How did Frederick Douglass become a conservative spokesman?

History gets a remake in Florida schools.

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

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

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

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

Elsewhere, it describes itself more explicitly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And his endorsement of the Union was conditional.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 14, 2023 – 10:20 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 14, 2023 – 8:50 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Conspiracies

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

– The United States of America v Donald J. Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Israel

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

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

but you should pay attention to this Republican vision

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

There are two main things to know about Project 2025:

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

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

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

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

The NYT summarizes Project 2025’s energy provisions:

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

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, Florida backed down, sort of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something oracular

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

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

August 7, 2023 – 12:14 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

The Evidence Against Trump is Unchallenged

Trump and his followers have said a lot about his indictments.
But their arguments have little to do with whether he’s guilty.

Since his legal troubles started, Donald Trump, his lawyers, and various conservative commentators who repeat his talking points have commented at length on his various indictments. But very few of those comments present arguments his lawyers could credibly present in court. Instead, most of what you’ll hear on Fox News are arguments intended either to move public opinion, or to intimidate witnesses, prosecutors, judges, and potential jurors.

It seems clear to me that Trump’s defenders want the public focused on anything other than the central questions the indictments raise: Is he guilty? Did he do the things he’s accused of? And if he did commit these crimes, should he be above the law?

Rather than refute the prosecutors’ evidence or offer exculpatory evidence of their own, “defenses” against Trump’s indictments mostly fall into a few other categories.

Threats. A threat is not an argument. Trump has issued many of them.

The most explicit threat came shortly after the magistrate judge warned Trump that “it is a crime to intimidate a witness or retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or otherwise obstruct justice”. He then went to Truth Social and posted “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

But this extreme example is far from unique. Trump supporters have threatened prosecutors and FBI agents involved in cases against him. One Trump supporter was killed after attacking an FBI office. Jack Smith (as well as his wife) is a frequent target of Trump’s vitriol. Shortly before his indictment in New York, Trump posted a picture of himself wielding a baseball bat next to a head shot of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.

Attacking witnesses. Saturday it was Mike Pence’s turn, leading Jack Smith to seek a protective order controlling what Trump can do with information he learns through discovery.

Joyce Vance explains why that’s a big deal:

Some of the discovery contains personal identifying information for witnesses. If publicly disclosed, that could put them at risk of doxxing, identity theft or other harm. There is also grand jury testimony from witnesses, who might be put at risk if they find themselves suddenly in the public spotlight.

A hearing on the government’s motion is scheduled for this afternoon, but it’s hard to imagine Trump changing his behavior in response to a mere warning. At some point, Judge Tanya Chutkan will have to demonstrate to Trump that he is not in control of this process. Personally, I’d give the stern warning, along with threatening a temporary revocation of his bail should he violate her order.

Very little gets through to Trump, but I think he would find a night in jail very instructive. Putting him in jail for any length of time would give him a political issue, but one night might be an effective warning shot.

Whataboutism. What about Hillary’s emails? What about Hunter Biden’s laptop? What about these pictures of Hunter’s penis? None of this has anything to do with whether Trump is guilty of the charges against him. I doubt Judge Chutkan will allow any such arguments to be made in front of the jury.

It’s all political. Assembling evidence that Trump committed felonies is “election interference“. Indicting him for his crimes makes the US a “banana republic” — because real democracies let candidates and former presidents commit crimes with impunity, apparently. (Actually not.) Again, I doubt the judge will allow the jury to hear any discussion of the political impact of either convicting or acquitting Trump. The trial will focus on whether or not he committed the crimes he’s accused of.

Ad hominem attacks. Jack Smith is “deranged“. Alvin Bragg is “a degenerate sociopath that truely hates the USA.” Fani Willis is “racist“. Countless people are “Trump haters”. Adam Schiff is a “pencil neck” and “sick”. Bill Barr is a “gutless pig“. But if Smith, Bragg, and Willis have the goods on Trump, their personal qualities won’t matter in court.

In addition to these obviously irrelevant arguments, Trump and his people make several arguments that may sound as if they are based in law, but actually aren’t. If Trump’s lawyers make these arguments in motions, judges will dismiss those motions out of hand, and juries will never hear these points.

Such as:

Trump has been indicted for exercising his First Amendment rights. Nope. This claim should not fool a first-year law student, much less a federal judge.

Trump has been indicted for, among other things, fraud. Fraud involves deception, and deception often takes the form of spoken lies. But lies that contribute to fraud are not “free speech”.

For example: If I falsely tell you the painting on my wall is an original Picasso worth millions of dollars, that’s just bragging, which I have every right to do. But if I then sell the painting to you for millions of dollars, that package of speech-plus-action is fraud.

Here’s how that “gutless pig” Bill Barr explains it:

As the indictment says, they’re not attacking his First Amendment right. He can say whatever he wants. He can even lie. He can tell people that the election was stolen when he knew better. But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy.

BTW: This next point may be as legally irrelevant as the things Trump is saying, but take a step back and recognize how breathtakingly unique his argument is. I’m sure Trump won’t be the first politician to claim in court that he has a First Amendment right to lie to the American public. But I doubt anyone has ever asserted that right while actively campaigning for office and expecting people to believe the things he’s saying now.

Trump didn’t lie, because he believed what he was saying. This is only relevant if Trump is planning an insanity defense, because he had no rational basis for such beliefs. The law doesn’t recognize absurd beliefs, no matter how fervently you hold them. (“Your honor, I thought pointing a gun at a teller was the normal process for making a withdrawal.”)

Trump’s own attorney general (and that AG’s successor) told him that his stolen-election claims were baseless. So did his White House counsel, the head of his cyber-security agency, the Republican secretaries of contested states like Georgia, and numerous people inside his campaign. On the other side of this question were clowns like Sidney Powell and the My Pillow guy. (As Philip Dick wrote in Valis: “Certainly it constitutes bad news if the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.”)

This argument also runs into the two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right principle. Former Assistant US Attorney Randall Eliason explains:

Even if he sincerely believed there was fraud [in Biden’s victory], that wouldn’t mean he could use illegal methods to overturn the result. If I honestly believe a bank had cheated me and owes me money, that doesn’t mean I can rob the bank to get my money back.

Trump just took bad legal advice. Bill Barr rephrased this point more accurately:

He would search for a lawyer who would give him the advice he wanted.

Trump was not simply a victim of what Mike Pence has called “crackpot lawyers“. He was an eager customer of crackpot lawyers.

Again, why didn’t he take more seriously the opinions of his own White House counsel and his own Justice Department? And when it came to the fake-elector scheme, any fool should have seen that it was illegal: Having people sign fake certificates attesting to something false, and then passing those certificates off as real in hopes of gaining something of value (like the presidency) — that’s textbook fraud.

He can’t get a fair trial. We’ve been listening to Trump for eight years now, so certain elements of Trumpspeak are easy to translate: “Fair” means grossly biased in his favor. He’s “treated fairly” only when everyone agrees to let him win.

So this is what the Trump camp has been saying lately about “fairness”:

  • He can’t get a fair trial in D.C., because the jury pool has too many Democrats. (And Black people: I can’t think of any other way to read Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that D.C. residents are “not his peers”. Trump is a private citizen. Why would any American not be his peer?) He also can’t get a fair trial in New York.

    What would be a fairer venue? West Virginia, because its three-percent Black population makes it “much more diverse“. Trump won West Virginia in 2020 by 40%. But if Trump wanted to be tried in West Virginia, he should have committed his crimes there.
  • He can’t get a fair trial from this judge, because she was appointed by Obama, ruled against him in a previous case (where he was wrong; her ruling was upheld on appeal), and has given harsh sentences to January 6 rioters. Way back in 2016, he couldn’t possibly get a fair trial in the Trump University fraud case because the judge was Mexican. He has also denounced “Obama judges” in general when they ruled against him.

However, Trump and his lawyers never mention the biggest reason he can’t get a fair trial on these charges: He’s guilty. Juries have an explicable bias against guilty people.

What does this mean? Jack Smith’s latest indictment — like the previous Trump indictments — presents compelling evidence that Trump committed several crimes. In spite of talking and posting constantly about that indictment,Trump has not challenged that evidence in any material way or offered countervailing evidence of his innocence. I draw two obvious conclusions from this:

  • Trump is guilty of the charges against him.
  • He isn’t really trying to win in court. His strategy is to delay his trials until after the election, win the election, and then use his presidential power to obstruct justice.
August 7, 2023 – 9:42 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

So, I missed a week for personal reasons. Did anything happen while I was gone?

Well, Trump got indicted again — not once, but twice, if you count the superseding indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case. And the indictment for plotting to overturn the 2020 election is the one we’ve all been waiting for. In a life and career that has been full of law-breaking, this is the one I want Trump held accountable for. If he gets away with cheating on his taxes and paying off porn stars, that’s just normal billionaire crime. But trying to stay in office after losing an election is arguably the worst thing any American president has ever done (though the Japanese removal and crimes against Native Americans make me hesitate about that). I want him to go to jail for it.

So naturally, the featured post has to be about the new indictment, but I’ll try not to repeat the wall-to-wall coverage you’ve undoubtedly seen elsewhere. To me, the striking thing in this case — and in the other Trump trials — is that he isn’t really contesting the evidence. The arguments Trump supporters make are mostly ad hominem attacks against anyone who dares to investigate the Great Orange One.

In the featured post, then, I want to model how I think we should argue with Trump supporters: Let them rant about “deranged” prosecutors, “Trump haters”, “election interference”, and “What about Hunter?”. But keep drawing them back to the evidence: Is he guilty? Did he do the things he’s accused of? If he did commit these crimes, should he be above the law? That post should come out shortly.

I wanted to keep that post focused, so more general stuff about the indictments (the text, links to other people’s analysis, etc.) will be in the weekly summary. Also: tomorrow’s vote on Ohio’s ballot initiative, yet another good jobs report, the ongoing destruction of public education in Florida, the democracy crisis in Israel, and a few other things.

Plus: I wanted to do a longer report on the Heritage Foundation’s detailed plan for the next Republican administration (and I may yet next week). But I’ll at least mention it today.

The weekly summary should come out around noon EDT.

August 7, 2023 – 8:34 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (4)

Persuasion

No Sift next week. New articles will start appearing again on August 7.

“Stop saying I’m violent or I’ll send people to murder your family” is an unpersuasive argument.

– Amanda Marcotte
“Trump threats will only backfire on him — they prove Jack Smith’s entire case“

This week’s featured posts are “The Party of False Equivalence” and “The DeSantis-approved version of American racial history“.

This week everybody was talking about a January 6 Trump indictment

Tuesday, Donald Trump announced that he had received a target letter from Jack Smith, warning of a possible indictment by the DC grand jury investigating January 6 and the overall plot to reverse Trump’s 2020 defeat at the polls. The letter gave him the opportunity to tell his side of the story last week, which he decided not to do. (Trump doesn’t actually have a side of the story. His defense relies on delay, getting evidence thrown out, accusing the prosecutors of political bias, and intimidating the legal system with thinly veiled threats of violence.)

If the timing follows the pattern of the Mar-a-Lago case, an indictment should appear this week.

Much discussion ensued about what that indictment might contain, based on the target letter (that was never officially released). I repeat earlier caveats: Indulge in this speculation if you find it engaging, but don’t imagine that you’re making a wise use of your time. We’ll all see the same indictment soon enough.

In a related development, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel charged the state’s 16 fake Trump electors with a number of crimes, including forgery.

Jack Smith is also looking into the fake electors in seven states, but Michigan’s action suggests a sensible division of labor: The states should charge the electors themselves, and federal prosecutors should go after the Trump campaign officials who organized and promoted the plot across multiple states.

After all, trying to steal a state’s electoral votes is fundamentally an offense against that state. Also, the fake electors proceeded somewhat differently in different states, so they shouldn’t all face the same consequences. The Michigan electors created and signed a fraudulent certificate naming themselves as “the duly elected and qualified for President and Vice President of the United States from the State of Michigan” and casting Michigan’s 16 electoral votes for Donald Trump, who lost Michigan by over 150,000 votes.

New Mexico’s fake electors, by contrast, signed a certificate “on the understanding that it might later be determined that we are the duly elected and qualified Electors” — a statement that seems considerably less fraudulent.

Speaking of the Mar-a-Lago case, Judge Cannon set a trial date: May 20.

As we awaited Judge Aileen Cannon’s announcement of a trial schedule for the Mar-a-Lago documents case, the big question was: How biased towards Trump is Cannon going to be? Her previous rulings on the items seized in the Mar-a-Lago search were absurdly pro-Trump, so divorced from law and logic that they earned her a stern rebuke from a three-judge panel at the next level, in spite of two of them being Trump appointees.

Jack Smith’s people had asked for the trial to start in December, a schedule widely recognized as ambitious but not unreasonable. Trump’s lawyers asked the judge not to set a trial date at all, which would violate the law. And they argued that Trump should not be tried until after the election, when he might again be protected by a DoJ policy of not indicting a sitting president, and he could be in a position to fire Smith himself.

Giving Trump what he wanted would be asking for another slap from the appeals court, so May 20 looks like the longest delay she thought she could get away with. Most presidential primaries will be over, and Trump may well have the Republican nomination locked up. From there the date could slip further, so Trump may yet get his wish not to be tried until after the election.

But that may not be as good for Trump as he imagines. If the trial still hasn’t happened when voting starts, the election becomes a referendum on his guilt. “Vote to keep me out of jail” is not a compelling campaign slogan.

and culture wars

I’m always torn about how much play to give culture-war skirmishes. On the one hand, people saying ridiculous or obnoxious things should be called out. They’re telling us who they are, and we should take that seriously. But on the other, a lot of them are intentionally trolling so that they can ride a wave of backlash when liberals like me criticize them. And finally, culture-war issues are often shiny objects that are supposed to distract us from real problems like climate change and racism.

Even so, sometimes I just can’t ignore them.

Exhibit #1 this week was Jason Aldean’s country-music song and video “Try That in a Small Town“, which was all over my social media news feed.

Now, I grew up in a relatively small town. (Quincy, Illinois has about 40K people, making it about 1/5 the size of Macon, Georgia, where Aldean grew up.) I don’t live there any more (and Aldean doesn’t live in Macon), but I still go back regularly, a decade after my parents died. So I see the charm of small-town life, recognize the importance of respecting your roots, and understand the sting of big-city people dismissing “fly-over country” as “the middle of nowhere”.

That sting is why small-town and rural people occasionally need to cut loose with a shout of pride in who they are and where they come from, in anthems like John Mellencamp’s “Small Town“, John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy“, and others even older. Those songs are full of positive emotions like affection, contentment, and gratitude. Fundamentally, they are what therapists refer to as I-statements: “This is what life is like for me. You may not want to live this way, but I love it.”

Aldean’s song, by contrast, is addressed to “you”, the kind of urbanite he has violent fantasies about. He’s daring you to “cross that line”, because small towns are “Full of good ol’ boys, raised up right”, so “If you’re looking for a fight, try that in a small town”.

He underscores the point by centering the video on a Tennessee courthouse that was the site of a famous lynching. And I was particularly amused by one behavior he recommends you leave in the city: “pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store” — like that never happened where I grew up. (In the real world, robbing a liquor store is the quintessential redneck crime. Grab me a six-pack on your way out the door.)

Several people on social media mentioned Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who tried jogging in a small town, and was murdered by gun-toting racists. Sadly, his killers can’t go to an Aldean concert because they’re in prison now. Whenever this song comes up on the radio, though, I’m sure they sing along.

But you know who really ought to be upset? People who live in small towns, but somehow aren’t filled with hate and possessed by violent fantasies. (I know lots of them.) Aldean has very effectively validated all the stereotypes the rest of the country holds against them. Thanks, Jason.

And then there’s the over-the-top conservative outrage against the Barbie movie, which I haven’t seen. OK, I just wrote about a conservative music video, but at least I didn’t post a 45-minute rant and then set fire to a doll like Ben Shapiro did.

One theme of Barbie for decades has been that girls can do anything (and look fabulous). So I can’t figure why anybody would be surprised that a Barbie movie is “woke”. (I’m reminded of the people who keep asking “When did Star Trek get so woke?” Star Trek was always woke.)

I also shake my head at the people who are outraged that one of the Barbies is played by a trans woman. Seriously: You think that kids who were called “boys” but believed they were girls didn’t didn’t play with Barbies? That piece of the fan base must go back to the beginning.

and you also might be interested in …

Today, Netanyahu’s coalition in the Knesset passed his bill to limit the power of the nation’s supreme court. The bill had been the target of massive protests for months, with critics claiming that Israel would no longer be a democracy if it passed. I guess we’ll find out how accurate that assessment was.

One of the few good decisions the Supreme Court made this year was to uphold a lower-court injunction against Alabama’s congressional-district map. The map’s problem was that only 1 of the 7 districts were majority-Black, when Blacks make up 1/4th of the state’s population. The Court ruled that this was very likely a violation of the Voting Rights Act, and so could not be used for the 2024 congressional elections.

Everyone assumed the Alabama legislature would go back to the drawing board and come up with a map that had two majority-Black districts. But apparently not: The two houses of the legislature have each proposed new maps that again have only one majority-Black district. They need to finalize their decision by Friday.

Ian Milhiser makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to the days before John Roberts gutted VRA enforcement:

One novel idea that someone should try is that we could make states with a history of enacting racist voting laws, often in defiance of federal court orders, to “pre clear” their election laws with officials in Washington, DC.

Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which had allowed Ukraine to export food. Prewar Ukraine was the source of 10% of the world’s wheat exports and half of its sunflower oil. Instead, Russia has begun bombing infrastructure in Odesa, Ukraine’s main grain-shipping port. Food prices around the world are expected to rise.

Anti-abortion activists often deny that they want to criminalize women, but that’s what’s happening. In Nebraska, a teen-aged woman was sentenced to 90 days in jail and two years probation. Her crime: She took miscarriage-inducing pills past the 20-week mark of her pregnancy, miscarried, and then disposed of the dead fetus’ body without notifying authorities. She was 17 at the time. The sentence follows her guilty plea for “concealing or abandoning a dead body”, a felony. Her mother, who acquired the pills, is awaiting sentencing.

When voters in the UK voted “Leave” in the 2016 Brexit referendum, many people foresaw a trend in which political ties of all sorts would begin to dissolve. But instead, the struggles of the post-Brexit UK have become a cautionary tale.

The NYT reports on a study that quantifies the carbon footprint of eating meat, especially beef. The subheadline says:

Researchers examined the diets of 55,500 people and found that vegans are responsible for 75 percent fewer greenhouse gases than meat-eaters.

Actually, I don’t like that way of framing the result, because it emphasizes the extremes. Even if you aren’t willing to go all the way to a vegan diet, cutting down the amount of meat you eat or shifting from beef to poultry and fish could still make a large difference. The body of the article is clear about that, but the headline lends itself to an all-or-nothing view.

and let’s close with something derivative

I love music video parodies and I love countdowns, so of course I love watchmojo.com’s countdown of their 20 favorite music-video parodies.

July 24, 2023 – 12:48 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (12)

The Party of False Equivalence

The No Labels target voter is a moderate Democrat who watches too much Fox News.

Over the weekend, former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan appeared on a number of interview shows, where he denied he would run for president as a Republican, but hinted at being available for a third party. Friday, he tweeted something that sounded a lot like an endorsement of the No Labels view:

We have two very unpopular potential nominees, and both of them potentially face very serious legal troubles.

The word potentially does a lot of work here. Donald Trump is facing multiple felony indictments, and probably will be charged with several more in the next week or two. Meanwhile, it would be a huge shock if the special prosecutor investigating the classified documents Biden voluntarily returned to the government recommended charges. Beyond that, House Republicans have floated a number of conspiracy theories about Biden’s alleged crimes, but their evidence has a way of going poof when they try to back those claims up.

Practically the same thing, right? Two men with “very serious legal troubles”. Potentially.

You often run into these sorts of false equivalencies when you listen to No Labels people. Last Monday, Joe Manchin and Jon Huntsman made a joint appearance to tout the new “Common Sense” platform of the No Labels Party. (The two are widely expected to form a No Labels presidential ticket in 2024, though which would be on top is still undetermined.)

It’s easy to write off No Labels as a spoiler that could allow Donald Trump to regain the presidency with minority support, or to criticize its dark money support from people with unknowable intentions. But it has a story to tell that many Americans find appealing: Most of our country’s problems have simple common-sense solutions that can’t be implemented because the two parties are controlled by their extremist wings. We need a bipartisan coalition of moderates to break through the logjam.

So I decided to take No Labels seriously enough to read the “Common Sense” booklet that Manchine and Huntsman were touting. What exactly are these “common sense solutions” that only a third party can implement?

What I found, with only a few exceptions, are moderate Democratic positions that few if any Republicans in Congress would vote for. A handful of No Labels positions would give progressive Democrats heartburn, but might get a lot of Democratic support if paired with enough of the Democratic ideas in the booklet. My guess is that if the substantive proposals in the booklet were sent to Congress for an up-or-down vote, it would narrowly fail, getting the support of maybe 3/4ths of Democrats and a handful of Republicans.

This is what makes No Labels dangerous on the 2024 ballot: Trump voters will reject them out of hand, but a slice of Biden voters won’t.

The Biden voters who could be peeled off, in my view, are those (predominantly older) ones who watch a little too much Fox News and so have a collection of false ideas: that Biden is senile or “faces very serious legal troubles”, that election security is a real problem that voter ID laws can solve, that the Twitter files showed a serious government effort to silence its critics, that Biden will take away their guns, and so on.

Why aren’t there more moderate coalitions? Before I get into any of that, though, a history lesson: The reason moderate coalitions in Congress don’t come together to forge compromise solutions is that recent examples are cautionary tales, particularly for Republicans.

In 2013, four Republican and four Democratic senators formed the “Gang of Eight” to work out a compromise on one of the country’s most contentious issues: immigration. And in short run, they succeeded. They wrote a bill that passed the Senate 68-32.

Impressive as it was, though, that 68-vote bipartisan consensus contained the seeds of the bill’s eventual demise: It wasn’t really a down-the-middle vote. Instead, 14 Republicans joined all the Democrats. So when the bill got to the House, it was viewed not as a common-sense compromise, but as a Democratic bill that 14 Republican traitors had supported. So Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, never brought it up for a vote. In the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, one of the bill’s provisions — a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — was labeled “amnesty” and became such a hot-button issue that Gang-of-Eight member Marco Rubio had to denounce his own bill.

Comprehensive immigration reform has been dead ever since.

That outcome is typical, because bipartisanship is not a bipartisan value: Democrats recognize the need to compromise to make progress (as they did numerous times to get the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed). But Republicans don’t. The reason a handful of Republican extremists were able to hold Kevin McCarthy hostage during the election of the speaker was that making a deal with Democrats to get the last few votes he needed was unthinkable. Democrats have cooties. Working with them is dangerous for Republicans.

So No Labels is right in that we do need more bipartisan compromises. But the two parties are not equally to blame. Democrats are willing to compromise, but Republicans aren’t.

No Labels positions that are suicidal for Republicans. No Labels wants to bring the federal budget gradually into balance. (So does Biden.) The Common Sense booklet (CS) envisions something like the solution proposed by the Simpson-Bowles Commission of 2010, which it describes as a “mix of modest spending cuts and revenue increases”. Of course, Simpson-Bowles failed largely because most Republicans in Congress had signed a pledge against any tax increases, no matter how many spending cuts they were paired with. So no compromise with them was possible. I’m not sure anything has changed.

The CS immigration position resembles the Gang of Eight compromise: more legal immigration, more judges to process asylum applications faster, and a path to citizenship for the Dreamers.

On healthcare: Let Medicare negotiate with drug companies.

On gun control: No gun purchases by people under 21. Close the loopholes in the background check system.

On defense and foreign policy: a globalist foreign policy that values our allies in NATO and elsewhere. Some Republicans would agree, but not the America-first faction.

On culture wars: CS supports access to abortion, but not late-term abortions. It refuses to draw a firm line where restrictions might start. Trans rights are affirmed, along with more parental control over what children are taught about gender issues, whatever that means.

CS positions that Democrats won’t like, but could accept as part of a package. The biggest headache CS would give Democrats is on energy, where it prioritizes keeping energy costs low over replacing fossil fuels, and pushes for more nuclear power. Favoring clean energy is good, but keep developing fossil-fuel resources as well.

On Social Security, CS wants to means-test benefits for people who are currently in their 40s or younger. Whether tax increases are part of making Social Security solvent long-term is left vague.

The healthcare proposals nibble at the problem rather than going big in a Medicare-for-All fashion. Reforming the malpractice tort system is one proposal, which would offend a major Democratic constituency (lawyers) without accomplishing a whole lot.

The one piece of immigration reform Democrats would have trouble swallowing is reinstating the remain-in-Mexico plan for asylum seekers.

The education plan calls for more charter schools.

Voter ID laws, but with an emphasis on government responsibility for making IDs free and easy to get. (I have a hard time imagining what such a proposal would look like. Literally every voter-ID law I’ve seen has been a voter-suppression law.)

False equivalence. So as you can see, there are things to like and not like for both parties. But the two are not equal. A Democrat like Manchin could run on this package in a red state like West Virginia. Most other Democrats wouldn’t campaign for him, but he probably wouldn’t (and won’t) face a primary challenge.

Conversely, no Republican could run on this package without being thrown out of the party. Even in a blue state like Massachusetts (where I am now), it would be political suicide.

On the presidential level, No Labels is running in Biden’s lane. People who voted for Biden expecting him to be just a little more conservative may find them appealing. But on the flip side, I don’t think they’ll peel away any voters from Trump. Some never-Trump Republicans (like Huntsman and Hogan) may vote No Labels rather than stay home or leave the presidential line blank. But they were never going to support Trump in 2024.

July 24, 2023 – 11:27 am Categories: Articles | Comments (20)

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The DeSantis-approved version of American racial history

Our story of slavery, Jim Crow, and continuing racism yields many heroes but no villains.

Wednesday, the Florida State Board of Education approved its new standards for teaching social studies, as required by last year’s Stop WOKE Act. The standards document is 216 pages, but the part that sparked immediate controversy was the African American History strand, contained in pages 3-21.

Most of the controversy centered on just two lines. “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” on page 6, and “Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre” on page 17.

Critics objected to the page 6 reference because it perpetuates a trope that goes all the way back to the slavery era itself: that slaves benefited from their enslavement. The problem with the page 17 reference is the “against and by” phrase, which frames attacks by Whites against Blacks as battles between Whites and Blacks.

Those criticisms are valid, but after reading the standards as a whole, I have larger objections.

Nonetheless, let me start by giving the Devil his due: If kids come out of Florida schools knowing everything in the standards, they’ll have had a better education on race than my generation did growing up in the 1960s and 70s. (Though that isn’t saying much. For example, I had never heard of the Harlem Renaissance or Ida B. Wells until I visited the Smithsonian’s African American History and Culture Museum a few years ago. My high school texts grudgingly noticed Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, but that was about it for Black contributions to American history and culture.) That’s due to progress generally, not just in Florida.

But having acknowledged that, here’s the central problem with the standards: Florida wants to tell a story about race in America that has heroes but no villains. This is in line with the demands of DeSantis’ Stop WOKE Act, which requires that students be indoctrinated with an upbeat narrative:

American history … shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.

To tell that story, the standards identify a lot of high-achieving Black Americans, as well as many admirable Whites who were abolitionists or allies of the civil rights movement. But slavery itself just sort of happened; it emerged out of vague historical and economic forces. Ditto for Jim Crow. So Thaddeus Stevens and Harriet Tubman get shout-outs, but John Calhoun and Nathan Bedford Forrest — particularly Calhoun’s explicit rejection of the universal principles in the Declaration of Independence — are never mentioned.

Instruction includes how whites who supported Reconstruction policies for freed blacks after the Civil War (white southerners being called scalawags and white northerners being called carpetbaggers) were targeted.

But nothing about who targeted them. Heather Cox Richardson examines the standards’ use of the passive voice in more detail, but the gist is that identified people did good things, while bad things were done. So there’s nothing about the Lost Cause mythology that venerated the Confederacy, or the Dunning historical interpretation that painted Reconstruction as a benighted period (dominated by scalawags and carpetbaggers) from which the South needed to be “redeemed” by Jim Crow.

There’s also a bizarre highlighting of relatively minor Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, who really don’t belong on a list (with several presidents and John Lewis) of “political figures who shaped the modern Civil Rights efforts”. And I think it’s fine that Clarence Thomas is listed among “African American pioneers in their field”, but where is the man he replaced on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall?

Omissions are harder to catch than misplaced inclusions, and I suspect better historians than me will find some howlers. But I noticed a big one: The standards don’t mention Bacon’s Rebellion of 1677. Bacon’s Rebellion united Black slaves and White indentured servants against Virginia’s White upper class, and is often described as the motive for the Slave Codes of 1705 (also not mentioned), which solidified racial divisions in Virginia law (in hopes that the White and Black underclasses would never again find common causes).

And of course, the standards highlight any nascent abolitionism among the Founders, while turning a blind eye to their contradictory actions.

Instruction includes examples of how the members of the Continental Congress made attempts to end or limit slavery (e.g., the first draft of the Declaration of Independence that blamed King George III for sustaining the slave trade in the colonies, the calls of the Continental Congress for the end of involvement in the international slave trade, the Constitutional provision allowing for congressional action in 1808).

But no mention of why the Continental Congress’ attempts to limit slavery failed, why that first draft got edited, or who led the countervailing effort. No mention of George Washington’s slaves, or the Black descendants of Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved Sally Hemings.

In short, the Florida standards describe an America inexplicably beset by the dark impersonal forces of slavery and discrimination, against which heroic individuals of all races fought a centuries-long and ultimately successful battle.

Why tell this slanted story? Because Stop WOKE demands it:

An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.

So the State Board has rewritten American racial history to avoid all “psychological distress” (other than perhaps cognitive dissonance). Florida’s children should feel pride in their ancestors, no matter who they were, because previous generations of Americans were all heroes. There’s no need to ask Grandpa if he ever lynched anybody, or if Grandma was one of the people throwing rotten fruit at the first Black children trying to integrate a public school. Because although such things were done, nobody actually did them.

July 24, 2023 – 9:08 am Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 24, 2023 – 8:40 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Surrounded

It is not the fault of the FBI that Donald Trump surrounded himself with criminals.

– Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA)

This week’s featured posts are “This summer’s weather is a turning point” and “DoJ, the FBI, and the Biden-crime-family conspiracy theory“.

This week everybody was talking about the weather

That’s the subject of one featured post. Short version: When climate-related disasters happen one at a time, they’re easy to deny: “We’ve always had floods” or heat waves or hurricanes or whatever. But when several apocalyptic weather events are happening at the same time, it feels qualitatively different. Those of us who care about the future need to jump on this moment. The debate over the existence and seriousness of climate change needs to be over.

and politicizing the NDAA

In 1948, the Senate paved the way for Democratic President Truman to negotiate the treaty that formed NATO by passing the Vandenberg Resolution, named for the Republican Senator who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg. At that time, Vandenberg said something that has been quoted many times since: “Politics stops at the water’s edge.”

In other words: Republicans and Democrats might have their partisan struggles, but when it came to defending the country, all that would be put aside. That sentiment has always been more of an aspiration than a hard-and-fast principle, but it was never blatantly rejected until this week, when House Republicans loaded up the annual National Defense Authorization Act (which has to pass if our troops are going to be funded in FY2024, which starts in October) with a long list of culture-war provisions that Democrats in the Senate are bound to reject.

Rep Jeff Jackson (D-NC) explains how this process is supposed to work, and how it actually worked this year within the Armed Services Committee: There’s a behind-the-scenes negotiation to draft a bill that can get broad bipartisan support, and then on the final day the committee has to vote on hundreds of proposed amendments.

On this day, the chair of the committee has a very specific job: It’s to say no to his own party.

Why? Because he knows that some of the amendments his party is proposing are absolute deal-breakers for the minority party and he wants a big bipartisan vote out of committee to give the bill the best chance when it reaches the whole House.

Honestly, he did a pretty good job of knocking away the real grenades that would have blown up the whole thing. He definitely knew what he was doing. He let in just enough of the culture war stuff to satisfy his party without going that step too far that could have sunk it.

So Jackson, a Democrat, praised Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican, for putting national defense above scoring political points. And while that bill would ban the Pentagon from funding drag shows, along with a few other culture-war provisions of little practical significance, it got out of the committee on a 58-1 vote.

Unfortunately, the bill then went to the House floor, where Speaker McCarthy could not stand up to his party’s radicals. Several amendments passed on party-line votes, turning the NDAA into a culture-war messaging vehicle that will make it much harder for servicewomen (or spouses of people in the armed forces) to get abortions, will eliminate the Pentagon’s office of diversity, equity and inclusion, and end coverage for transgender health care. As a result, the NDAA itself became a near-party-line vote, passing the House 219-210.

Now the Senate will undoubtedly pass a very different bill, setting up a showdown closer to the new-fiscal-year deadline of October 1. In that debate, the defense of the country and its global interests will take a back seat to domestic politics.

Another example of Republicans prioritizing culture wars over national defense is Senator Tuberville’s one-man blockade on military promotions. Ordinarily, promotions pass the Senate en masse by unanimous consent, a process that avoids highly time-consuming votes on individual officers. But Tuberville’s objection makes that impossible, and the result is that the Marine Corps has only an “acting” commandant. Soon several of the Joint Chiefs will need to be replaced as well.

As with the House NDAA vote above, his issue is abortion.

and conspiracy theories about DoJ and the FBI

That’s the topic of another featured post.

A related story that I didn’t mention there: The saga of Gal Luft, who was supposed to be the House Oversight Committee’s star witness against the Bidens. But he went “missing” before he could testify. And then it turned out that he was on the run from an indictment filed in November, before the GOP had even won control of the House, much less touted Luft for a starring role in their hearings.

He faces eight separate counts, including two charges of making false statements to federal officials, one for conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and five counts relating to separate schemes which allegedly involved Luft trying to trade in sanctioned Iranian oil and broker deals for a Chinese firm to supply, among other things, “strike UAVs” to Kenya and anti-tank missile launchers to Libya.

He’s been found and is currently under arrest.

and the Hollywood strike

Most of us aren’t used to thinking of actors or TV/movie writers as workers. We imagine them living lives we can only dream of. And for some of them — though far from the majority — that’s true.

So when the Writers’ Guild of America went on strike May 2, and the Screen Actors’ Guild followed on Wednesday, most of the world’s truck drivers, waitresses, and assembly-line workers probably didn’t feel much instinctive solidarity.

However, there’s a lot to sympathize with here. The issue is a new technology (artificial intelligence) that has the potential to make entire professions obsolete. And the question is: Who’s going to profit from that technology? The dispute parallels issues that played out during the Industrial Revolution centuries ago. Things came out badly for skilled workers then, and it would be a shame if those mistakes got repeated.

One of the myths I was taught about industrialization is that it mechanized repetitive low-skill jobs and created more high-skill jobs. The economist Harry Braverman exploded that myth in his 1974 classic Labor and Monopoly Capital: the degradation of work in the 20th century. In Braverman’s retelling, it was precisely skilled labor that got replaced: weavers, bakers, blacksmiths, cobblers, and craftsmen of all sorts. Their specialized knowledge got designed into machines whose repetitive operations could be overseen by comparatively unskilled workers.

Most of the craftworkers got nothing for their knowledge. A few skilled workers would be observed closely by engineers. When the skills it had taken them years to master had been captured in a machine, they were no longer necessary — and neither were any of their guildsmen. The resulting profits went to the industrialists who owned the machines.

Artificial intelligence could soon do something similar to writers and actors. AI could digest, say, all the romantic comedy scripts ever written (with no payment to their authors), and then be able to fulfill requests like “Write me a rom-com set in Singapore with a rich woman fresh from a messy divorce and an airline pilot.” Another AI might take body-scans of a few real people (maybe they’d be paid for a single day of “labor”) and create a movie in which those “actors” perform the rom-com script.

The possible profits are immense, and they would all go to the companies that own the AIs.

At the press conference announcing the strike, National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said that the [American Motion Picture and Television Producers]’s proposal for AI “proposed that our background actors should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”

People trying to break into the creative professions are often desperate and correspondingly ripe for exploitation. One famous example is the comic-book duo of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, who sold the rights to their new Superman character for $130 in 1938.

and Trump’s next indictments

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis swore in two new grand juries this week. Georgia grand juries serve for two months. Many of her previous statements indicate that this is the cycle when she will seek to indict Trump for his efforts to interfere in Georgia’s 2020 election.

Jack Smith is investigating many of the same crimes — the fake elector scheme, pressuring election officials (all the way up to VP Mike Pence) to change or throw out the election results — in Georgia as well as other states Trump lost, in addition to his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection. Lots of former federal prosecutors have been speculating that Smith will want to get his own indictment out ahead of Willis.

So we’re on indictment watch again: The Georgia indictment is expected early next month, and Smith could file any day.

In some sense, this would be the “real” indictment. Trump’s constant law-breaking has created a public expectation that ordinary laws don’t apply to him, so the filing-false-business-records charges in New York and the federal stealing-classified-documents charges feel illegitimate even to some people who aren’t part of his personality cult. Those are real laws frequently used against other people, and he’s clearly guilty in both cases. Even in my eyes, though, those charges resemble nailing Al Capone for tax evasion rather than the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

But if I had to pick one reason why I want to see Trump in jail rather than back in the White House, it’s that he tried to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election. That’s the greatest breach of faith committed by any president in American history, and it’s the crime he deserves to be judged on.

If you’re wondering what such an indictment might look like, Just Security has a written a “pros memo” based on the evidence that is publicly available. Such memos are typically written by the DoJ (and kept confidential) prior to writing an indictment that will be available to the public. The full document is over 250 pages, but the introduction and executive summary together are just six.

Trump’s lawyers filed for an indefinite delay in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, at least until after the 2024 election. Their filing argues that

there is simply no question any trial of this action during the pendency of a presidential election will impact both the outcome of that election and, importantly, the ability of the Defendants to obtain a fair trial.

Like Andrew Weissmann, I read this as a confession of guilt.

If you are innocent and want to be vindicated, you ask for a trial before the election. If you are guilty and want to run on victimization, without being undermined by facts and law, you don’t.

Judge Aileen Cannon is supposed to hear arguments on the trial schedule tomorrow, and should set a trial date (or not) soon. That ruling will tell us a lot about how lenient she intends to be with Trump, who appointed her.

Another confession of guilt, in my view, is the lawsuit Trump filed asking the Georgia Supreme Court to quash the report of the special grand jury that investigated his attempt to steal Georgia’s electoral votes in 2020. If he’s indicted and a trial jury looks at the evidence against him, he’s toast. So he has to get the evidence thrown out.

An innocent candidate would be demanding that all the evidence come out so that he could clear his name as quickly as possible. But all along, Trump’s strategy has been to delay, block witnesses from testifying, and claim that there’s nothing to see here.

and you also might be interested in …

An appellate-court panel has temporarily set aside the crazy injunction a Trump-appointed judge made last week — the one that barred large chunks of the Biden administration from discussing disinformation with social media companies. The order is short and doesn’t explain the panel’s reasoning, but promises an “expedited” hearing for oral arguments.

The Netanyahu government has revived its plan to reduce the independence of the judicial branch, and so protests are starting up again. What could possibly go wrong with a plan to give more power over the courts to a leader facing indictment?

Turkey has dropped its opposition to Sweden joining NATO, so that might happen soon. The other prospective new member, Finland, officially joined in April.

And that makes me shake my head at this poll result:

52 percent of MAGA-identifying Republicans believe Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a better president than Joe Biden. 

Because Putin is doing such a great job of achieving his goals, I suppose.

A Texas judge is arguing that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the 303 Creative case should mean that she doesn’t have to marry same-sex couples.

If I asked you to think of some horrible example of gun violence, probably you’d name a school shooting: Uvalde, Sandy Hook — something like that.

But a report in Thursday’s IndyStar calls attention to another kind of shooting that is horrible in a different way: family annihilations, where some guy (men do 94% of family annihilations) wipes out his whole family, usually with a gun, and often (64%) finishes by committing suicide.

There are way more of these than I had ever imagined: 227 in the US since 2020. Texas has the most,

But it’s happening across the U.S., and the number is going up by the year. There were 62 cases in 2020, 61 in 2021, and 72 in 2022. There already were at least 32 in 2023 through the end of April, a pace that could lead to nearly 100 incidents this year. …

The U.S. has three times more family annihilations than Canada, eight times more than Great Britain and 15 times more than Australia, according to The National Institute of Justice. …

A USA TODAY investigation found American children are three times more likely to be shot at home than at school — and the majority of perpetrators are their parents or guardians.

The IndyStar article shifts back and forth between a general description of the problem and an in-depth account of a specific case: 61-year-old Jeffrey Mumper of Bloomington, Indiana killed his wife and two children (pictured below), before killing himself in September, 2020.

If you’re considering supporting RFK Jr. for president, you should watch this video, where he seriously discusses the possibility that the Covid virus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese”.

After that clip went viral and accusations of antisemitism poured in, Kennedy tweeted a clarification, which also turned out to be bogus.

Kennedy perfectly illustrates a quote I have never been able to track to its source, but I’m sure I didn’t think of it myself: “Anybody who believes crazy things will eventually believe crazy things about Jews.”

In Friday’s NYT, a federal district judge wonders what ever happened to the Supreme Court’s sense of smell. He recounts the kinds of ethical issues that have popped up in his own career: a lawyer has Red Sox tickets he’s not going to use, a man he had awarded disability benefits comes to his office to give him a hand-carved pencil box in gratitude. Neither offer, he believed, was being made with bad intentions. But he turned them down, because

You don’t just stay inside the lines; you stay well inside the lines. This is not a matter of politics or judicial philosophy. It is ethics in the trenches.

He is disturbed that Supreme Court justices seem not to understand this. You turn gifts and favors down not because you can’t find a loophole in the law big enough to squeeze them through, but because they smell bad, and they undermine public faith in the fairness of the judiciary.

While we’re on the topic: Justice Sotomayor’s taxpayer-funded staff helping promote her books also smells bad. I don’t think this is on the same scale as Clarence Thomas’ corruption, but that doesn’t mean I have to defend it. The Supreme Court needs an enforceable ethics code that applies to everybody. That idea ought to have bipartisan support. But sadly, it doesn’t.

George Lakoff (the guy who popularized the notion of “framing” back in the 1990s) gives advice on responding to trolls on social media: Don’t do it. Do this instead.

If you don’t wish to amplify trolls, don’t respond to their posts. Instead, try posting your own proactive message. If you see a post spreading false information about vaccines, you could do your own post that says: “I’ve noticed posts containing false information about vaccine safety. I won’t take the bait by responding, but here are the facts…” Then deliver whatever message you were planning to write as a response to the troll, even if it’s just a link to a news story debunking whatever the troll is saying.

This is how far gone the Right is these days. At the Turning Point USA conference in Florida yesterday, MTG “attacked” President Biden with a long comparison to transformational presidents LBJ (who got Medicare and Medicaid passed) and FDR (Social Security), concluding with this:

LBJ had the Great Society, but Joe Biden had Build Back Better (and he still is working on it): the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started, then LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete.

Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu responds: “Thank you, @RepMTG. More of this, please.”

I have no special animus towards Tom Cruise, and in general I love action movies, but his action-movie series will never be Mission: Impossible to me. The original MI TV series was the polar opposite of a star vehicle: The plan was the star, and it was carried out each week by a rotating collection of perfectly chosen agents with extraordinary-but-not-superhuman abilities.

While I’m on the subject, here’s something I just learned this week: One of the best things about the MI franchise is the catchy beat of its theme song. If you read that beat as Morse code, it’s dash-dash, dot-dot, dash-dash, dot-dot. In other words: MI, MI, MI …

A related point: Cruise will also never be Jack Reacher for me. In the Lee Child novels, Reacher is 6’5″, and the first thing people notice about him is how physically imposing he is. Alan Ritchson, who plays the role in Amazon’s Reacher series, is a much better choice.

and let’s close with something cosmic

The James Webb space telescope turned 1 this week. To celebrate, I’ll share this image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.

July 17, 2023 – 11:37 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)