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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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”.
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.
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.
It’s getting hard to keep track of all the overlapping climate disasters. In Phoenix, Arizona, the temperature has broken 110 degrees for nearly two weeks running. The waters off the Florida coast are approaching hot-tub hot, and before long, marine heat waves may cover half the world’s oceans. Up north, Canada’s worst wildfire season on record burns on and continues to suffocate American cities with sporadic smoke, which may not clear for good until October. In the Northeast, floods have put towns underwater, erased entire roadways, and left train tracks eerily suspended 100 feet in the air. Also, the sea ice in Antarctica—which should be expanding rapidly right now, because, remember, it’s winter down there—may be losing mass.
Over the last ten or twenty years, we’ve gotten used to a certain pattern of debate about problematic weather.
The immediate threat abates: the heat wave breaks, waters recede, cities clean up, and life more-or-less goes back to normal for a few weeks or months.
Media attention moves on.
For most people, the significance of these blips of bad news is hard to sort out, because both sides have ways of fitting such events into their favored narrative: Either “The clock is continuing to tick down towards a climate apocalypse”, or “Environmentalists keep trying to scare us, but life goes on.”
Trying to break through that endless back-and-forth leads scientifically-minded people to apply statistics: Yes, there have always been natural disasters, but not this often. For example, what used to be a hundred-year flood now comes once a decade, or maybe even sooner.
But statistics can’t solve the public-perception problem, because the people who need to be convinced are precisely the not-scientifically-minded folks, the ones who distrust “experts” and especially distrust mathematical models and other ways of measuring things that they couldn’t have come up with on their own.
In general, non-scientists are only impressed by a statistic if they were already paying attention to it before the latest event. You can see this phenomenon in non-political arenas like sports. In 1998, for example, baseball fans everywhere were fixated on Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s chase after the Ruth/Maris single-season home run record. That’s because every baseball fan already knew that Babe Ruth had hit 60 home runs in 1927 and Roger Maris hit 61 playing a longer season in 1961. McGwire and Sosa were racing towards a finish line that had been marked out for decades.
By contrast, look at the season Aaron Judge had last year: By some accounts, it may be the best season a hitter has ever had. But to make that claim, you have to cite advanced statistical measures that most fans have never heard of and could not calculate for themselves: WAR, OPS+, RV+ and so on. So while every fan recognizes that Judge’s 2022 was a really good year — his 62 home runs surpassed Maris’ 61, which was still the record for the American League — it lacked the drama of 1998, and the best-ever arguments feel like something cooked up after the fact.
The result is that American public opinion on climate change displays the same left/right split that you’ll see on more values-based issues like abortion or affirmative action. As the chart below (from Pew Research) shows, the US is unusual in this regard. In South Korea, climate change is barely a partisan issue at all, and a right-leaning voter in the UK is three times more likely to consider climate change a “major threat” than his American cousin. (If you can explain what’s going on in Israel, where left-leaning voters worry about the climate less than anywhere else in the world, leave a comment.)
This summer’s combination of disasters is an opportunity to break out of this left/right pattern. When one disaster starts before the previous one ends, and record-setting heat in Florida and Texas competes for headlines with unprecedented floods in Vermont and Pennsylvania, we’re in new territory. You don’t need any statistics or expert analysis to recognize that the weather never used to do stuff like this. “Bad things didn’t used to happen this often” is a statistical claim. But “Bad things didn’t used to happen all at once” is something ordinary people can verify through our own experience.
Whatever their political loyalties, just about all Americans must know in their hearts that something is seriously wrong, and that the kinds of predictions that got labeled as “alarmist” or “fear-mongering” a few years ago are starting to come true. We’re no longer talking about projections of problems our grandchildren will face. We’re looking at what’s happening here and now.
Environmental activists and their allied politicians (who are almost all Democrats) need to run with that perception. In the past, the burden has been on them to use expert analysis to explain away the average American’s impression that life was continuing more-or-less normally. But going forward, the tables will have turned: It will be climate deniers who will need to make complicated arguments to explain away the public’s perceived reality.
Going forward, the role of long-term climate models will also change. The point won’t be to make apathetic people worry about the future. Instead, the models will explain to people who are already worried that things are only going to get worse until we make major changes.
Americans also know in their hearts that in the long run it’s more cost effective to prevent disasters than to clean up after them. Yes, it will require substantial investment to convert our economy to renewable energy, to modernize the electrical grid, and shift our consumption patterns away from fossil-fuel intensive products. But those investments will not only create jobs in the present, they’ll save money overall.
And the long-term models will also play another role: As sweeping changes get proposed, we’ll need expert analysis telling the public “This can work.” The models that have been carrying messages of despair could also carry messages of hope.
No, lifelong Republicans have not established a liberal Deep State at the FBI.
In 2021, I raised the question “What makes a good conspiracy theory?” People obviously do conspire to do bad things from time to time, so we shouldn’t reject out of hand every claim that some group of malefactors is conspiring. But can we at least limit ourselves to good conspiracy theories, i.e., ones that at least have a chance to be true?
In that post I identified one clear marker of a bad conspiracy theory: The size of the conspiracy has to keep increasing as more facts come out. The deeper people dig, the larger the conspiracy has to grow to account for all the pieces that don’t fit the original theory. (Really good conspiracy theories, on the other hand, tend to shrink. The better you understand how things work, the more you realize that a few well-placed conspirators really could pull this off.)
With that principle in mind, every time a conspiracy theorist says “They must be in on it too”, you should reevaluate the whole conspiracy. If you would have rejected a massive they’re-all-in-on-it claim at the start, you shouldn’t let yourself drift into accepting one without a good reason.
Lately we’ve been seeing a lot of expansion in the Right’s Biden-crime-family conspiracy theory. Consider David Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney that Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr assigned to run the Hunter Biden investigation. Weiss was one of the few Trump US attorneys Biden left in place, probably because it would have looked bad to pick his own guy to investigate his son.
Weiss filed some tax charges and a firearms charge against Hunter, and negotiated a plea deal that most experts say is not out of line with what any defendant in a similar situation could get: repay the taxes and accept two years probation, but don’t go to jail.
“If you are a Trump, you will be prosecuted. If you are a Biden, you will be protected,” said Rep. Wesley Hunt, claiming a double standard in the justice system.
Wray seemed to have a hard time taking such claims seriously.
“The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me given my own personal background,” said Wray, a Republican who served in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department.
Equally insane is the idea that the FBI (in Sean Hannity‘s words) “has now sadly been transformed into nothing short of an arm of the Democratic Party.”
As I’ve explained in the past, there really is a Deep State — an entrenched bureaucracy that resists certain kinds of top-down change — but it arises in a fairly natural way: The reason young people decide to join an organization and commit themselves to it (the way you have to to rise in the ranks) is that the organization’s mission harmonizes with their values.
So if direction from on high conflicts with an organization’s perceived mission, people up and down the chain of command will resist: Items will fall off the agenda, orders will be carried out in ineffective ways, and so on. Probably the resisters don’t even need to conspire, because people at all levels just know that “that’s not how we do things here”.
Top-down pressure can change the culture of an organization, but it requires either consistent attention over a very long time or a large-scale purge of the rank-and-file employees. (Trump is planning such a purge if he gets another term: “MAGA Republicans believe that they will be able to enact their programme only if they first defang the deep state by making tens of thousands of top civil servants sackable. Around 50,000 officials would be newly subject to being fired at will, under a proposed scheme known as Schedule F.”)
Now think about why idealistic young people make a career at the FBI: They want to catch the bad guys. Fundamentally, it’s a rules-and-punishments mindset, which tends to appeal to conservatives. (Stereotypically, liberals are more driven to understand the bad guys, and to figure out why they don’t find places in lawful society.) That’s why law enforcement in general tends to be a bastion of conservatism. (Think about it: When you meet someone and find out that they’re a cop, what expectations do you have about their opinions?)
So yes, there would naturally be a Deep State in the FBI: a conservative Deep State. The fantasy of a liberal Deep State at the FBI, led by lifelong Republicans like Chris Wray and James Comey, is truly nutty.
So what’s the FBI been up to as it investigates Donald Trump? Not persecuting conservatives, but catching the bad guy.
The Weekly Sift 