Laboratories of Autocracy

The 20th-century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called the American states “laboratories of democracy”. But recently the red states have been experimenting with something else entirely.

In his 2018 book Reconstructing the Gospel, Christian minister Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove reflected on one of the paradoxes of religious fervor.

Even as we feel guilty about doing the things we know we ought not to do, and strive to do more of the good we want to do, our very worst sins are almost always things we know to be our Christian duty.

He illustrated the point with examples: the Crusades, the high priests who condemned Jesus, and the Southern “Redeemer” movement, whose violent terrorism ended Reconstruction and inaugurated Jim Crow.

Over and over, Christians support and participate in atrocious evil, not because we choose to do wrong, but because we think we’re doing the right thing — the righteous thing, even.

Not wanting to pick on Christianity, I’ll add some secular examples: the Reign of Terror, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and the Bush administration’s torture policy. Wilson-Hartgrove is pointing to a human thing, not a uniquely Christian thing. Cruelty is often practiced by people who imagine themselves to be heroes.

Seekins-Crowe. I recalled Wilson-Hartgrove’s observation this week, when Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe‘s moving and highly emotional speech went viral.

Seekins-Crowe gave the speech in March, during the debate over Montana’s new law banning gender-affirming care for minors. (The bill passed and was signed Friday by Governor Greg Gianforte.) The main argument against the bill was that it would cost lives. (We’ll get to Rep. Zooey Zephyr’s “blood on your hands” comment later on.) Teens struggling with their gender identity have a high suicide rate; gender-affirming care is often an attempt to save their lives. So banning it may well increase teen suicides.

Seekins-Crowe did not shy away from that argument. She did not scoff at it or trivialize it, but took the bull by the horns. She explained that she had lived for three years with a suicidal daughter, and so she knows that some things are more important than saving your child’s life.

That seems like a brutal summation of her words, so I feel obligated to quote her at length and provide a video.

One of the big issues that we have heard today and we’ve talked about lately is that without surgery the risk of suicide goes way up. Well, I am one of those parents who lived with a daughter who was suicidal for three years. Someone once asked me, “Wouldn’t I just do anything to help save her?” And I really had to think. And the answer was, “No.”

I was not going to give in to her emotional manipulation, because she was incapable of making those decisions and I had to make those decisions for her. I was not going to let her tear apart my family and I was not going to let her tear apart me, because I had to be strong for her. I had to have a vision for her life when she had none, when she was incapable of having [one].

I was lost. I was scared. I spent hours on the floor in prayer. Because I didn’t know that when I woke up if my daughter was going to be alive or not. But I knew that I had to make those right decisions for her so that she would have a precious, successful adulthood.

Monstrous as it is, I can’t watch that video without feeling Seekins-Crowe’s sincerity. She believes what she is saying, and believes that letting her daughter suffer for three years was the right thing to do. (I have no idea how that story came out. After three years, did the daughter stop being suicidal, or just reach adulthood?) And now, she believes that passing this law is the right thing to do. I have little doubt that she would describe it as her Christian duty.

That speech is, I think, an almost perfect distillation of the authoritarian mindset: People who see the world differently than I do are deluded, so I have to be strong enough to make their decisions for them, even if it kills them.

There is, of course, room for debate about when parents ought to overrule their children’s desires. Nearly every parent, at some time or another, has forced a toddler to go to bed, or refused to let one eat all the candy. Those calls get harder as children grow, and I don’t know any clear rule about when someone is old enough to make their own decisions about gender-affirming medical interventions.

But now Seekins-Crowe has taken the next step, and is making “right decisions” for all the parents in Montana, particularly those who might not be “strong” enough to ignore their children’s anguish, or sure enough of their own convictions to close their ears to whatever their children might say. Those “weak” parents need a strong government, full of strong people like Seekins-Crowe herself.

Providing that strength is her Christian duty.

Watching Seekins-Crowe’s speech makes me realize that conservative leaders like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have spoiled me, because their villainy is so direct and uncomplicated. I have no doubt that Trump knows he is a grifter, and that he is consciously taking advantage of the people who support him. Likewise, DeSantis knows that critical race theory is not a thing, and that Florida’s librarians and grade school teachers are not grooming children for pedophilia.

If everyone on the other side were like that, life would be simple. But instead the world is full of Abrahams whose willingness to sacrifice Isaac makes them feel closer to their God.

What can we do with them?

I don’t have an answer for that question, so I’m just going to continue talking about the Montana legislature, and red-state governments in Texas and Florida that also gave us insight into authoritarianism this week.

Zooey Zephyr. One thing authoritarians don’t do is tolerate dissent, particularly from people they deem inferior. A few weeks ago, the Tennessee House decided not to tolerate Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, who are Black. The Justins delayed the business of the House for an hour or so by encouraging pro-gun-control demonstrators in the gallery, so they were expelled from office. But the people of their districts put them right back.

This week, the Republican supermajority in the Montana House did something similar to Zooey Zephyr, a trans woman (whose adulthood, in Seekins-Crowe’s terms, must not be “precious” or “successful”). On April 18, during debate on the bill banning gender-affirming care for minors (and several other anti-trans bills), she was blunt:

This body should be ashamed. If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.

In response, the ironically-named Freedom Caucus in the Montana House called for “his” censure because of that “threatening” comment. Majority Leader Sue Vinton responded directly (and self-righteously) to the “shame” comment:

We will not be shamed by anyone in this chamber. We are better than that.

The censure resolution was not immediately taken up, but the Speaker refused to recognize Rep. Zephyr when she rose to speak, and said that he would not do so until Zephyr apologized, which she refused to do.

Last Monday, hundreds of pro-Zephyr demonstrators came to the Capitol. When Zephyr rose and was ignored, they loudly chanted “Let her speak.” The Speaker still did not recognize Zephyr, and the House ground to a halt for half an hour until the demonstrators could be removed. On his way to jail, one demonstrator explained:

In this country you don’t get many rights but one of the things you do get is an elected representative, and 11,000 Montanans are waiting for Zooey Zephyr to speak for them, to represent the interest of trans people in the state who belong in the state as well. It’s not just … the old white men who run the show over here. It’s every single person. Montana is big enough for all of us, and I think it has space for all of us.

Republicans have since inaccurately described the demonstrations as “violent” and “an insurrection”. (I commented two weeks ago on the Right’s practice of breaking words that have been used against them. Ever since January 6 they have been trying to break insurrection through misuse. It falls flat to claim that January 6 was merely a “protest”, so they have been characterizing any liberal protest as an insurrection.)

Zephyr was blamed for this breech of “decorum” (the same offense charged against the Justins). So she was banned from the House floor for the remainder of the session (which ends May 5). The resolution banning her did not also bar her from serving on committees, but all the committees she serves on then had their remaining meetings cancelled.

Like the Justins, Zephyr returned home to a large rally of her supporters. (Remember: “Large” means something different in Montana, where each House district has only about 11,000 people.) Since the legislature only meets in odd-numbered years, her term is effectively over. But she’ll be running for reelection in 2024.

Universities. Another thing authoritarians do not tolerate is an alternative source of institutional authority. That’s why the current crop of red-state authoritarians is working so hard to bring the universities under control. Universities do not wield power directly, but they are recognized sources of authoritative opinion. So they cannot be allowed to remain independent.

A number of German words have already made it into the American vocabulary — zeitgeist, schadenfreude, realpolitik, gestalt, wanderlust. Well, it’s time to learn another one: gleichschaltung, whose root words mean “same circuit”. Originally an engineering term translated as “coordination” or “synchronization”, gleichschaltung was adapted in the 1930s to describe the process of unifying German society and culture under Nazi ideology. Simply controlling the national government wasn’t good enough; the kind of German renewal the Nazis promised could only be accomplished by a unified society whose institutions all pulled in the same direction. So local governments, corporations, unions, professional associations, universities, social clubs, and youth organizations all needed “coordination”.

This week, Texas took a step towards its own gleichschaltung when its Senate passed SB-18, which would eliminate tenure in the state’s universities.

An institution of higher education may not grant an employee of the institution tenure or any type of permanent employment status.

Current tenured faculty are grandfathered in, but no new tenured appointments would be made after September 1. The Texas Tribune claims that the bill “faces an uphill battle at the Texas House”, so perhaps Texas’ university system will be spared for another term or two.

The argument for the bill is primarily political, not educational.

[Lieutenant Governor Dan] Patrick’s push to end tenure in Texas started more than a year ago after some University of Texas at Austin professors passed a nonbinding resolution defending their academic freedom to teach about issues like racial justice. The resolution came as Republicans hinted that they wanted to extend restrictions on how race is discussed in K-12 classrooms, which were approved by the Texas Legislature in 2021, to the state’s public universities.

The resolution outraged Patrick, who accused university professors of “indoctrinating” students with leftist ideas and argued that the state must stop awarding tenure because faculty with the benefit don’t face any repercussions for it.

But that’s precisely the justification for tenure: It allows academics to do their jobs without worrying about offending the politicians currently in power. In a liberal democracy, universities are not supposed to be “coordinated” with the ruling party.

Florida is another state trying to synchronize its educational institutions with government ideology. Governor DeSantis’ Stop WOKE Act created a list of ideas that cannot be taught in Florida public schools, including the state universities. The part affecting the universities has been blocked by a federal judge, whose ruling says:

The First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark.

But acts of the legislature are only one path to gleichschaltung. The governor also has executive power to appoint trustees to university boards. DeSantis’ new trustees are in the process of coordinating New College in Sarasota. At a recent meeting, all five faculty members up for tenure — including three in the supposedly apolitical hard sciences — were rejected, and the faculty chair (who had been broadly criticized for being too accommodating to the new regime) quit.

Disney. I mentioned corporations in the list of things that need to be synchronized with the ruling ideology. Well, after DeSantis passed his Don’t Say Gay law, Disney had the temerity to put out a statement saying that it opposed the law and would continue to work against it through the systems our constitution provides for reversing government actions:

Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that.

All in all, it was pretty tepid stuff, but it marked Disney as a company not marching to the DeSantis drum. That led DeSantis to strike at Disney in ways that fell comically flat: A bill to dissolve the special taxing district around Disney World had to be undone when nearby counties noticed they might wind up responsible for about $1 billion in bonds the district had outstanding. Then DeSantis announced a takeover of the board that oversees the district, but was again outsmarted by an agreement Disney signed with the outgoing board.

Now DeSantis is trying to get the legislature to nullify that agreement, and Disney decided it had had enough: It filed a federal lawsuit claiming that DeSantis is illegally retaliating against Disney for speech protected by the First Amendment.

There is no room for disagreement about what happened here: Disney expressed its opinion on state legislation and was then punished by the State for doing so. … This is as clear a case of retaliation as this Court is ever likely to see. …

It is a clear violation of Disney’s federal constitutional rights—under the Contracts Clause, the Takings Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the First Amendment—for the State to inflict a concerted campaign of retaliation because the Company expressed an opinion with which the government disagreed. … In America, the government cannot punish you for speaking your mind.

The reason there’s “no room for disagreement” is that DeSantis didn’t just announce in public that he was abusing state power to punish Disney for making a political statement, he wrote about it in his book. DeSantis clearly could have benefited from the class Stringer Bell taught in The Wire:

Is you taking notes on a criminal f**king conspiracy? What the f**k is you thinking, man?

DeSantis’ defense of his actions is that Disney’s control of the special taxing district around Disney World is an inappropriate merging of state and corporate power, so he is right to take it away. And in the abstract, that may even be true. But legal and even reasonable exercises of government power become unconstitutional when they are used to punish speech protected by the First Amendment, as these actions clearly were.

David French looked up the appropriate legal precedent: O’Hare Towing Service v City of Northlake (1996). Speaking for a 7-2 majority, Justice Kennedy wrote:

If the government could deny a benefit to a person because of his constitutionally protected speech or associations, his exercise of those freedoms would in effect be penalized and inhibited. Such interference with constitutional rights is impermissible.

But in spite of the governing precedent, French is still not entirely sure how the case will come out.

At the beginning of this piece, I said that DeSantis should lose, not that he will lose. Court outcomes are never completely certain, but this much is correct: A Disney defeat would represent a dangerous reversal in First Amendment jurisprudence and cast a pall of fear over private expression.

French is afraid, in other words, that gleichschaltung may already have reached the Supreme Court.

May 1, 2023 – 10:07 am Categories: Articles | Comments (21)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Most of the news that attracted my attention this week happened at the state level, where Republican majorities and supermajorities have gotten increasingly extreme. Separately, these are stories that might travel below your radar (like the Texas Senate passing a bill to eliminate tenure in the state universities), so I’ve pulled several of them together in a piece I’m calling “Laboratories of Autocracy”. Among other things, the post will explain why you need to learn the German word gleichschaltung. That should be out maybe around 10 EDT.

In another era, President Biden announcing his reelection bid would be the week’s lead story. But there are continuing scandals at the Supreme Court, everybody’s still speculating about the real reason Tucker Carlson was fired, and a civil trial just started that will hang on whether a jury believes the previous president committed rape. So Biden gets pushed well down the page. One of the things Biden promised was not to be in our face 24/7 like Trump was (and largely still is). That’s a promise he’s kept, but it must be frustrating not to be able to grab public attention when you really want it.

Oh, and there’s been another mass shooting. We still cover those, don’t we? They haven’t quite reached the dog-bites-man stage yet.

Anyway, I’ll aim to get the weekly summary out by noon.

May 1, 2023 – 8:37 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

People are People

Transgender people are people, representative, and deserve to be treated as such by this body too.

– Justin Pearson

This week’s featured post is “Reflections on driving across America“. My time in the wilderness gave me a vision I’d like to get out of my head.

This week everybody was talking about bizarre shootings

By now, we’ve almost gotten used to mass shootings, even school shootings: Somebody goes crazy in a way that makes them want to see a lot of people dead. Even though it doesn’t make sense in any rational way, we’ve learned how to tell a story about it. You say, “There was a school shooting in Nashville” and people more-or-less know what you mean.

But the last two weeks have been marked by shootings that made the whole country go “Huh? What was that about?”

It started with the shooting of Ralph Yarl on April 13. Ralph is 16 years old, Black, and (still) lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His mother sent him to bring his younger brothers home from a friend’s house. But he got the address wrong, so he rang the doorbell of Andrew Lester, who is 84 years old and White. Lester told police he was “scared to death” to see a young man “approximately six feet tall”, so he shot him through the glass door, hitting him in the head and arm. (Yarl is actually 5’8″ and weighs about 140.) Police believe there was a “racial component” to the incident.

Yarl is home now and talking, so at least there’s that.

Two days later Kaylin Gillis, a 20-year-old White woman, was in a car full of young people who turned down the wrong driveway in Hebron, New York, a rural community near Vermont. As the car was backing out, Kevin Monahan reportedly came out of his house and fired two shotgun blasts at the car, killing Gillis.

Three days after that, just past midnight on Tuesday, four cheerleaders were in a supermarket parking lot in Elgin, Texas, regrouping after they had car-pooled to a practice session. Heather Roth got into the wrong car and saw Pedro Rodriguez Jr. in the passenger seat. She realized her mistake and returned to her friend’s car. Rodriguez allegedly got out of his car and began shooting, grazing Roth and seriously wounding her friend Payton Washington.

Also on Tuesday, a basketball rolled into Robert Singletary’s yard, and he yelled at the kids who came to retrieve it. When one of the kids’ fathers came to Singletary’s door to protest the language he had used, Singletary reportedly opened fire, wounding the father and his six-year-old daughter.

Hardly anybody even mentions the Instacart drivers who got shot at for being at the wrong address on Saturday. Nobody was hurt and they were in Florida, so local police didn’t think shooting at them broke any laws.

In each of these cases, someone got rattled or annoyed for a somewhat understandable reason — a stranger getting into your car, kids who won’t respect your property line — and then opted to shoot rather than talk or just walk away. For both Gillis and the cheerleaders, the situation was already resolving itself: the car was backing out the driveway, Roth got out on her own. If the shooter just does nothing, everyone goes home unharmed.

The NRA likes to say that “an armed society is a polite society” (a quote Psychology Today critiqued last year). But these incidents make the opposite point: In an armed society, misunderstandings and trivial conflicts easily become life-threatening. In each of these cases, someone is dead or badly wounded because there was a gun involved. In each case, we can be thankful that no “good guy with a gun” was ready to shoot back. Who knows what the body count would have been?

The more accurate slogan is: more guns, more deaths.

I have to apply this principle to the suggestion that we can solve school shootings by arming teachers. First off, until she retired, my sister was an elementary school teacher. I don’t like the image either of her feeling obligated to shoot it out with somebody wielding an AR-15, or of a gun being one more thing to keep track of in a normal day in her classroom. (I just talked to her; she doesn’t like it either.)

But second, I have to wonder how long it will be before some teacher is the shooter. Kids can be annoying. Parents can be annoying. There are arguments in teacher lounges. Teachers often feel mistreated or unfairly judged by their principals. How long before one of these situations leads to gunfire?

And finally, I am absolutely certain that armed teachers will have a higher suicide rate. Like policing, teaching is an emotionally stressful profession, full of ups and downs and occasional feelings of pointlessness or failure. As a Stanford study noted, access to a gun is a major risk factor for suicide:

Suicide attempts are often impulsive acts, driven by transient life crises. Most attempts are not fatal, and most people who attempt suicide do not go on to die in a future suicide. Whether a suicide attempt is fatal depends heavily on the lethality of the method used — and firearms are extremely lethal.

Give teachers guns, and more of them will wind up dead. More guns, more deaths.

The shootings mentioned above make another point: The sheer number of guns is only part of America’s problem. Another part is the exaggerated level of fear that gun manufacturers use to sell more guns, and that right-wing media uses to argue against sensible gun laws.

Andrew Lester’s problem wasn’t just that he had a gun. It’s that his mind so quickly jumped from seeing a Black teen at his door to stories of deadly home invasions, which are actually quite rare. And what if you need to fend off multiple home invaders? Then you don’t just need a gun, you need the kind of high-capacity magazines that anti-Second-Amendment types want to ban.

Your goal is to protect yourself and your family. Having 15 to 30 rounds in your weapon at a time will exponentially increase your ability to defend your family. You can be the greatest shot in the world, but 10 rounds runs out faster than 15 to 30. Period.

Besides, what if your attackers are equipped with high-capacity magazines themselves? In a situation where you are defending yourself and your family, you do not want to be outgunned. Having high-capacity magazines is a responsibility you can take to ensure that you won’t be outgunned

What if? What if? Our culture trains our minds to jump to the most horrifying possibilities, no matter how unlikely they are. And right-wing politicians stoke fear. As Donald Trump likes to tell his rallies: “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you. I’m just in the way.”

They? Who the hell are they?

Paul Waldman quotes NRA President Wayne LaPierre: “every day of every year, innocent, good, defenseless people are beaten, bloodied, robbed, raped and murdered”. Lately, though, it looks like the bigger danger is scared people with guns. If you want to feel less afraid, don’t buy a gun. Just turn off Fox News, especially when they cover Trump or LaPierre.

David French, a gun owner who was considered a staunch conservative not so long ago, describes the current right-wing attitude towards guns as “idolatry”. (French also wrote the foreward for a book discussing right-wing idolatry of another type: Christian nationalism.)

He mentions the shootings I just discussed, and connects them with people who take their guns and go looking for violent encounters: Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry, just to name two. Both are revered as heroes by a certain segment of the Right.

Whoever that guy was who said “Blessed are the peacemakers”, he has been long forgotten.

and medication abortion

Friday, the Supreme Court put a stay on Judge Kacsmaryk’s order taking the abortion drug mifepristone off the market. So the drug remains available for now.

The back-and-forth here is a little confusing, so let’s review.

  • Anti-abortion organizations filed a federal lawsuit in Amarillo, where they were guaranteed a hearing before Kacsmaryk, who is a well-know culture warrior likely to agree with them. The suit asked the court to reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, which has been available for 23 years and is used in over half of all abortions.
  • Ignoring a number of clear deficiencies in the case, Kacsmaryk gave the plaintiffs what they wanted: a court order removing mifepristone from the market.
  • He put a stay on his ruling for a week to give the FDA time to appeal.
  • The FDA did appeal to the court above Kacsmaryk’s, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which might be the most conservative appellate court in the country. (Plaintiffs also knew that when they filed the suit.) The Fifth Circuit will hear arguments on the merits of the case on May 17.
  • In the meantime, the FDA asked the Fifth Circuit to stay Kacsmaryk’s ruling until it decided the appeal. But the court only suspended part of the ruling, leaving mifepristone on the market, but less available than it had been: Under their ruling, the drug couldn’t be mailed, and could only be used by women less than seven weeks pregnant rather than ten.
  • The FDA asked the Supreme Court to stay the whole ruling, pending the Fifth Circuit’s decision. Friday, the Court granted that request.

So: the temporary situation is unchanged from the time before Kacsmaryk’s ruling. The long-term situation will be decided by the Fifth Circuit sometime this summer. Given the commentary in its ruling on the stay, the Fifth Circuit is likely to impose at least some restrictions on mifepristone, which the FDA will then appeal to the Supreme Court. The ultimate decision, then, is probably at least a year away.

A few comments: The Supreme Court is unlikely to go along with Kacsmaryk when the case reaches it next year, but not because it cares about women’s health or respects their bodily autonomy. Agreeing with Kacsmaryk, though, would profoundly disrupt the pharmaceutical industry, because FDA approval could never again be taken as final. This case would establish a precedent allowing just about anybody to ask a court to remove just about any drug from the market.

By granting the stay, the Supreme Court refused to play the game many of us feared: They could have denied the lawsuit ultimately (protecting the pharmaceutical industry), while allowing mifepristone to stay off the market for more than a year as the legal machinery churned.

The two dissenters — Alito and Thomas — wanted to play that game.

and the Fox Dominion settlement

Ever since this case was filed, I’ve believed that Fox had to settle, because the damage it threatened went far beyond the money. Rupert Murdoch or Tucker Carlson answering questions under threat of perjury simply could not be tolerated.

What’s more, Dominion was always bound to accept a settlement. Settlements are zero-sum; what one party loses the other gains. But the trial would negative-sum. Beyond some point, the damage to Fox’ reputation would not be balanced by any gain to Dominion.

When parties are in a negative-sum game, the rational thing to do is get out of it. And that’s what Fox and Dominion did this week when they agreed to a $787.5 million settlement.

Now, lots of us were hoping to see that trial, where big-name Fox hosts would have to admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, and that they knowingly lied when they told their viewers anything else. That would have been a great thing for American democracy and for our political discourse as a whole. But Dominion’s lawyers represent the corporation and its shareholders, not American democracy. So that didn’t happen.

Will this settlement cause Fox to lose credibility with its viewers? It ought to, but it probably won’t. For comparison, think about Trump’s $25 million settlement with the people Trump University defrauded. The money was a tacit admission of fraud, just as the $787.5 million is a tacit admission that Fox lies to its viewers. But Trump’s followers didn’t want to look at it that way, so they haven’t.

I had just written a note criticizing Fox for the fact that no heads were rolling, when I noticed that Tucker Carlson is leaving the network in a blameless parting of ways. If CNN or MSNBC faced a similar scandal, Hannity and Ingraham would also be out the door. But we’ll see.

Undoubtedly Tucker has a plan, and will take his pro-Trump pro-Russia White-supremacist program somewhere else.

and the debt ceiling

So we’re now probably less than two months from a true debt ceiling crisis, one that would force the government to default on at least some of its obligations. Kevin McCarthy has the hostage, but he’s still working on his ransom letter. Maybe he’ll be able to pass a laundry list of Republican demands, or maybe his caucus can’t even get to “yes” when no Democrats are in the room. (One provision that is in all the rumored demands I’ve seen: Biden has to give back all the progress he’s made towards fighting climate change.)

I’ve previously written about why the debt ceiling shouldn’t exist at all and how we got $32 trillion in debt. I’ve promised an article on whether (or to what extent) the debt actually is a problem, and I will come through on that before the country defaults.

and you also might be interested in …

The Texas Senate has passed one bill mandating every public-school classroom display the Ten Commandments, and another allowing public and charter schools to set aside time each day for students to read the Bible or pray. The Ten-Commandments bill still has to pass the House, while the Bible-reading bill just needs the governor’s signature.

Proponents believe these are “wins for religious freedom in Texas”, and that the Supreme Court’s decision in the praying-coach case indicates these bills will pass legal muster. In the ten years since I wrote “Religious Freedom means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination“, they just keep proving my point.

DeSantis’ war on Disney is getting increasingly hard to explain.

The WaPo has a frightening story about Ottawa County, Michigan, where anti-government MAGA types have now become the government themselves.

We have the Tennessee GOP to thank for calling national attention to Justin Pearson, who is amazing. Here, he schools a legislator pushing an anti-trans bill about American traditions.

Transgender people are people, representative, and deserve to be treated as such by this body too.

Monica Potts goes back to her Arkansas home town to try to figure out why rural and small-town women are dying young.

In 2012, a team of population-health experts at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that white women who did not graduate from high school were dying about five years younger than such women had a generation before—at about 73 years instead of 78. Their white male counterparts were dying three years younger. From 2014 to 2017, the decline in life expectancy in the U.S., driven largely by the drop among the least-educated Americans, was the longest and most sustained in 100 years.

Several red states have been changing laws to allow more child labor. The push is coming from the Foundation for Government Accountability, an organization funded by several large conservative donors.

Back when Mike Lindell was claiming he had irrefutable proof the 2020 election was stolen, he announced a $5 million challenge for anyone to disprove his data. When Robert Zeidman claimed the prize, Lindell welched. This week an arbitration panel found that Lindell owes Zeidman the $5 million.

Meanwhile, Lindell is furious that Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems, which is the villain in Lindell’s delusional theories. Dominion is also suing Lindell, who says he won’t settle even if Dominion pays him.

Suicide rates went down during Covid. It turns out that this is typical: When the world is trying to kill you, the desire to kill yourself diminishes.

and let’s close with something anthropomorphic

Do you ever find yourself talking to inanimate objects? Urging your car to keep going as you watch the gas gauge drop? Scolding a shoelace that keeps untying itself for no good reason? Asking your lost keys where they’re hiding this time?

Well, Ian Chillag talks to a lot of inanimate objects. In his podcast Everything is Alive, he interviews items most of us are unable to converse with: a can of off-brand cola growing old in the refrigerator, a newspaper, a baguette, a song that gets stuck in your head.

The conversations are clever and imaginative. Having just returned from a cross-country driving trip, I can testify that they passed the time while keeping me alert.

April 24, 2023 – 12:31 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Reflections on driving across America

Why aren’t rural people even crazier than they are?

Over the last month, I’ve driven nearly six thousand miles. My wife and I started in Massachusetts, where we live, and went first to central Illinois, where I grew up. From there we struck out towards Sedona, where the red rocks are, and towards the Georgia O’Keefe landscape of Santa Fe, home of one of my favorite cuisines. On the way home, we saw family in Nashville.

Between those highlights, we strung together a series of roadside attractions, like the otherwise undistinguished corner in Winslow that the Eagles sang about, or the figuratively (but not literally) tasteless Uranus Fudge Factory in Missouri. We considered stopping for many other diversions, like the Superman statue in Metropolis, Illinois, but kept driving. We passed maybe dozens of Route 66 museums, and countless Native American trading posts that seemed far too small to contain all the wonders promised by miles and miles of billboards. My best eating days being behind me, I did not try to win the free 72-ounce steak in Amarillo.

In other words, I have been seeing America, the “real America” that gets lauded at Republican rallies and NRA conventions.

A lot of it struck me as depressing. Through much of the drive, I was plagued by the thought “Why does anybody live here?” Or, more accurately, “Why will anybody live here?”

Of course I knew why people had settled the farm country where I grew up: The soil was rich, the Native Americans had vanished through some process we preferred not to think about, and the Homestead Act had divided the newly empty land into 160-acre plots that an ordinary White man could afford. Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a nation of yeoman farmers — who might never get rich, but would have the independence that comes from owning the land they tilled — was becoming real.

That agricultural land produced surplus, which needed to get to the cities somehow. So there were river ports like Cincinnati and Louisville and (eventually) St. Louis. In return, the farmers needed whatever tools and luxuries they couldn’t produce themselves, so trading posts developed into small towns, where doctors, dentists, lawyers, and accountants could hang a shingle. Eventually you had a real economy.

When industrialization happened, those small towns turned out to be ideal places to site factories. They had transportation, and surplus labor coming off the mechanizing farms. So you had John Deere in Moline, Caterpillar in Peoria, and countless lesser enterprises dotted across the landscape.

In the mid-20th century, it all made a lot of sense. But it doesn’t any more.

For decades I’ve been making the 300-mile drive from Chicago to my hometown, Quincy, Illinois. Quincy itself has been holding steady at around 40,000 people. It’s the biggest thing for 100 miles in any direction, so it has become the regional retail center. It has lost most of the factories I remember from my youth, and the ones that remain employ far fewer people, but there appear to be jobs (of a sort) at the Home Depot and the Walmart. The small hospital where I had pneumonia when I was three is now a sprawling campus that gets bigger every time I visit. Upper-middle-class people from St. Louis or Chicago can retire to Quincy and build mansions, so a number of them do.

Population-wise, it more or less balances out.

But the drive from Chicago goes through a lot of dying towns, ones that are too small or too close to something else to become regional centers. Homestead Act farms have been amalgamated into agribusinesses that support far fewer families. As the countryside depopulates, the towns lose their supermarkets and general stores, and then eventually even their gas stations. Where two or three restaurants used to compete, now there’s maybe enough traffic to support a bar. If you live there and want a gallon of milk, you need to drive a few dozen miles to a regional center like Quincy.

While the voices coming through my satellite radio debated the future impact of artificial intelligence, I was picturing electric robot combines roaming across the endless prairie, powered by automated windmills.

Why will anybody need to live here at all? And if some people want to live here, maybe because their families have lived here for generations, what will they do?

On the way from the fudge factory to Nashville, I resisted the macabre urge to see Cairo (pronounced KAY-ro). Cairo sits at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, which sounds like it ought to be the site of a great city. St. Louis, Pittsburgh — lots of cities have been founded at the confluence of rivers. The rich, fertile land surrounding Cairo is said to be the source of the region’s nickname “Little Egypt”. As Jacob’s sons made their way to Egypt to escape a Biblical famine, so did the surplus of Little Egypt feed the areas around it.

So Cairo’s original settlers must have had visions of empire. It never quite worked out that way, but the town did prosper as a minor transportation hub, growing to about 15,000 people by the 1920s. Mansions were built there in the late 1800s.

But transportation routes changed. Symbolically, Cairo used to be a stop on the City of New Orleans train made famous by Steve Goodman’s song. But although that train has still not disappeared (as Goodman mournfully envisioned) it doesn’t stop in Cairo any more. Hardly anybody does.

In addition to its economic challenges, Cairo had a history of lynching, and did a bad job managing the racial conflicts of the 1960s. And now the town is down to about 1700 people, barely a tenth of its previous size. The downtown is mostly boarded up.

I grew up picturing ghost towns as artifacts of the western deserts. Mines created boom towns, but then the mines played out and there was no reason to live there any more. As a child, I could not have imagined ghost towns in the farm country, but now I can.

The outlook gets even worse as you go west. Much of the agriculture of the Great Plains is based on pumping water out of the ground, which has gradually depleted aquifers like the Ogallala. Long term, that land won’t even support the robot combines. As far back as 1987, Deborah Epstein Popper and Frank J. Popper were envisioning letting the whole region go back to nature, restoring the “buffalo commons” that existed before the White man came.

Driving through this empty land gives you a lot of time to think, and one of the questions I considered was “What does living in a place with no future do to your outlook on life?”

Of course, the individuals who grow up in these places do have viable paths into the future. They can, for example, do what I did: Get a scholarship to a state university and earn a marketable credential they can cash in somewhere else. In this era of diminishing state education budgets and correspondingly higher student debt, that path is not as smooth as it used to be. But it is still there.

But what if you love your home in more than just a sentimental way? What if the people and the landscape and the way of life has burrowed deep into your soul? What if catching a lifeboat out seems less like an exciting adventure and more like exile?

And what if you’re older? What if you have children and grandchildren you’d dearly love to keep around you, but you know you can’t? For their own sakes, they need to go. And they need to leave you behind.

What does that do to your outlook on the world? Maybe in that situation, you wouldn’t like thinking of yourself as the victim of History’s impersonal forces. Maybe you’d prefer to imagine conspiracies that have stolen your future from you. Maybe those conspiracies would center on your children, on pulling them away from you or turning them against you or making them unrecognizable. Somebody — let’s call them “liberals” (or maybe “Jews”) — wants to make them “woke”, or turn them gay or trans, or replace them with dark-skinned immigrants.

Imagining such things may not give you hope, but at least it gives you someone to blame. Maybe that helps.

Last week I was writing (yet again) about fascism. I observed that the Trumpist brand of fascism isn’t even pretending to offer solutions to its rural supporters. Rather than a new deal, Trump promises vengeance. “I am your retribution,” he has been telling his rallies.

Maybe that’s what passes for “telling it like it is” in certain circles. Once you see that the future is hopeless, then it’s the people making plans and promises who sound like grifters. The “straight talkers” just promise to make other people suffer, which you are confident they can do.

How do we deal with this? I keep coming back to that Obama “Hope” poster. Somehow, we have to address the widespread sense of hopelessness in America without sounding like bigger grifters than Trump is. In a contest of solutions, liberals have it all over conservatives. But if there are no solutions, why not just lash out against the people you hate?

So anyway, I have been to the wilderness and seen a vision. Now I’m trying to get it out of my head so I can get on with life. If I’ve transferred that vision into your head, I apologize.

April 24, 2023 – 10:14 am Categories: Articles | Comments (25)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

After about a month on the road, I’m back home and producing the Sift on its usual schedule.

None of the major news stories this week — the Fox/Dominion settlement, the bizarre series of people getting shot for making common mistakes, the Supreme Court’s decision to stay the lower-court ruling banning mifepristone — seemed to me to need an in-depth analysis beyond what’s available in your usual news sources, so this week’s featured post is a more general reflection on driving through the empty places of America.

I grew up in the rural Midwest, so I understand the economic story of why the area was settled in the first place: The Homestead Act, then an economy grew up around the small family farms, and then industry came.

But then industry moved to Mexico or China, and farms don’t require that many people any more. So what’s the future of this place? Why won’t it all turn into endless fields where robot combines are powered by windmill electricity?

Living in a place that you love, but which has no obvious path into the future, might make you paranoid or depressed or resentful. And it more or less has. Maybe there’s a reason the Trump base in rural America seems so insane to the rest of the country.

Anyway, those reflections should appear by 10 EDT or so. The weekly summary will cover the stories I listed above, before closing with the most charming podcast I listened to on the drive. That should post around noon.

April 24, 2023 – 8:38 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (6)

Not Silent

Those who seek to silence us will not have the final say.

– Justin Pearson

This week’s featured post is “Why fascism? Why now?“.

This week everybody was talking about a security leak

Thursday, the FBI arrested a 21-year-old man suspected to be the source of the recent leak of hundreds of classified documents, whose publication has damaged the US relationship with its allies and possibly exposed intelligence sources to America’s enemies. He worked as a “cyber transport systems specialist” for the Massachusetts Air National Guard, which appears to have given him access to highly classified systems.

The FBI’s explanation for the leak is frightening in its ordinariness: Jack Teixeira wanted to impress his friends. He appears not to have been motivated by money, blackmail, loyalty to another country, hatred of America, or any of the other motives typically found in spy movies. I am reminded of two characters in a minor John Le Carre novel struggling to explain why someone had defected. “I knew a man once who sold his birthright because he couldn’t get a seat on the Underground.”

I was investigated for a top-secret clearance (which I got) back in the 1980s, though I probably never saw more than half a dozen classified documents. The questions the investigators asked me and my references focused on things like whether my lifestyle matched my income, did I have blackmail-worthy secrets, had I expressed bizarre political beliefs, did I have friends or relatives in hostile countries, and so on. None of it would have picked up a motive like wanting to show off for an online discussion group. I don’t know how investigators could look for that kind of risk. That’s what’s most scary about this case.

The depth and variety of the leaked documents raises another question: Why did anybody in the Massachusetts Air National Guard need to know all this stuff? Why did our systems allow access to it?

The leak may have helped Russia, and it also sort of looks like Donald Trump’s theft (and possible misuse) of classified documents. So of course Marjorie Taylor Greene defends the leaker.

and abortion drugs

The abortion-pill injunction is still working its way through the system. The initial injunction banning mifepristone was supposed to take effect Friday. The appeals court rolled back the worst of it, but still left a terrible ruling. (That’s how bad the original was.) The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court, which froze everything until Wednesday. Stay tuned.

The Supreme Court has an easy way out if it wants one: Under existing precedents, the plaintiffs don’t have standing to sue. The appeals court upheld their standing, which is just really bad law in general, independent of how you feel about abortion. If an organization can sue any time one of its members is statistically likely to suffer some theoretical injury sometime in the future, the courts will be swamped with frivolous suits.

and the Fox News trial

The Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News was supposed to hear opening statements today, but (in a surprise last-minute move) that was delayed until tomorrow. Maybe that means a settlement is in the works.

and even more evidence of Clarence Thomas’ corruption

Last week, we found out that for two decades Thomas has been taking expensive vacations paid for by a major Republican donor who also gives a lot of money to organizations trying to influence Supreme Court decisions. We had to find out about these trips from Pro Publica rather than Thomas himself because, you know, the gift-reporting rules are just way too complicated for a mere Supreme Court justice to understand, and it’s not like Thomas should be expected to have some kind of moral intuition that would tell him this whole arrangement smells bad.

Right-wing media raced to Thomas’ defense, because clearly Thomas was just a guy hanging out with a dear friend — who just happens to be a billionaire and just happens to have befriended Thomas after he rose to the Supreme Court. And it’s not like there’s been a pattern of conservative organizations trying to befriend justices.

This week Pro Publica let another shoe drop: In 2014 the same donor, Harlan Crow, bought real estate from Thomas, including the house where Thomas’ mother lives, for over $100K, which might or might not be market price for properties a previous Thomas disclosure form had valued at less than $15K each. Again, Thomas did not report the transaction, in spite of laws that seem to say he has to.

Crow has since been paying the property taxes on Thomas’ mom’s house, and has funded a number of improvements that I’m sure Mrs. Thomas appreciates.

Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.

Crow’s statement on the Pro Publica scoop doesn’t say whether Mrs. Thomas pays rent. Clarence himself has said nothing.

Even Fox News has more-or-less gone silent, mentioning Thomas less than 50 times (and Bud Light 183 times) since the first Pro Publica article. The substance of its reporting has been that Democrats are attacking Thomas, and that AOC wants him impeached. But that’s Democrats for you. And you know AOC, she’s like that. It’s not like there’s an actual issue here. I mean, it’s not like George Soros has been buying off a liberal justice. That would be a national scandal deserving 24/7 coverage.

Yesterday, the WaPo reported another Thomas disclosure anomaly — that he reports income from a defunct real estate firm rather than the entity that replaced it. But unless there’s more to this story, I’m willing to write this one off as sloppiness rather than corruption.

and Tennessee

Both of the Justins — Justin Jones and Justin Pearson — have returned to the Tennessee House. After they were removed by the Republican supermajority last week, both were unanimously reappointed by councils of their constituents.

Both appointments are temporary until a special election can be held. But if the Justins were popular at home before, they are rock stars now. I don’t think getting elected will be a problem.

I’ll make a prediction: One or both of them will speak at the 2024 Democratic Convention.

Republican criticism of the demonstration the Justins led has included intentional misuse of the word insurrection. It started with Speaker Sexton, and then became a more general Republican talking point.

For almost a decade, I’ve been pointing out the right-wing practice of breaking words through intentional misuse. In 2014, I recalled the effort that had gone into breaking fascism, terrorism, and religious freedom, while pointing to a then-current effort to break torture.

The American Thinker blog reports on the “real torture scandal in America“, which is abortion. General Boykin says “Torture is what we’ve done by having the IRS go after conservative groups.” The Koch-funded American Energy Alliance is calling EPA fossil-fuel regulations “torture”.

Fortunately, they failed to break torture, and we have since been able to reclaim fascism, a word that has a lot of work to do these days. In 2021, I updated my 2014 analysis to include fake news, socialism, and even, ironically, Orwellian. (The breaking of fake news was so effective that hardly anyone remembers the original meaning: imitation “news” articles from entirely fictitious “publications” like the Denver Guardian or WTOE 5 News, created to be shared online and promote a false reality. The 2016 Trump campaign was the primary beneficiary of fake news, as many people took seriously fake articles that went viral, like “Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president” or “FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apartment murder-suicide“. Trump hated this meaning, so he misused fake news until it broke, and instead came to mean any news report — no matter how accurate — that he doesn’t like.)

And that leads us to insurrection. It annoys Republicans that January 6 is quite accurately described as an insurrection, so they want to make that idea inexpressible. That’s what’s behind their widespread use of insurrection to describe the protest on the floor of the Tennessee House that led to the Justins’ expulsion.

That usage is literally absurd. The Tennessee House was inconvenienced for about an hour. No one was injured and no one was threatened. The state house was not damaged. At no time did anyone propose establishing a new government in Nashville outside the usual electoral process. January 6, by contrast, was the culmination of a months-long plot to install the loser of the 2020 election as president. Had it succeeded, the United States’ centuries-old tradition of constitutional government would be over. Along the way, 114 Capitol police officers were injured, and numerous member of Congress (and their staff) feared for their lives. So did Mike Pence’s Secret Service detail.

But the absurdity is the point. Expect more misuse of insurrection, until the word ceases to mean anything at all. As Orwell put it in “The Principles of Newspeak“:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

and crazy new laws

Red-state legislatures just keep upping the ante on crazy.

Idaho hasn’t just outlawed almost all abortions, it is also outlawing “abortion trafficking”.

The new “ abortion trafficking ” law signed on Wednesday, is the first of its kind in the U.S. It makes it illegal to either obtain abortion pills for a minor or to help them leave the state for an abortion without their parents’ knowledge and consent. Anyone convicted will face two to five years in prison and could also be sued by the minor’s parent or guardian. Parents who raped their child will not be able to sue, though the criminal penalties for anyone who helped the minor obtain an abortion will remain in effect.

So if an Idaho man gets his 13-year-old daughter pregnant, her grandmother can get 2-to-5 in the big house for driving her across the border to get an abortion in Washington. But at least the rapist can’t sue the grandmother, because that would push a good idea too far.

In Missouri, the House just passed a budget that defunds the state’s libraries. Reportedly, the Senate plans to put the $4.5 million back, but still. Is there any public institution that does more good for less money than the public library?

And in Llano County, the commissioners are debating whether to close their three libraries rather than submit to a judge’s order not to ban 17 books.

The banned books, which include themes of LGBTQ+ identity and race, were removed last year without public input after Llano County officials declared them pornographic and sexually explicit.

Somebody’s going to have to explain to me how Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is pornographic. (I somehow missed the dirty parts when I read it.) Among a long list of awards and honors, Time magazine named Caste as its #1 nonfiction book of 2020. And remember: This is the public library, not a school library. It would be bad enough to keep children from reading Caste, but Llano is claiming no one should be allowed to read it, at least not on the public dime.

Another too-sexy-for-Llano book is Larry the Farting Leprechaun, which I have not read. If I do, I’ll have to stay alert so I don’t miss the pornographic sections.

Amanda Marcotte sees the defund-the-library trend as a skirmish in a more general war against public education.

Libraries are the latest battlefield, but the real white whale for the GOP is the destruction of public education.

She cites Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s “school choice” proposal, which would move money from public to private (i.e. religious) schools through a voucher program linked to “education savings accounts”.

In the Texas Observer, David Brockman goes a step further: The motive behind ESAs is Christian nationalism.

Having spent nearly a decade researching and writing about Christian nationalism—the movement to make the United States an explicitly “Christian nation” governed by Bible-based laws—I see this year’s push to fund private and religious schools as just the latest front in that movement’s decades-long battle to undermine what Thomas Jefferson called the wall of separation between church and state, and thereby establish conservative Christian dominance over government. … Though not all “school choice” supporters are Christian nationalists, it’s hard not to notice the strong Christian nationalist presence among them.

But Texans who believe in separation of church and state have an unexpected ally against Abbott’s proposal: rural Texas communities who find a civic identity in their public schools.

Many in New Home worried that political shifts in Austin threatened to leave out the voices of rural Texans, for whom the local schools — the Friday night football games and principals whose cellphone numbers you know — are essential parts of what makes a community.

While we’re talking about publicly supported religious schools, Oklahoma is deciding whether to approve its first explicitly religious charter school, which would be Catholic. If it does, the inevitable lawsuit will undoubtedly go to the Supreme Court. I think this Court will find a way to approve it on originalist grounds, despite so many of the Founders being anti-Catholic bigots. As we saw in Alito’s Dobbs opinion and Thomas’ Bruen opinion, history says whatever the six-judge majority needs it to say.

It’s not true, but you can be forgiven if you got the impression this week that 12-year-olds can marry in Missouri. (The actual minimum age is 16, with anybody under 18 requiring parental consent.) Tuesday, a debate in the legislature over an anti-trans law produced this viral clip: Missouri state Senator Mike Moon defended the idea that 12-year-olds should be allowed to marry. He claimed to know a couple that got married at 12 when the girl became pregnant. And “their marriage is thriving“.

Somehow, I don’t find that story as heartwarming as he apparently does.

Ordinarily, I’m a fan of electoral systems where a jungle primary is followed by a runoff between the top two candidates. The system should allow moderate candidates to win by marshaling support from independents and the other party, even if they couldn’t win a one-party primary.

But there’s something decidedly shady about the way Montana’s Republican legislature is planning to implement such a system: They’ve written the election-law change so that it applies once — to Jon Tester’s Senate race in 2024 — and then sunsets immediately. The point here is to keep a Libertarian candidate from siphoning votes away from Tester’s Republican challenger.

So: The jungle-primary system, I like. Changing the rules election-by-election to get the result you want, I don’t like.

and you also might be interested in …

There was another mass shooting, this one in Alabama at a teen-ager’s birthday party. Four dead, 28 injured. The birthday girl’s brother was one of the four.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) on the changing politics of guns:

For decades, the most vocal voices on the issue of guns were on the side of the gun lobby. If you held a town hall and someone stood up and said “I want to talk about guns”, you knew they were going to be advocates for the Second Amendment. That’s totally flipped. Today, in red and blue states, if somebody says “I want to talk to you about guns”, they want you to pass the assault weapons ban and universal background checks.

DA Alvin Bragg is asking a federal court to get Jim Jordan off his back. Jordan’s attempt to interfere in Bragg’s prosecution of Trump is completely out of line. Heads would explode on the right if a congressional committee tried to protect a Democratic politician against a local indictment, or to intimidate the local prosecutor.

I could have mentioned the right-wing outrage at Bud Light last week, but it was just too crazy to wrap my mind around. So I’ll let Vox explain it. The gist seems to be that the parent corporation wants to sell their beer to trans people, so if you hate trans people you should boycott it.

But hey, maybe there’s money to be made off folks who drink beer to express their bigotry rather than because they like the taste.

As JoJoFromJerz tweeted:

Apparently, this is real. But if I told you it was a parody video, would you know the difference?

Anyway, there’s a long history of such performative outrage, and zero examples of it accomplishing anything beyond providing opportunities for grifters. MAGA types love to lash out, but they don’t organize and persist, as successful boycotts must. So corporations just wait for them to get over it.

Remember the Great Keurig Boycott of 2017? Or Frito-Lay in 2021? Or, more recently, when people were mad because M&Ms were girls?

Most right-wingers probably don’t remember either.

I continue to believe that the best way to bridge the culture-war gap is for all of us to listen to each other’s stories. HuffPost Personal published one mother’s story of discovering that her child was trans.

I’m occasionally asked whether we should “trust” the mainstream media. My answer is usually some form of “Trust them to do what?”

A good case in point is Thomas Friedman’s recent NYT column “America, China, and a crisis of trust“. Nobody who lived through the Iraq War will ever again trust Friedman as a prognosticator. His rolling assurances that the war would turn a corner (for the better) in the next six months led to six months being referred to as a “Friedman Unit“.

Friedman is well-spoken and has access to the top experts — his problem in Iraq was that he too easily believed Bush administration sources who wouldn’t have talked so openly to the rest of us — so he can do a very convincing Voice of Authority. But he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, and his sources aren’t as smart as he thinks they are, so his authoritative predictions often go astray.

However, Friedman is also an honest reporter. In the current column, he goes to a conference in Beijing and talks to a lot of well connected Chinese who undoubtedly would not return my calls, even if I knew their numbers. Do I believe his account of what they’re saying? Yes, I do. I also believe his observation that the Chinese are investing in infrastructure that puts ours to shame.

And then there’s this:

a story making the rounds in Beijing is that many Chinese have begun using ChatGPT to do their ideology homework for the local Communist Party cell, so they don’t have to waste time on it.

and let’s close with someone who deserves my gratitude

Like Stephen Colbert, I grew up reading Mad Magazine and enjoying the cartoons of Al Jaffee, who died last Monday at the age of 102. I picture him reaching the Afterlife and giving the gatekeeper a snappy answer to a stupid question.

Here’s Stephen’s tribute to Al, which is well deserved.

April 17, 2023 – 12:10 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Why fascism? Why now?

We spend a lot of time thinking about how fascism is rising, but not nearly enough about why.

Week after week, I find myself chronicling the signs of a rising fascism, both in the United States and around the world: the January 6 insurrection (and the attempts to write it off as no big deal), the parallel Bolsonaro riot in Brazil, Governor Abbott’s offer to pardon a conservative for murdering a liberal protester, increasing state violence in India (“politicians are learning that violence can yield political dividends in a country deeply polarized along religious lines”), refusal to accept that electoral defeat can be legitimate, defense of treason if it supports your cause (“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. … Ask yourself who is the real enemy?”), the increasingly cynical abuse of right-wing political and judicial power, combined with a reflexive tolerance for right-wing corruption in high places. And so on. [1]

Examples of rising fascist tendencies easily draw attention and produce fear for the future. But much less attention gets focused on the deeper question: Why is this happening now? Fascism has never been completely stamped out, but for decades it was a fringe phenomenon. By and large, losing parties admitted their defeats, tacked back to the center, and tried to regain majority support rather than disenfranchise the voters who rejected them. Elected officials distanced themselves from violence, treason, and blatantly corrupt allies.

What changed? It can’t just be the fault of one bad leader. How, for example, could Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin be causing a drift towards fascism in Europe or South America or India or Israel?

Recently I happened across two essays that address this question in different ways: science fiction author David Brin’s “Isaac Asimov, Karl Marx, & the Hari Seldon Paradox” and Umair Haque’s “The Truth About Our Civilization’s Fascism Problem Is Even Worse Than You Think“. I don’t intend to broadly endorse either author (especially Haque, who in general seems far too negative and fatalistic for me), but both have insights that strike me as important.

The post-war “miracle”. For both Haque and Brin, the key question isn’t why fascism is rising now, but how it got pushed to the fringe for decades after World War II. Haque explains it like this:

Consider the founding of modern Europe. Its entire idea was to prevent the far right ever rising again. Modern Europe, rebuilt in the ashes of the war, did something remarkable, that led to what later observers like me would call the European Miracle. It took the relatively small amount of investment that America gave it — which was all it had — and used that in a way that was fundamentally new in human history. Instead of spending it on arms, or giving it to elites, it used it rewrite constitutions which guaranteed everything from healthcare to education to transport as basic, fundamental, universal rights.

This was the point of Keynes’ magisterial insight into why the War had happened. Germans, declining into sudden poverty, destabilized by debt, had undergone a political implosion. Economic ruin had had political consequences. The consequences of “the peace” as Keynes said — the peace of World War I, which had been designed to keep Germany impoverished. Fascism erupted as a result. And so after the Second World War, Europe did something bold, unprecedented, and remarkable in all of human history — it offered its citizens these cutting edge social contracts, rich in rights for all, built institutions to enact them, from pension systems to high speed trains, and then formed a political union on top of that, to make sure that peace, this time, remained.

Fascism, in Haque’s view, is a political technique for gathering up the misery of the masses and focusing it on scapegoats rather than solutions. The primary promise of the fascist leader is revenge, which will solve the problems of his followers through some magical process of subtraction rather than addition. Throwing rocks through the windows of Jewish businesses or preventing trans kids from getting gender-affirming care will somehow make your own life better. Break up the families of migrants seeking asylum, and somehow your own inability to care for your sick wife or send your children to college will not hurt so much.

America and England both had fascist movements in the 1930s, but they didn’t catch on like Germany’s. Maybe that was because — even in the depths of the Depression — neither country had Germany-level misery. Neither country experienced quite the sense of failure and loss of hope that made Hitler seem like a compelling way forward.

But Brin points to something else that happened in 1930s America: the New Deal, which confounded Karl Marx’ prediction of ever-increasing dominance by wealthy capitalists, inevitably leading to a revolutionary explosion.

Karl Marx never imagined that scions of wealth – Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his circle – would be persuaded to buy off the workers, by leveling the field and inviting them to share in a strong Middle Class, whose children would then (as recommended by Adam Smith) be able to compete fairly with scions of the rich. 

It was a stunning (if way-incomplete) act of intelligence and resilience that changed America’s path and thus the world’s.

Brin, recalling the lessons of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, invokes the Seldon Paradox: “Accurate psychohistorical predictions, once made known, set into effect psychohistorical forces that falsify the prediction.” In this case, American plutocrats like “that smart crook, Joseph Kennedy” took Marx’ predictions seriously and tried to head them off. Brin quotes Kennedy: “I’d rather be taxed half my wealth so the poor and workers are calm and happy than lose it all to revolution.”

Kennedy’s view was far from universal among the American rich, but it did split the forces of plutocracy, enabling the creation of an American safety net.

Post-war Europe took the lesson further, as Haque describes:

What do Europeans enjoy, still, even though it’s teetering now, that Americans don’t? All those rich, sophisticated social contracts, one supposes, which guarantee them everything from high speed transport to cutting edge healthcare.

But there’s more than that. All that creates — or did for a very long time — a feeling that doesn’t exist in America. A sense of community. A kind of peace, which you can readily see in the absence of gun massacres in Europe, even though, yes, there are guns, if not quite so many. Stronger social bonds and ties — Europeans still have friends, and in America, friendship itself has become a luxury. All that matters.

The short description of what Europe achieved is public happiness.

Fascism is born of rage, fear, despair, which drives people into the arms of demagogues, who blame all those woes on hated subhumans, “others” — and so the truest antidote we know of to all that is human happiness itself.

Revenge, not hope. That observation explains one of the great mysteries of current American politics: why the GOP has no governing program. The party has a clear constituency: the non-college White working class, particularly in rural areas. So why are there no plans to do anything for them?

Think about it: expanding Medicaid to save not just the families of the working poor, but rural hospital systems as well; bringing broadband internet to rural areas; raising the minimum wage; shoring up community colleges — those are all Democratic goals that Republicans do their best to block.

It’s not that Republicans have no proposals. The red-state legislatures they control are buzzing with activity: loosening gun laws, taking away women’s bodily autonomy, banning accurate accounts of racism from schools, defunding libraries, and making trans youth invisible, just to name a few.

But how exactly does that help anybody?

Or take that frequent Trump claim that “They’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way.” Who is after you? How did Trump ever stand in their way? Even a sympathetic NY Post columnist has no answer for that. He spins conspiracy theories of how the Deep State has been out to get Trump from the beginning, but what does any of that have to do with the “you” in Trump’s statement?

What Trump offered “you” was revenge. Those people you hate: the Muslims, the queers, the immigrants, the Blacks, the educated “elite”, and so on. He demeaned them, insulted them, made them suffer. He “owned the libs” and made them hopping mad in ways that you never could have managed on your own..

But he never did anything to improve your life, because that was never the point. It would, in fact, have been counterproductive, because MAGAism needs your misery. If you felt more secure, more hopeful, more capable of dealing with a changing world, then you wouldn’t need revenge any more. And you wouldn’t need Trump.

Beyond the Seldon Paradox. So what happened to public happiness? Now we bounce back to Brin, who quotes a corollary to the Seldon Paradox: After people adjust to dire predictions and cause them to fail, the next generation stops taking the predictions seriously. And then they come true.

In other words, what we are seeing now… a massive, worldwide oligarchic putsch to discredit the very same Rooseveltean social compact that saved their caste and allowed them to become rich… but that led to them surrounding themselves with sycophants who murmur flattering notions of inherent superiority and dreams of harems. Would-be lords, never allowing themselves to realize that yacht has sailed.

In other words: Marx? Who listens to Marx any more? All his nonsense predictions turned out to be laughably false.

So sometime in the 1970s, the plutocratic counter-revolution began. One turning point was the infamous Powell Memo, written in 1971 by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The American system of free enterprise, he wrote, was under broad attack from socialist thinkers, and business leaders had been responding with “appeasement, ineptitude and ignoring the problem”. Powell outlined a multi-faceted program to create a new intellectual climate in America, one more favorable to corporate power and the influence of big money.

Within ten years, Ronald Reagan was president, and the United States had embarked on an era of ever-lower taxes on the rich, restrictions on corporate regulation, and union-busting.

And that was the end of the great American middle class. From 1940 through 1980, income growth among the rich had lagged behind the larger public, but after the Reagan Revolution it rapidly made up the difference.

Then and now. A decline in human happiness and hope can lead to a Marxist revolution. (That was one possibility in Weimar Germany as well.) But it also creates opportunities for fascist scapegoating.

So if you don’t feel as successful as your parents were at the same age, and you see even worse prospects waiting for your children, whose fault is that? Maybe it’s the Jews. Maybe it’s the November criminals who stabbed your valiant German soldiers in the back at Versailles. Maybe it’s the decadent culture of big cities like Berlin: the gays, the transvestites, the young people dancing to that African “monkey music” from America.

If only we had a leader strong enough to make them pay.

See the resemblance?

Lessons. So where does that leave us? What lessons can we draw? One lesson is to keep our own resentment tightly focused on the people who deserve it. Working class Americans who see little hope for their children are not our enemies, even if they vote for our enemies. We shouldn’t want revenge on them, we should want them to have better prospects, so that they lose their own need for revenge.

Us against Them is the fascist conversation. We can’t let ourselves be drawn into it.

Our salvation will not come through their misery. Quite the reverse. If we are to be saved, it will have to be through happiness — everyone’s happiness.

And if we’re lucky, maybe some rebel faction of smart plutocrats will come to see the same thing.

[1] Some want to argue about whether to call this worldwide movement “fascism”. I’ve explained why I do, but if you’d rather reserve the word for Hitler, Mussolini, et al, that’s fine. Trump, Orban, and Bolsonaro are certainly not identical to Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, but I would say that 20th-century fascism differs in some particulars from 21st-century fascism, not that they are completely different animals.

The important thing is that the lack of a word doesn’t lead to an inability to discuss the phenomenon, in the fashion of Orwell’s Newspeak. Simply referring to Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, Modi, et al as “authoritarians” (as Tom Nichols does) is not nearly specific enough. Any general who stages a successful coup is an authoritarian. But an anti-democratic movement that anoints one segment of the citizenry as the “real” or “true” citizens, and scapegoats the “unreal” or “false” citizens as the cause of all the nation’s problems, justifying discrimination and even violence against them — that’s something more than just “authoritarianism”.

In short, I’d be content to use some other word to carry on a discussion with someone who wants Hitler to be unique. But that word has to capture the full evil of the phenomenon, without diluting it by including anyone who finds democratic governance inefficient.

April 17, 2023 – 10:54 am Categories: Articles | Comments (21)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Not much happened this week: The FBI caught the guy who leaked all those documents (and Trump supporters rallied around him). The abortion-pill injunction rose through the judicial system, but is still unresolved. The Fox News trial is about to start. Clarence Thomas is even more corrupt than we realized last week. The Justins made a triumphant return to the Tennessee legislature. Idaho outlawed “abortion trafficking”, while the Missouri House tried to defund all the state’s libraries. Alan Bragg sued Jim Jordan in an attempt to stop his interference in the Trump prosecution. Something something something Bud Light. Oh, and we had another mass shooting of teen-agers.

Hardly anything, in other words.

But I decided to take a step back and look at something longer term: Why is all this happening? Yes, it almost all revolves around the Republican Party’s continuing descent into fascism. But why is that happening? Why now? What global trend opened up opportunities for the likes of Trump, Modi, Orban, Netanyahu, et al?

I found two recent essays that look at this question from different directions, but coalesce around this framing: Fascism is an eternal temptation of modern politics. The mystery isn’t why we have to deal with it now, but why we didn’t have to deal with it for so many years after World War II. How did those lessons get lost?

That post still needs work, so it probably won’t show up until 10 or 11 EDT. (I’ve made it back as far as the central time zone, but I’m trying to run on my usual east-coast schedule today.) The weekly summary will cover the other stuff, and appear by about 1 or so.

April 17, 2023 – 8:33 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (5)

Representatives or Rulers?

The Republican Party in Tennessee succeeded in creating tens of thousands of lifelong Democrats when they did this. … The Tennessee state legislature showed its hand. They’re not representatives, they’re rulers. You don’t get a voice. What you think doesn’t matter. You’re going to do what you’re told. Whether you accept that or not is up to you.

– Beau of the Fifth Column,
speaking to young Tennessee voters after the legislature’s expulsion
of elected representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson

This week’s featured post is “What We Learned from the Trump Indictment“.

This week everybody was talking about the Trump indictment

Believe it or not, he was arraigned and the indictment was unsealed last Tuesday, not even a week ago. Details of the indictment and what happens next are discussed in the featured post.

and the Tennessee Three

If you’re the kind of Sift follower who reads and remembers every word, you’ve heard of Nashville legislator Justin Jones before: Back in February, I linked to this clip of Jones calling out the Tennessee General Assembly’s Republican majority for its hypocrisy in outlawing drag shows “to protect the children”, but ignoring far more serious dangers to the state’s children. Several more Jones speeches have popped up on my social media feeds in the last few months and very nearly made it into the Sift. You could say I’m a fan.

Well, Thursday the majority took its revenge and expelled Jones from the Assembly, along with another eloquent young Black representative, Justin Pearson of Memphis. A White woman, Gloria Johnson from Knoxville, missed expulsion by one vote. (If the votes had been taken in a different order, Johnson might have been expelled too. Pearson was expelled last, and so was able to vote for Johnson. But the margin against Jones and Pearson was more than one vote.)

The trigger for the expulsions was an incident on March 30. A few days before, a shooter had killed three children and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville. Young people from all over the state came to Nashville on the 30th to protest the legislature’s unwillingness to do anything about Tennessee’s gun violence problem. As demonstrators filled the Capitol gallery, Jones, Pearson, and Johnson occupied the floor without recognition from the Republican chair, and led the protesters in chants. The business of the Assembly was disrupted for about an hour.

Tennessee, you should remember, was the birthplace of the KKK. A bust of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest was prominently displayed in the Capitol — I saw it myself in 2013 — until 2021, when Jones was leading a protest movement against it. So it should not be surprising that White Republican Speaker Cameron Sexton would not take lightly such disrespect from uppity young Black representatives. Expulsion is vanishingly rare in Tennessee history — only two representatives have been expelled since 1866, and those were for bribery and sexual misconduct. Expulsion for a violation of “decorum” has no precedent.

But never mind that. Gerrymandering has given Republicans a supermajority, so they could muster the required 2/3rds vote purely on party lines. So the Justins are out. (A clever protest line I’ve been seeing: “No Justins, no peace.“)

Much of the debate prior to the expulsions made it clear that uppity-ness was the Justins’ real crime. Here’s White Republican Rep. Andrew Farmer talking down to Pearson.

That’s why you’re standing there, because of that temper tantrum that day. That yearning to have attention. That’s what you wanted. Well, you’re getting it now.

To which Pearson responded:

You all heard that. How many of you would want to be spoken to that way?

Wikipedia explains what happens next:

The expulsions of Jones and Pearson left vacancies in House Districts 52 and 86. Article 2, Section 15 of the Tennessee State Constitution allows the local legislative body—in this case, the Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County and the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, respectively—to appoint an interim successor until a special election can be held. At least 29 members of the 40-member Davidson County Metropolitan Council have vowed to reappoint Jones; the measure requires a majority of members to approve it. Shelby county commissioner Erika Sugarmon claimed that commissioners were threatened with cuts in state funding for certain local projects during budget negotiations if Pearson were reseated, which was disputed by a spokesperson for the House Speaker.

So local officials are going to send Jones and Pearson right back to the General Assembly. White Speaker Sexton will probably not take that uppity-ness well either, so stay tuned.

Prior to these events, University of Washington Professor Jake Grumbach had quantified the health of democracy in each state.

Grumbach’s State Democracy Index (SDI) grades each state on a series of metrics — like the extent to which a state is gerrymandered at the federal level, whether felons can vote, and the like — and then combines the assessments to give each state an overall score from -3 (worst) to 2 (best).

Tennessee got the lowest score in the nation. Wisconsin (see below) also did badly.

White Speaker Sexton’s draconian response to protest has led some journalists to take a closer look at his own situation. Jud Legum claims to have found a problem much more serious that a breach of “decorum”: Sexton appears not to live in the district he represents.

Just last week, I remarked on the strangeness of the GOP making absolutely no policy moves to change its disastrous performance with young voters, nothing that would say to them “We’re not your enemies”.

Well, in Tennessee, young people showed up in the thousands to tell the legislature what they want — action against gun violence — and the legislature’s response was to expel two young representatives who demonstrated with them. In short: “We are your enemies.” I think a lot of young voters have heard that message loud and clear.

(See below for similar cluelessness in Wisconsin.)

Two of my favorite podcasters have roots in Tennessee, and commented on this week’s events: “liberal redneck” Trae Crowder and Beau of the Fifth Column. Trae’s reaction is funnier, Beau’s more serious.

and abortion pills

As I predicted three weeks ago, the lone federal judge hearing cases in Amarillo did the job Trump appointed him to do: He issued an injunction taking mifepristone, part of the two-drug combination used in almost all medication abortions (which now constitute more than half of abortions nationwide), off the market.

Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s ruling makes precisely the arguments that Adam Unikowsky had debunked over a month ago: An organization of doctors (incorporated in Amarillo precisely to bring this case to his court) has standing to sue, based on a mythic rush of patients they may have to treat after medication abortions go wrong. The FDA was wrong to rely on 20 years of safety data out of Europe, and is wrong now to rely on mifepristone’s 23-year safety record in the United States. The plaintiffs do not have to exhaust the FDA’s own process before suing.

All of this flies in the face of numerous Supreme Court precedents, which Unikowsky cited. But nonetheless, Kacsmaryk found that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail in their claims, justifying an injunction upending the majority of abortions in America.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling is couched in the terms of pro-life propaganda, without even a pretense of objectivity. In footnote 1, for example, he explains why he will use the terms “unborn human” and “unborn child” rather than “fetus”. Throughout his ruling, doctors who prescribe mifepristone are “abortionists”, while the doctors suing are “physicians”.

Unlike abortionists suing on behalf of women seeking abortions, here there are no potential conflicts of interest between the Plaintiff physicians and their patients.

In other words, the plaintiffs’ (and the judge’s) prior commitment to a religious ideology that their patients may not share is not a relevant conflict.

Anyway, this predictable judicial activism won’t stand unless higher courts validate it. The FDA and the Justice Department appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday. This is one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country (another reason for the plaintiffs to choose Amarillo), so we’ll see what happens.

Almost simultaneous with the Amarillo injunction, a federal judge in Washington state issued a contradictory injunction ordering the FDA not to remove mifepristone from the market. That injunction applies to the 17 (blue) states whose attorneys general were suing.

The two rulings will be appealed to different appellate courts. So unless those courts miraculously come to the same conclusion, the fate of mifepristone will ultimately have to be decided by the Supreme Court. When that might happen, and whether the drug will remain available in the meantime, remains to be seen.

and Clarence Thomas

Speaking of the Supreme Court, there’s a new Clarence Thomas scandal.

Thomas, if you remember, has been embroiled in scandal since Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearing in 1991.

Back in 2011, he had to amend 20 years of financial disclosure forms after Common Cause pointed out that he hadn’t listed the sources of his wife Ginni’s income — largely conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation (who have opinions and desires about Supreme Court decisions). He blamed that on “a misunderstanding of the filing instructions”. Common Cause found that explanation “implausible”.

Justice Thomas sits on the highest court of the land, is called upon daily to understand and interpret the most complicated legal issues of our day and makes decisions that affect millions. It is hard to see how he could have misunderstood the simple directions of a federal disclosure form.

Thomas regularly has had conflicts of interests through his wife. In 2011, he didn’t recuse himself from Supreme Court rulings on the Affordable Care Act, despite Ginni’s active lobbying for repeal of the act.

More recently, Thomas didn’t recuse himself from ruling on ex-President Trump’s request that the Court block release of White House records related to January 6. (He was the only justice to vote in Trump’s favor.) When Mark Meadows turned over his text messages, we found out that Ginni had been urging Meadows to urge Trump to challenge the 2020 election, which she called “the greatest Heist of our History”.

The latest scandal is that the Thomases have been accepting massive gifts from billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow for over 20 years, and Justice Thomas hasn’t been reporting them as the law requires. Clarence and Ginni regularly cruise on Crow’s yacht, fly on his private jet, and vacation at his private resort.

In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.

If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.

… These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.

Crow himself has not had cases before the Supreme Court during this time, but he is associated with organizations that often do, like the Club for Growth and the American Enterprise Institute.

He has also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Tea Party organization founded by Ginni Thomas — one that paid her $120,000, ProPublica notes.

Thomas issued a statement making this excuse:

Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.

In other words, Thomas has once again misunderstood the legal requirements. I have three comments on this:

  • As in the Common Cause scandal, Thomas’ defense is that he isn’t very good at law.
  • Even if his false impression were true, Supreme Court justices shouldn’t be trying to squeak through loopholes in the rules. Any idiot should know that accepting these kinds of favors looks really, really bad and would undermine the legitimacy of the Court.
  • Thomas’ “close friend” is someone he didn’t know when he joined the Court.

Meanwhile, elected Republicans and conservative media has been lining up to defend Thomas. The Wall Street Journal editorial page characterized this scandal as a “smear” and “another phony ethics assault to tarnish the Supreme Court”. The “smear” charge is repeated in a tweet from Senator Cornyn.

Last week, many of the same voices were trying to make some sinister connection between Trump-indicting DA Alvin Bragg and billionaire George Soros, because Soros contributed to an organization that contributed to Bragg’s political campaign. But here we have an actual corrupt arrangement, where millions of dollars in benefits accrue to Thomas personally, and it’s no big deal.

I don’t want to make too much of Crow’s collection of Nazi memorabilia. Lots of people collect weird things, after all. But it does seem like a red flag.

and Wisconsin’s stunning election

Most other weeks, this would be the top news story: Wisconsin voters elected a liberal to replace a conservative on the state’s Supreme Court, tipping the balance in the liberal direction for the first time in 15 years.

The result is important for two reasons:

  • Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has been one of the most blatantly partisan in the country, giving Republicans a huge advantage statewide.
  • Wisconsin elections are typically close, and this one wasn’t. The liberal won by 11%.

Let’s start with partisanship. Wisconsin has long been one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, locking in large Republican majorities in spite of a relatively even split among the voters.

Wisconsin is an evenly divided purple state and [Governor] Tony Evers won re-election with 51.2% of the vote, but on the very same 2022 midterm ballots, Republicans won more than 60% of seats in the state legislature.

Republicans also hold six of the state’s eight seats in the House of Representatives.

Many states are gerrymandered because the state’s supreme court tolerates biased maps. But in Wisconsin, the state supreme court chose the map itself, resulting in a map that was even more biased than the previous one. If the new liberal majority tears those maps up, the state could return to a semblance of democracy.

Now let’s talk about that “evenly divided” electorate. In 2016, Trump won the state by 43,000 votes, or less than 1%. In 2020, Biden won by 20,000 votes, a little more than half a percent. But on Tuesday, Janet Protasiewicz beat Daniel Kelly by over 200,000 votes, more than 11%.

We don’t have detailed exit polls that break that victory up according to demographics, but educated opinion attributes the landslide to two groups: women and young people. The court is expected to rule on whether the state’s ancient ban on abortion is back in effect after Dobbs, and Republicans nationwide have a serious problem with young voters.

It’s fascinating watching Republicans try to deal with this reality without changing any of the positions that have alienated women and young voters. National GOP chair Ronna McDaniel said, “When you’re losing by ten points there is a messaging issue” on abortion. But of course there isn’t a “messaging issue”; voters understand very well where the two parties stand on abortion, and they agree with the Democrats.

Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker sounded a similar alarm about young voters. He noted the big margins Democrats ran up among younger voters in the 2022 midterms, and then called attention to the 82% of the vote “the radical” (Protasiewicz) got in Dane County, home of the University of Wisconsin.

But like McDaniel, Walker doesn’t see the need for any policy changes. In his mind, the problem isn’t that the GOP is dominated by climate-change denial, or that it promotes (or at best winks at) racism and homophobia, or that it wants the state to take control of women’s bodies.

This is years of liberal indoctrination come home to roost.

I suppose the obvious answer, then, would be to ban more books, as DeSantis is doing in Florida. But in the real world, the GOP’s problem with young voters isn’t that they’re deluded, it’s that they see all too well what Republicans stand for.

and you also might be interested in …

Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he will pardon newly convicted murderer Daniel Perry if the pardon application reaches his desk.

Perry murdered a demonstrator who was protesting the murder of George Floyd. Both Perry and his victim were armed, so Perry claims self-defense. But he raised that claim in his trial, and a jury of his peers unanimously rejected it. What does Abbott know that they didn’t?

This is yet another example of creeping fascism in red states: brownshirt violence going unpunished. Apparently, in Texas you can get away with murdering people the regime considers undesirable.

Over 100 classified documents have appeared on social media sites, revealing closely held US assessments of the military situation in Ukraine, China, and the Middle East. It’s still not known who released the documents or why.

A. R. Moxon makes an apt analogy I wish I had thought of first: Elon Musk and his Twitter followers resemble Butthead with an army of Beavises.

Along the way he raises a dangerous idea that I haven’t analyzed: Maybe the profit in technological disruption comes from the associated destruction, not the creation.

Jon Cooper explains the folly of Ron DeSantis’ escalating war against Disney:

If he eventually wins, his GOP presidential primary opponents (and Democrats) will rightfully portray him as being anti-business. If he loses, his opponents will ridicule him for having been beaten by a mouse. Either way, the American people are already seeing DeSantis for what he is — thin-skinned, vindictive, stubborn, mean, shortsighted, and not very bright.

Meanwhile, Democrats are using the vagueness of DeSantis’ own laws to try to get his book “The Courage to Be Fascist Free” taken out of school libraries. After all, it contains several “divisive concepts”.

and let’s close with a blast from the past

Yesterday my wife and I were drinking tea at the one table in Cafe Vinyl in Santa Fe (“coffee, records, books, t-shirts”) when the not-quite-30 guy behind the counter cued up a Tom Waits album we used to listen to in the 1970s.

Aside from the sheer nostalgia of it, listening to Waits while the 20-somethings flipped through used vinyl records raised an issue I’ve been thinking about since I read a Slate retrospective on Rod McKuen last fall: What gets remembered and what doesn’t?

One of the weird contradictions of living in the future is that every artist is at the tip of your fingers, but you can only find who your fingers know to search for. In the not-so-distant past, artists could avoid slipping away thanks to only the physical evidence: a record in a thrift store, a used book with a man in a white turtleneck on its cover, murmuring to the bewildered shopper, “Who am I? To whom did I matter? To whom did I stop mattering?”

The Spotify algorithm, Amazon’s recommendations, they’ll never, ever show you Rod McKuen. Those are designed to direct you towards things that other people like right now. But thrift stores, used bookshops, and Goodwills are, accidentally, perfectly designed to show you things that people liked decades ago, then stopped liking.

Unlike McKuen, Waits deserves to be remembered. So here’s one of my favorites from 1976, Waits’ lampoon of salesmanship and advertising, “Step Right Up“.

“You got it, buddy. The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.”

April 10, 2023 – 12:12 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

What we learned from the Trump indictment

If you were hoping for more detail about the DA’s case, you were disappointed. But that doesn’t imply the case against Trump is weak. Now the wheels of justice will grind slowly.

For weeks I’ve been trying not to waste my time (or yours) on speculation, but at last there’s finally something real to talk about.

Donald Trump, a private citizen who no longer has any connection with the presidency, showed up for his arraignment in New York on Tuesday, and his indictment was unsealed. The indictment itself isn’t that interesting: It’s 34 counts of falsifying business records, and each count just lists a record that the DA alleges is false. Like this:

The defendant, in the County of New York and elsewhere, on or about February 14, 2017, with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise, to wit, an entry in the Detail General Ledger for the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, bearing voucher number 842457, and kept and maintained by the Trump Organization

The DA also filed a statement of facts, which lays out some of the narrative he’s going to try to prove in court. The high-level description goes like this:

From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects. In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York. The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.

That expands into 13 pages of details, with reference to testimony and documents that presumably the prosecution is ready to present in court.

But the DA didn’t go into detail about how the legal logic fits together: What exactly is the “other crime” the indictment keeps referring to? Maybe it’s the violation of federal election law Michael Cohen went to jail for. Maybe it’s some related state election crime. Maybe it’s filing a false tax return. DA Bragg doesn’t need to specify at this point, and he doesn’t.

But the “other crime” is a load-bearing component of the case: Without it, the falsified records are just misdemeanors rather than felonies, and it’s possible that the statute of limitations has already run out on them. (One detail various TV commentators have pointed out: The other crime doesn’t have to have been committed; it only had to be intended. So if the other crime is some kind of tax fraud, it doesn’t matter whether the fraudulent tax forms were actually filed.)

Several commentators interpreted this lack of detail as a flaw in the case, and expressed disappointment at the “weak” indictment. I (and several writers more qualified than I am) interpreted it differently: Bragg isn’t trying to win in public opinion, he’s trying to win in court. So (in contrast to the “speaking indictments” we often got from the Mueller investigation), he’ll reveal his strategy to the defense as he has to, and not before. Undoubtedly, the defense will file a motion challenging the indictment’s legal logic, and then Bragg will have to make an argument. We’ll see then how well his structure holds.

A few other things are clear from the indictment and supporting statement: Trump’s claim that he “did absolutely nothing wrong” is just gaslighting. One claim his lawyers have made in the media is that the $130K payment to Stormy Daniels was personal and not campaign related. But then we run into this:

The Defendant directed Lawyer A [Cohen] to delay making a payment to Woman 2 [Daniels] as long as possible. He instructed Lawyer A that if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public. As reflected in emails and text messages between and among Lawyer A, Lawyer B, and the AMI Editor-in-Chief [David Pecker], Lawyer A attempted to delay making payment as long as possible.

If Bragg really has those emails and text messages, the “personal” interpretation goes away: Melania would have been just as upset the day after the election, so the payments are about fooling the voters, not protecting Trump’s marriage.

Also, the steps Trump, Cohen, and Pecker took to hide their actions make it obvious they knew they were up to no good. When Trump reimburses Cohen for the payoffs he’s made, he doubles the amount so that Cohen can declare the payment as income rather than a reimbursement, which might leave a trail back to Trump. After paying taxes on the false “income”, Cohen would have his original payment back. That bit of subterfuge was worth nearly $200K to Trump, so he must have believed he had something to hide.

Another red herring is the idea that the case will come down to whether the jury believes Cohen or Trump. (Since both are habitual liars, such a case couldn’t be “beyond reasonable doubt”.) Cohen (backed up by Pecker) is likely to be the narrator for the evidence presented in documents; his testimony won’t be the substance of the evidence. The jury will have to decide between Trump and the documents, not between Trump and Cohen.

In summary, the case will fall into two parts: The judge will decide the law, and then the jury will decide the facts. The two parts will be practically separate. The judge will decide if the factual claims made by the prosecution would be sufficient to convict Trump of the offenses he’s charged with. If not, the case will be thrown out before it ever reaches the jury. If it does reach the jury, the judge’s instructions will probably tie the facts to the verdict: “If you believe beyond a reasonable doubt that X happened, then you must convict. But if you have reasonable doubt that X is true, then you must acquit.” The jury may not even know about the legal issues the judge has decided.

If DA Bragg has the documents he alludes to in the indictment, then the facts are clear. So if the case reaches the jury, Trump should be convicted.

Criminal justice is a slow process. The prosecution must turn over its evidence to the defense, which then has a chance to review it and possibly ask the judge not to allow some of it. Defense motions about the case (for example, a motion to dismiss the charges for lack of the “other crime”) have to be filed by August 8. The prosecution has until September 19 to respond to those motions, and the judge will announce his decisions on December 4, the next official court date. At that point, the judge would lay out a schedule for the trial, assuming the case is going to trial.

All those dates might be delayed if the motions get appealed up the Supreme Court, as they might.

This means that the trial could be happening during the primary season, with a verdict possible around the time of the conventions. Politically, the process would be smoother if the trial could wrap up before the primaries, so voters could process the verdict rather than media speculation about Trump’s guilt or innocence. But (despite what Trump keeps saying) this isn’t about politics. It’s about the rule of law. So it will happen on its own schedule.

Meanwhile, Trump will try to spin this to his benefit politically, but I have my doubts about how well that’s going to work. This week’s SNL Trump parody was way too on-the-nose.

April 10, 2023 – 8:54 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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