James.galbraith

When dangerous GOP extremists emerge, the party approaches them with kid gloves.

Apple delayed a plan to require workers to come back to the office three days a week, citing a resurgence in Covid-19 cases, marking the latest setback in its efforts to return to normal. From a report: The company informed employees Tuesday that it's delaying the requirement, which had been slated to go into effect on May 23, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg. However, the company is still expecting workers to come to the office two days per week. The company said the requirement is being delayed for "the time being" and didn't provide a new date. Apple was set to require employees to work from the office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays beginning next week -- a policy that had been controversial among some staff. Already, employees have been coming in two days a week as part of a ramp-up effort that began in April. For now, that mandate isn't changing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Daily Kos is fortunate enough to be associated with the poll team from Civiqs, led by former professor and statistical researcher Drew Linzer. That gives writers on this site a fantastic resource not just for polling data, but for insight into what it takes to create polling questions that are fair—that is, questions that actually draw information from the public on their real concerns rather than feeding them lines that are certain to draw a predetermined response.

However, it doesn’t take the assistance of a data scientist or polling expert to determine that what Morning Consult did in a poll that’s making headlines on Tuesday is far from fair.

According to Morning Consult, their poll shows that fears about “immigration policy that weakens whites’ power” are a bigger concern than mass violence committed by white supremacists for more than a third of all voters, and for 60% of all Republicans. How much truth there is in this “analysis” is hard to ascertain, because the way that Morning Consult framed the poll was blatantly designed to not only generate headline-worthy results, but to reinforce conspiracy theories being promoted by Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson.

Here’re the actual polling results being promoted by Morning Consult.

But take a careful look at the genuinely small print, as in the text showing what people responding to the poll were actually asked. People were asked about their concern over “mass violence committed in the U.S. by white supremacists,” but they weren’t asked about that issue in a vacuum. Instead, they were asked to compare it to their fears over this:

Officials use of U.S. immigration policy to try to lessen the influence white Americans have on the country’s economics, politics, and culture.

Morning Consult asked people to compare their fears over something that definitely does exist, with something that definitely does not. There are exactly zero politicians and zero policies designed to promote the conspiracy theory that Morning Consult pushed at people in their poll.

You might as well ask in a poll, “Are you more concerned about being hit by a bus, or by that massive killer asteroid now screaming toward Earth at a million miles an hour which will snuff out all life forever?” There’s a good chance the asteroid will rack up a lot of votes. That doesn’t make it an actual threat.

Or, to put it in terms that are more equivalent to what Morning Consult actually did, why not ask people, “Are you more concerned by violence committed in the U.S. by white supremacists, or by the $700,000 that the U.S. government gives to every Black person?” or, “Are you more concerned by violence committed in the U.S. by white supremacists, or by how Democrats are trying replace the current electorate with new, more obedient voters from the Third World.” The first of those is from the Buffalo shooter’s “manifesto.” The second is from a Tucker Carlson diatribe. They’re both the same thing as what Morning Consult actually used: a conspiracy theory fed to respondents without qualifiers and given the same weight as a genuine, ongoing threat.

There are ways to poll over the concerns created by a racist conspiracy theory that was directly cited in the manifesto of a mass murderer as justification for his killing spree. Providing a poll that directly reinforces that racist conspiracy theory is not one of them.

It’s possible to ask about online radicalization without contributing to online radicalization. One other thing: Even given a false comparison, more Americans were still concerned about white supremacist violence.

Nearly two years before a bunch of white nationalists with tiki torches stormed Charlottesville, VA, chanting "Jews will not replace us," Donald Trump announced his bid to be the next U.S. president by proclaiming that Mexico wasn't "sending their best" to America.

"They're not sending you," Trump told his audience in June 2015. "They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."

But it wasn't just Mexico, it was "coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably -- probably -- from the Middle East,” Trump spitballed.

They're not sending you, Trump explained to the U.S.-born Americans listening, they're sending a slew of troubled brown people. In other words, "you" are being intentionally replaced ("they're sending") with inferior substitutes ("people that have lots of problems").

After Charlottesville's racist "Unite the Right" rally shocked the nation awake in August 2017, Trump struck a sympathetic view of the neo-Nazis, declaring "very fine people on both sides" of the event that night.

Trump didn't invent the "great replacement theory" that U.S.-born Americans were being purposely replaced by immigrants, but he rode the racist narrative straight into office and then resurrected it every election cycle, repeatedly warning of the "caravans" coming for America.  

So when Fox News' Tucker Carlson chose last year to begin making the fringe conspiracy theory central to his show, he was actually catching the same GOP wave Trump had caught in 2016.

“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest for the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson told his audience in April 2021. “But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually.”

But where Trump's appeal more-so implied the "replacement" was intentional, Carlson made the intentional engineering explicit and assigned the effort to Democrats.

“Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions,” Carlson said on the show last year. “In order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country.”

Now, about 1 in 3 Americans—including nearly half of Republicans—believe an intentional effort to replace U.S.-born citizens with immigrants for electoral gains is actually commencing, according to an AP/NORC poll conducted last late last year.

More than 20% of Republicans "strongly agree" with that fringe theory and are "extremely concerned" by it, according to the Washington Post's Philip Bump.

Nearly 30% of respondents also believe that native-born Americans are losing economic, political, and cultural influence because of immigrants coming to the country.

And finally, almost 20% of Americans believe the U.S. election system discriminates against white people.

"As might be expected, those who preferred Fox News were more likely than Americans overall or than those who preferred CNN or MSNBC to agree with the replacement theory idea," writes Bump.

In fact, believing the great replacement theory isn’t even extreme within the Republican Party anymore. Based on the polling, it’s very nearly the majority opinion. In other words, one of the nation’s two major political parties has become a virtual cesspool of fringe racist conspiracy.

If you’ve ever doubted that conservatism breeds intolerance, this example from a private, Christian middle school in Kentucky just might be what solidifies your opinion. As reported by the Louisville Courier-Journal, a homework assignment given to students at the Christian Academy of Louisville asked students to convince a “same-gender” friend they’ve known since kindergarten who is “struggling” with “homosexuality” to … not be homosexual. Yes, really.

The class is an elective that focuses on the Bible, but still. There are plenty of religious LGBTQ+ people and allies and there is absolutely no justification for teaching queerphobia, even in a religious setting. That doesn’t make it okay, especially not when it comes to vulnerable young people.

RELATED: Republicans hate George M. Johnson's memoir 'All Boys Aren't Blue.' Johnson saw the book bans coming

In this case, the assignment asks students to figure out talking points to get an (imaginary or hypothetical) gay friend to realize that their identity will not “bring them satisfaction” and to help them accept God’s “design” instead. Per a statement from the school to the Courier-Journal, the point of the assignment was to teach students how to discuss homosexuality with a loved one from a “biblical perspective” of “compassion and love.” Because nothing spells “compassion and love” like trying to change someone's sexual orientation, right?

The assignment asks for the letter to include at eight least sentences using the Bible, in addition to “reason” and your friendship, to make the point that while homosexuality will not bring “satisfaction,” the letter writer will love them even though they don’t approve of their lifestyle. Yes, it’s so transparent it even uses the word “lifestyle.” The assignment also, obviously, assumes the letter writer is not LGBTQ+ themselves, nor an ally or advocate, and in fact normalizes the idea that one should not accept a dear friend’s sexual orientation.

And conservatives accuse LGBTQ+ people of grooming … 

For the curious, this story gained major attention after screenshots of the assignment made waves on Twitter. In an interview with the Courtier-Journal, J.P. Davis, who posted the screenshots, told the outlet that he shared them after a parent concerned with the assignment gave him the heads up.

“Her kid is in the class that was given the assignment,” Davis told the outlet. “And he and her are both uncomfortable with it." Davis added that the parent doesn’t know how to handle the situation but that her son is ultimately “upset” about the homework. “She doesn’t know how to handle it.”

Here are those screenshots.

Research shows us, again and again, that LGBTQ+ youth report higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. We know trans youth are particularly likely to become homeless, leave high school without a diploma, and face physical and sexual violence. And all of this has been the case even before Republicans launched an onslaught of anti-queer legislation across the nation, targeting, in particular, sports, books, health care, and bathroom access. 

The immediate response from some folks is going to be that kids simply shouldn’t go to this sort of school if they don’t like what they’re teaching. But remember that these are kids—they aren’t making the decisions about their education. Their parents or guardians are. And if their family isn’t supportive, what are young people supposed to do?

There’s also the reality that sometimes these private and/or religiously affiliated schools are the “best” in the area when it comes to college or athletic opportunities. And make no mistake, that’s not a coincidence, either, when we see how conservatives are trying hard to essentially dismantle public education.

At the end of the day, there is no excuse for teaching hate. It is cruel, pointless, and damaging for LGBTQ+ youth along with everyone else. If you can’t teach young people to treat others with real dignity, you shouldn’t have a career in education. Period.

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Controversy surrounding Senate candidate Kathy Barnette continues to surface as we near Pennsylvania’s Republican primary election. After tweets surfaced clearly depicting how homophobic and Islamophobic she is, the candidate’s most recent controversy has arrived in the form of photos of her participating in a march before the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. In the photos, Barnette is depicted with the white nationalist group, the Proud Boys.

Prior to the photos being confirmed by NBC News on May 16, no evidence indicated Barnette attended the insurrection outside of speculation. Barnette admitted hosting multiple rallies for the “Stop the Steal” movement and organizing buses to attend a rally before the failed Capitol coup, but had never spoken about attending it herself. The newly released photos reveal not only that she attended but that she also marched alongside a member of the racist group who was later indicted for breaking into the building and attacking officers.

Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have noted that the Proud Boys group is violent and hateful, with "anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric.”

At this time, no evidence indicates Barnette breached the Capitol or engaged in violent activities.

Local reports indicate that the photos were first found by extremism reporter Chad Loder on Sunday. In an interview with NBC News’ Dasha Burns, Barnette tried to downplay her presence by suggesting that the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection wasn’t that bad of an incident. “I feel about Jan. 6 the way the left feels about the summer of 2020 when you have Black Lives Matter and Antifa and other groups out there looting and robbing, and everyone was calling it mostly peaceful protests.”

We all know the reality of Jan. 6 and how violent it really was. Of course, Barnette’s campaign knows this—and thus tried to distance her from the Proud Boys. The campaign attempted the same tactic earlier this year when her racist tweets went viral.

"Kathy was in D.C. to support President Trump and demand election accountability," Barnette's campaign said in a statement to NBC News. "Any assertion that she participated in or supported the destruction of property is intentionally false. She has no connection whatsoever to the Proud Boys."

But Barnette is not the only political candidate in Pennsylvania to attend both the "Stop the Steal” rally and Jan. 6 events. Sen. Doug Mastriano, the frontrunner in the Republican Party's gubernatorial race, also attended both events. Barnette and Mastriano have been running as an unofficial ticket in the Republican primaries.

According to The Washington Post, more than 30 people who are running for office this November attended the rally. While some have openly admitted it, others were found to have attended through social media posts and other leaked photos.

Given the support Barnette is receiving, it will be no surprise if these photos actually work in her favor. Despite sharing blatantly racist, homophobic, and conspiracy-filled tweets and statements, Barnette is quickly making her way to the top.

According to a RealClearPolitics average of the GOP Senate primary in Pennsylvania, Barnette is in second place behind Mehmet Oz, a Trump-endorsed candidate. Republicans worry that if Barnette were to win the primary, the GOP would lose the general election—and as a result, lose a seat in the U.S. Senate.

A case brought by Ted Cruz is a huge boon to rich candidates and moneyed lobbyists.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been at war with campaign finance laws for more than a dozen years, stretching at least as far back as its decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010). On Monday, the Court’s six Republican appointees escalated this war.

The Court’s decision in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate is a boon to wealthy candidates. It strikes down an anti-bribery law that limited the amount of money candidates could raise after an election in order to repay loans they made to their own campaign.

Federal law permits candidates to loan money to their campaigns. In 2001, however, Congress prohibited campaigns from repaying more than $250,000 of these loans using funds raised after the election. They can repay as much as they want from campaign donations received before the election (although a federal regulation required them to do so “within 20 days of the election”).

The idea is that, if already-elected officials can solicit donations to repay what is effectively their own personal debt, lobbyists and others seeking to influence lawmakers can put money directly into the elected official’s pocket — and campaign donations that personally enrich a lawmaker are particularly likely to lead to corrupt bargains. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) manufactured a case to try to overturn that $250,000 limit, and now, the Court has sided with him.

Indeed, now that this limit on loan repayments has been struck down, lawmakers with sufficiently creative accountants may be able to use such loans to give themselves a steady income stream from campaign donors.

According to the Los Angeles Times, for example, Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) made a $150,000 loan to her campaign at 18 percent interest in 1998 — before the 2001 law was enacted. Though Napolitano did eventually reduce the interest rate on this loan to 10 percent, the high-interest loan allowed her to make a considerable profit from donors.

As of 2009, Napolitano reportedly raised $221,780 to repay that loan — $158,000 of which was classified as “interest.” Because the 6-3 decision in Ted Cruz neutralizes the 2001 law, lawmakers may now potentially use a similar scheme in order to funnel legal bribes into their personal bank accounts.

Other lawmakers might not be quite as brazen in seeking to line their own pockets. But they still may be inclined to reward donors who help them recoup the cost of personal loans. As Justice Elena Kagan writes in dissent, a candidate who receives money that goes directly into their own pocket is likely to be “more grateful than for ordinary campaign contributions (which do not increase his personal wealth).”

The case builds upon past campaign finance decisions, but also expands upon them

The thrust of Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in Ted Cruz is that protecting the right of candidates to get out their campaign message — and to spend as much as they want to get out that message — is of such superlative importance that it trumps society’s interest in preventing corruption or in making sure that elections are not dominated by the wealthy. As Roberts writes, “the First Amendment ‘has its fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office.’”

To be clear, candidates were allowed to spend as much as they want to influence their election under the now-overturned law — they could loan their campaigns any amount they like, and could use donors’ money to repay all of it, as long as they got those donations before the election and repaid their personal loans within 20 days.

But that didn’t go far enough for the Court’s current conservative majority.

Roberts’s Ted Cruz opinion fully embraces the value system implicit in past decisions like Citizens United, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections so long as they did not donate directly to candidates.

The First Amendment, Roberts writes, “safeguards the ability of a candidate to use personal funds to finance campaign speech,” a rule that “reflects our profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

Of course, this “profound national commitment” only favors uninhibited, robust, and wide-open debate by certain privileged individuals. It should go without saying that most Americans cannot afford to drop $250,000 or more on a political campaign, even if they expect that money to be repaid at some point in the future.

But Roberts brushes off any concerns that the rule announced in Ted Cruz unfairly favors rich people who want to run for office. Quoting from the Court’s decision in Davis v. FEC (2008), Roberts writes that “level[ing] electoral opportunities for candidates of different personal wealth” is an “impermissible goal.”

Similarly, Roberts’s opinion places a great deal of weight on a distinction between different forms of corruption that also played a starring role in Citizens United. Though the Court’s decisions ostensibly permit Congress to ban “quid pro quo” corruption — that is, an explicit deal where a lawmaker agrees to cast a certain vote or take some other official action in return for a campaign donation — decisions like Citizens United do not permit campaign finance laws that try to prevent donors from buying access to lawmakers.

Much like Citizens United, Roberts’s Ted Cruz opinion frames this sort of influence-seeking as an affirmative good. “Influence and access ‘embody a central feature of democracy,’” Roberts writes, “that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.”

In other words, the Ted Cruz opinion suggests that it is good for democracy if a Texas oil executive can write checks to candidates who will look out for the oil industry’s interests. And, if that candidate rewards this executive by meeting with him to hear his particular concerns, that’s a “central feature of democracy” as well.

Yet, while the outcome of Ted Cruz won’t surprise anyone familiar with the conservative justices’ previous statements about campaign finance laws, it is an escalation from prior decisions. As Justice Kagan writes in dissent, the Court’s previous decisions drew a distinction between laws “restricting expenditures” and those “restricting contributions.”

That is, the government’s power to limit what campaigns can do with the money they’ve lawfully raised is rather circumscribed. But, as the Court held in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), “a limitation upon the amount that any one person or group may contribute to a candidate or political committee entails only a marginal restriction upon the contributor’s ability to engage in free communication.”

This is why, for example, the Court has thus far left untouched a federal law limiting the amount that each individual may donate to a particular federal campaign to $2,900.

But the decision in Ted Cruz strikes down a limit on how much money campaigns can raise from donors, and not a restriction on how campaigns can spend their money. Before Ted Cruz, campaigns could only raise $250,000 in post-election funds to repay a loan from the candidate. Now they can raise as much as they want.

That’s an escalation in the Court’s approach to campaign finance. While decisions like Citizens United permit unlimited donations to political organizations independent from a political campaign — such as a super PAC — the Court has historically recognized that donations directly to a candidate or their campaign are different because they are more likely to lead to corrupt behavior.

Under the theory articulated by cases like Citizens United, a lawmaker is less likely to be corrupted by a large donation to an “independent” organization that supports their reelection, than they are to be corrupted by a similarly large donation to their campaign, so long as the independent group’s activities are “not coordinated” with the candidate.

In fairness, Roberts’s opinion does contain some language suggesting that the Court will leave the $2,900 cap on individual donations to campaigns intact. Indeed, Roberts argues that the anti-bribery protections offered by the cap on loan repayments is unnecessary because lobbyists and other donors may only give up to $2,900 per election cycle to an elected official — even if that money is going directly into the official’s pocket.

Apparently a bribe isn’t a big deal, so long as it is less than $2,900 (and so long as that bribe isn’t made to a super PAC or another group that is nominally independent from the candidate.)

In any event, the Court’s campaign finance decisions have been a steady march toward deregulation. So there’s no guarantee that any attempt to make elections less corrupt will remain safe.

Rep. Elise Stefanik wants to change the subject from how she has amplified the same racist theory used by the Buffalo mass shooting suspect to justify targeting Black people for murder. Stefanik released a statement attacking the media in a naked attempt to get the media to back off from covering her own use of great replacement theory rhetoric. We see you, Elise.

The three sentences attributed to Stefanik herself in the statement are a generic expression of sorrow at the racist mass murder in Buffalo on Saturday, followed by an invocation of National Police Week. The ensuing four paragraphs coming from “Alex DeGrasse, Senior Adviser,” rant about “the Left, their Never Trump allies, and the sycophant stenographers in the media” who have dared talk about Stefanik’s own promotion of replacement theory. How dare they! She would never!

Shall we go to the screenshots?

RELATED STORY: Buffalo supermarket mass shooting was spurred by racist theory regularly aired on Fox News

“Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

Overthrow our current electorate. Or, you know, replace it. 

That ad drew an editorial from the Albany Times Union, slamming the “despicable tactic,” and writing, “If there’s anything that needs replacing in this country—and in the Republican party—it’s the hateful rhetoric that Ms. Stefanik and far too many of her colleagues so shamelessly spew.”

The Daily Kos Elections Team talks about how the MAGA civil war might be hurting the GOP in races across the country on The Downballot podcast

And it is coming not just from Stefanik and Fox News but from many elected Republicans. Last September, around the time Stefanik was running those ads, Rep. Matt Gaetz tweeted, “@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America.” Now he’s saying he’s “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race.” (If you’re saying Tucker Carlson is correct about replacement theory, you’re talking about it in terms of race.)

Rep. Scott Perry, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, said during a House hearing that many people believe “we’re replacing national-born American—native-born Americans—to permanently transform the political landscape of this very nation.” Many people do believe it! Well over 40% of Republicans, specifically, at least somewhat agree that “There is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.” Fox News viewers were more likely to agree than CNN or MSNBC viewers, but OAN and Newsmax viewers were far more likely to agree than Fox News viewers.

It goes on: The Washington Post’s Max Boot writes, “A few hours after the Buffalo shooting, Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters (R) posted a video saying: ‘The Democrats want open borders so they can bring in and amnesty **tens of millions** of illegal aliens—that’s their electoral strategy.’ J.D. Vance, the GOP Senate nominee in Ohio (who, like Masters, is bankrolled by billionaire Peter Thiel), offers an even sicker twist on this demented theory: He says that Democrats are not only opening the borders to create ‘a shift in the democratic makeup of this country’ but that President Biden is deliberating letting fentanyl into the country ‘to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland.’”

Monday morning, Stefanik returned to the theme, softening her language and tone just enough to suggest that she’s trying to pretend this is as far as she’s ever gone. But it’s bad enough: “Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote. Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity.” It’s replacement theory without the explicit invocation of replacement, but the meaning is plenty clear in the context of her past ads and statements. And trying to rewrite your explicit use of a racist theory into something a little fuzzier less than 48 hours after a mass shooting inspired by that theory is at least as disgusting as having used the racist theory to begin with.

The Republican Party—literally, Stefanik is one of its top leaders, and she’s not alone—is actively promoting racist rhetoric that has inspired multiple mass shootings. We have not, as a nation, fully grappled with what that means. It’s time to do that, and the media needs to get its act together on that. At a bare minimum, every time the media quotes a Republican who has used replacement theory rhetoric or appeared at a white nationalist event, those facts need to be right alongside whatever that Republican has to say in that moment. This cannot just be allowed to fade into normalcy.

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Buffalo shooting only the latest attack in the radical right’s insurgent war on American democracy

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Don't let Republicans get away with their ugly 'great replacement theory' scam.

JetBlue launched a hostile takeover of Spirit Airlines after its earlier acquisition offer was rejected. The New York-based airline said in a release that its tender offer for $30-per-share was "all-cash" and "fully financed." From a report: Earlier this month, Spirit's board of directors rejected JetBlue's $32-a-share bid to acquire the airline in favor of an existing merger agreement with Frontier, one of its ultra-low-cost competitors. The board cited antitrust issues and "an unacceptable level of closing risk" to its shareholders as its reasons for rejecting the JetBlue bid. But JetBlue is still intent on acquiring Spirit, whether it wants to go ahead with the deal or not. The airline has said that absorbing Spirit would allow it to better compete with the "Big Four" carriers by increasing the size of its fleet and roster of trained pilots.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York Rep. Elise Stefanik was catapulted to a top House Republican leadership position after Republicans purged Rep. Liz Cheney from the role as punishment for speaking out against Donald Trump's violent attempted coup. Stefanik has since proven to have no moral boundaries whatsoever, eagerly embracing the farthest-right conspiracy theories culled from QAnon, from neo-Nazi groups, and other extremists—but we knew that, due to her fervent prior backing of an actual attempted coup and her devotion now to sabotaging investigations of that coup.

Stefanik was quick to express vague sympathy over the murder of 10 Americans at the hands of a white supremacist citing the neo-Nazi "great replacement" theory, a white nationalist conspiracy theory that claims world elites (billionaire George Soros is frequently mentioned, or just nameless "Democrats") are importing non-white immigrants in great numbers so as to dilute America's "whiteness."

But Stefanik, like Tucker Carlson, has been a promoter of that same neo-Nazi conspiracy theory. She is one of the House Republicans that helped mainstream it into the party proper.

Stefanik did not just embrace the "great replacement" theory as a one-off nod to the party’s white supremacist base. Stefanik launched a Facebook ad campaign pushing the conspiracy theory that was considered abhorrent at the time, and looks even more grotesque now that it has yet again become the cited impetus for a mass murder.

But Stefanik, whose promotion of fringe-right conspiracy theories includes the frothing QAnon-premised claim that opponents of Trumpism are secretly pedophiles, is of course offering no apologies or acknowledgements.

Like Tucker Carlson, she uses violence-provoking conspiracy claims to further her own career while ignoring or mocking the deaths caused when violent believers decide that only terrorism can prevent their advertised conspiracy from taking place. The "great replacement" conspiracy is now widespread in Republican rhetoric; there is now no great difference between the spittle-flecked conspiracies of neo-Nazism and those of Republican Party "leadership."

The Republican Party is a cesspit. From national leaders to minor state functionaries, its officials stoke violence like it is nothing to them. Party propagandists invent new hoaxes for every situation, hoping that the resulting extremism boosts them even if it kills others. It makes perfect sense that the fascist supporters of an attempted coup would expel Liz Cheney from leadership while embracing this perpetually amoral liar and propagandist; that is who they are.

On CNN this morning, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts tossed aside the evasions his Republican Party used to rely on to assure American women that Republicans would not, in fact, force them to give birth to the babies of their rapists. No abortion exceptions for incest or rape, said Ricketts. None.

Under Republican government in Nebraska and elsewhere, a 12 year old girl raped by her father will carry that pregnancy to term.

It's a position that is almost required, if one truly believes in the "personhood" of a fertilized egg with no organs or nervous system. Pete Ricketts knows not a damn thing about medicine, but has strong religious convictions that he believes should override medical knowledge—not for him, but for every last American of every religion or no religion, in any circumstance, enforced by the powers of the state.

This is what is coming. Republicans have vowed they would do it ever since racist evangelical leaders of past decades latched onto abortion as a means of galvanizing support for a Christian nationalism-premised erasing of the last half-century of gained civil rights. The leaked news that the Supreme Court the Republican Party packed exclusively with theocrats is on the cusp of ending federal abortion rights means that Pete Ricketts and other Republicans like him will now use their power to implement whatever faux-religious rules their base demands of them.

Republicans are done being coy about what's coming next. They don't believe they need to play those games, now that they have a Supreme Court that will back their theocratic moves every step of the way.

Though certainly not an easy task, it’s important that we stay engaged with what conservatives are pushing on the state level before hateful bills make it all the way to a governor’s desk. In an ideal world, such bills would be small potatoes, but thanks to the Republican Party’s bliss in stirring outrage over marginalized people simply existing, we have many, many heinous bills bubbling up all over the nation.

One such bill is stewing in South Carolina, as highlighted over at South Carolina United. The South Carolina state Senate passed H 4608 last week in an attempt to ban trans youth from participating in sports teams that align with their gender identity. Sadly, there is nothing surprising about this move. More recently, however, the same Senate voted to pass H 4776, misleadingly titled the “Medical Ethics and Diversity Act,” which would essentially permit medical providers, health care institutions, and insurance companies to deny care to LGBTQ+ people based on their religious, ethical, or moral beliefs, as covered by local outlet ABC News 4. If signed into law, these workers would be protected from any civil, administrative, or criminal penalties.

If all that sounds like discrimination, you’re right.

RELATED STORY: 94% of trans youth who transition socially still identify as trans half a decade later, says study

What would this bill look like in practice if signed into law? Essentially, medical providers—including physicians and nurses, for example—would be allowed to refuse care when it comes to everything from gender-affirming health care like puberty blockers and hormonal therapy to medications for HIV, fertility treatments, and mental health services. It would even expand to contraceptives and end-of-life care.

The Daily Kos Elections Team talks about how the MAGA civil war might be hurting the GOP in races across the country on The Downballot podcast

In terms of insurance providers, they’d be allowed to deny necessary services like PrEP and gender-affirming care. Employers would be able to do the same. In essence, if a provider wants to, they could deny care based on someone’s sexual activity (including same-sex activity); sex outside of marriage; or their identity, like being openly trans or nonbinary. This is basically a license to discriminate and harm vulnerable people—denying safe, lifesaving care to someone seeking treatment for HIV, for example, is so cruel it feels surreal to type.

This is a dire situation no matter where you live, but it’s always worth remembering that low-income folks, people who live in rural areas, and people of color may be especially hurt. Not everyone can drive across state lines to access care, for example, and especially not if that care is consistent or needed on short notice, like PrEP or an abortion. 

In the big picture, this is another important example of the ways conservatives are trying to be sly and cover all of their bases when it comes to gradually taking us back in time and denying more and more rights to marginalized and vulnerable folks. To my knowledge, this bill seems to be one of the first of its kind to make it so far, and we don’t yet know what the governor will do with it. But as we’ve seen with the anti-trans sports bills overwhelming the nation, even if something isn’t immediately signed into law, its sheer existence can serve as a precedent for other folks to try the same thing. 

The bill, which passed in the state House back in March, now moves to the desk of Republican Gov. Henry McMaster. 

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Few Americans have any clue just how extreme most Republicans are when it comes to abortion. The other side likes to caterwaul about so-called partial-birth abortion—which isn’t really a thing—or so-called late-term abortions, which happen so rarely and under such extraordinary circumstances, it’s hard to imagine anyone with even a rudimentary heart could remain unmoved by the stories of the people who are compelled to get them. 

All that makes sense, of course. No one is going to carry a fetus to full term, only to decide at the last minute that they’re just not feeling it anymore. Childbirth is not like a date with Donald Trump Jr.—only with slightly fewer opioids and marginally less unintelligible screaming. You can’t just back out the moment the surgical implements and ether make their first appearance.

If a woman is tragically forced to seek an abortion late in her pregnancy, it’s almost always because her life is in danger or the fetus is nonviable. But that’s just common sense. On the other hand, the horror stories liberals can—and most likely soon will—tell about the vile excesses of the forced-birther regime are real. And, well, horrific. In fact, many, many Republicans are so extreme on abortion, they’d force a 12-year-old child to give birth to her rapist’s baby. Even if, say, the fetus’ father was her uncle.

So it’s time to name and shame these fuckers. Just how far do they take this stuff? It’s one thing to say you’re against “late-term abortions,” as fake as that stance is. But what do they have to say about more problematic—and far less popular—abortion restrictions like, say, banning the termination of a pregnancy after just a few days or weeks?

Christina Reynolds, VP of Communications at EMILY's List, talks about spending $150 million to center abortion rights in this November’s elections on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast.

Christopher Ingraham, a former Washington Post reporter who once wrote for the paper’s Wonkblog, makes a great point about the abortion rights bill Democrats recently put forward, and which just failed in the Senate, 49-51, with Sen. Joe Manchin joining every Republican in voting “no.”

The bill was going to fail regardless. Why not make Republicans feel just a bit more uneasy about their no votes? (If you don’t do Twitter, click here to read the unrolled thread.)

A robust majority of Americans already support upholding Roe v. Wade. And when the nuances of the abortion issue are explored by nonreptilians with normal human brains, they tend to agree that people facing difficult or life-threatening pregnancies—or who simply want to prevent a pregnancy with early intervention, such as a Plan B pill—should have reasonable access to reproductive health care. 

Make these extremists go on record as opposing these things. Or make them go on record as supporting at least some forms of abortion. Either way, we win.

Come on, Democrats. As usual, we have the truth on our side. If we fumble this message, there’s no one left to pick up the ball and run with it—and we really will be consigning millions of Americans to a nightmare world where The Handmaid’s Tale is now a blueprint for the brave new world that’s about to smack us all upside the head.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE. 

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The First Amendment doesn’t apply to Republicans anymore?

The conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit handed down a brief, unexplained order Wednesday evening that will throw the entire social media industry into turmoil if the Texas law at issue in this case is allowed to remain in effect.

The decision in NetChoice v. Paxton reinstates an unconstitutional Texas law that seizes control of the major social media platforms’ content moderation process, requiring them to either carry content that those platforms do not wish to publish or be so restrictive it would render the platforms unusable. This law is unconstitutional because the First Amendment prohibits the government from ordering private companies or individuals to publish speech that they do not wish to be associated with.

As the Supreme Court said in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), “this Court’s leading First Amendment precedents have established the principle that freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.”

The Texas law prohibits a social media platform “that functionally has more than 50 million active users in the United States in a calendar month” from banning a user — or even from regulating or restricting a user’s content or altering the algorithms that surface content to other users — because of that user’s “viewpoint.”

The law only applies to Texas residents, businesses that operate in Texas, or to anyone who “shares or receives content on a social media platform in this state.” Practically speaking, however, a social media company could struggle to identify which users view social media content within the state of Texas, and which businesses have Texas operations. So, if they don’t want to be sued for violating the Texas law, they would likely end up applying Texas’s rules to all users.

The law applies broadly, moreover, to all forms of viewpoint discrimination, regardless of whether that viewpoint is political.

For these reasons, even setting aside the fact that this law is unconstitutional, it imposes a completely unworkable standard on social media platforms. Imagine, for example, that a man stalks his ex-girlfriend on Twitter, creating multiple accounts that harass her and call her “ugly,” while also encouraging others to do the same.

If Twitter bans this stalker for calling his ex “ugly,” the Texas law could be interpreted to also require Twitter to ban anyone who calls the same woman “beautiful,” because the law forbids discrimination on the basis of viewpoint.

Similarly, imagine that a member of the Ku Klux Klan starts a YouTube account called “Black people are worthless,” which posts videos of racial-slur laden rants claiming that Black people have contributed nothing valuable to society. If YouTube so much as tweaks its algorithm to prevent this klansman’s videos from autoplaying for unsuspecting users, it would also have to do the same to any content on the same topic expressing the opposite viewpoint — that is, the viewpoint that Black people have, in fact, made valuable contributions to society.

The law permits any user who believes that a social media platform has violated the Texas law, as well as the state’s attorney general, to sue that platform in order to force compliance. A victorious plaintiff is entitled to an injunction requiring the platform to comply with the state law, as well as attorney’s fees. Courts may also “hold the social media platform in contempt” and “use all lawful measures to secure immediate compliance” if a social media company resists an unconstitutional court order requiring it to involuntarily publish content.

The Texas law, in other words, would effectively turn every single major social media platform into 4chan — a cesspool of racial slurs, misogyny, and targeted harassment that the platforms would be powerless to control, unless they wanted to enact such sweeping content moderation policies that their platforms would become unusable. (Admittedly, the Texas law does permit social media companies to remove some racist and sexist content, but only if that content “directly incites criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence.”)

The law was set to go into effect last December, but after two social media trade associations sued, a federal judge blocked the law one day before that could happen. The Fifth Circuit’s one-sentence order doesn’t rule on the constitutionality of the law, but reinstates it while the lawsuits play out — placing social media companies in immediate jeopardy if they engage in the most basic content moderation.

Texas claims that social media is just like a train

The Texas law is one of several recent attempts by Republican state governments to sanction media companies they perceive as insufficiently deferential to conservatives. In a statement released shortly after he signed the bill, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) claimed that he did so to thwart a “dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas.”

Although there are individual examples of conservatives being kicked off of social media platforms — Twitter and Facebook famously banned former President Donald Trump after they found his actions on January 6 violated their policies — the evidence that social media companies are engaged in any kind of systematic discrimination against conservative viewpoints is, to say the least, thin.

Even if companies like Twitter or Facebook were targeting conservative speakers, they have a First Amendment right to do so. Corporations, like individuals, are allowed to express whatever viewpoint they choose. And they are not required to give equal time to opposing viewpoints.

The rule that the First Amendment applies to corporations, and not just individuals, became controversial after the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), but this rule long predates Citizens United. In New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), for example, the Court ruled that Jim Crow state officials could not use malicious libel suits to punish a media corporation that published an advertisement with a pro-civil rights viewpoint.

This rule — that companies can publish whatever viewpoints they want, and can also exclude any viewpoint they want — applies to newer platforms like social media as surely as it applies to traditional platforms such as a newspaper or a company’s public statements. That was the holding of Reno v. ACLU (1997). Although Reno acknowledged that the internet offered speakers new ways to popularize their views, it held that “our cases provide no basis for qualifying the level of First Amendment scrutiny that should be applied to this medium.”

The First Amendment provides free speech protections that sometimes go beyond the protections afforded to social media companies under federal laws such as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 establishes that internet platforms typically cannot be sued because they host content that may be libelous or that is otherwise unprotected by the First Amendment. In this way, they are more of a platform than a newspaper publisher legally responsible for the views expressed on their site.

But even if Section 230 were repealed tomorrow, the First Amendment would still prohibit the state of Texas from ordering a social media company (or any other company, for that matter) to publish content that it does not wish to publish.

To this, Texas says that the First Amendment should treat social media companies less like a newspaper, and more like a railroad. Specifically, the Texas law declares that major social media companies should be classified as “common carriers,” a term that has historically applied to buses, trains, airlines, and other transportation companies that offer their services to the general public.

As one federal appeals court explained in a 2016 opinion, “common carriers have long been subject to nondiscrimination and equal access obligations” without raising any First Amendment issues. And courts have long allowed some communication forums to be classified as common carriers, such as telephone companies and broadband providers.

But, as Judge Robert Pitman explained in his opinion blocking the Texas law — the opinion that was just stayed by the Fifth Circuit — there are very important distinctions between a company like Facebook or Twitter, and a phone company or internet service provider.

Common carriers, Pitman explains, act “as a passive conduit for content posted by users.” Your phone company does not monitor your calls to make sure that you aren’t saying anything offensive to the people that you speak with. And your broadband provider does not read your emails and refuse to deliver ones that contain racial slurs.

Social media companies, by contrast, are “more akin to newspapers that engage in substantial editorial discretion.” As Facebook told Pitman in a court filing, that company “makes decisions about ‘billions of pieces of content’ and ‘[a]ll such decisions are unique and context-specific[] and involve some measure of judgment.’”

To be sure, social media platforms are not exactly the same as newspapers. The whole reason why laws like Section 230 exist is because internet platforms exist in a gray area between newspapers, which publish nothing that is not approved by a journalist employed by that paper, and telephone companies, which engage in no content moderation whatsoever. Congress enacted Section 230 because it understood that platforms that fall into this gray area should not always be subject to the same rules that apply to newspapers.

But that doesn’t mean that social media companies are common carriers. Again, the sort of communications companies that are treated as common carriers — phone companies and internet service providers — are companies that typically engage in no content moderation. Social media platforms, by contrast, typically have terms of service that its users must comply with, and they employ teams of moderators who evaluate whether specific content violates these terms and must be taken down. Many also use algorithms that effectively give each user a customized experience tailored to whatever the platform thinks the user wants to see. That’s a far cry from a common carrier that acts merely as a “passive conduit.”

Even if a company like Twitter could be classified as a common carrier, the anti-discrimination rules applied to such carriers are rarely absolute. Amtrak’s terms of service, for example, permits it to remove passengers “whose conduct is objectionable” or “whose personal hygiene makes them offensive.” So why shouldn’t Twitter be allowed to remove a user who, for example, bombards others with racial slurs?

Texas’s approach to the First Amendment is probably only shared by a fringe of judges

The Fifth Circuit’s decision halting Pitman’s order consists of only a single sentence — “IT IS ORDERED that the appellant’s opposed motion to stay preliminary injunction pending appeal is GRANTED” — and a single footnote indicating that the three-judge panel that heard this case is “not unanimous.”

Although the court did not identify which of the three judges dissented, it’s not hard to guess how the votes broke down. The panel includes Judge Leslie Southwick, a relatively moderate conservative appointed by President George W. Bush, as well as two notoriously right-wing judges.

Judge Edith Jones is a former general counsel to the Republican Party of Texas who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan when she was just 35 years old. Since then, she’s developed a reputation as an especially caustic conservative — Jones once told a liberal colleague to “shut up” during a court hearing, and she joined an opinion arguing that a man should be executed despite the fact that his lawyer slept through much of his trial.

The third judge, Andy Oldham, is a young Trump appointee who clerked for Justice Samuel Alito. Among other things, Oldham is the author of a Fifth Circuit opinion permitting a Trump-appointed district judge to seize control of much of the nation’s policy governing the US-Mexico border.

It is likely, but not entirely certain, that Jones and Oldham are right-wing outliers even when compared to the median justice on the Supreme Court. In 2021, Justice Clarence Thomas published an opinion expressing sympathy for the “common carrier” theory Texas relies on in NetChoice. But that opinion was joined by no other justice.

In any event, given the enormous disruption the Fifth Circuit’s NetChoice decision is likely to create for social media companies, it is likely that they will ask the Supreme Court to intervene very soon. We should know in very short order, in other words, whether the Supreme Court intends to write social media out of the First Amendment.

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It's never been more political, because they made it that way. Yet they'll deny it until their dying breath.

The road map for a future stolen election is taking shape right in plain sight.

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[The employee argued that "her faith in God 'will protect her from COVID-19 so there is no reason to take a test.'"]

From In re Whitehead (N.J. Office of Admin. L.), decided Sept. 1 by Administrative Law Judge Julio Morejon, and adopted Oct. 6 by the Civil Service Commission, but just posted on Westlaw:

Appellant, Carolyn Whitehead … was employed by respondent, City of East Orange, … as a Keyboarding Clerk I & Assistant Zoning Officer. On July 23, 2020, Whitehead was terminated from her employment for failure to take a COVID-19 test as a condition to return to work. Whitehead appeals East Orange's decision….

Whitehead claims that her rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act were violated by East Orange when it refused to provide her "reasonable accommodations" for her sincerely held religious belief that her faith in God "will protect her from COVID-19 so there is no reason to take a test," as she stated in oral argument….

According to Title VII, reasonable accommodations are adjustments/modifications provided by the employer to enable those with sincerely held religious beliefs that conflict with work requirements to enjoy equal employment opportunities, provided said accommodations do not impose undue hardship on the employer. According to the EEOC, an undue hardship is an accommodation that is too costly, compromises workplace safety, infringes on the rights of other employees, decreases workplace efficiency, infringes on the rights of other employees, or requires employees to do more than their fair share of burdensome or hazardous work. The Supreme Court has held that if an employer must bear more than a "de minimis" (minor) burden when making religious accommodations, the accommodations are considered undue hardships….

In the present case, Whitehead argues that she should be allowed to work from home as East Oranges allows at risk employees to remain working from home until they can return to work. Whitehead argues that according to East Orange's "Return To Work Policy," East Orange has already implemented "staggered schedules" and office reconfigurations. Whitehead argues further that East Orange also allows high risk employees to work from home. Whitehead states that her four-month period of working from home during the partial work suspension was successful as she was able to successfully perform her duties from home four-days each week.

East Orange argues that Whitehead's refusal to be tested creates an undue hardship because it risks exposing their low-risk employees to COVID-19 in the office which could create an outbreak and shut down the office again. East Orange argues further that said employees could then also expose high-risk individuals outside of work…. [I]t is unreasonable to expect East Orange to mandate those high-risk employees to stay at home so Whitehead can come into to work, which is no guarantee that Whitehead could transmit COVID-19 to low-risk employees simply by being at the office. Even if Whitehead could guarantee that she would remain in a full quarantine before returning to the office, there is no way of knowing definitively that she poses no risk to her fellow employees without a test….

Whitehead argues that the test is an unreasonable search and is not justified at its inception because there is not sufficient individualized suspicion to justify a search…. The Court held in Skinner v. Ry. Labor Executives' Ass'n (1989) that drug and alcohol tests for railroad employees, mandated by Federal Railroad Administration ("FRA"), constituted a search under the fourth amendment. These tests involved breathalyzer tests and gathering samples of employee's blood and urine for chemical analysis which intrudes upon traditional expectations of privacy. This regulation was put in place following a large amount of railroad accidents that were caused by employees being intoxicated while on the job. The Court held that such intrusions, whether they involved reasonable individual suspicion or not, were permissible because of the government's compelling interest in preventing deadly railroad accidents.

Similarly, in the present case, preventing the spread of COVID-19 to East Orange employees while they are in the office could be considered a compelling government interest. Viral testing is a crucial means to that end…. And requiring individualized suspicion to conduct these tests would jeopardize the government's interest because many carriers of the virus are asymptomatic, and the only way to know they are infected is to test them….

Whitehead alleges that East Orange's testing requirement violates her rights under the Free Exercise Clause ….. However, this clause does not relieve an individual from complying with a generally applicable and facially neutral law because said law violates their religious prescriptions. Employment Div. v. Smith (1990)…. In the present case, East Orange's testing mandate is facially neutral and generally applicable as it makes no mention of religion and is meant to apply to all employees. Also, there is no evidence to suggest the mandate is being enforced disproportionately against Whitehead nor those who share her religious beliefs….

I say, that and, "Trust in Allah, but tie your camel."

The post Mandatory Employee COVID Tests Don't Violate Religious Freedom Rights or Fourth Amendment appeared first on Reason.com.

On the face of it, Samuel Alito’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, published by POLITICO last week, represents a vindication for the Religious Right, the culmination of nearly five decades of working to outlaw abortion. “I don’t know if this report is true,” said evangelist Franklin Graham of the draft opinion overturning abortion rights, “but if it is, it is an answer to many years of prayer.”

The history of that movement, however, is more complicated. White evangelicals in the 1970s did not mobilize against Roe v. Wade, which they considered a Catholic issue. They organized instead to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions, including Bob Jones University.

To suggest otherwise is to perpetrate what I call the abortion myth, the fiction that the genesis of the Religious Right — the powerful evangelical political movement that has reshaped American politics over the past four decades — lay in opposition to abortion.

The historical record is clear. In 1968, Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, organized a conference with the Christian Medical Society to discuss the morality of abortion. The gathering attracted 26 heavyweight theologians from throughout the evangelical world, who debated the matter over several days and then issued a statement acknowledging the ambiguities surrounding the issue, which, they said, allowed for many different approaches.

“Whether the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed,” the statement read, “but about the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.”

Two successive editors of Christianity Today took equivocal stands on abortion. Carl F. H. Henry, the magazine’s founder, affirmed that “a woman’s body is not the domain and property of others,” and his successor, Harold Lindsell, allowed that, “if there are compelling psychiatric reasons from a Christian point of view, mercy and prudence may favor a therapeutic abortion.”

Meeting in St. Louis in 1971, the messengers (delegates) to the Southern Baptist Convention, hardly a redoubt of liberalism, passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, a position they reaffirmed in 1974 — a year after Roe — and again in 1976.

When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and sometime president of the Southern Baptist Convention, issued a statement praising the ruling. “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” Criswell declared, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

When Francis Schaeffer, the intellectual godfather of the Religious Right, tried to enlist Billy Graham in his antiabortion crusade in the late 1970s, Graham, the most famous evangelical of the 20th century, turned him down. Even James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family who later became an implacable foe of abortion, acknowledged in 1973 that the Bible was silent on the matter and therefore it was plausible for an evangelical to believe that “a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being.”

Despite this history, the abortion myth persists, stoked repeatedly by the leaders of the Religious Right. If abortion was not the catalyst for this political movement of white evangelicals, however, what was?

According to Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and architect of the Religious Right, the movement started in the 1970s in response to attempts on the part of the Internal Revenue Service to rescind the tax-exempt status of whites-only segregation academies (many of them church sponsored) and Bob Jones University because of its segregationist policies. Among those affected was Jerry Falwell, who referred to the civil rights movement as “civil wrongs” and who had opened his own segregation academy in 1967. The IRS actions against racially segregated institutions, not abortion, is what mobilized evangelical activists in the 1970s, and they directed their ire against a fellow evangelical, Jimmy Carter, in the run-up to the 1980 presidential election.

Weyrich’s genius, however, lay in his understanding that racism — the defense of racial segregation — was not likely to energize grassroots evangelical voters. So he, Falwell and others deftly flipped the script. Instead of the Religious Right mobilizing in defense of segregation, evangelical leaders in the late 1970s decried government intrusion into their affairs as an assault on religious freedom, thereby writing a page for the modern Republican Party playbook, used shamelessly in the Hobby Lobby and the Masterpiece Cakeshop cases.

Weyrich’s savvy sleight-of-hand conveniently failed to acknowledge that tax exemption is a form of public subsidy and that, pursuant to the Brown decision of 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Green v. Connally ruling of 1971, the government has every right to stipulate that tax-exempt public institutions not engage in racial exclusion.

In any case, “religious freedom” didn’t prove to be the energizing issue that the leaders of the movement hoped, which is how abortion became part of the Religious Right agenda.

Because evangelicals had considered abortion a Catholic issue until the late 1970s, they expressed little interest in the matter; Falwell, by his own admission, did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 26, 1978, more than five years after Roe. During the midterm elections of 1978, however, antiabortion activists — Roman Catholics — leafleted church parking lots in four Senate races during the final weekend of the campaign: New Hampshire, Iowa and two races in Minnesota, one for the unexpired term of Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president. Two days later, in an election with a very low turnout, anti-abortion Republicans defeated the favored Democratic candidates.

I recall reading through Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and when I came across his correspondence following the 1978 midterm elections, the papers almost began to sizzle with excitement. He characterized the outcome as “true cause for celebration.” Weyrich had finally landed on an issue — abortion — that could mobilize grassroots evangelicals. Now, Falwell and other leaders of the Religious Right had a “respectable” issue, opposition to abortion, one that would energize white evangelicals — and, not incidentally, divert attention from the real origins of their movement.

Even so, as late as August 22, 1980, when Ronald Reagan addressed more than ten thousand cheering evangelicals at Reunion Arena in Dallas, he talked about creationism, he said that if he were stranded on a desert island he would want the Bible, and he lambasted “Jimmy Carter’s Internal Revenue Service” for challenging the tax exemption of racially segregated evangelical institutions. On that occasion, however, Reagan said nothing whatsoever about abortion.

Abortion did not take hold among evangelicals until the eve of the 1980 presidential election, the result of assiduous promotion by Weyrich, Falwell and other leaders of the Religious Right following the 1978 midterms. In addition, although it was poorly received when it toured the country early in 1979, Frank Schaeffer’s anti-abortion film series Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, which featured his father, Francis A. Schaeffer, and C. Everett Koop, began finally to take root among evangelicals.

Opposition to abortion, therefore, was a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right because it allowed them to distract attention from the real genesis of their movement: defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions. With a cunning diversion, they were able to conjure righteous fury against legalized abortion and thereby lend a veneer of respectability to their political activism.

Alito’s draft makes no mention of this tawdry history.

Holding covid aid hostage in order to undermine the asylum process.

Thanks to Republican hate and fearmongering, trans folks in Alabama are suffering. As Daily Kos has covered in the past, while Florida gets a lot of national media attention because of the evil Don’t Say Gay law, conservatives in Alabama have been pushing some dangerous hate as well. As reported by the Associated Press, Alabama became the first state to make it illegal for physicians to provide safe, age-appropriate, gender-affirming health to trans and nonbinary people under 19 years old. This includes non-surgical procedures like puberty blockers and hormones. 

Physicians who provide such care anyway could face 10 years in prison on felony charges. The same law, which was misleadingly titled the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, also requires that school administrators, including teachers, must tell a minor’s parent if the student shares that they are trans. All of this, in a word, violence.

RELATED: Plaintiff in Don't Say Gay lawsuit alleges they're being silenced at Florida high school

Make no mistake: This is not about protecting children. This is not about protecting teenagers. This isn’t about protecting 18-year-olds, who are legal adults. This is a synchronized effort to stomp out the existence of LGBTQ+ people; to deny us access to life-saving health care, to erase us from public record, and to psychologically abuse young people into staying in the closet indefinitely. And just as much, it’s an effort by Republicans to try and mobilize their base just in time for midterms.

Republicans are so transparent, and if literal human rights didn’t hang in the balance, it would be a lot easier to laugh at their attempts to lead. But already vulnerable people are losing their rights.

“They always existed, but they often did not have the feeling of empowerment to come out,” Dr. Hussein Abdul-Latif, who works at UAB’s Gender Clinic, a trans-inclusive clinic for both youth and adults, told the AP in an interview. “Or come out to their physicians. And now that they are, we’re hitting them back with legal action.”

Fellow Alabama physician who treats youth who live with gender dysphoria, Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, testified during a hearing for the bill. Ladinsky stressed that the legislation will force physicians to risk a felony conviction for providing “evidence-based care,” according to Teen Vogue.

At the end of the day, the law is unethical for both the patients and physicians. It is wrong to put health care providers in a position where they cannot provide what they know to be the best, most appropriate care because of hate-based legislation. Prior to the law going into effect, many have tried to strategize and, for example, fill extra prescriptions ahead of time so patients have a little wiggle room, but that can only go so far. This law is an enormous emotional burden on both the patients and the physicians, during a pandemic, no less. 

As reported by AL.com, parents of four transgender youth in the state have already filed a lawsuit to challenge the hateful law. The suit argues that the law will “deprive” the youth of access to safe, effective, and necessary health care. Plaintiffs are requesting a temporary hold of the law in the meantime. But since May 8, 2022, and at the time of writing, the law is in effect.

In the big picture, we know attempts to legislate safe, legal abortion out of existence come from the same place of control and hate as attempts to legislate trans bodies. It is invasive, wrong, and based on misinformation and frankly, lies. But we all need to work together to stay unified, and organize in unison, especially on behalf of young people who don’t have the same political opportunities and rights as adults.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Hidden away in Coinbase Global's disappointing first-quarter earnings report -- in which the U.S.'s largest cryptocurrency exchange reported a quarterly loss of $430 million and a 19% drop in monthly users -- is an update on the risks of using Coinbase's service that may come as a surprise to its millions of users. In the event the crypto exchange goes bankrupt, Coinbase says, its users might lose all the cryptocurrency stored in their accounts too. Coinbase said in its earnings report Tuesday that it holds $256 billion in both fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies on behalf of its customers. Yet the exchange noted that in the event it ever declared bankruptcy, "the crypto assets we hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings." Coinbase users would become "general unsecured creditors," meaning they have no right to claim any specific property from the exchange in proceedings. Their funds would become inaccessible.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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