.

It also includes specific exemptions for abortions that save a woman’s life, or remove a dead fetus or an ectopic pregnancy. It kinda-sorta has a rape/incest exception, but only if the crime “has been reported to law enforcement”.

HB4327 gets around criminalizing IVF clinics (which also kill lots of fertilized ova) by stipulating that such killing only counts as “abortion” if it is done

with the purpose to terminate the pregnancy of a woman

So the point seems to be to control pregnant women, not to save “human life” as the Religious Right defines it. No pregnancy, no abortion.

The same is true of a 2019 Alabama law, which was blocked at the time, but may be enforced if Roe is overturned.

While defining “life” on the basis of a fetus’ location in relation to a woman’s womb may seem like a legislative oversight, the bill was actually written with specific language to ensure this application of the law.

During the bill’s legislative debate, a Democratic state Senator inquired as to  how the law would impact labs that discard fertilized eggs at an in vitro fertilization clinic. Republican state Senator and sponsor of the bill Clyde Chambliss, responded that, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”

The Oklahoma law’s enforcement is through Texas-style private lawsuits. If you know that somebody performed an abortion or helped a woman get one, you can sue them for $10,000 (unless somebody else has already collected from them for that abortion). If you live in Oklahoma, you can sue in your own county, even if none of the relevant events happened there and it’s inconvenient for the people you’re suing.

If the abortion hasn’t happened yet, you can sue for an injunction to stop it.

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Tennessee has criminalized getting abortion drugs through the mail.

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The Archbishop of San Fransisco has banned Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving communion because of her support for a bill to codify abortion rights.

I’ll be blunt about this: The archbishop is using his religion as a Trojan horse for his politics.

Pelosi has not performed an abortion, gotten one herself (as far as we know), or encouraged anyone else to get one. What she has tried to do is to protect a woman’s right to make decisions about her own pregnancy. What that woman decides should be on her, not on Pelosi.

Compare abortion to, say, guns. No one is refused communion for selling guns, or making them, or keeping them legal. In the church’s view, sins committed with those guns belong to whoever pulls the trigger, not to people further up the causal chain. Why is abortion different? Because of politics.

and the crypto crash

In retrospect, we should have known the crypto-currency boom was ending when we saw the Super Bowl ads. BitCoin was already down to $40,000, from its November peak of $65,000, and yet

Digital funny money was everywhere during the Super Bowl, without even attempting to explain what the hell crypto is. Though, in some cases, like the eToro “social investing” site, it’s just as easy to parade out some Doge and “to the moon” memes, which is basically the same as explaining how stupid this stuff is. If they explained it, they couldn’t advertise it.

It was all a little too reminiscent of the dot-com bubble two decades before.

It’s hard to pinpoint a tipping point on something like the dot-com bubble — the tippy-top of the Dow’s chart was thrust upward and pulled back down by more than just tech stocks — but Super Bowl XXXIV, which had over a dozen ads for startups, many of which the broader public had never heard of, might be it.

Now BitCoin is around $30,000, and the other crypto-currencies are doing even worse. The so-called “stable coins” have proven to be anything but stable. Non-fungible tokens, which were supposed to be a way to invest in art without actually owning anything physical, are plunging.

There are two ways to look at this:

• Every new market has its ups and downs. The crash of 1929 wasn’t the end of stock investing.
• From the beginning, crypto was an illusion. It only seemed to make sense because it was techy, and nobody understood tech anyway.

I’m in the second camp. I’ve never owned any crypto-currency or NFT, on the general principle that if you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t invest in it. A number of articles have come out lately making the point that there was never a there there. Current Affairs interviewed crypto-skeptic Nicholas Weaver. Vox’s Emily Stewart wants to believe the hype, but “I have a hard time telling myself a coherent story about all of this” after she debunks just about everything crypto is supposed to be good for.

and the war in Ukraine

Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership. Turkey is objecting. The issues: Sweden suspended weapons sales to Turkey after its Syria invasion, and both countries have taken in Kurdish refugees that Turkey classifies as terrorists.

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President Biden signed a bill authorizing another $40 billion in aid to Ukraine. The NYT has a table describing what’s in it.

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Masha Gessen describes what it’s like to work for Russian news media.

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CNN talks to a Russian officer who resigned after participating in the invasion of Ukraine. Because this is a “special military operation” rather than a war, resignation is an option.

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The German news site Deutsche Welle provides (in English) an informative 15-minute look at the Russian economy. Interesting macro-economic note: The ruble has recovered from its post-invasion crash, and is now higher than it was in February — but that’s not the good news for Russia that it appears to be. Imports have crashed as more and more countries/businesses refuse to sell to Russia. That gives the country a trade surplus, which boosts the currency. But a lack of Western retail goods is depressing consumers, while lack of Western parts is working through the supply chain, hurting production.

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Mitt Romney on the suggestion that Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling should make us back away from Ukraine.

Failing to continue to support Ukraine would be like paying the cannibal to eat us last.

you also might be interested in …

After endlessly demanding that Biden do something about the infant formula shortage, nearly all House Republicans voted against doing something. Meanwhile, Biden is airlifting formula from Europe, and has invoked the Defense Production Act to help get American production back up.

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Every week, it seems, I could write a post called “January 6 was worse than you thought”. This week we found out that Ginni/Clarence Thomas’ corruption was worse than we thought. In 2020, Ginni was lobbying Arizona Republican legislators to ignore the voters and appoint their own slate to the Electoral College, invoking a fringe legal theory that her husband would undoubtedly have to rule on when it reached the Supreme Court.

And it turns out that Rep. Barry Loudermilk really did give Capitol tours the day before the January 6 insurrection, in spite of his previous denials.

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Yes, there’s a new virus circulating: monkey pox. But it doesn’t seem nearly as contagious as Covid.

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On his wannabee-Twitter platform Truth Social, former President Trump “retruthed” somebody else’s “truth” calling for civil war. Rep. Adam Kinzinger posted on actual Twitter:

Any of my fellow Republicans wanna speak out now? Or are we just wanting to get through “just one more election first…?”

and let’s close with some AI art

This week a Facebook friend shared images generated by putting Beatles’ lyrics into the Wombo app. I couldn’t resist doing something similar, so here’s what I got from “Buying a stairway to Heaven”.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

– U.S. Constitution, Ninth Amendment

To use a history of discrimination to deny people their constitutional rights is a perversion of logic and a betrayal of justice. … Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor.

– Jill Lepore, “Of course the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion“

This week’s featured posts are “What Alito Wrote” and “Who’s to blame for overturning Roe?“

This week everybody was talking about overturning Roe v Wade

One featured post goes through what Justice Alito’s draft opinion says. Another lists the people to blame for this finally happening, assuming it does. Here I’m going to discuss the politics of the decision.

Republicans have been oddly silent about the approaching culmination of their decades-long effort to overturn Roe. At a rally in Pennsylvania Friday, Donald Trump talked for almost 90 minutes and mentioned abortion only in passing.

The reason they’re restraining their urge to crow is obvious: Yes, the GOP has accomplished something, but it’s not something the American people want. (How they managed that in a country widely regarded as a democracy is discussed in one of the featured posts.) For decades, people who favor at least some level of abortion rights have greatly outnumbered those who don’t, but anti-abortion voters have been more fervent. Many on the Right considered a politician who wanted to preserve Roe unacceptable, a baby-killer. But on the Left, abortion was somewhere in the middle of a laundry list of issues. Republican politicians talked endlessly about ending abortion, but for most swing voters life went on as before. The upshot was that, in spite of the polls, standing against abortion might win you more votes than it lost you.

Now that it’s actually happening, though, things are getting real. Parents in about half the states have to wonder: “What happens if my daughter gets pregnant?” Will she have to drop out of college to raise her rapist’s baby? Will she marry that guy she never should have gone out with in the first place? Can she really go through nine months of pregnancy and then give the child away? What if there are major birth defects? What if the pregnancy endangers her life? What if she gets desperate enough to seek out an illegal abortion, and then something goes wrong?

Younger women are realizing that their lives are no longer their own. A failure of birth control can wreck all their plans for the future. Married couples can no longer decide not to have children (as my wife and I did), and be confident their decision will stick.

All along, abortion has been a deal-breaking issue for the religious Right. Now it’s becoming a deal-breaker across the board.

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But polls on abortion vary wildly, depending on how you ask the question. Asking about preserving Roe, as Gallup has in the graph above, is basically a proxy for maintaining the status quo, whatever it is. People who don’t understand exactly what Roe means are really saying, “I can live with things the way they are.”

Other polls get different results, though, because most Americans’ views on abortion are complicated. Practically no one (including a lot of people who will tell you otherwise, I suspect) really believes that an IUD commits murder when it prevents a newly fertilized ovum from implanting in the uterus, or that a clump of cells sitting in an IVF clinic’s freezer is a “baby”. A similarly small number are comfortable with the idea of a healthy woman aborting a healthy fetus that is only a few days away from a normal birth. Most of us sympathize with a woman who wanted a baby but whose life will be in danger if she carries her fetus to term. We have less sympathy for one who just couldn’t be bothered to use birth control.

So the answers you’ll get depend largely on the examples people imagine when they hear your question. Most women who get an abortion don’t publicize it, so until now the Right has largely been free to paint whatever picture it wants, especially to captive audiences like Evangelical congregations. But as more and more women are forced to bear children against their will, or start dying from illegal abortions, the real situation will be harder to hide. “What ever happened to Jenny?” you ask, remembering the bright ten-year-old you taught in Sunday school. And then someone tells you.

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Based on little more than intuition, I suspect a large majority of Americans could accept this general framework, which is not terribly different from the status quo:

• The moral value of life in the womb increases with time. A newly fertilized ovum evokes little empathy, a ready-to-be-born fetus a great deal.
• Before the abortion option is closed off, a woman deserves a fair chance to discover that she is pregnant, to consider her situation, and to discuss the matter with people she trusts.
• Given the growing significance of the fetus, the woman has a responsibility to make a timely decision.
• She should be allowed to reconsider if significant new information becomes available about her own health or her potential child’s quality of life.

My own preference would be to keep the government out of the decision entirely, but I could live with this kind of compromise.

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NPR’s “7 persistent claims about abortion, fact-checked” is essential to having an intelligent discussion of this issue. The part I found most surprising was the graph of abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing age: The number of abortions did rise sharply between 1973 and 1980, but has been declining ever since. Today, there are fewer per capita abortions than in 1973.

The reason, if you chase their link to data from the Guttmacher Institute, is fewer pregnancies, presumably leading to fewer unwanted pregnancies. This is consistent with the abortion-prevention strategy that has been so successful in the Netherlands: Don’t drive abortion underground by banning it, but make contraception readily available and teach everyone how to use it. (That is, of course, the polar opposite of what the Religious Right wants to do in America. I have to suspect that they don’t really care about fetuses; they just want to control women’s sexuality.)

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One of the more bizarre takes on the end of Roe came from the NYT’s Ross Douthat:

Worth noting that in the 50 yrs since Roe, men have become less likely to find a spouse, less likely father kids or live with the kids they father, and less likely to participate in the workforce.

Equally worth noting is that in less than two decades after Roe was decided, America won the Cold War.

If Ross thinks he can beat me in a non-sequitur contest, he needs to think again.

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Because they don’t want to accept responsibility for the consequences of what they’ve done, Republican politicians want the national discussion to be about whoever leaked the Alito’s draft. The leak certainly violates normal court procedure, and deserves to get somebody fired or even disbarred. But unless you work at the Court, the leak’s significance doesn’t compare with being forced by law to carry a fetus to term.

In the cartoon below, Nick Anderson pokes at the hypocrisy of cheering a leak when an enemy of America does it to favor a presidential candidate (and potentially put the next president in his debt), but being outraged by the much less serious leak of Alito’s draft. (I would also point to the “Climategate” leak, where illegal hacking was just fine when it provided fodder for climate-change denial.)

If you do care about the leak, which I mostly don’t, the most solid theory I’ve heard is that there were actually three leaks: a conservative leaking the result to the Wall Street Journal, a leak to Politico of which justices voted which way, and then a liberal leaking Alito’s draft opinion to Politico.

and primary elections

Tuesday got us into primary election season. In Ohio, J. D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, won a tight race for the Republican senate nomination with 32% of the vote. Vance’s win showed both the power and the limits of a Trump endorsement. 32% is not that impressive, but second-place Josh Mandel (24%) claimed to be even Trumpier than Vance. Matt Dolan, a non-Trump but not anti-Trump Republican, got only 23%.

Meanwhile, Democrats united around Tim Ryan (70%), who faces an uphill race in what is increasingly a red state.

and the pandemic

The numbers keep getting worse: new cases are up 50% in the last two weeks. Hospitalizations are up 21%. And the longest-lagging statistic — deaths — has turned upward as well, up 1%.

I would expect this wave to turn around first in the Northeast, because it started there earlier. But so far it hasn’t.

I also wonder how accurate these new-case numbers are, now that we have access to home tests. I think many people test positive, have mild symptoms, and just wait it out at home. Their cases never get into the statistics.

and Esper’s book

Trump’s final Defense Secretary Mark Esper has book coming out, titled A Sacred Oath. In it, he relates a number of anecdotes about President Trump that make him appear even more unfit for office than we already thought he was.

• Trump proposed shooting missiles at drug labs in Mexico and denying we did it. “No one would know it was us,” Trump improbably suggested. Maybe it was one of those other missile-shooting countries.
• In response to the George Floyd protests of police brutality that erupted in D.C., Trump wanted to put 10,000 troops on the streets. About the protesters, he asked: “Can’t you just shoot them?”

Esper also tells about bizarre suggestions from Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who wanted 250,000 troops sent to the southern border to meet refugee caravans, and proposed mutilating the corpse of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

What Esper doesn’t say is that he ever went to Vice President Pence and offered his support in invoking the 25th Amendment, which to me seems like the most rational response to his experiences. When NPR asked him why he didn’t resign, he said that he feared some “uber loyalist” would get his job and do the bad things he was stopping Trump from doing.

I am reminded of what James Comey wrote three years ago:

[Trump’s] outrageous conduct convinces you that you simply must stay, to preserve and protect the people and institutions and values you hold dear. Along with Republican members of Congress, you tell yourself you are too important for this nation to lose, especially now. …

Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values.

And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.

I have not read Esper’s book, but I suspect a better title would be How Trump Ate My Soul. It would probably also sell better.

and you also might be interested in …

The Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine continues, but we’re also hearing about Ukrainain counter-offensives. It’s hard to know who’s winning.

Many suspected that Putin would use the annual commemoration of the Russian victory over Nazi Germany to make some major announcement about the war, but he seems not to have.

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Anonymous American “senior defense officials” have been taking some credit for Ukrainian successes. American intelligence helped sink the Moskva, and also has helped target Russian generals.

I share Josh Marshall’s trepidation about this:

What I take from these leaks is that there is a specific message the U.S. is trying to send the Russians. They have decided that these leaks are the best way to send that message. I’ve heard it suggested that the message is somehow connected to the May 9th Victory Day celebrations which many fear will be the pivot point for Putin declaring a national mobilization and expansion of the conflict. I have no idea whether that’s true. But this isn’t loose lips. It’s not bragging. It’s strategic and intentional. This is clearly a specific message being sent. I wish I knew what that was. Because on its face it seems like a very bad idea.

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Student loan forgiveness is a topic that rings a lot of people’s bells, both positively and negatively. On the one hand, it’s crazy that getting an education costs students so much, and that we expect them to go into debt to cover it. The nation needs educated people, and the benefits go well beyond the students themselves. (When I go to my doctor, for example, I hope she got a good education.) Forgiving debt would be a way of acknowledging the mistake we’ve been making in the way we structure our educational system.

On the other hand, the issue seems almost tailor-made for the conservative politics of envy: Somebody who is already better off than you (because they went to college) is going to get a benefit you’re not getting.

The easiest target for envy is someone who is just slightly better off than you (or someone slightly worse off who might be gaining on you). Corporate welfare and trillion-dollar tax cuts for the ultra-rich seem abstract, but the idea that your cousin who went to college is going to get some debt forgiven, or that you could have gotten debt forgiven if you’d just waited longer to pay it off — it boils people’s blood.

Personally, I know that I got my education cheap, because I graduated from high school in the 1970s. Government contributed a lot more of a university’s budget in those days, so my parents were able to cover my state-university expenses without me taking on debt. In grad school, I got a fellowship from the NSF. So again, no debt.

Primarily, that’s not some virtue of mine, it’s the luck of when I was born. So I don’t begrudge student debt forgiveness now.

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This farewell exchange between Fox News’ Peter Doocy and press-secretary-about-to-leave Jen Psaki reminds me of the old kind of politics, when competition didn’t imply personal animosity. Reporters didn’t used to be part of that political game, but the game was played like this.

and let’s close with something photogenic

Apple has an annual contest for macro photography. My favorite of the winners is this photo of strawberries dropped into a carbonated beverage.

Though I also like this close-up look at sea glass.

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear May 2.

Consolidating control is not the way to protect democracy and enhance free expression

– Samir Jain,
director of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology

This week’s featured post is “Elon and Twitter“.

This week everybody was talking about Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter

That’s the subject of the featured post.

and the Ukraine War

Ukrainian missiles sunk the Moskva, a guided-missile cruiser that was the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet. Russia disputed claims that Ukraine was responsible, instead saying just that a fire broke out (which is undoubtedly true, if not complete). After initially saying it didn’t know, US intelligence eventually confirmed the Ukrainian account.

If you want to speculate on exactly how this happened, Naval News postulates a chain of Russian failures rather than one clever Ukrainian tactic.

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Ukrainian forces are still holding on to the Azov Sea port of Mariupol, but it could fall at any moment. Currently, Mariupol is the only holdout between Russian forces in the Donbas and those in Crimea.

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Eliminationist Russian rhetoric towards Ukraine (which I noted last week) is spreading. The Washington Post characterizes it as “genocidal speech” and gives these examples:

On state television, a military analyst doubled down on Russia’s need to win and called for concentration camps for Ukrainians opposed to the invasion.

Two days later, the head of the defense committee in the lower house of parliament said it would take 30 to 40 years to “reeducate” Ukrainians.

And on a talk show, the editor in chief of the English-language television news network RT described Ukrainians’ determination to defend their country as “collective insanity.”

“It’s no accident we call them Nazis,” said Margarita Simonyan, who also heads the Kremlin-backed media group that operates the Sputnik and RIA Novosti news agencies. “What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children on the basis of nationality.”

WaPo searched for an expert assessment.

Ruth Deyermond, a Russia expert in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, said such arguments are “hard to read in any other way than a justification for mass killing. It’s extremely disturbing language and clearly has genocidal overtones. It’s not that they, Ukrainians, have a Führer or a political ideology or a Nazi system. They’re just Nazi.”

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Long but interesting background reading: Retired Lieutenant General Mark Herling tells stories about his interactions over the years with both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. When he first interacted with them, both were corrupt and inept. But the Ukrainians worked to get better.

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A Finnish writer explains one way Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has backfired: Finland wasn’t planning to join NATO, but now many Finns think it must.

and the pandemic

I’ve described the last few weeks as a stalemate between the fading of the previous Covid wave and the start of the next one. The battle line was around 30K new cases per day.

This week the new wave made a decisive breakthrough. Cases are now running at about 38K per day. Hospitalizations and deaths are still headed downward. I’d expect hospitalizations to turn upward in a week or two, but whether deaths turn around is an interesting question. More and more of the infected people have at least some resistance from either a vaccination or a previous infection. Also, treatments keep improving. So maybe deaths, which have come down to about 500 per day from peaks over 3000 in January of 2021 and a recent peak over 2600 in early February of this year, can stay around 500 for a while.

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Nate Silver tweets some interesting numbers:

Some tangible indications of the return to “normal” pre-pandemic social behavior in the US: Restaurant reservations = 100% of pre-pandemic levels MLB attendance = 100% of pre-pandemic levels Air travel = 90% of pre-pandemic levels

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Tucker Carlson spoke at a church and told them he isn’t vaccinated, something he has never revealed before during his many anti-vax rants. Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t believe him:

Tucker Carlson is the vaccine equivalent of the guy on the Titanic who dresses as a woman to get on the lifeboat first. The sickest part is his audience is mostly scared and impressionable senior citizens, who happen to be the most vulnerable group when it comes to Covid. This is like selling Girl Scout cookies outside a diabetes clinic. But I’m glad to see the church welcoming prostitutes, as Jesus taught us to do.

and presidents’ relatives involved in corruption

I have to be careful about covering this topic without engaging in whataboutism. The fact that what Jared Kushner did is so much worse than what Hunter Biden is accused of is not an excuse for ignoring Biden.

Since the point of whataboutism is to avoid discussing something bad about your own side, let’s start with Hunter Biden. Frank Figliuzzi at MSNBC outlines what needs to be investigated there.

Hunter Biden’s contract with [Chinese energy company] CEFC is questionable not only because of the large sums involved in return for services that he appears ill-suited to provide, but also because of the characters it brought him in contact with.

Figliuzzi, a former counter-intelligence director at the FBI, sees this as part of a larger pattern of foreign adversaries attempting to form relationships with people close to powerful figures. Hunter Biden is supposed to have closed off business dealings with CEFC before his father became president, and

We may never know precisely what executives, said to be affiliated with the Chinese government, thought the Bidens could do for them.

But at a minimum this is an example of bad judgment. Democrats have been slow to take any of this seriously because the previous conspiracy theories about Hunter and Ukraine were so badly overblown. But if Biden did something illegal, the law should apply to him the way it would to anyone else.

Now let’s talk about Jared Kushner.

Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, a close ally during the Trump administration, despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal.

… But days later the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and a beneficiary of Mr. Kushner’s support when he worked as a White House adviser — overruled the panel [of advisers].

Ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024.

You don’t say. Hunter Biden was close to a powerful figure, and we can’t identify an actual quid-pro-quo. It looks like the Chinese just wanted to generally get in good with the Bidens.

Kushner, on the other hand, was himself a powerful figure who repeatedly did favors for the Saudis, and for MBS personally, while he was in office. And now he’s gotten his payment.

and culture wars

The Missouri House was debating an amendment that would ban trans students from school sports (one of several anti-trans bills in the Missouri legislature this term) when Ian Mackey, a gay Democratic legislator from St. Louis, blew his top. It’s worth listening to. Speaking directly to the amendment’s sponsor, Mackey said,

I was afraid of people like you growing up. … Gentlemen, I’m not afraid of you any more. Because you’re going to lose. You may win this today, but you’re going to lose.

State Rep. Martha Stevens, a Democrat from Columbia (site of Missouri’s flagship state university) also wasn’t inclined to be polite about Republican legislators scoring political points by attacking children.

It makes my blood boil and the same time it breaks my heart that children have to keep traveling to this capitol to face adults, elected officials, … that they have to come down here and justify their existence.

Both speeches are several minutes longer than those excerpts, and are well worth your attention.

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Last month, I told you about a librarian getting fired in Llano, Texas because she resisted conservative censorship. Yesterday, The Washington Post added a lot of detail about the right-wing-Christian takeover of the Llano public library system.

“God has been so good to us … please continue to pray for the librarians and that their eyes would be open to the truth,” Rochelle Wells, a new member of the library board, wrote in an email. “They are closing the library for 3 days which are to be entirely devoted to removing books that contain pornographic content.”

[Local parent Leila] Green Little [who has started an anti-censorship group] said little is known about what administrators did during the time the libraries were closed. The book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” a work about systemic racism by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson, has mysteriously vanished, and the fate of several other works remains unknown, she said.

A library board of political appointees is meeting secretly to make decisions about what books to keep or purchase.

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An English teacher at Greenfield High School in Greenfield, Missouri has been fired for teaching “critical race theory”. Her offense was distributing a worksheet “How Racially Privileged Are You?” to prepare the class for reading the award-winning young-adult novel Dear Martin. (The novel is about a Black teen-ager in Atlanta who tries to make sense of his run-in with police, and more generally his life as a Black scholarship student in a predominantly White prep school, by writing a series of letters to the spirit of Martin Luther King.)

The worksheet is a list of 15 true/false questions for readers to answer about their own experiences, like: “I can go shopping alone most of the time and feel sure that I will not be followed or harassed.” and “I can be pretty sure that if I ask to speak to ‘the person in charge’ I will be facing someone of my own race.”

A letter from the Superintendent Chris Kell

stated this reason: “Your decision to incorporate the worksheet associated with the novel ‘Dear Martin,’ due to the content and subject matter.”

In a subsequent interview with the News-Leader, [Kell said the vote was not unanimous. He said the vote not to rehire Morrison went against his recommendation and that of the high school principal.

What probably drew complaints is the scoring scale at the bottom of the worksheet. The upper range of scores sits above the statement:

You are privileged. You may or may not know it. It means a lot of other people in the world don’t live life with the advantages you have, and that’s something you should always be aware of, as you can use your voice to help those who are marginalized.

Incidents like these make it clear what anti-CRT laws are trying to protect White students from: learning about the existence of racial privilege in America. It’s very important that White teens who “may not know” about their privilege remain ignorant.

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The Florida Department of Education announced Friday that it is banning 54 of the math textbooks submitted for use in Florida public schools.

28 (21 percent) are not included on the adopted list because they incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRT.

FDoE’s announcement gave no examples to illustrate how the math books were teaching critical race theory. The Miami Herald explains the larger process, and why math books are the current targets:

The state has a textbook adoption cycle that rotates through subjects every six years. When buying books for their schools, districts turn to the state’s approved list to make sure they align with state standards. Next up is social studies, and many educators have predicted the effort will be more confrontational than in past years

In DeSantis Newspeak, textbooks have to be banned in order to stop “attempts to indoctrinate students”.

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A lawsuit challenging Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law is calling out the law’s vagueness as implicit discrimination. While the text doesn’t specifically target LGBTQ discussions,

the law plainly isn’t intended to ban discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity related to “non-LGBTQ people.” It doesn’t intend to ban a teacher from presuming “the normalcy of opposite-sex attraction while teaching literature,” or to ban “run of the mill references” to people’s heterosexuality.

So the suit argues that under the measure, “anyone who discusses or acknowledges any aspect of LGBTQ identity must fear running afoul of the law,” while it’s “taken for granted that discussing heterosexuality or cisgender identity in school settings is perfectly fine.”

and you also might be interested in …

Easter humor is tricky, but some people manage to pull it off.

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Alex Jones is trying to escape responsibility for his lies by declaring bankruptcy.

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott is backing away from his disruption of trade with Mexico. He has accomplished nothing, but the supply chain issues and increased inflation he caused will probably get blamed on Biden.

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The Republican National Committee voted unanimously to pull out of the Commission on Presidential Debates, saving Trump the embarrassment of losing another debate in 2024. If Trump is the candidate, he will have to spend his entire campaign avoiding obvious questions, like why he tried so hard to hang onto power after he lost the election in 2020. His whole campaign will take place inside a bubble of sycophants.

The move is part of a decades-long trend on the Right: Any organization they don’t control must be biased against them. Recently Facebook has been showing me ads for a conservative rival of AARP, because any group that isn’t explicitly conservative must be “woke”. (The research I do on conservative issues sometimes confuses Facebook’s algorithms.)

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Relationship coach Matthew Fray writes in Atlantic about his amazing discovery: When people you love tell you they’re unhappy about something, you should listen to them. (I don’t know how I’ve survived 38 years of marriage without the benefit of insights like this.) The book-length version of Fray’s startling wisdom came out last month.

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On his Substack blog (which I subscribe to and recommend), James Fallows writes about DC’s ban on gas-powered leaf blowers. Banning these devices may seem like one of those laws whose main effect is to annoy homeowners, but actually it’s a big deal. In Fallows’ words:

• The little pieces of equipment are a genuine concern. They are far and away the most-polluting form of machinery still in legal use. In California they produce more ozone pollution than all cars combined. They emit carcinogenic fumes. For neighbors, their unique noise might be irritating; for lawn crews, it can be deafening. 
• They’re one more example of poorer people being exposed to greater environmental risks. The people breathing the fumes all day, and being battered by high-decibel sound within inches of their ears, are disproportionately low-wage and often non-English-speaking. They’re sacrificing themselves to keep some customer’s lawn pristine.
• There are wholly practical alternatives, thanks to the battery revolution transforming all industries.

Fallows is also one of the best observers of news-media behavior. In this post, he discusses a number of topics in current framing:

• How the mainstream media’s life-in-a-red-state lens colors all news from places like Texas, which are much more three-dimensional than they get credit for.
• The pointless fixation on trying to predict how elections will come out, which pundits are bad at anyway. Unlike coverage of government or the mechanics of democracy, the value of even accurate predictions evaporates once there is a real outcome to report.
• How all things Trump are graded on a curve. Attacks on democracy or financial corruption are just “Trump being Trump”, rather than the front-page stories they’d be if anyone else did the same things.
• The important distinction between “tough” reporters who stage confrontations with powerful newsmakers, and authentically tough reporters who respectfully but firmly insist on getting their questions answered.

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Jen Psaki sort-of defended Fox News reporter Peter Doocy on Pod Save America Thursday. The host asked her if Doocy really was a “stupid son of a bitch” (as President Biden said in a hot-mic moment in January and then apologized for), “or does he just play a stupid son of a bitch on TV?” Psaki answered that Doocy

works for a network that provides people with questions that, nothing personal to any individual including Peter Doocy, but might make anyone sound like a stupid son of a bitch.

So (in my words) Doocy is a victim of what we might call “systemic stupidity”. Psaki went on to tell “a nice Peter Doocy story”.

The President did call him a stupid son of a bitch, right? So, that happens and it was like, “oh, okay. That happened.” So, what do you do about it? The President called him. He’s talked about this a little bit. The President called and apologized and what have you. So, he went on TV that night and I actually watched Sean Hannity to see what he said. … But Sean Hannity asked him about the, you know, what the President had said and what he said back and he could have been like, “he is a son of a bitch” or, “I’m standing up for —” whatever. He could have said anything. And instead, he said, “you know, he called me. We had a really nice conversation. I’m just asking my questions. He’s doing his job.” So, I will say that was a moment of grace. You don’t have to like everything Peter Doocy says or does but that is certainly a moment of grace by Peter Doocy.

and let’s close with something

I’ve closed with Holderness Family song parodies before. In this one, Penn Holderness starts with the music from Dua Lipa’s “Levitating”, and turns it into an ode to his wife Kim’s different way of dealing with the world: “Introverting“.