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They are however quite pleased to have their dead family members listened in a spreadsheet.

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By Zanandi Botes Published: May 21st, 2022

2016: "Wells Fargo Fires 5,300 Employees For Creating Millions of Phony Accounts" 2017: "Up To 1.4M More Fake Wells Fargo Accounts Possible" The headlines kept coming.... ("Wells Fargo Hit With 'Unprecedented' Punishment Over Fake Accounts..." "Wells Fargo Employee Informed the Bank of Fake Customer Accounts in 2006") But this week the New York Times reported a new allegation — involving fake job interviews: Joe Bruno, a former executive in the wealth management division of Wells Fargo, had long been troubled by the way his unit handled certain job interviews. For many open positions, employees would interview a "diverse" candidate — the bank's term for a woman or person of color — in keeping with the bank's yearslong informal policy. But Mr. Bruno noticed that often, the so-called diverse candidate would be interviewed for a job that had already been promised to someone else. He complained to his bosses. They dismissed his claims. Last August, Mr. Bruno, 58, was fired. In an interview, he said Wells Fargo retaliated against him for telling his superiors that the "fake interviews" were "inappropriate, morally wrong, ethically wrong." Wells Fargo said Mr. Bruno was dismissed for retaliating against a fellow employee. Mr. Bruno is one of seven current and former Wells Fargo employees who said that they were instructed by their direct bosses or human resources managers in the bank's wealth management unit to interview "diverse" candidates — even though the decision had already been made to give the job to another candidate. Five others said they were aware of the practice, or helped to arrange it...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sen. Susan Collins is safe back home in Maine from both marauding chalk bearers who would write messages for her in front of her house politely asking her to represent them, and from journalists trying to figure out why in the world she would call the cops on those people.

She also seems utterly unembarrassed by the fact that her constituents are a) forced to attempt to communicate with her by writing chalked messages outside her home because she won’t actually meet with them, and b) that she would actually call the cops on said constituents. I mean, seriously, - they said “please” in their messages about how she should fulfill her long-standing promises to protect abortion rights.

“Susie, please, Mainers want WHPA —–> vote yes, clean up your mess,” Mainers wrote in a chalk message outside Collins’ Bangor home Maine. Over that, she called the cops. Not only is Collins unembarrassed by fact, she actually came up with a statement lauding the Bangor police for protecting her. Against chalk. “We are grateful to the Bangor police officers and the City public works employee who responded to the defacement of public property in front of our home.” Chalk.

“The message was not overtly threatening,” a police spokesman said.

Russel Neiss with Muckrock was curious about what prompted Collins to actually call 911 over chalk, so he filed a Maine Freedom of Access Act information request, asking for the 911 recording. The response is as ridiculous as that 911 call must have been.

In the process, we learn that while Collins did call police, she didn’t use the emergency 911 line. So there’s that.

“Since the ‘phone call’ related to this matter did not go to a ‘public safety answering point’ aka 911 call center, we can neither provide a copy, or written transcript of it. Doing so would constitute an ‘unwarranted’ invasion of personal privacy, Title 16 Sec 804-3,” Sergeant Wade Betters, Public Information Officer for Bangor Police Department, informed Neiss.

No, I don’t understand the use of quotation marks there, either.

That really makes you want to hear the call though, right? I mean, if the Bangor Police Department is working so hard to protect her “personal privacy” it’s got to be embarrassing. Or it would be if it wasn’t Collins. She’s clearly not capable of experiencing that reaction.

All new buildings in the EU would be fitted with solar panels on their roofs under plans to turbocharge a drive for renewable energy to replace the continent's need for Russian oil and gas. From a report: The European Commission wants half the bloc's energy to come from renewable sources by 2030, more than double the current figure. The total cost of achieving this would reach hundreds of billions of euros but be offset by an annual $88.6bn saving on imported fuel, according to a copy of the plan seen by the Financial Times and dubbed RepowerEU. One proposal is to "introduce an obligation to have rooftop solar installations for all new buildings and all existing buildings of energy performance class D and above [the most energy-intensive]." The original EU plan to cut carbon emissions by 55 per cent of their 1990 level by 2030 called for a target of 40 per cent renewables. But the war in Ukraine has spurred Brussels to seek energy independence from Russia, which accounts for 40 per cent of the region's gas and about 20 per cent of its oil supplies. Householders will pay an average of $326 extra a year under the plans.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Senate overcame the traditional week-long hissy fit by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to round out its week of work by passing the $40 billion Ukraine aid package requested by President Joe Biden. The House had its own obstructionist Republicans to overcome, but finished out the week passing legislation to deal with energy company price gouging and trying to ease the baby formula shortage.

According to MSN, Paul—in defiance of his senior senator, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—had held up the package for a week, demanding that the bill include the appointment of an inspector general to oversee the spending. Last Thursday, Paul refused to agree to an amendment vote on his proposal, stopping the chamber from moving forward. “No matter how sympathetic the cause, my oath of office is to the national security of the United States of America,” Paul said according to MSN. “We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the U.S. economy.”

“They’re only asking for the resources they need to defend themselves against this deranged invasion,” McConnell said of the Ukrainians on the floor last week. “And they need this help right now.” Eventually Paul relented. He got no changes made to the bill the House had already overwhelmingly passed earlier this month, and the bill passed the Senate 86-11.

Ten other Republicans joined with Paul to vote against it: Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, John Boozman of Arkansas, Mike Braun of Indiana, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Mike Lee of Utah, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

Washington state Sen. Emily Randall and RuralOrganizing.org's Matt Hildreth talk about what they're seeing and hearing while knocking on doors this week on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

“It appears more and more MAGA Republicans are using the same soft-on-Putin playbook used by former President Trump,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said of those 11 according to Capitol Hill correspondent Jamie Dupree. It’s hard to argue otherwise.

None of those MAGA senators, however, were willing to stop the Senate from passing the House infant formula bill by unanimous consent, meaning no roll call vote was forced. That bill authorizes the Department of Agriculture to waive some of the restrictions in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to ensure needy families have access to formula. It would allow WIC participants to purchase whatever brand of formula is available. Usually the vouchers provided through WIC only allow a single brand.

“The Senate has just passed legislation to help ease the terrible nightmare parents are facing trying to find baby formula for their kids,” Schumer said after the bill passed according to CNN. “It’s rare that we have unanimity in the Senate on important measures, and I wish we had more. But this is one of these important issues and I’m glad we’re acting with one voice.”

That bill has passed in the House with nine Republicans voting against it—the usual MAGA caucus suspects. Before that vote, though, 192 Republicans told American babies to starve, refusing to pass a relative paltry $28 million in emergency funding for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The bill would give the FDA extra funding to “prevent fraudulent products from being placed on shelves and to help acquire better data on the infant formula marketplace,” and to “strengthen the workforce focused on formula issues, and increases FDA inspection staff.” That bill did pass in the House 231-192, but prospects for it in the Senate are murky.

The Senate is also likely to bring a grinding halt to other House achievements for the week. On Wednesday, it passed legislation in response to the Buffalo white supremacist massacre. It would create domestic terrorism offices in three federal agencies. Just one Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, voted with Democrats on this one. A similar bill was passed back in September 2020 with a unanimous voice vote in the House. Republicans blocked it in the Senate in 2020 and will almost certainly do so again.

They’ll do the same with the oil company price-gouging bill the House passed Thursday. It would give the Federal Trade Commission authority to investigate price-gouging on the part of energy companies, a deterrence mechanism to try to prevent the oil companies from exploiting crises like global pandemics and wars. Every Republican voted against that, along with four “moderate” Democrats: Reps. Kathleen Rice of New York, Stephanie Murphy of Florida, Jared Golden of Maine, and Lizzie Fletcher of Texas.

All this happened in a week in which our old favorite band of nihilists in the House Freedom Caucus pissed off just about everybody. (Rand Paul can do it single-handedly in the Senate—it takes a caucus in the House.) The maniacs have been refusing to allow the uncontroversial stuff in the House from being passed under suspension of the rules and have been forcing dozens of roll call votes.

That eats up a lot of time. It also has messed up travel schedules and—this is what really chaps the asses of fellow Republicans—interfered with scheduled fundraisers. “Demanding roll call votes on every bill comes at a cost,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) told CNN. “Some of these vote series go on for hours, and members lose meetings with constituents as an example.” Even one anonymous Freedom Caucus maniac is opposed to the tactic. “It’s screwing all of us,” they told CNN, because it makes the caucus look unserious and weakens its influence. Yes, the very serious and influential Freedom Caucus is jeopardized by the actions of the Freedom Caucus.

“They’re like second graders, throwing tantrums every day,” said Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, told CNN. “It’s clear (House Minority Leader) Kevin McCarthy has no control over his members. I get more complaints from Republicans about these votes than I do from Democrats.”

He doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for his Republican colleagues who are saying it takes way too long to have the votes on the roll call votes they are forcing. “Tough shit,” McGovern said. “They look like a bunch of clowns.”

They get a break, having no more floor votes scheduled until after the Memorial Day recess, coming back on June 7. The Senate will be back in next Tuesday, when perhaps they’ll be trying to figure out how to pass increasingly critical COVID-19 funding.

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House Democrats passed a bill on Thursday night that would let the Federal Trade Commission investigate price gouging allegations against energy companies. Gas prices have been at record highs in recent weeks, and while legitimate supply chain issues account for some of that, the gas companies are also pulling in record profits.

”At a time when people in my district and across the country are feeling the pain of high prices at the gas pump, Congress needs to be doing all we can to bring down costs,” Rep. Kim Schrier, one of the bill’s sponsors, said in a statement. “Gas prices in my neighborhood were already high at $5/ gallon two weeks ago. Now, for no apparent reason, prices are up another 10% in the last week, at $5.50/ gallon. Meanwhile, neither the price of a barrel of oil nor the cost of refining have changed appreciably. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) needs to have the power to investigate and crack down when there is evidence of real gouging.”

RELATED STORY: Democratic leadership seizes on Warren's idea to fight price gouging by oil companies 

Four Democrats joined Republicans in opposing the measure, which is guaranteed to be filibustered by Republicans in the Senate.

As U.S. consumers paid higher prices at the pump, Exxon’s profits in the first quarter of 2022 were more than double what they were in the first quarter of 2021. BP’s quarterly profit was its highest in more than a decade. But Republicans don’t want the Federal Trade Commission to be able to even investigate price-gouging.

How do we wean ourselves off of dictator oil. Daily Kos’ Meteor Blades and Mark Sumner join Markos Moulitsas on The Brief podcast to discuss

The Republican opposition to the government doing anything to rein in price-gouging by oil companies came a day after most House Republicans voted against a bill providing the Food and Drug Administration with $28 million in funding to help address the baby formula shortage. And it came two days after every Republican but one voted against a domestic terrorism bill in the wake of the racist mass shooting in Buffalo.

All this is, at base, because Republicans do not want the government to be effective at solving problems. They want the problems to continue so that they can use them as bludgeons against President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats. Gaining an advantage for November’s elections is desirable to Republicans in a way that ensuring babies are fed and people can afford gas to drive to work are simply not.

It’s true, Republicans are also not interested in limiting gas company profits, at least unless and until those gas companies do something outrageous like speak out for the rights of LGBTQ kids, and they’re not interested in addressing domestic terrorism or the guns often used to carry it out. Protecting Black people in a supermarket from a heavily armed white supremacist would not be a Republican priority. (Go figure.) But most of all, they just want to reap partisan benefit from things going badly in this country, and they’re willing to block potential solutions to keep things going badly.

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192 House Republicans vote against easing the baby formula shortage

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The government is trying to solve the formula shortage while Republicans continue to blame Biden.

How Hungary turned replacement theory into state ideology.

On May 16, just days after the deadly mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, motivated by conspiratorial fears of white Westerners’ “Great Replacement” by minorities, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán endorsed the shooter’s ideology in a nationally televised speech.

“Part of the picture of the decade of war facing us will be recurring waves of suicidal policy in the Western world. One such suicide attempt that I see is the great European population replacement program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants, with adults arriving from other civilizations,” Orbán said.

Orbán is a close observer of American politics; the speech literally contains an exhortation to “make Hungary great again.” It is implausible, as the Guardian notes, that he was unaware of the concern in Washington over “Great Replacement” ideology — a conspiracy theory that posits a shadowy plan to “replace” the white Western population with immigrants and the children of nonwhites.

But Orbán is not adopting this language in response to events in America: It has been a central element of his ideology for years.

“I think there are many people who would like to see the end of Christian Europe,” he said in a representative 2018 radio interview. “They believe that if they replace its cultural subsoil, if they bring in millions of people from new ethnic groups which are not rooted in Christian culture, then they will transform Europe according to their conception.”

In contemporary Hungary, we see a country where “Great Replacement” theory dominates not just official rhetoric but also policy. Migrants are treated cruelly at the border, while the government casts LGBTQ minorities as a threat to Hungarian birthrates and pushes a message to convince women to take up “traditional” roles as homemakers and mothers. Advocates for immigration and immigrant rights, like the Hungarian American Jewish philanthropist George Soros, are described as enemies of the state and attacked accordingly.

Meanwhile, Republicans are increasingly seeing Orbánism as a model. Currently, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) is holding a major conference in Budapest. Orbán gave a speech Thursday morning; both Tucker Carlson and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows will be giving addresses by videoconference. The event serves as ratification of a trend I’ve been writing about for years: the GOP’s evolution into an illiberal faction that closely resembles Orbán’s Fidesz party.

At the conference, my colleague Noel King met with István Kiss, the executive director of the Danube Institute, a government-sponsored think tank with links to prominent Western conservatives. She asked Kiss directly whether his government’s embrace of replacement theory bothered him. He said, more or less, that it didn’t.

“If Hungary changes, then Hungary no longer exists,” he says. “If you have a society or civilization which is unwilling to reproduce themselves, then that shows that there’s something wrong within our societies. Because that’s strange; that’s kind of suicidal.”

These are the ideas spreading out from Budapest to Washington. And the implications for America are more than a little ominous.

How Orbán turned the “Great Replacement” into governing ideology

In the United States, replacement theory has been popular with the racist fringe — people like the Buffalo shooter and Charlottesville, Virginia, marchers — for decades. Only recently has it made its way into the GOP mainstream, due in no small part to the influence of Carlson’s Fox show.

In Europe, the idea is widespread among both neo-Nazis and the continent’s far-right political parties, like the Netherlands’ Freedom Party and Germany’s AfD. After these parties surged in popularity in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis, such ideas moved closer to the political mainstream. During the 2022 French presidential election, Valérie Pécresse — the candidate of the center-right Republican party — used the term “Great Replacement” in a campaign speech railing against immigration.

But nowhere has the idea been more influential than Hungary, where Orbán and his increasingly far-right Fidesz party has engineered the political system to give itself a virtual hammerlock on power without parallel in the European Union. The Hungarian prime minister has elevated fear of demographic replacement into a central governing ideology, serving as justification for a policy agenda that demonizes minorities and helps cement his hold on power.

Orbán’s vision goes like this: Hungary is a small country of about 10 million people, with a unique culture and language, that has been repeatedly invaded and subjugated throughout its history. Today, the biggest threat to this nation’s continuation is low birthrates: “Hungarians are an endangered species,” as he once put it.

Immigration to Europe from the Middle East and Africa is, in this worldview, the principal reason for this “endangered” status. Because Orbán sees “Hungarianness” as defined in ethnonational terms, there is no sense that the children of migrants could ever become Hungarian. By bringing in their own cultures and languages, he believes, they pose an existential threat to the Hungarian nation’s future.

Armend Nimani/AFP via Getty Images

“We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children. In our minds, immigration means surrender,” as he put it in a 2019 speech. “If we resign ourselves to the fact that we are unable to sustain ourselves even biologically, by doing so we admit that we are not important even for ourselves.”

Only about 2.1 percent of the Hungarian population is foreign-born, according to 2020 data (though that’s up from 1.6 percent in 2018). Most hail from nearby European states, like Ukraine and Romania; 97 percent of the country’s population is currently made up of ethnic Hungarians. Yet Orbán still describes migration as a deliberate plot against Hungary — an intentional replacement orchestrated by bureaucrats in Brussels and George Soros.

“What they want is that henceforward it will increasingly not be we and our descendants who live here, but others,” he said in a speech commemorating the country’s 1848 revolution. “External forces and international powers want to force all this upon us, with the help of their allies here in our country.”

The upshot of this conspiracy theory is that Orbán and his allies in Fidesz are justified in doing nearly anything — however cruel and authoritarian — in service of preventing migration. They have built a fence on the border with Serbia to block migrants from entering; when I visited there in 2018, I saw a detention center, with some migrants stuck in a miserable processing system while others slept in squalid tents on the Hungarian side.

That year, the government passed something called the “Stop Soros” law: a bill punishing Hungarian people and organizations for “promoting and supporting illegal migration,” with provisions so broadly worded that, in theory, the government could arrest someone who provides food to an undocumented migrant on the street or attends a political rally in favor of their rights.

Replacement theory’s influence extends beyond immigration policy. Orbán’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric centers on the idea that “gender ideology” poses a threat to Hungarian continuity by allegedly weakening the heterosexual family (and thus discouraging reproduction). This view is so central to Fidesz’s thinking that, in 2021, it codified it as a constitutional amendment.

“Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman established by voluntary decision, and the family as the basis of the survival of the nation,” the amendment reads. “Family ties shall be based on marriage or the relationship between parents and children. The mother shall be a woman, the father shall be a man.”

Some of Hungary’s birthrate-related policies are less alarming: Subsidies for families with children, in particular, are entirely defensible social policy. However, they take place in a broader context of government rhetoric and policymaking that sees women as obligated to serve the nation by becoming mothers and homemakers.

“I’d like to have an agreement with the Hungarian ladies, and their role in the nation’s future,” the prime minister once said. “Childbearing is a private matter, but also a very public one.”

Replacement theory, from Budapest to Washington

It’s unclear how much Orbán actually believes his “Great Replacement” theorizing. In the 1980s and ’90s, he positioned himself as a committed political liberal before making an abrupt right turn. Hungary is a socially conservative country by European standards, so some of his polices on this front are genuinely popular. And many of the policies justified by replacement rhetoric just so happen to weaken his enemies and expand state power to stifle dissent, furthering his undemocratic regime’s primary goal of staying in power.

Regardless of his true beliefs, Orbán is now very committed to the politics of replacement and has invested in exporting it — attempting to build an alliance of far-right Western politicians, bringing prominent right-wing intellectuals to meet with him in Budapest, and even funding institutes and journals that spread the tenets of Orbán thought in English.

He seems to have found his greatest success in the United States, where the leading figures in the Republican Party are seeing him as a model.

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In January, Donald Trump endorsed Orbán in the latter’s reelection bid, calling him a “strong leader” who “truly loves his country and wants safety for his people.” Later that month, the party’s leading media ally Tucker Carlson released a special titled Hungary vs. Soros that attempted to disseminate Orbán’s “Great Replacement” mythology to an American audience.

In the episode, Carlson argues that migration to Hungary is akin to an actual military invasion — one in which migrants are effectively trying to colonize Hungary and replace its population with their babies.

“Unlike the threats from the Soviets and the Ottoman Empire, the threat posed by George Soros and his nonprofit organizations is much more subtle and hard to detect,” Carlson says. Not coincidentally, Carlson is the leading mainstream exponent of the idea that a similar process is underway in America: arguing that Democrats are using immigration policy to conduct “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.”

And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis — a leading figure in the GOP and potential 2024 candidate — is pioneering a kind of American Orbánism. While DeSantis has not openly endorsed Orbán’s replacement rhetoric in the way Carlson does, he has picked up on the style of using social conservative ideas as a justification for policies that attack one’s political enemies. There’s some evidence that his infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill was directly influenced by Hungary’s recently passed restrictions on LGBTQ speech.

Which brings us back to CPAC in Budapest. The group has held international events before in attempts to build cross-national conservative linkages, but this is its first conference in Europe. Even though few prominent Republican politicians are attending in person, the significance for the direction of the conservative movement is lost on no one.

The trans-Atlantic mainstreaming of “Great Replacement” rhetoric is especially troubling, given that it has inspired white supremacist attacks on mosques in New Zealand, Latinos in El Paso, and, most recently, Black shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket. It is a style of thinking that is not only conspiratorial, but inherently prone to justifying violence and repression. It posits that the very existence of nonwhite people in a country is a threat to the body politic.

We have seen how this has facilitated the development of an illiberal authoritarian state in Hungary; it seems the Republican Party has no qualms about traveling down a similar path. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the No. 3 ranking Republican in the House, has shown no contrition for her past comments endorsing replacement theory. And there are no signs she will face any consequences.

During Orbán’s address at CPAC Budapest, he outlined a 12-point “recipe” for political success that the American right could borrow. The very first point, he said, “is that we must play by our own rules” — that conservatives “must not be discouraged by being shouted at, by being labeled unfit, or by being treated as troublemakers.”

In context of recent developments, this advice sounds less like friendly pointers and more like the words of an enabler. And it’s clear the Republican Party is taking the idea to heart.

Today, Explained, Vox’s daily news explainer podcast, is following CPAC to Hungary. In a three-part series May 18-20, host Noel King reports on why American conservatives want to align themselves with — and express such admiration for — an increasingly authoritarian country. Listen to Today, Explained wherever you find podcasts.

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The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is denying defendants their constitutional right to a jury trial by putting them in front of its own internal judges. From a report: In a 2-1 ruling, the court ruled for George Jarkesy and Patriot28 LLC, who sued the SEC in 2011 after the agency imposed a $300,000 fine and other punishments in a securities fraud case. Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote in the majority opinion that the SEC violated the Seventh Amendment's right to a jury trial by bringing defendants before in-house judges and allowing the agency to "act as both prosecutor and judge." Congress also unconstitutionally delegated power to the SEC to act as a legislative body, Elrod wrote. "'We the People' are the fountainhead of all government power. Through the Constitution, the people delegated some of that power to the federal government so that it would protect rights and promote the common good," Elrod said. "But that accountability evaporates if a person or entity other than Congress exercises legislative power." In a dissenting opinion, Judge Eugene Davis disagreed, saying the right to a jury trial did not pertain to administrative proceedings and that the SEC was enforcing laws and statutes in the public interest.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kansas’ highest court on Wednesday upheld a Republican redistricting law that makes it harder for the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation to win reelection in a big victory for the GOP.

The state Supreme Court declined for now to declare that overly partisan gerrymandering violates the Kansas Constitution. The ruling sets district boundaries less than a month before the state’s June 10 filing deadline for congressional candidates.

The court’s opinion was two paragraphs long, saying only that the voters and voting rights group challenging the map “have not prevailed on their claims” that the map violated the state constitution and that a full opinion would come later.

The brief decision was written by Justice Caleb Stegall, who is seen as the most conservative of the court’s seven justices, five of whom were appointed by Democratic governors. During arguments from attorneys on Monday, he questioned whether anyone could clearly define improper partisan gerrymandering.

Lawsuits over new congressional district lines have proliferated across the U.S., with Republicans looking to recapture a U.S. House majority in this year’s midterm elections. Congressional maps in at least 17 states have inspired lawsuits, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.

In the past, congressional district lines have been reviewed by federal judges and not the state Supreme Court. The conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision in 2019 that complaints about partisan gerrymandering are political issues and not for the federal courts to resolve.

The state’s Republican-appointed solicitor general argued in defending the GOP-drawn map that because the state constitution doesn’t specifically mention gerrymandering or congressional redistricting, the Kansas Supreme Court should reject the legal challenges. He and other state officials said that the justices had no guidance on how to define improper political gerrymandering.

“It’s elected legislators who are best positioned to determine how to balance out the competing interests,” Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican, told reporters after the state Supreme Court heard arguments Monday.

Democrats argued that the map was drawn to help Republicans unseat Democratic U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids in the 3rd District, in the Kansas City area, and that it diluted the political clout of Black and Latino voters. Twenty voters and a voting rights group, Loud Light, filed three lawsuits that were consolidated into one, and a lower court sided with them.

State Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes, a Kansas City-area Democrat, said Republicans had “disrespected, ignored and gaslit engaged voters from the very start.”

And House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer, a Wichita Democrat, added: “The decision regarding Congressional maps opens a Pandora’s box for even worse political gerrymandering in the future.”

State courts have issued decisions favoring Democrats in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. New York’s highest court recently declared that that state’s new districts were gerrymandered to favor Democrats.

The Kansas lawsuits argued that the state’s bill of rights prohibits partisan gerrymandering by declaring that “free governments” are formed for the people’s “equal protection and benefits” and that the state’s residents have “equal and inalienable natural rights” including, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The state Supreme Court also cited that latter provision in 2019 in declaring access to abortion a “fundamental” right in Kansas.

Republican legislative leaders argued that based on 2020 election results, Davids still could win her new district. They said their map was a fair way to rebalance the population in each of the state’s congressional districts to make them as equal as possible after 10 years of demographic shifts.

The map moved the northern part of Kansas City, Kansas, out of the 3rd District represented by Davids and into the larger 2nd District of eastern Kansas represented by Republican Rep. Jake LaTurner. Kansas City, Kansas, is among the few Democratic strongholds in the GOP-leaning state. Davids lost territory where she performs well, while the new map added several rural, heavily Republican counties to her district.

The map also moved the liberal northeastern Kansas city of Lawrence — a Democratic stronghold that is home to the main University of Kansas campus and is only about 40 miles (64 kilometers) west of Kansas City — out of the 2nd District. Instead, the city of 95,000 has been added to the already sprawling 1st District, which is dominated by small conservative communities in central and western Kansas.

The lower court’s ruling relied heavily on the testimony of a University of Michigan political scientist who used a computer algorithm to produce 1,000 alternative redistricting plans to conclude that the new districts “are extreme pro-Republican partisan outliers.”

In a separate ruling, the state Supreme Court also upheld maps drawn by Republicans for legislative districts that are expected to preserve the GOP’s supermajorities in both chambers.

For the fourth time in four years, Democrats are wondering how to grapple with the policy issue they believe will decide the next election. First it was health care. Then it was Covid. Next it was infrastructure. Now it’s inflation. But if the party fails to galvanize a winning coalition in November, maybe it’s time to reconsider the role of policy in electoral politics altogether.

Politicians and political thinkers, particularly in liberal circles, often talk about elections and politics as if they are centered around a handful of core topics: the economy, health care, immigration, taxes. Voters don’t care about the day-to-day drama of Washington, D.C., this theory says. Instead, their attention is focused on an unchanging set of issues — mostly things that affect their personal lives. The way to win these voters over, the reasoning continues, is to propose policies that will address these core concerns. The idea is a close cousin to a more general one, that all politics is downstream of economic conditions, and voting behavior primarily reflects voters’ evaluations of the parties’ competing kitchen-table economic proposals.

That means no self-respecting Democrat would be caught dead without a detailed policy platform. Media appearances and campaign ads are treated as opportunities to zero in on topics that “everyday Americans care about,” not to fulminate against opponents or pick culture-war battles. This produces campaigns built around sober, economically oriented and slightly dull themes: prescription drug pricing, or how many jobs a new law will produce. Because policy is pragmatic and outcome-driven, urgent appeals to voters’ personal values are kept to a minimum. Democrats seem to assume their coalition is united more by their economic self-interest than by their moral commitments. But recent events should put that assumption in doubt.

Across the aisle, obviously, a different ethos has prevailed. Republicans have adopted an aggressive, freewheeling politics that tends to center anything sufficiently lurid, enraging, frightening or energizing: Socialism, “the caravan,” Ebola, Doctor Seuss, critical race theory. The list goes on and on. Outside of an effort to launch assaults along fault lines of race, gender, sexuality or age, there’s no consistent set of real-world issues or policies being addressed.

Where Democratic politics is characterized by a rigid left-brain approach that evaluates a list of issues and tries to prioritize each one in accordance to its presumed salience, the GOP in recent years has been pure right-brain: Emotion leads, everything else follows. One side’s tactics are highly structured. The other’s are postmodern, assuming that any narrative can be forced into political relevance, mostly by dint of being shouted about.

If it were true that politics was about a small set of core policy issues, the Democratic approach would be clearly and unambiguously superior. After all, in many respects, it is the only party even attempting to tackle such concerns. In 2020, the Democratic Party platform ran for 92 pages and touched on every traditional policy issue in the country. Infamously, the GOP did not even produce a platform, instead releasing a one-page resolution professing uncompromised loyalty to Donald Trump and his aims, whatever those may have been.

But election results do not suggest that Democrats have a smarter approach. The party has run slightly ahead in most recent elections, but hardly by a margin that suggests they have a powerful fundamental advantage — and certainly not enough to consistently overcome the structural hurdles facing them in the Senate and Electoral College.

In the 2018 midterms, Democrats won the House solidly, but there was no evidence that the party’s singular campaign focus on maintaining health coverage for preexisting conditions was transformative. The suburban-urban coalition that delivered the election was the same one that rallied against Trump in 2016 and 2020. In 2020, the country faced no shortage of real-world policy problems, most notably the Covid-19 pandemic. Characteristically, Democrats were convinced that the pandemic would define the election and focused campaign efforts around it. But while the policy-laden Biden defeated the policy-absent Trump, head-to-head polls barely budged throughout the year, and, in the final total, Trump achieved essentially the same vote share as in 2016.

More than anything else, the 2018 and 2020 results — and the freakish stability of Trump’s approval rating throughout his presidency — suggested that the main subject in U.S. politics since 2016 was not any policy issue, but Trump himself. A large number of Americans strongly supported the man; a somewhat larger number loathed him. Everything else in their voting behavior seemed to flow outward from that.

And yet most Democrats specifically avoided making their campaigns about Trump, refusing to accept that he could be a more salient issue than the traditional set of policy concerns. Perhaps as a result, down-ballot Republicans substantially outperformed Trump himself.

Trump’s centrality to voters broke all the assumed rules. Here was an all-consuming political force, one that largely washed out the electoral effects of tumultuous real-world events. It was attenuated from specific policy proposals and only indirectly linked to anyone’s day-to-day material wellbeing. It was a topic defined mainly by moral and emotional narratives on both sides. Yet, Trump shaped political reality. Few felt, or feel, indifferent.

Democrats face a dire midterm in 2022. If the party’s business-as-usual strategy keeps falling flat, it might be time to reflect on the success of the GOP’s political postmodernism. Democrats should consider that politics, rather than being about a short list of predetermined issues, can really be about anything at all. Political narratives don’t have to stick to tried-and-true positioning around health care, immigration or taxes. They just have to tell a good story.

Plenty of potent civic sentiments are available. The desire to defend community and democracy — whether against creeping disease, conquering foreign despots or far-right insurrection — reaches across countless demographic groups. Support for fundamental values like fairness and patriotism is shared as widely as any policy preference. From civil rights and racial injustice to prohibition and abolitionism, American history is packed full of intrinsically moral causes that galvanized the public, both quickly and slowly. Nor should negative sentiments be written off. Nobody likes a crooked politician, and public fury over injustice or graft has driven many votes in the past. And few emotions motivate people as well as fear — like the fear of unelected judges eliminating basic reproductive rights.

Some Democrats seem to have figured this out. Barack Obama’s successful campaigns leaned heavily on themes of inspiration and forward progress, dovetailing with his own oratory and the gravity of his personal presence. In the 2020 Georgia Senate runoff, Jon Ossoff successfully hammered David Perdue’s perceived corruption, a tactic Democrats have ample opportunity to wield against Trump and his allies.

Democrats that are newer on the political scene also seem more comfortable living in this reality than party elders. It isn’t just congressional lefties like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. John Fetterman, who just swept to victory in the Pennsylvania Senate primary, has noted that voters make up their minds based on a “visceral” feeling — and he has notably avoided efforts to pigeonhole him as a progressive. Even some relative moderates, like Pete Buttigieg in the 2020 presidential campaign and Beto O’Rourke in the 2018 Texas Senate race, have overperformed expectations with campaigns built more around memorable personas and emotionally evocative narratives than fine-tuned issue positions.

None of this is to say that there’s a single right way for Democrats to stave off disaster in 2022. There is no formula here. Issue polls can give hints about the sort of political stories that might catch on, but they ultimately cannot predict the future. Audiences often don’t know what they’ll respond to until they see it. What’s more — as is obviously true in other mediums, but can be strangely overlooked in political campaigns — presentation is often as important as content. Embedded in genuinely emotive language or evocative imagery, even standard talking points can suddenly become inspiring or thrillingly combative. Who’s surprised Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow went viral simply for standing up for herself and her values? But a lot of Democratic campaigning focuses on matters like highway funding or drug pricing, which seem practically lab-constructed to repel any kind of emotional response outside of boredom.

Ultimately, politics has been around a lot longer than issue polls or even public policy. The standardization of national campaigns into a mechanical, poll-driven enterprise has not produced obvious benefits for the Democratic Party. For most of history, politics was an intuitive art, not a mechanical science. Democrats should remember this — and going forward, pursue a little more artistry and a little less math.

It’s easy to caricature Justice Samuel Alito, author of the draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade, as an arch-conservative. His relentlessly right-of-center votes tell as much. Likewise, his early, subtly disparaging nickname, “Scalito,” suggests he is a mere mini-me clone of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. But this sells short Alito, who will be a senior and guiding figure in the Supreme Court’s newly empowered conservative bloc.

For Alito is not just a conservative. He’s not a consistent “originalist” in the vein of Scalia or Justice Clarence Thomas, only a “practical” one. The key to understanding Alito is not judicial philosophy or ardent conservatism: it’s his anger — an anger that resonates with the sentiments of many voters, especially white and male ones, who feel displaced by recent social and cultural changes. If you want to understand what to expect from the post-Roberts Court, paying attention to that anger pays dividends.

In both his public actions and his opinions, Alito has a confrontational, take-no-quarter approach. It offers a sharp contrast with his fellow Catholic, fellow alumnus of the executive branch and fellow former court-of-appeals-judge John Roberts. Partly this is a matter of each man drifting a different way over time — Roberts to the left in his role as a chief trying to steer his court, Alito to the right less tethered by commitment to the court as an institution. Yet that differing pattern of ideological change is also fueled by their distinct temperaments and bedrock beliefs.

In the popular imagination, Brett Kavanaugh is the angry justice — thanks to his searing opening statement at his 2018 confirmation hearing. But Kavanaugh’s reasoning on the bench is legalist, his tone measured, his scholarly interests running to the technical, even esoteric. Not so Alito: In the Dobbs draft, in his earlier abortion decisions, in his opinions on affirmative action and elsewhere, there is a starkly personal and emotional quality lacking in other justices. Roe is “egregiously wrong and deeply damaging.” Same-sex marriage should not be recognized as a constitutional right because such a decision “will be used to vilify Americans … unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.” The hypothetical risk of critical, First-Amendment protected speech, for Alito, sufficed to deny the dignity of marital recognition to same-sex couples.

A seething and resentful anger can be traced to a tetchy 2006 confirmation hearing, from which his wife fled in theatrical tears. It registered during the first official State of the Union address delivered by a Black president, when Barack Obama’s comments on a campaign finance ruling caused Alito to visibly respond “not true.” When his female colleagues Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan have read opinions from the bench, Alito repeatedly would purse his lips, roll his eyes, and (again) mouth “no.” Perhaps Alito subjects white male antagonists to the same openly disdainful — and nakedly unjudicial — displays of contempt. But there is no public record to suggest as much.

Instead, Alito’s anger consistently sounds in a register of cultural decline, bemoaning the growing prominence of women and minorities in American life. Writing the majority opinion in Hobby Lobby, which endorsed a company’s right to deny employees contraception coverage, Alito waxed lyrically about the “men and women who wish to run their businesses as for-profit corporations in the manner required by their religious beliefs.” The women denied medical care that facilitates participation in the labor market, in contrast, weren’t a concern. Examining a Washington state regulation of pharmacists, Alito was quick to detect “hostility” to conservative religious beliefs. And in an opinion repudiating New Haven’s effort to promote more Black firefighters, Alito alone trawled the history of the case to complain about the role played by a Black pastor who was an ally of the city’s mayor and had “threatened a race riot.” Black involvement in municipal politics, for Alito, appears as a sinister threat to public order.

In stark contrast, when the charge of discrimination is made on behalf of racial or religious minorities, Alito expresses no such solicitude. He does not search for evidence of bias. Instead, he takes an impossibly narrow view of job-related discrimination that demands women somehow instinctively know they are being paid less than male counterparts. Despite his claim to a “just the facts ma’am” approach, Alito has a distinctively constricted take on what the “facts” are. To read his opinions is to inhabit a world in which it is white Christian men who are the principal targets of invidious discrimination, and where a traditional way of life marked by firm and clear gender rules is under attack.

When it comes to the criminal justice system, Alito is a reliable vote for the most punitive version of the state. In 2016, when the Supreme Court invalidated Florida’s death-penalty scheme on Sixth Amendment grounds, only Alito dissented. When the court, a year earlier, found a federal sentencing rule for armed offenders unconstitutionally vague, only Alito voted for the prosecution. It’s difficult to think of cases where Alito has voted for a criminal defendant, or any other litigant that elicits liberal sympathies.

Looking forward in anger, Alito’s voice anticipates and resonates with a growing constituency in the Republican Party. Political scientists such as Ashley Jardina call it “white identity politics.” Central to this worldview is a (false) conviction that whites are increasingly the victims of discrimination. Also important is a belief that speaking English, being Christian and being born in the United States are predicates to being American. Paradoxically, then, even as he wraps himself in the law’s cloak, Alito may well be that most democratic of judges: one who has power because his accent chimes with a growing political force in electoral politics.

Where might this anger lead? In November 2020, Alito gave a keynote speech to the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society. Much criticized at the time for its partisan tone “befitting a Trump rally,” in the words of one critic, those remarks are useful because they prefigure where a court on which Alito is a dominant voice might go.

In that speech, Alito criticized pandemic restrictions by bemoaning the rise of “scientific” policymaking. He complained about the “protracted campaign” and “economic boycotts” of Catholic groups and others with “unpopular religious beliefs” (self-identified Christians make up some 63 percent of the American populace). And he (falsely) warned of “morning after pills that destroy an embryo after fertilization.” If that speech is any guide — and there is no reason to think it won’t be — the future of the Supreme Court will be increasingly one of religious censor: keeping women in their lane, standing up for Christian rights, and making sure that uppity “scientists” in the federal government don’t get their wicked way.

The gun advocates are proven wrong yet again.

When it comes to trans rights, the news cycle has been predominately bleak, largely thanks to Republicans who are all-in when it comes to taking away rights and protections from an extremely marginalized and vulnerable population. But we do have some (relatively) good news coming out of Tennessee.

As reported by CNN, the anti-trans bathroom bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Bill Lee in 2021 has been struck down by United States District Judge Aleta A. Trauger. As covered by Daily Kos at the time, Lee signed House Bill 1182 into law in May 2021 and it went into effect last summer in July 2021 but was blocked by a preliminary injunction just over a week after it went into effect. The bill essentially mandated that businesses that allow trans folks to use the bathroom that align with their gender identity post signs alerting customers of this fact but written in the most fearmongering way possible.

RELATED: Texas librarian fired for 'insubordination' was just trying to do right by readers

The signs include the word “NOTICE” at the top and go on to state: “THIS FACILITY MAINTAINS A POLICY OF ALLOWING THE USE OF RESTROOMS BY EITHER BIOLOGICAL SEX, REGARDLESS OF THE DESIGNATION ON THE RESTROOM.” Businesses that allow trans folks to use the bathroom that aligns with their identity but doesn’t post such a sign were liable for criminal penalties including misdemeanor charges punishable by a $500 fine and up to six months in jail.

The sponsor of the bill, Republican state Rep. Tim Rudd, at the time used the all-too-common conservative rhetoric of saying it was about “protecting” (cisgender) women and girls from predators and groomers. Of course, he could not offer any concrete examples of trans-inclusive bathroom policies actually leading to this scenario in Tennessee. 

A restaurant owner in Nashville, Tennessee, initially filed a lawsuit in objection to the required signs, arguing they were sending a stigmatizing message. Bob Bernstein, who owns Fido in Nashville, has policies that allow customers to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity, which means the signage rules would have applied to them. That injunction was in place through the judge’s call on Tuesday to strike down the law. 

Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk also stated they would not actively enforce the rule, including after it was signed into law. Funk defended his reasoning to lawmakers via a letter last summer, saying that as a district attorney, he does have “discretion” when it comes to enforcing laws and that his office is focused on supporting victims, prosecuting violent crime, and maintaining public safety. He argued this hateful bill accomplishes none of those things.

“Transgender Tennesseans are real,” Trauger wrote in part in her decision. “The businesses and establishments that wish to welcome them are real. And the viewpoints that those individuals and businesses hold are real, even if they differ from the views of some legislators or government officials.”

“While those government officials have considerable power,” the judge added. “They have no authority to wish those opposing viewpoints away.” She said it would be a “disservice” to the First Amendment to see the act as anything other than a “brazen attempt to single out trans-inclusive establishments” and force them to “parrot” a message they believe would “sow fear and misunderstanding” about trans folks. 

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Madison Cawthorn conceded the race to state Sen. Chuck Edwards, who rose to the top of a packed Republican primary.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Curbed: The fever isn't breaking. There are now bidding wars for one in every five Manhattan rental apartments (and one in three luxury units), according to the most recent Douglas Elliman report. Inventory in all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and northwest Queens has been hovering well below 10,000 units -- as of April, the number was just 7,669. Which is several thousand less than the number of entire-apartment and entire-home Airbnb rentals available in New York City right now: 10,572, according to AirDNA, a third-party site that tracks short-term rentals. Inside Airbnb, another site that scrapes Airbnb for listings data, puts the number even higher, at 20,397. Ever since Airbnb came on the scene in 2008, there have been concerns that the short-term-rental company would deplete the housing stock by sucking up available rooms, causing prices to rise in cities like New York and San Francisco, where there were already severe housing shortages. The absolute number of available apartments and houses on the site peaked before the pandemic and has since dropped back, according to both Inside Airbnb and AirDNA. But there's a difference now: There are just so few apartments to be had that Airbnbs make up the majority of the city's available rentals. The company doesn't release listings or bookings data and wouldn't comment on the data collected by AirDNA and Inside Airbnb. They did however confirm that its NYC listing inventory has fallen since the start of the pandemic, citing factors that may have contributed to the housing shortage but weren't related to Airbnb. "Over the past two years, our entire space listing supply citywide has decreased, and it now represents a fraction of a percent of the city's rental units -- and all while rent prices have trended upward and city-issued permits for new-unit development remain down by a double-digit percentage," a spokesperson for the company wrote. Curbed notes that this number is "somewhat gamed," adding: "Airbnb is comparing its inventory to the total number of rental units in New York, not just the available ones, which as of 2017 was 2.18 million. But, of course, only a tiny fraction of those are open in any given year, let alone any given month."

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The white supremacist conspiracy theory has a long history in the United States and abroad.

Before the gunman shot down 10 Black people in Buffalo, New York, at a supermarket on Saturday afternoon, he had stated his intent: “kill as many Black people as possible.” He reportedly wrote these words in a 180-page screed published online before he carried out what investigators are calling a hate crime and a racist act of violent extremism.

The 18-year-old white man, who claimed to drive hours to the zip code he targeted in Buffalo because it “has the highest black percentage that is close enough to where I live,” repeatedly lamented immigration, which he feared would result in “ethnic replacement,” “cultural replacement,” “racial replacement,” and ultimately, he wrote, “white genocide.”

This is the “white replacement theory” or the “Great Replacement” that has motivated similar mass killings in recent years — the racist conspiracy theory that holds that, through immigration, interracial marriage, integration, and violence, and at the behest of secret forces orchestrated by “global elites” (as the Buffalo shooter claimed) or Jews, white people are being disenfranchised, disempowered, and pushed out of “white nations.”

These ideas are not new. They have been documented for at least a century, the forces of white fear that shaped the national origin quotas of the 1920s. They have inspired mass attacks — and also smaller-scale instances of violence — that have claimed the lives of hundreds of people in the United States and abroad.

A brief history of the flawed — and racist — replacement conspiracy theory

In the United States, white people’s fear about being replaced by “outsiders” and migrants of “inferior” backgrounds has a long history. These fears were especially apparent in the early 1900s when white intellectuals openly explored and shared ideas about displacement that shaped immigration policies and other laws.

A leading proponent was Madison Grant, a lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist who published The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, arguing that the supposedly superior “Nordic” race was in danger of extinction in the United States. Grant advocated for sterilization programs for supposedly inferior races, immigration restrictions, and anti-miscegenation laws that would stop any intermingling between racial groups.

Grant’s work had lasting consequences, influencing the lawmakers who drafted the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants from southern and western Europe for 40 years. His work left an impression on President Theodore Roosevelt, who praised it as “a capital book”; President Calvin Coolidge echoed Grant’s ideas in a 1921 Good Housekeeping article, “Whose Country Is This?” claiming that the US should reject being regarded as a “dumping ground” for an “advancing horde of aliens.” Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, referred to Grant’s work as his bible.

Grant was not alone in making his argument. Four years later, an adherent of his, historian Lothrop Stoddard, published The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy, in which he similarly warned that the Nordic race would be eliminated or absorbed by “alien hordes” of immigrants that he viewed to be of lesser value including “Alpines, Mediterraneans, Levantines and Jews.” He called for race solidarity among white people to preserve what he considered “good stocks.” Stoddard, too, influenced elected officials like Warren G. Harding, who praised the book in a public speech in 1921, and leaders abroad in Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Nazi Germany.

By the end of World War II, the ideas that Grant and Stoddard promulgated were largely disavowed by elites for their association with the Nazis and the Holocaust. But they didn’t disappear. US senator and former governor of Mississippi Theodore G. Bilbo published the book Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization in 1947, in which he argued that the “Caucasian race,” which he credited with creating civilization, was “in jeopardy” from Black people, whom he considered “mongrels” who could not “maintain a culture.”

The 1970s saw the use of the phrase “white genocide” in the official newspaper of the National Socialist White People’s Party (formerly the American Nazi Party), which argued “birth control campaigns” would make whites “outnumbered four to one.” Jean Raspail’s 1973 dystopian fantasy novel Camp of the Saints, depicted a world in which France and the Western world is invaded by foreign dark-skinned refugees — a text “widely revered” by white supremacists, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve argued that the United States was encouraging the “wrong women” to have babies, and that “the intelligence of immigrants is a legitimate topic for policymakers to think about” since “Latin and black immigrants are, at least in the short run, putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence.”

French philosopher and white nationalist Renaud Camus helped give the theory new life in a 2012 book, Le Grand Remplacement. In a 2017 interview with Vox following the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, Camus argued that the extremists who chanted “we will not be replaced” had reason to be concerned that the United States could change into “just another poor, derelict, hyperviolent, and stupefied quarter of the ‘global village.’”

At the core of replacement theory is the concept of protecting a white “race” — one that is not necessarily bound by borders but simply held together by racist ideas of white power and supposed white dominance.

Replacement theory is the link connecting racist violence

The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel about a race war that eliminates all nonwhites, directly inspired the Oklahoma City bomber, who killed 168 people. The same text inspired the Norwegian far-right extremist who killed 77 people, mostly immigrants, in a bombing and gun rampage in 2011, saying he was fighting “mass immigration.”

The Norway extremist inspired the New Zealand shooter, who killed at least 50 Muslim worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, leaving behind a document that explained an alleged “assault on European people.”

And the New Zealand shooter particularly inspired the Buffalo shooter, according to his 180-page screed.

Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Replacement theory forms the strands that connect this web of violence — from the Oklahoma bomber to Norway to New Zealand to Buffalo. As University of Chicago historian Kathleen Belew told Vox following the Christchurch massacre in 2019, white supremacists motivated by replacement theory and white power see themselves as fighting for “the Aryan nation.”

The connections don’t stop there. The shooter who killed 23 people in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 claimed he acted in response to “the Hispanic invasion” of the state.

In 2018, a man who blamed Jewish people for helping to resettle immigrants killed 11 Jewish people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

The white man who killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 claimed to be concerned about “living in the melting pot”; the white man who stabbed two people to death on a train in Oregon in May 2017, after harassing two Muslim women, adhered to the idea that there should be a “white homeland for whites only.” The man who opened fire in a California synagogue, killing one and injuring three others in 2019, wrote in an open letter that Jews were preparing a “meticulously planned genocide of the European race” and cited the Christchurch and Pittsburgh shootings as inspiration.

The white people who gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 for the Unite the Right rally, where a white supremacist struck and killed a woman with his car, chanted “you will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”

Replacement theory has become mainstream among Republicans

Meanwhile, the rhetoric of replacement theory has become increasingly prominent among some Republicans. Party members have espoused tenets of replacement theory, and some have supported it by name, to help bolster anti-immigration sentiments and policies.

Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump repeatedly employed the arguments and tropes that form the basis of replacement theory — that white people were facing “white genocide” as a result of an “invasion” from foreigners. “We don’t want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us!” Trump tweeted in 2018. The former president’s latest presidential campaign posted more than 2,000 ads that featured the word “invasion,” according to a New York Times analysis.

Following Trump’s fearmongering that a migrant caravan of Central Americans was on its way to the US’s southern border, other lawmakers adopted the language. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) has repeatedly tweeted about an invasion that lawmakers need to take action against.

Former Iowa Rep. Steve King, who was in Congress from 2003 to 2021, constantly voiced fears about replacement. In 2017 he tweeted, “We can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies,” once retweeted a Nazi sympathizer’s fears about migration, and celebrated Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán for denouncing “mixing cultures.”

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has perhaps become the foremost champion of replacement theory on the right. In about 400 episodes of his show since 2016, according to a New York Times analysis, he shared ideas about replacement. He even used the idea to defend the people who carried out the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. “In political terms, this policy is called the great replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries,” Carlson said on his program last year in response to the Haitian migrants who arrived at the border.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) defended Carlson’s interpretation of replacement theory on Twitter, saying the news host was “correct” in his analysis of “what is happening to America.”

There’s some evidence that these ideas are resonating with Americans. A large poll conducted by the Associated Press and NORC in late 2021 found that about one in three US adults thinks that there is a plot underway to replace US-born Americans with immigrants. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to believe that native-born Americans are losing economic, political, and cultural influence because of immigration.

Replacement theory has a long history, but no longer lies dormant — if it ever did — in the past, or in the black holes of the internet. The conspiracy allows white supremacist violence to remain “the most persistent and lethal threat” in America, as long as the country fails to root it out.

You don’t need to tell the residents of the mostly-Black East Side neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, where 10 people were killed and three were wounded in a mass shooting at a grocery store, that their city is deeply racially divided. Eleven of the 13 people shot were Black.

Payton Gendron, the white man accused of the mass shooting, targeted that particular grocery store because, one, he knew it was in a predominantly Black area, and two, it was in a food desert. Tops Friendly Markets is the only grocery store in the East Side neighborhood. Gendron knew the store would be busy and that its patrons would be mostly Black.

Gendron drove around 200 miles from his home in Conklin, New York, to the East Side neighborhood to investigate the area in preparation for his murderous act.

RELATED STORY: White mother suing her Black biracial son’s school district over anti-racism curriculum

Donna Davis, 62, told the Los Angeles Times she was outraged by how the police treated Gendron.

“If he was Black, they would have shot him… Instead, police officers showed up and begged him to surrender? After shooting 13 people? And he’s armed?” Davis said.

Gendron, 18, planned to continue his shooting spree, according to Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. In an accounting of the teen’s reported 180-page, hate-filled diatribe, he outlined his white supremacist conspiracy views—often espoused by some GOP officials and many Fox News hosts—of the “great replacement theory,” a fear-based ideology that justifies killing innocent Black and brown people who may one day replace his ridiculous white ass.

Garnell Whitfield lost his 86-year-old mother, Ruth Whitfield, in the mass shooting. At a recent news conference, Whitfield described his grief and anger at a nation that continues to allow Black people to be erased at the hands of violent, white racists.

“We’re not just hurting. We’re angry, we’re mad—this shouldn’t have happened,” Whitfield said. “We do our best to be good citizens, to be good people. We believe in God, we trust him. We treat people with decency, and we even love our enemies, and you expect us to keep doing this over and over again, forgive and forget, while the people we elect and trust in offices around this country do their best not to protect us, not to consider us equal, not to love us back. What are we supposed to do with all this anger and all this pain?”

The Times reports that civil rights attorney Ben Crump is arguing for lawmakers to pass a hate crime bill and for shootings like Gendron’s to be deemed acts of domestic terrorism.

“We have to define it as such. We can’t sugarcoat it, we can’t try to explain it away by talking about mental health. No, this was an act of domestic terrorism perpetrated by a young white supremacist. There’s no question about his intentions,” Crump said. “And just like America’s response to terrorism, America needs to respond to this act of bigotry, racism and hate as a terrorist act.”

Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the Center for Urban Studies and a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, wrote a follow-up study last year to one he’d prepared in 1990 documenting the state of Black residents in Buffalo. “Black Buffalo did not progress. Everything changed, but everything remained the same,” the new report reads.

“When we looked back, the city leaders never addressed the core problems facing the African American community,” Taylor said in a 2021 interview with UB Now. He added that although some changes had been made since 1990—like new development, for example—nothing had been done to address issues facing Buffalo’s Black residents.

“When we took a look at Black Buffalo 31 years ago, we felt the community was on a downward trend; we were increasingly locked in the economic basement,” Taylor said.

“When we looked at these trend lines some 31 years later, we see no reversal. … We see us not getting closer to any of the goals and objectives that we outlined. We see that with some of the critical metrics—the poverty rate, household income, homeownership, employment—not only is there no progress, there’s no change. When we say there’s literally no change, we’re saying that in a lot of ways the situation is more entrenched, more solidified. And that implies that breaking the downward cycle is going to be even more difficult and complex than it was before,” Taylor added.

Dwayne Jones, senior pastor at Mt. Aaron Baptist Church and a former deputy sheriff, told the Times he’s been unsuccessfully trying to get another grocery store on the East Side for a long time.  

“And that’s systemic racism itself… That we only have one supermarket on the East Side,” he said. 

Today, most Americans think about the segregation-shattering 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in one of three ways. We may think about Linda Brown, the plaintiff in Brown, a little girl forced to walk miles to a segregated Black school instead of attending the white school down the block. We may remember the famed Norman Rockwell painting featuring 6-year-old Ruby Bridges escorted by U.S. Marshals past a wall splattered with tomatoes and a racial slur. Or we may recall the tumult of busing in the South — Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia… and even much further north of the Mason-Dixon Line in South Boston, too.

But there is plenty that we have not been taught about Brown, which turns 68 today, or how it continues to impact us. We know about Linda Brown and Ruby Bridges. But we don’t know about Pressley Giles, Mary Preyer, Virgil Coleman and Jewel Butler. They were among the 100,000 exceptionally credentialed Black principals and teachers illegally purged from desegregating schools in the wake of Brown.

In the years following the Supreme Court ruling, and well into the 1970s, white resistance to the decree decimated the ranks of Black principals and teachers. In large measure, white school boards, superintendents, state legislators — and white parents — did not want Black children attending school with white children. And they certainly did not want Black teachers educating white children and Black principals leading schools and supervising white teachers. The scheme devised to quickly eliminate Black educators: the closure of Black schools. Even prior to Black school closures, black principals and teachers received letters from district superintendents erroneously telling them that the desegregation decree was responsible for their firings, dismissals and demotions. Less-qualified white teachers, many of whom didn’t have credentials, were hired in their stead.

As early as 1952, NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall knew that Black educators' jobs would be threatened given the racist strictures and customs of the Southern and border states. He was correct. After Brown, the NAACP litigated thousands of cases on behalf of displaced Black educators and pressured the Nixon administration, the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the FBI and Congress to investigate and remedy the illegal and discriminatory treatment of Black principals and teachers. Though some litigants prevailed winning back pay and reinstatement, most never got their jobs back.

Today, the nation, not to mention our public education system, is still living with the fallout: traumatized Black school children; roughly $1-2 billion in salary losses and the largest orchestrated brain drain ever experienced in the U.S. public education system. What’s more, many of the beliefs and levers that were used to eliminate Black principals and teacher leadership after Brown are still in effect today. When I read and watch contemporary news accounts of (mainly white) parents objecting to the teaching of Black history and a more truthful accounting of American history; threatening to burn books; and physically intimidating school board members, I think about resistance to the Brown legal decision. The tactics being used now come from the exact same script.

In conducting research for my new book, Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership, I discovered the purging of Black educators happened even though Black principals and teachers were more qualified than the white educators who replaced them. Proven Black principals and teachers were replaced on a near one-to-one basis with whites who held fewer or no qualifications. Even in segregated all-Black schools, Black educators were more likely to hold bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, certification, and higher levels of licensure than their white peers. Yet after Brown, they were deemed unfit to teach white students for racist reasons, losing both their jobs and their ability to directly influence education policy and practice.

The loss inflicted four traumas still felt today. The first trauma was economic. As I estimate in my book, the low end of calculated salary losses is about $250 million for elimination of 30,000 Black educators’ jobs. Over time, 100,000 Black principals and teachers were shunted off the payrolls due to white resistance to Brown, leaving Black educators nearly $1 billion poorer. Adding to the salary losses from firings were those induced from lack of hiring. Between 1968 and 1971 alone, a total of 23,000 new principal and teaching jobs were created in 11 southeastern states. Black educators were placed in fewer than 500 of these new jobs. In these post-Brown firing and hiring equations, Black educators were desegregation’s prey and white educators its beneficiaries. They lost their jobs — and they were blocked from newly created positions producing income losses and wealth transfers from Black people to white people totaling approximately $2.2 billion today.

The second trauma was the damage done to school systems because of the loss of a high-caliber principal and teacher workforce. The mass exodus of Black teachers and principals yielded school systems led by racist fearmongers manipulating the system to maintain white power and jobs at the expense of Black people. The assault on the professional stature of Black educators ensured that the desegregated school system would be held captive by the same Jim Crow power structure that had fought vehemently against desegregation for decades.

The third trauma resulted in the “near total disintegration of Black authority in every area of public education,” according to a 1972 report by the National Education Association. That served to greatly diminish the aspirations of Black educators and young people. It is reasonable to conclude that Black youth observing the fate of their elders, would worry (and be advised) that they would have limited futures as principals and teachers. The loss of leadership symbols, success symbols and symbols of aspiration were known and felt in the Black community.

The fourth trauma was the cruelest cut of all. If schooling is about the children, as all the sentimental slogans profess, Black children did not seem to count. Ushered into “integrated” schools without Black models of intellectual authority who could serve as guides and protectors, Black students were subjected to physical violence and emotional abuse, racial intimidation and hostility and illegal suspensions, according to numerous reports by the National Education Association and the American Friends Service Committee, a human and civil rights organization. In 1965 Time magazine published an article about the firings, quoting then-U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel, who said, “We must not deceive ourselves that the exclusion of Negroes is not noticed by children. What can they assume but that the Negroes are not deemed by the community as worthy of a place in mixed classrooms? What can the white child assume but that he is somehow special and exclusive…How can the world of democracy have meaning to such children?” Even today, public school students of all races are taught curriculums that are nearly all-white in content, imagery and authorship.

We think about Brown as ancient history. It’s not. School segregation was still in full effect well into the late 1970s and early 1980s. At some point in their histories even those non-Southern states that we today categorize as liberal leaning had laws prohibiting the education of Black and white students together, including California, Iowa and Ohio, among others. At least 17 states fought with all their might against Brown for more than 20 years. In Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, all that might include outright law-defying governors, state legislatures, local school boards and superintendents, and white citizens groups that illegally hijacked state budgets and statutes to steer tax dollars and white students away from desegregating schools.

Most folks don’t want to talk about failures and failings. Americans especially seem to prefer stories about the triumphant underdog, the up-by-my-own-bootstraps tale, and any narrative that advances an American exceptionalism void of evil intent and outcomes. It is this psychological persuasion that keeps the nation falling into the racial sinkholes that some would like to pave over, but never excavate to resolve and seal. The American myth histories that we are taught, and our schoolbooks tell, are filled with outright lies, as our (mis)understandings about Brown exemplify. So, what’s not true that we think is true about Brown? And why does any of this matter in 2022?

The Brown decision proclaimed that racial segregation had no place in America’s public schools. It did not mandate that all-Black schools had to be shuttered and closed and that all-white schools were to be the singular recipient of integrating student bodies — but that’s what happened. White officials and citizens orchestrated this outcome as they aggressively, openly and illegally defied the new law of the land.

The Black educators who were demoted and dismissed had played by the rules. Many, if not most, attended historically Black colleges and universities because state laws restricted their attendance at white-reserved public colleges and universities, including graduate and professional schools. Even still, after earning degrees at HBCUs, thousands attended graduate school programs, earning master’s and doctoral degrees, not in their segregated home states, but in nationally prominent, Northern universities — mainly Columbia University, New York University, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Ohio State University and Iowa State University. They then returned to serve as principals and teachers in segregated Black schools completing an academic migration back to their home states.

The mass closure of Black schools and influx of Black students into previously all-white schools led to an increased need for principals and teachers in desegregating schools. With Black principals and teachers pushed out, white superintendents and school boards found themselves in a quandary: Who was going to lead the schools and teach the swelling numbers of students? Pressed by the need to hire more educators, they manufactured principal and teacher shortages, turning almost exclusively to whites outside the profession, vacating state requirements for education degrees and teacher licensure, and creating fast tracks into the classroom through emergency certification. The NAACP and National Association of Secondary School Principals reported as late as 1971 that Black principals and teachers who held certification and years of experience were being replaced by white principals and teachers who had no certification and no experience in the communities in which they were placed.

The oft-repeated myth that Black people fled the education professions after Brown to pursue careers in other professions newly opened to them after desegregation is not an accurate rendering of history. The historical record shows that the Black educator pipeline was purposely decimated by racists intent on keeping schools segregated even in the face of mandates by Brown and numerous other legal cases that states desegregate students, faculty and staff. Prior to Brown in the 17 dual system states 35-50 percent of educators were Black. Today, there is no state that approaches these percentages. In fact, about 7 percent of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers, 11 percent of the nation’s nearly 90,000 principals and less than 3 percent of the nation’s nearly 14,000 superintendents are Black. This is so, even though the nation’s most credentialed educators are Black, according to my research.

We are seeing new versions of those post-Brown policies today. The modern-day fast-track alternative certification programs that place non-certified individuals as teachers, primarily in schools serving Black and poor students, would be familiar to the generations of Black principals and teachers who were illegally fired, demoted and dismissed after Brown. These deposed Black educators would likely also distrust contemporary school “reform” models such as vouchers, school choice and charter schools. After all, these were the very mechanisms that they experienced during the long stalling of Brown’s progress that were used to siphon public tax dollars from desegregating public schools — and annihilate their careers as principals and teachers. It’s worth noting that these various “reform” mechanisms likely wouldn’t exist if a generation of uniquely qualified Black educators were integrated into the public school system rather than expelled from it. These were people with superior academic credentials, professional licensure, commitment to democratic ideals, consistent activism against the ideology of racism, and experience with integrated society (during their graduate school education). They were lost to the profession and their voices, perspectives and activism to the implementation of Brown and subsequent education policy formulation.

This disturbing history needs to frame contemporary policy and practice discussions about educator workforce diversity, because many of the beliefs and levers that were used to eliminate Black principals and teacher leadership after Brown are still in effect today. In other words, the disproportionately low participation of African Americans in the teaching profession is a result of institutional racism, not just a recruitment problem.

What does it mean to American public schooling, the quest for integrated schools, the formulation of progressive and inclusive education and social policies, Black children’s academic achievement and attainment, and the erosion of racism to have lost these professionals after Brown? It means that our nation never fulfilled the full mandate of Brown to ensure that all students had access to diverse models of intellectual authority and leadership in their schools. Attention was turned away from this vital goal on June 15, 1971, when desegregation became a national debate about busing and pairing and clustering schools to achieve a racial balance of students. It also meant that Black, white and all other students would enter desegregated schools manufactured to be nearly all-white in their principal and teacher workforces; with curriculums and textbooks nearly all-white in authorship, content, and imagery; and, with district leadership, funding, and policy levers controlled almost exclusively by white officials.

What if things had been different? What if the purged generations of Black principals and teachers (who against all odds attained their own education achievements and successfully taught Black students) been integrated into schools following Brown? How might the nation, its schools, and its citizenry have benefited? Against every challenge and even terror, these Black educators led generations out of illiteracy, modeled civic engagement through the establishment of NAACP chapters and voting rights campaigns — and offered hope and a future to disenfranchised masses.

It is difficult to untangle the damage done from any progress made. What is sure: This is the legacy our public schools and our nation’s children live with — and must overcome as a path forward is crafted.

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