Daily Kos has covered the renewed Republican effort to stomp out LGBTQ+ people and identities. Whether it’s trying to ban trans girls from participating in girls’ sports, trying to keep trans people of all ages from using the correct bathroom, or trying to prevent youth from accessing safe, age-appropriate, lifesaving, gender-affirming medical care, conservatives have some clear goals in mind. One: Turn public attitude against an already marginalized group. Two: Stomp them out of existence.

Tied up in all of this is, of course, the book bans. We’ve seen conservatives at all levels of government fan false hysteria over certain books being available in public school classrooms and libraries. These titles are overwhelmingly by or about LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and survivors of systemic violence, but they’re being deceptively labeled as “inappropriate” or too “adult” for young readers. As reported by NBC News, ProPublica, and The Texas Tribune, a superintendent in Texas already told librarians to remove books about gender identity and sexual orientation from public school libraries in the district.

RELATED: Texas librarian fired for not pulling books off the shelves in banned book purge

Jeremy Glenn, who serves as the Granbury Independent School District Superintendent, told librarians he was worried about students reading books including LGBTQ+ people and themes back in January, according to ProPublica. Now, this sort of lines up with the discriminatory missive sent from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who said he wanted librarians to pull “pornographic” and “obscene” books from school library shelves. 

But Glenn’s instructions reportedly referred to all books with LGBTQ+ themes—including ones that don’t have sex in them. Glenn argued such books don’t fit with the community’s beliefs and might expose students to inappropriate ideas.

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“I don’t want a kid picking up a book,” Glenn said per a recording of a meeting he held with librarians on Jan. 10, per NBC News. “Whether it’s about homosexuality or heterosexuality, and reading about how to hook up sexually in our libraries.”

Glenn seemingly could not help himself, explicitly spewing transphobia. He told the group he was going to “take it a step further,” and then went on to share his backward ideas about gender identity

“There are two genders,” he told librarians per NBC News. “There’s male, and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women. And there are women that think they’re men. And again, I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”

It’s truly astonishing that conservatives will in one breath say they don’t have “any issues” with something and in the next say they want to ban or criminalize it. The mental gymnastics!

Sadly, this is not an isolated issue. Republicans have been trying to pull, ban, or even burn books in a number of states across the nation. A Tennessee school board recently pulled Maus, an award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its eighth-grade curriculum, for example. Parents in a school district in Kansas went viral for trying to get All Boys Aren’t Blue, a young adult memoir by award-winning journalist George M. Johnson, pulled from schools.

In Texas alone, more than 800 titles have been threatened. These books are, again, largely by and about marginalized people. That means students who might feel especially heard and seen by the content (or might learn and grow from reading it) are missing out on valuable connections and learning opportunities. 

At the end of the day, we know book bans aren’t even popular in polling. But Republicans will spread hysteria and hype up an issue until it catches on with mainstream voters. Again: It’s not really about the books. It’s about the people represented in them, and about stomping them out. 

Who is ready for a Banned Book Club here at Daily Kos?

In the now public resignation letter to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg from veteran prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, the cards, as they say, are on the table for all to see. 

Pomerantz, a special assistant district attorney in New York, was leading an exhaustive fraud investigation into former President Donald Trump’s finances, ultimately reviewing whether Trump or Trump Organization defrauded bank lenders and tax assessors when disclosing the value of various holdings to secure high-value loans. 

What Pomerantz now openly says he found was proof of Trump’s “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” and enough evidence to prosecute, which has piled up in Trump’s bogus financial statements and false claims that have compounded year after year.

Related: Prosecutors say exit in Trump fraud case spurred by indictment-shy DA

Pomerantz’s choice to step down, along with fellow prosecutor Carey Dunne, emerged from a deep well of gradually building frustration with Bragg, who had only recently replaced New York District Attorney Cy Vance. 

When The New York Times first reported the resignations, sources effectively told the paper the attorneys left because Bragg had amassed too many doubts that the case could survive a grand jury. 

Pomerantz would not comment to the press in February about his decision to leave. The publication of his letter on Wednesday reverses that course and presents the stakes urgently to the public. 

“The investigation has been suspended indefinitely,” Pomerantz wrote. “Of course, that is your decision to make. I do not question your authority to make it and I accept that you have made it sincerely. However, a decision made in good faith may nevertheless be wrong.” 

He described the failure by Bragg to prosecute—quite baldly—as “misguided and completely contrary to the public interest.”

“Because of the complexity of the facts, the refusal of Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization to cooperate with our investigation, and their affirmative steps to frustrate our ability to follow the facts, this investigation has already consumed a great deal of time. As to Mr. Trump, the great bulk of the evidence relates to his management of the Trump Organization before he became President of the United States. These facts are already dated, and our ability to establish what happened may erode with the further passage of time,” Pomerantz wrote.

When Dunne stepped down, he told fellow attorneys working the case he had to “disassociate” himself from Bragg’s decision because he felt the district attorney was “on the wrong side of history.”

According to a spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, the fraud investigation into Trump and Trump organization continues. 

“A team of experienced prosecutors is working every day to follow the facts and the law. There is nothing we can or should say at this juncture about an ongoing investigation,” spokeswoman Danielle Filson told CBS. 

But time is of the essence: The grand jury hearing evidence assembled under Pomerantz and Dunne’s scrutiny is set to expire in April. 

Well before they left, they emphasized this deadline repeatedly to Bragg. At a meeting in January, Pomerantz and Dunne told the newly sworn in official that it could take months to present the case. Bragg was reportedly well aware of the stakes—he had met with Pomerantz and Dunne weeks before in December. At that meeting, he reportedly sought an update on the case and appeared eager to pick up where his predecessor left off. 

Once formally in office, Bragg started off receptive to pursuing the path toward an indictment, but that enthusiasm fizzled after New York Attorney General Letitia James announced the state’s civil investigation into Trump and the Trump Organization had turned up new evidence of fraud. That included, according to James, evidence that Trump grossly inflated property valuations to banks as well as the IRS for no fewer than a half dozen entities. 

The Times reported this January:

“Ms. James highlighted details of how she said the company inflated the valuations: $150,000 initiation fees into Mr. Trump’s golf club in Westchester that it never collected; mansions that had not yet been built on one of his private estates; and 20,000 square feet in his Trump Tower triplex that did not exist.”

On the criminal side, Pomerantz and Dunne were struggling to secure a witness for their grand jury that appeased Bragg. He was opposed to proposals calling Trump’s onetime fixer, Michael Cohen, before the grand jury. Bragg cited concerns over Cohen’s trustworthiness. The special prosecutors asked Bragg’s office to consider suspending the grand jury before it expired. 

The clock, however, kept running down, and Pomerantz grew more frustrated with delays. He proposed different strategies to coax Bragg, but those too fell on deaf ears. Pomerantz and Dunne allegedly conceded to Bragg just before their resignations that it would be a hard road to tread toward indictment, but it was a “righteous case that ought to be brought.”

“To the extent you have raised issues as to the legal and factual sufficiency of our case and the likelihood that a prosecution would succeed, I and others have advised you that we have evidence sufficient to establish Mr. Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and we believe that the prosecution would prevail if charges were brought and the matter were tried to an impartial jury,” Pomerantz wrote to Bragg on Feb. 23. 

He continued: 

“No case is perfect. Whatever the risks of bringing the case may be, I am convinced that a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice. As I have suggested to you, respect for the rule of law, and the need to reinforce the bedrock proposition that “no man is above the law,” require that this prosecution be brought even if a conviction is not certain.”

Daniel Goldman, who served as lead counsel to Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, reacted to Pomerantz’s letter publicly on Twitter on Thursday. Goldman ran for the New York attorney general spot.

Knowing someone committed a crime and proving that crime in court are distinctly different events, Goldman said.

“The easy thing for Bragg to do would be to charge Trump. It certainly would be the politically expedient thing to do,” Goldman said.

Goldman wrote that Bragg, to his credit, has served as a former federal and state prosecutor who led probes into Trump when Bragg worked at the attorney general’s office. The newly elected official should be “applauded,” Goldman added.

Suggestions that Bragg’s decision was reached corruptly were deemed “preposterous,” he said. 

An attorney for Trump, Ronald Fischetti, told The Guardian that Pomerantz’s departure was just the latest proof that prosecutors didn’t have the goods to indict Trump. Fischetti said Bragg should be “commended” for following the rule of law instead of the rules of politics. 

For Pomerantz, according to his February resignation letter, it was never about politics. 

“I fear that your decision means that Mr. Trump will not be held fully accountable for his crimes. I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice,” he wrote.

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Finding the language to describe the legislative assault on trans people is tricky. Pushing back against it shouldn’t be.

In recent weeks, as Republican politicians in several states have introduced increasingly draconian measures designed to crack down on the lives and well-being of trans teenagers, my trans friends and I started asking questions: What do we have to do to get people to pay more attention to this? What language can we use to make clear the severity of what is happening?

Let me try to offer you a window into why we’re as terrified as we are and why we want, so badly, to find the words to convince you to take these laws as seriously as they deserve to be taken.

While by far the most common laws passed or introduced this legislative session have been aimed at cutting down on trans teens’ participation in high school sports, several states have gone even further, considering measures that would make providing trans-affirming health care to minors illegal. A bill in Idaho, currently being considered by the state Senate after being passed out of the House, perhaps goes furthest in this regard. That bill would make providing medical care to trans youths a felony, punishable with up to life in prison. It would also effectively trap families of trans children in Idaho by forbidding them to travel elsewhere for treatment.

In the move that has garnered the most media attention, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed that state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to open child abuse investigations into parents who pursue gender-affirming health care for their trans children. A judge issued an injunction against the directive being carried out, but a tweet from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton suggested that the state will ignore the injunction and continue investigations into families of trans children.

To me, a trans woman whose gender was harshly policed for almost all of her childhood, the definition of parents affirming their trans kids as “abuse” is positively Orwellian — a literal manifestation of “war is peace.” The idea that children simply living their lives as themselves would be taken from families who loved and supported them and tossed into the foster care system (a potential outcome of the Texas measure) is a nightmare, and it’s being sold under the guise of protecting children.

These measures are seriously misguided, and they do nothing to protect trans children. They are all built atop the cis-sexist idea that transness is a harmful aberration at best and an outright fabrication at worst, and they aim not to help children but to suppress their basic selves. I issued this argument at much greater length last year, during what was then the worst legislative year for anti-trans bills. This new year has already surpassed it. 2023 will surely surpass 2022. In that article, I wrote:

There is a reason every major American medical body recommends giving trans children the chance to transition. (Here’s an article from the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics making this argument 11 years ago.) Children first transition socially — with changes to their clothing, haircut, and name. Then, with a physician’s guidance, they can block the onset of puberty in early adolescence, and finally start hormone treatment in later adolescence.

This method works. We have records of trans children receiving hormone treatment as long ago as the 1930s. With this approach, trans kids can largely live lives that are indistinguishable from those of cis kids. (If you don’t believe me, consider the surprisingly large number of famous trans women who transitioned as kids, like Nicole Maines, Kim Petras, and Hunter Schafer.)

The numbers are stark and horrifying, and they should be looked right in the eye. The prevalence of attempted suicide among trans and gender-nonconforming people is believed to be roughly 40 percent, compared to about 5 percent for the general population. A 2018 study from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that more than half of trans teen boys, nearly a third of trans teen girls, and 40 percent of nonbinary teens have attempted suicide. There is limited data on trans people who die by suicide, but a seriously elevated risk of suicide attempts generally correlates with an elevated risk of death. There is so much we don’t know, and will never know.

It’s worth repeating some other basic facts: Affirming trans children’s genders reduces their risk of attempting suicide; the use of puberty blockers in trans kids is safe; children are having bottom surgery only in exceptionally rare cases; and almost every element of trans health care we have was originally developed for cisgender people. (Cis children with precocious puberty have been using blockers for decades!)

I hopefully do not need to convince my cisgender allies of the asinine nature of these legal measures.

But how do I convince people of the severity of this problem, of the idea that what is happening is an assault on the civil rights not just of Americans but of literal children? How do I make everyone care as much about this issue as the anti-trans forces who wish to so casually destroy us? What language can I use?

A mass murder, abstracted

In nearly every trans person I know, the ongoing legal assault against trans people alongside the low-level background radiation that is TERF rage on social media (as well as the ongoing train wreck of cis lawmakers asking way-too-invasive questions of trans kids) have contributed to a mild, building panic. My friends who are the parents of trans children are struggling even more – their very real desire to help their children could land them in prison. These proposed measures aren’t just needlessly invasive, inserting government interference into private medical care decisions made by families. They’re dangerous, creating conditions that make trans children much more likely to die by suicide.

Even Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, in vetoing that state’s bill banning trans kids from participating in high school sports, pointed to alarming statistics on high reported rates of suicidal behavior as a reason not to sign the bill. “I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do,” he wrote of trans children, in a letter to the state legislature. “But I want them to live.”

This is why, in conversations with friends, the word “genocide” keeps coming up. We don’t use that term metaphorically, either. This movement is a direct assault on our lives. If these measures are carried out, a lot of trans people will needlessly die.

Still, if I use the word “genocide” in, say, the headline of this article, I know almost every cis person who reads this will blanch, at least a little bit, then quibble with the word choice. I would agree, to some degree. The United Nations defines genocide as happening to “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” which does not describe trans people, necessarily. But the UN’s definition also says genocide may involve “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; … [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” I would argue all of these proposed laws would have some or all of the above effects.

Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images

My friend Lily Osler, a trans woman who spent much of her childhood in Waco, Texas, described the pain of this kind of life in an op-ed about Texas’s recent anti-trans measures in the Waco Tribune-Herald better than I possibly could. She writes:

That whole time, everyone perceived me as a boy. I knew I was a girl — it’s my earliest and strongest memory — but I didn’t have the language to describe myself, and I learned quickly that it was a very bad idea to try and tell anyone. It was absolutely miserable. It left me without a childhood as myself or a body that is completely my own. While I’m lucky enough to still be here today, I would never, ever wish what I went through on anyone.

This hollow longing, this sense that nothing is quite right and nothing will fix it, is something that comes up in so many conversations I have with trans people who transitioned as adults. Often, they made efforts to get the world to see them as they were in childhood and were brutally rebuked. Those who survive to adulthood too often turn themselves off to some degree. (A friend compares this to a spaceship in a sci-fi movie, gradually losing power to different sectors, life support critical.) And too many don’t survive.

If these laws go into effect, many in the trans community believe they will enable a mass murder — and, yes, that is what it will be — that no one will ever be able to count or quantify. These measures will create deaths that look like individual tragedies (which they will be) but never be understood as part of a massacre created by uncaring, even evil laws (which they will also be).

Again, how do you talk about that? “Well, this will be a mass murder, but it won’t look like one” is true, I think, but it feels insufficient to describe what’s going on. That indirectness blunts the impact just a little bit. The stakes are high, but it’s too easy to miss them entirely.

These measures aim to make trans identities impossible to conceive of. They’ll fail, but the pain will be real.

The bitter pill to swallow about trying to find the right language to use to best convey trans people’s panic over these measures is that, to a real degree, our language is being policed too. Florida’s now-infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill, for instance, aims to curb discussion of LGBTQ people in schools and is written with such a broad brush that it’s easy to believe it will have a chilling effect on talking about LGBTQ people in educational contexts at all.

And though the bill odiously resurrects the horrific myth of queer people “grooming” minors in order to corrupt them, its supporters have focused on trans people specifically. In its efforts to promote the bill (which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has yet to sign), the governor’s office has put “transgenderism” front and center.

Combine laws like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill with measures designed to crack down on the lives and well-being of trans kids, and you create an environment where trans kids suffer, their parents risk imprisonment, and would-be allies either remain silent or exit their positions altogether.

As a singular example of this potential spiral, Randa Mulanax, a Texas CPS employee who testified in the court arguments that led to the initial injunction against Abbott’s order, said she was leaving her position at the end of March after disagreeing with the new policies. In particular, Mulanax spoke out against what she said was a statewide directive to prioritize cases involving trans kids. She said CPS can no longer denote cases involving trans kids “priority none,” which means CPS dismisses them as cases where no abuse has happened. Instead, they must be investigated, a condition that only otherwise exists in cases where a child dies. This post by a Texas mother under investigation by CPS for affirming her trans kid is wrenching to read, a clear example of what sounds like government overreach. And yet it may well become the order of the day in Texas.

“I’ve always felt at the end of the day, the department has children’s best interest at heart. I no longer feel that way with this order,” Mulanax said, according to the Washington Post’s Casey Parks. Her stand is admirable; it is not hard to imagine her position being filled by someone who would be all too happy to carry out Abbott’s rules in the event they are upheld by a higher court.

The goal isn’t just to punish trans kids seemingly for existing but to limit the imaginations of everybody else. If schools aren’t allowed to use language that suggests trans people exist and if trans kids aren’t allowed to pursue treatment, then the hope of these lawmakers seems to be that by never allowing discussion of these ideas, boundaries are placed upon the imagination.

Trans kids will still figure out they’re trans — I did, and I didn’t have the word “trans” — but they’ll have to wade through an artificial minefield to get there. Kids who are just questioning their gender, questioning that might even end up in them realizing they’re cis, will inevitably feel frightened by the contents of their own brains. It’s a clumsy attempt to shove a genie back in a bottle. It won’t work, but the cost will be immense.

Many lawmakers who support these measures argue that they’re saving the lives of children, but not any children who exist. Instead, the argument goes, by not allowing kids to pursue medical transition, those kids might ... someday have kids of their own.

“I see this conversation as an extension of the pro-life argument. ... We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation. So in that sense, there is a nexus on this issue. I don’t see it as a contradiction,” Idaho state Rep. Julianne Young said in floor arguments, according to the Idaho Press. (Later, Bruce Skaug, the representative who introduced the bill, said, “The ability to procreate is a fundamental right that must be protected for these children.”)

These theoretical future children take precedence over actual kids who are alive. It’s the logical endpoint of a political and religious philosophy that prizes the imagined perfection of something not yet real over the messy humanity of those who already walk among us.

This argument uses the language of something many on the religious right care deeply about — eliminating the right to an abortion — and ties it, no matter how absurdly, to anti-trans measures, because both are about the terror many conservatives feel at the idea of anyone possessing some form of autonomy over their own body. You cannot legislate trans people out of existence. You can introduce laws that make it more likely we will die.

Like many others in the trans community, I’m angry and exhausted and terrified. Yet so often my conversations with even the staunchest cis allies I know get bogged down in the morass of explaining away the tiniest details of, say, trans medicine, or how kids know their gender from an incredibly early age, or assorted other topics. That’s all important information to convey, but we need to continue to move the conversation forward.

While we’re talking about minutiae, the lives of trans kids are under threat right now, all over America. A lot of people are going to die, while too many of us only worry about semantics.

Car dealers are charging way over sticker price — and consumers are paying.

It’s a wild time out there in the car market. Wild in a good way if you’re a car dealer trying to sell a car. Wild in a less good way if you’re a consumer looking to buy, which is the spot Richie Iglar recently found himself in.

In the fall, he and his wife were in the market for an SUV and made an appointment at a Mercedes dealer in New Jersey. The salesman was “super nice” throughout most of the process, Iglar explained … until it came to the price. The dealership wanted to charge them $20,000 over the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (or MSRP).

“We were both shocked and politely declined, saying while we would like to have the car, we can’t justify over-spending for it,” he said. Iglar emailed another dealer trying to get a sense of what their markups were, and a week later they responded they were adding on $15,000. He decided to put a pause on buying. “I can’t justify spending that much over sticker.”

Iglar is hardly alone. Tens of thousands of dollars over the sticker is something of an outlier, but across the country, people on the hunt for a new vehicle are being met with significant dealer markups, thanks to supply shortages and high consumer demand. New car dealers have the upper hand at the moment, and some of them are willing to use it.

“At the end of the day, it’s saying, ‘Look, if you don’t buy this, the guy right behind you or the gal three people behind you is going to, and they’re going to pay me $1,000, $2,000 more than you’re willing to, so I have to go with them.’ It’s one of the first times in history where the dealer has so much demand that they can actually do that,” said Ivan Drury, senior manager of insights at Edmunds, a consumer research company. “If there are five people raising their hand to buy the exact same product, you just go with whoever is bidding the highest.”

According to Kelley Blue Book, the average new car price in the United States was $46,085 in February, $5,000 more than it was a year ago. Going by the Consumer Price Index, which measures what consumers pay for goods and services, new vehicle prices are up 12.4 percent over the past year. (Used car prices are up a ton, too, but for this story, we’re focusing on new ones.)

How much are dealer markups contributing to this average price increase? The answer is certainly not all of it, or maybe even most of it. But they’re not helping, either. “It comes down to if someone’s willing to pay it, and they can sell it and keep selling it, I think they’re going to ride that train as long as they can,” Iglar said.

Amid the current inflationary environment, there’s a broader debate going on about what’s causing prices to rise. Some Democrats and economists argue that corporate greed is playing a role, basically saying that companies are taking advantage of the moment to boost their profits even when it’s not necessary, and contributing to higher inflation overall. Other economists have dismissed this, saying it’s a flimsy excuse, and that other factors, among them supply chain problems, increased demand, and commodity prices, have much more of an impact. After all, corporate greed wasn’t invented in the pandemic.

I am not going to litigate whether profiteering — which is generally legal in the US — is driving up inflation. But it’s hard not to recognize that in some corners, businesses and CEOs and salespeople are likely looking at the current economic landscape and thinking, “Eh, why not bump that price tag up a little more?” And who can blame them? That’s capitalism.

“Are they taking advantage of the situation? Yeah,” Drury said with regard to dealers. “I think they’re doing exactly what anyone else would if they were selling something too.”

This is capitalism. Welcome.

In an environment where goods are scarce, intermediaries can push up the prices to pocket the money. We are in an environment where goods are scarce, and where, because of inflation, people sort of expect prices to go up anyway, and so in some corners, there’s a little bit of padding going on.

Even in a moment like this, with inflation on the rise, the point of companies is to make money. Many executives have been pretty open that they’re able to pass on price increases to consumers and keep their margins up, or do a little bit better. Procter & Gamble, for example, has hiked prices on a variety of items over the past year, including diapers, razors, and feminine care products. It has helped them deal with rising costs but also has helped them increase revenue.

Are these price increases along the margins creating broad-based inflation across the economy? Many economists say probably not. But in the system we live in, when businesses big and small are in a position of power, they use it, and that’s certainly not helping.

“We need to be honest that price changes are complex, and I don’t think it’s fair to boil it down to a single cause. Saying that profiteering is playing a role and profiteering is driving inflation are two different arguments,” said Mark Paul, an assistant professor of economics and environmental studies at New College of Florida. “The degree of price increases we’ve seen today are absolutely in line with a story where car companies are charging consumers above and beyond what should be considered a reasonable markup due to these market disruptions.”

Eventually — and hopefully — the current supply/demand mismatch the automotive industry is seeing will sort itself out. The semiconductor shortage will subside, other production and supply chain bottlenecks will settle, there will be more new cars available, which should also help the used car market settle down. And that, again eventually and hopefully, will help cool inflation down. (New and used cars are a pretty significant factor in current inflation numbers.)

In the meantime, consumers like Iglar can bide their time and wait for things to settle back down. Or they can bite the bullet and pay much more than they’d like to for a new car.

If you want a new car right now, you have to really ($$$) want it

Previously, it’s been pretty rare for shoppers to pay above sticker price for new cars. Now, it’s pretty common.

According to Edmunds, 82 percent of customers paid above sticker price for a new car in January of this year. For some perspective, that figure was 2.8 percent in January 2021 and 0.3 percent in 2020. On average, transaction prices for a new car in January were $728 above the sticker price. In the same month in 2021 and 2020, they were more than $2,000 below it. For some higher-end vehicles, like the one Iglar was in the market for, dealers are charging tens of thousands of dollars above what manufacturers suggest.

In more normal times, it’s car dealers that are often trying to undercut one another on prices to attract customers and compete. Now, with inventories so low, it’s customers who are competing with each other for vehicles.

Bill Brunner, vice president and general manager at Paramus Chevrolet in New Jersey, told me that right now he has about 80 cars on his lot compared to what used to be 300, 400, or even 600 vehicles available. The scenario has created what he describes as a “balancing act” on pricing. “Our prices have definitely adjusted based on availability,” he said. “Having said that, we still need to be conscious of our customer base.” He knows some people have a budget. He also wants customers to come back next time their lease is up or they want to buy a new car.

Brunner said he’s starting to see some vehicles come through with more volume now, which will allow his dealership to be more competitive with the pricing. But it all really just depends on what they have. “There were some vehicles that we made better gross profits on than we would have if we had 100 of them in stock. It’s just supply and demand. If we had two of a particular model instead of 100, our pricing structure is different. It’s just the way it is,” he said. Brunner also noted the pandemic has been tough on dealerships, as it has been on a lot of businesses.

Still, some auto manufacturers aren’t loving the situation and have told dealers to knock it off on some egregious price hikes out of concern it will hurt their brands. (A lot of people don’t realize it’s the dealer that ultimately sets the price, not, say, GM or Ford.) Traditional auto manufacturers are also dealing with competition from companies such as Tesla, which sell direct to consumers. Plus, a number of car companies are launching electric vehicle products that they hope will expand their customer base, and many of those vehicles already come with long wait times.

“You figure somebody’s trying out your brand for the first time and it’s an EV product, you don’t want to ruin that relationship by saying, one, you’re going to wait, and two, you might pay more than you expected,” Drury said.

In a February earnings call, Ford CEO Jim Farley said that the automaker believes 10 percent of its dealers over the last year had charged above-MSRP prices and warned that “future allocation” of their models would be impacted by those policies, meaning the dealers in question might not be getting their most popular cars. The Wall Street Journal reported that GM also told dealers in a letter it might take action against a “small minority of bad actors” selling and leasing far above sticker price.

The Wall Street Journal has also reported that Toyota and Honda have talked to individual dealers about charging above MSRP, too. Jack Hollis, Toyota Motor North America’s senior vice president of auto operations, told the publication he thinks dealers thinking only about the short term are making a mistake. “If that customer experience is great during this time, they’ll be with you,” he said. The Journal noted that many dealers aren’t happy with the practice, either, because they worry it could damage the entire sector’s reputation.

To be sure, dealer markups are not the only thing contributing to price increases. “A whole slew of things” are making cars more expensive, said Stephanie Brinley, principal automotive analyst at IHS Markit. The pandemic has tossed the car industry into chaos over the past couple of years. Semiconductor shortages and supply chain woes have caused major setbacks in production, and the costs of making and moving the cars have gone up as well. Brinley pointed out that many consumers also want more, costlier features, which drives prices, too. “It’s a combination of trying to maintain margin and keep profitability up, but it can’t be done if consumers don’t want it,” she said.

Many of the vehicles with the highest markups are ones that are already pricey to begin with. “If you have $50,000 to spend on a car, how bad can someone feel for you when they can’t afford a $15,000 used car?” Drury said. “I don’t feel bad for certain people when they can bid up the price.”

Brinley pointed out it’s pretty easy to figure out what manufacturers suggest the price should be on a new car — the information is readily available on the internet. If you’re in the market for one, she suggests looking it up and then going from there. “Figure out what you’re willing to pay, and if you’ve got a dealership that is charging more than you might be willing to pay, you might not get a car in the next two hours, it might be a bit more complicated, but move on,” she said.

In the current landscape, you might have to be in “move on” mode for a while.

We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.

Have ideas for a future column? Email emily.stewart@vox.com.

Debra Meadows was a busy bee in 2020. According to the North Carolina Board of Elections, on Oct. 26, Debbie showed up at the Macon County community building in Franklin, North Carolina, and filled out a one-stop voter application for early voting in the 2020 presidential election. She claimed she lived in Scaly Mountain in a 14-foot by 62-foot mobile home. The problem was … she didn’t. 

RELATED: Voter fraud finally uncovered by GOP: Mark Meadows investigated in North Carolina

According to North Carolina state law, in order to vote in that state, you must reside in the claimed address for at least 30 days prior to the election. Again, she didn’t. Debbie must not have read the top of the voter form either, which clearly states: “fraudulently or falsely completing this form is a Class I felony under Chapter 163 of the NC general statutes.” 

Debbie additionally dropped off an absentee ballot for her hubby Mark Meadows, who was then the White House chief of staff for failed President Donald Trump. 

This is just the latest in a long list of discoveries regarding Mark and Debbie and their shady-as-hell voting practices. 

As first reported by The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea, Meadows does not own the Scaly Mountain property, which sits in the southern Appalachian mountains. Debbie did rent the house for a couple of months, but as the unnamed owner of the house told The New Yorker, “He [Mark Meadows] did not come. He’s never spent a night in there.” The Meadows family did stay at the home in the fall of 2020 when they were in the area for a Trump rally as nearby hotels were mostly booked. 

According to The News & Observer, Meadows is still registered to vote at the mobile home address.

As The Washington Post’s Fact Checker reporting shows, Debbie signed not one, not two, but three forms fraudulently. First a voter registration form, then an absentee ballot request for Mark, and then the one-stop application—a form that’s intended to warn someone of the legal ramifications of knowingly falsely signing. 

Debbie voted in the 2020 primary runoff using the false mobile home address; Mark signed a voter registration form but did not end up actually voting in the primary. 

Last month, Pamela Moses, 44, was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote. 

Moses, a longtime Black Lives Matter activist in Memphis, Tennessee, told The Guardian that what happened to her was a straight-up “scare tactic” designed to keep her—and people who look like her—from voting.

In 2019, Lanisha Diresha Bratcher was charged with felony voter fraud. Jones had served time for a felony offense and was out on probation when she tried to vote. She learned then that under North Carolina regulations, as a convicted felon, she wasn’t allowed to vote. However, she hadn’t been informed of that when she registered to vote in 2016.

The justices are concerned that Wisconsin’s legislative maps may give too much political power to Black people.

On Wednesday, as the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court, the incumbent justices handed down a decision undermining the right of Black people to participate equally in America’s elections.

The Court’s decision in Wisconsin Legislature v. Wisconsin Elections Commission strikes down state legislative maps selected by the Wisconsin Supreme Court after the state’s Republican legislature and Democratic governor were unable to agree upon which maps the state should use. The maps that the state court adopted were proposed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, but Evers was also constrained by criteria, laid out by the GOP-controlled state supreme court, that favor Republicans.

These maps apply to the state legislature. The Court’s decision does not touch the state’s congressional maps.

The Court relied on a confusing array of legal doctrines governing racial gerrymanders, but one key, inflammatory assumption appears to undergird the decision: That legislative maps with fewer Black-majority districts are often preferred to those that give more power to Black voters.

The US Supreme Court did not reveal how each justice voted in Wisconsin Legislature, but the Court used a process known as “summary reversal” to toss out Wisconsin’s maps — meaning that the Court tossed out the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision completely without receiving full briefing or hearing oral arguments. Ordinarily, the Court requires six votes to summarily reverse a lower court’s decision.

Two justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, publicly dissented.

The majority opinion in Wisconsin Legislature, which is unsigned, faults Evers and the state supreme court for potentially doing too much to protect the voting rights of African Americans. The state’s previous maps included six majority-Black districts, and Evers proposed adding a seventh such district. The Supreme Court struck down that proposal, which was approved by the state’s GOP-controlled supreme court (although with most of the state court’s Republican members in dissent).

Wisconsin Legislature places new hurdles in the way of parties challenging racial gerrymanders

Admittedly, the laws and precedents governing racial gerrymanders are not easily navigated.

The equal protection clause of the Constitution largely forbids mapmakers from considering race when drawing legislative lines. But the Voting Rights Act also forbids maps that dilute the voting power of racial minorities, even if those maps were not intentionally drawn to diminish the political power of voters of color.

These two requirements often come into tension. In order to draw maps that do not unlawfully dilute minority voting power, mapmakers often have to pay very close attention to the state’s racial demographics. For this reason, the Supreme Court held in Cooper v. Harris (2017) that a state has some “breathing room” to draw maps that benefit racial minorities.

Under Cooper, when a state “invokes the VRA to justify race-based districting,” its maps will be upheld if the state had a “strong basis in evidence” for concluding that it needed to consider race while drawing its maps. In close cases, Cooper suggests that judges should err on the side of upholding maps drawn in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

The Court’s new decision in Wisconsin Legislature, however, appears to flip this rule on its head, applying a presumption in favor of fewer majority-minority districts. The majority opinion claims that the state supreme court erred because it did not consider “whether a race-neutral alternative that did not add a seventh majority-black district would deny black voters equal political opportunity.”

Thus, before the state could draw a map with seven majority Black districts, it must first have ruled out at least some alternative maps that included only six such districts. That leaves open the possibility that the Wisconsin Supreme Court could reinstate the maps it originally selected, but only after it jumps through new procedural hoops.

The Court raced unusually fast to overturn Evers’s map

Setting aside the novelty of this legal rule — law professor and election law expert Rick Hasen writes that “the way this case was handled is quite bizarre and is another signal of a conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court showing increasing hostility to section 2 of the Voting Rights Act” — there are a number of procedural problems with the Wisconsin Legislature opinion.

For one thing, the Court reaches this new, precedent-setting conclusion despite only minimal briefing — the case arose on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of historically very brief orders and emergency rulings that the justices decide on a expedited basis.

The Court, moreover, raced to decide issues that were barely litigated in the lower courts. As Justice Sotomayor notes in dissent, the state supreme court selected the map at issue here, and it explicitly “preserved the possibility that an appropriate plaintiff could bring an equal protection or VRA challenge” to that map in the future.

Ordinarily, when someone challenges a legislative map, they must wait until the mapmakers finalize that map. Only then can they file a new lawsuit in a state or federal trial court challenging that map. This ordinary process gives the lower courts plenty of time to develop a full record and tease out the nuances of the case before it reaches the Supreme Court. In Wisconsin Legislature, by contrast, the Supreme Court raced to decide the case just weeks after the new maps were finalized.

Finally, it’s unclear how Wednesday’s decision can be squared with the so-called “Purcell principle.”

In Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), the Court warned that judges should be reluctant to hand down decisions impacting elections as the election itself draws nigh. In recent years, however, the Court’s Republican majority has steadily expanded the window of time when judges are not allowed to alter state election laws. In early February, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote an opinion, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, which suggests that this “Purcell window” extends for as much as nine months before the next general election.

Again, the Court did not reveal how each justice voted in Wisconsin Legislature. But if six justices voted to summarily reverse the Wisconsin Supreme Court, that means that either Alito or Kavanaugh — and most likely both — voted with the majority in Wisconsin Legislature.

Neither justice explained why the Purcell principle does not apply in this case, though the majority opinion in Wisconsin Legislature does claim that Wednesday’s decision gives the the Wisconsin Supreme Court “sufficient time to adopt maps consistent with the timetable for Wisconsin’s August 9th primary election.”

The Court, in other words, appears to have gone out of its way to decide an important voting rights case, with minimal briefing, and on an extraordinarily expedited schedule. It also did so despite warnings from conservative justices that judges should be more cautious in election years.

And the upshot of the Court’s opinion is that Black people now have less sway in Wisconsin’s elections — and possibly in those of other states.

CGI superheroes are more common than you think.

On June 9, 1995, Batman Forever introduced audiences to what was likely the first CGI stunt double.

In a few brief shots, a digital double leaped from tall buildings and swung on a grappling hook, and was used to convince viewers that Bruce Wayne was more “super” than the average man. Since then, superheroes and digidoubles have gone hand in hand. Protagonists in superhero films often wear masks or skin-tight bodysuits, which makes them perfect candidates for digital replacement; fabric is way easier to replicate digitally than skin.

Technology has only improved over the years, which means digidoubles are used for so much more than just “super” sequences. Today, digidoubles are used to give filmmakers and artists flexibility. Instead of being locked into what they’re able to shoot during principal photography, they can add and remove shots, completely change characters’ costumes, and rewrite the script if they need to — long after filming is over.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision this month in FBI v. Fazaga, a case challenging FBI surveillance, will make it significantly harder for people to pursue surveillance cases, and for U.S. and European Union (EU) negotiators to secure a lasting agreement for transatlantic transfers of private data. The Hill reports: The justices gave the U.S. government more latitude to invoke "state secrets" in spying cases. But ironically, that victory undercuts the Biden administration's efforts to show that the United States has sufficiently strong privacy protections to sustain a new Privacy Shield agreement -- unless Congress steps in now. In July 2020, the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) struck down the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, a legal framework used by thousands of U.S. companies to facilitate data transfers, because the U.S. failed to provide adequate protection for data belonging to people from the EU. Specifically, the court found that U.S. surveillance authorities, including Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and Executive Order 12333, permit unjustifiably broad government surveillance. The court also found that the Privacy Shield failed to provide adequate redress mechanisms for Europeans whose data is transferred to the U.S. -- namely, the ability to be heard by an independent court that can order binding remedies. In striking down Privacy Shield, the CJEU was clear: no EU-U.S. data-transfer agreement will survive the court's scrutiny until the U.S. narrows the scope of its surveillance and ensures that individuals subject to potentially illegal surveillance have a real, meaningful way to pursue accountability.

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"Completely misunderstood when he asked it," the Indiana Republican said.

As the confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson went into hour 13, Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked the Supreme Court nominee on Tuesday to define the word “woman.”

“I can’t — ” Jackson replied.

“You can’t?” Blackburn said.

“Not in this context. I’m not a biologist,” Jackson said.

“The meaning of the word woman is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?” Blackburn asked.

The Tennessee Republican’s line of questioning hit on nearly every political hot-button issue, from critical race theory to teaching children about gender identity in schools to Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s team.

Jackson said her role as a judge would be to address disputes about a definition and to interpret the law.

“The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about,” Blackburn said, before turning to Thomas, who has been at the center of the debate over policies for transgender athletes.

Blackburn asked what message allowing Thomas to compete sends to “girls who aspire to compete and win in sports?”

“Senator, I’m not sure what message that sends. If you’re asking me about the legal issues related to it — those are topics that are being hotly discussed, as you say, and could come to the court,” Jackson said before Blackburn cut her off, to explain her view of what message this delivers to young women.

“I think it tells our girls that their voices don’t matter,” Blackburn responded. “I think it tells them that they’re second-class citizens. And parents want to have a Supreme Court justice who is committed to preserving parental autonomy and protecting our nation’s children.”

Come hear the tale of Brett Kavanaugh, modern-day Job, the most noble victim of all.

While Republican Senators tried to be as odious as possible for the benefit of steadfastly gullible American media outlets that eat it up with a spoon and the Republican Party itself proved itself unable to stop being racist for even one damn day, it was left to Indiana Republican Sen. Mike Braun to spell out the desired results of Republican Supreme Court ambitions. It's not just abortion and birth control rights they want to see rolled back to the states.

The Republican philosophy, says Braun, means that states should regain the ability to make interracial marriage illegal.

Some jackass Braun spokescreature may attempt to half-assedly walk this one back, perhaps with claims that, while Braun personally doesn't have a problem with interracial marriage, heavens no, he's merely pointing out that states ought to be able to ban it if the Republicans of that state want to. And why should states have that supposed "right”? Because every Republican is an odious slimeball no longer willing to even abide the thought of the public being able to elect people who are Not Them, so of course, there's no other basic human right gained in the last century of American existence that they're not eager to also erase.

Republicanism is a white nationalist and fascist movement that does not recognize civil rights. Any of them. And they're coming for every last one of them.

According to OpenAI CEO and former president of Y Combinator, Sam Altman, college education in the U.S. "is nearer to collapsing than it appears." He writes in a Twitter thread: Most of all, it's clearly a bad deal for many students, or we wouldn't have the student debt crisis. Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something. But cancelling all student debt and then continuing to issue new debt to students that the university fails (i.e. by not putting them in a position to make enough money to easily pay it back) doesn't make sense. Tech jobs (I assume other jobs will follow) are increasingly willing to hire with no degree if an applicant can do well in an interview/on a test. It seems very clear that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American students, and that the Supreme Court is going to find this. (One expert said no discrimination would result in around 65% Asian-American admits.) The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes. Stopping standardized tests -- which are imperfect and correlated with socioeconomic status -- seems to be bad. Other items like the personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable. I'm all for looking at test scores in context, but dropping entirely denies opportunity. (I wonder if this is correlated to the earthquake coming when colleges can no longer discriminate against Asian-American students.) Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning. (A personal anecdote: I was invited a few years ago to speak at a college but I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed... Although I understand the spirit and obviously I am privileged, I consulted with friends from different backgrounds and then declined: what kind of message does that send to listeners?) The list could go on for a long time, but the point is: What a time to start an alternative to college! The world really needs it.

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When disgraced former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens resigned from his position as governor of Missouri—over allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman he was having an affair with, tied her up, took photos of her, attempted to blackmail her, and subsequently participated in publicly humiliating her—everyone hoped that was the last we would hear from Mr. Greitens. Unfortunately, Greitens, like a true Trumpian psychopath, announced he would be running in the Missouri GOP primary to replace Sen. Roy Blunt’s soon-to-be-vacated seat.

While some on folks in the GOP are willing to try and finesse the dark-recent history of Greitens, even attempting to call the accusations against him “half-rape,” the fact remains: Eric Greitens has more than simply skeletons in his closet, he sounds like a true nightmare of a person. Greitens’ ex-wife, Sheena Greitens, has made a new filing in the ongoing custody case between the two. The filing, once again, calls into question Greitens’ capacity to be in charge of anything—let alone the responsibilities of a U.S. Senator.

According to the Associated Press, the affidavit Sheena Greitens filed includes statements casting doubt on the GOP candidate’s emotional and psycological stability. “Prior to our divorce, during an argument in late April 2018, Eric knocked me down and confiscated my cell phone, wallet and keys so that I was unable to call for help or extricate myself and our children from our home. I became afraid for my safety and that of our children at our home.” Sheena Gretiens also alleges physical abuse on the part of Eric Greitens, against his children, giving the example of “cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face at the dinner table in front of me and yanking him around by his hair.”

The Washington Post reports that the affidavit also details more potential abuse, saying that after one visit with her former husband, one of their children came back “with a swollen face, bleeding gums, and a loose tooth.” According to Sheena, the child said his “dad had hit him,” but Eric Greitens had said it was an “accident” that happened while the two were “roughhousing.”

Also  in the affidavit are claims by Greitens’ former wife that in the months leading up to his resignation, Greitens claimed to be suicidal, and tried emotionally extorting her in order to get her to provide “specific public political support.” An interesting note here is that Sheena Greitens writes that “multiple people other than myself were worried enough to intervene to limit Eric’s access to firearms.” This means she believes, at least in writing, that she has evidence to support her claims.

According to Sheena Greitens, Eric’s actions and emotional instability during that time led to her “sleeping in my children’s room simply to try to keep them safe.”

Finally, Sheena Greitens’ filing includes an allegation that during a trip, where she was taking her children to fly to her parents’ home, Eric Greitens—still governor at the time—“threatened to come to the airport and have me arrested for kidnapping and child abuse, saying that because of his authority as a former governor who had supported law enforcement, the police would support him and not believe me.”

Eric Greitens’s campaign manager Dylan Johnson released a statement saying this affidavit “is clearly a politically-motivated attack against him.” Johnson also said that Eric Greitens was suing for full custody of the couple’s children: “This attack is nothing more than a sad attempt to force a father to yield custody of his children to a deranged individual.”

Related: Greitens’ campaign off to a great start after conservative hosts asks about ‘half-rape’ allegation

Related: Morning Digest: Eric Greitens, the GOP's worst nightmare in Missouri, already has a major opponent

Related: During custody trial, Trump’s pick for Senate accused of brutalizing and abusing estranged wife

Greitens first ran for Governor of Missouri, and won, even his ad campaign sort of exposed his strange pornographic obsession with guns and firing automatic and semi-automatic guns into trees. It was what most of us in the business would call scary and gross. Sadly, his Navy SEAL pedigree seemed to wash away all of the red flags pertaining to his character, and Greitens was elected and quickly set about signing anti-labor, pro-big business laws into effect.

Shortly into his tenure as Missouri Governor, Greitens was indicted on multiple charges connected to tying up, photographing, and then threatening a woman with blackmail, in a predatory series of heinous acts. Greitens refused to resign for what felt like forever, even as charges were added to what ought to have been a career-ending violation of another human’s rights. When Greitens finally resigned, he signed a few dozen laws into action—including a law that would have criminalized his sexual blackmail violations to a higher degree than they already were, if it had been enacted before he had been charged.

Greitens’ resignation came only after Missouri republicans made it clear they were willing to impeach him. Greitens seems to have been able to get a deal that included not being charged in another computer tampering case, wherein Greitens was suspected of having illegally used his veteran nonprofit’s fundraising list to help generate money for his gubernatorial campaign.

Greitens subsequently made it clear that he was still considering a run for higher office at some point in the future. Not because he planned on rehabilitating his image, but because, like Donald Trump, he maintains the deluded stance that he never did anything wrong. In order to make any semblance of reality out of this position, Greitens has maintained that all of these allegations—including the ones from his now-estranged wife—are politically-motivated attacks from powerful and mysterious operatives.

Since announcing his campaign to become Senator, Greitens has misrepresented the nature of the allegations against him, painting the accusations of sexual assault against him as proven to be false. In fact, at the time, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker explained that the lack of sexual assault charges against Greitens was due to two things: the statute of limitations has lapsed on some of the charges, and perhaps more crucially, “31,000 files had disappeared from Greitens' phone between an April review conducted by his legal team and a forensic examination in May ordered by a St. Louis judge.”

Greitens has not yet received the Trump seal of approval, but as Trump has shown, GOP candidates accused of serious domestic violence charges seem to be exactly the kind of pathological narcissists Trump wants to promote. Probably something to do with needing fascist officials whose motivations are easy for Trump to understand.

Check out Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast for coverage of races like Missouri’s gubernatorial clown car.

On Nov. 4, 2008, Barack Obama, then a senator from Illinois, was elected the first Black president of the United States. His election was seen as a hopeful moment in America and ushered in lots of think pieces and reporting that his presidency was the start of a new “post-racial” society. At long last — in the eyes of many, at least — there was hope that the racial wounds that have long divided Black and white Americans would heal.

That, of course, never happened. Even at the time, certain white voters refused to vote for Obama because of his race, and a rise in hate crimes followed his win. Moreover, in the lead up to Obama’s first election, some polls showed that only about one-third of white Americans (38 percent) thought Obama would help race relations, compared with 60 percent of Black Americans. Moreover, a plurality of white Americans thought (or, perhaps, hoped) that his candidacy would have no impact on race relations, essentially upholding the status quo. What’s more, some white voters during this period started to become resentful of a Black man ascending to the highest political office. And that backlash, in part, spurred the election of former President Donald Trump eight years later.

Trump’s election killed any illusions anyone might have had about a “post-racial” America. Indeed, Trump was successful in finding a predominately white audience who lapped up his overt racism toward people of color and who were eager to embrace a rising sense of white victimhood. 

Trump may be out of power, but those feelings aren’t. They may even be growing. 

With President Biden having just passed one full year in office, public opinion research shows that white Americans — and especially Republicans — see whites as victims of discrimination more than, say, Hispanic or Black Americans. According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, for example, only 17 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning Americans said there is “a lot” of discrimination against Black people in today’s society. That number rose to 26 percent when Republicans were asked whether they believed white people faced “a lot” of discrimination. And intense white racial resentment remains present both among Trump’s base and in our politics today. Case in point: Trump, who’s a (very, very early) favorite to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is still hitting that same drum; during a recent political event, the former president went so far as to falsely claim that white people were currently being discriminated against and sent to the “back of the line” when it came to receiving COVID-19 vaccines and treatment.

Trump is not the first white person to feel like a victim of discrimination or to make claims in that spirit. This phenomenon started long before him. But in the U.S., if we look at things like the racial wealth gap, mortgage denial rates, COVID-19 vaccination and illness rates, police violence rates or myriad other data sets, we quickly see plenty of systemic biases against Black Americans and other minority groups (such as increasing hate crimes against Asian Americans). You can’t, however, find such widespread evidence for anti-white discrimination. So why have many white Americans started to see themselves as the victims of racial discrimination?

Back in 2011, Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton and Tufts University professor Samuel Sommers published a study showing that white Americans perceived bias against whites as increasing from the 1950s to the 2000s. 

According to Sommers, it’s hard to pinpoint just one factor driving this feeling of white victimhood among white Americans. “There’s this sense that there’s only so much of anything to go around, so more of something for other groups or entities might mean less of something for me and my group,” he told us. “That makes a lot of sense when you’re talking about food at the table in front of you, but it feels like it’s getting applied to things like equal rights — or respect and status.” 

These feelings were especially prevalent in the late 2000s, when white people saw a Black man rising to the nation’s highest office. But today, beyond Obama, other perceived “threats” to white Americans — such as an increasingly multiracial nation that could eventually lead to the U.S. becoming a “majority-minority” society, or Trump’s loss in 2020 to Biden — likely fueled existing beliefs and feelings of inadequacy and victimhood among white Americans.

The same is likely true of the discussions about “racial reckonings” following the murder of George Floyd, coupled with a few high-profile examples of Black people breaking barriers. Indeed, previous polling has documented that white Americans — and especially white Republicans — largely think too much attention is paid to race and racial issues. And, as we wrote about in our last article, there are additional concerns about racial minorities getting more than they deserve. Kamala Harris’s ascendance to the vice presidency as well as the nomination of U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, for example, likely further stoked white Americans’ existing hatred against Black people and other marginalized groups. To use the language of Ohio State University professor Koritha Mitchell, “Black success beckons the mob.” There is a phenomenon Mitchell calls “know-your-place aggression” whereby U.S. culture celebrates the success of straight white men (regardless of their merit) but discourages, diminishes or destroys the achievements of members of other groups.

This phenomenon is related to one of the other things Sommers told us about: jockeying for stigma. 

“Maybe that’s a more general human phenomenon that transcends race and racism,” Sommers said, “but now we’re talking about it on a much more serious and problematic level.” When white Americans see minorities succeed, it threatens them in a way that makes them feel like victims. As Sommers puts it: “It seems like there’s some kind of status, attention or special treatment that certain white people think will be bestowed on them if they make the claim that they’ve been treated unfairly.”

In other words, for a “post-racial” America to exist, white people would need to see people of color ascending to higher political offices and an increasingly multiracial nation as a win for all of America. Instead, many take these things as a personal attack and view it as a loss of their own status at the top of America’s racial hierarchy. 

We see evidence for this in public opinion data, too. With the help of Kathleen Weldon and Jacob Harris of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research — a research center that has one of the largest archives of public opinion datasets (and where one of us, Neil Lewis Jr., is a faculty affiliate) — and Natalie Jackson from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), we looked at perceptions of discrimination against white Americans over time, and how those perceptions vary by both partisanship and race.

Since at least the year 2000, polling firms have been asking Americans questions about how much discrimination they perceive is faced by white Americans, asking respondents to place that discrimination on a scale or to compare it to other racial and ethnic groups. And our analysis of the Roper Center’s data shows that before Obama’s first election, roughly half of Republicans perceived there to be at least some discrimination against white people. Specifically, according to a 2000 poll from Princeton Survey Research Associates/The National Conference for Community and Justice, 56 percent of Republicans said that white Americans faced at least some discrimination, and by 2005, when the organizations asked the question again, that number dipped slightly to 47 percent. However, toward the end of Obama’s first term, other polling found the share of Republicans answering a similar question to be higher, as can be seen for the years 2011 and 2012 on the chart below, which uses data from PRRI.

PRRI has asked a slightly different question — to what extent respondents agree that discrimination against white Americans is now as significant of an issue as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities — almost yearly between 2011 and 2020. The trend across that timespan is a bit messier, but the share of Republicans who “completely agreed” or “mostly agreed” with the statement was mostly higher during Trump’s time in office than during Obama’s.

It is noteworthy that Democrats saw things quite differently than Republicans — indeed the clearest trend in the chart above is the polarization of views on this question along party lines. The percentage of Democrats who say there is at least “some” discrimination against whites has steadily decreased since the turn of the century, and this trend is consistent across both Roper and PRRI datasets. These trends are also consistent with new research that builds on Norton and Sommers’s initial work. In a forthcoming paper in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a team of researchers from Tufts, Harvard and the VA Bedford Healthcare System found that race and partisanship shape perceptions of racism as a zero-sum game. “Liberal White Americans saw racism as a zero-sum game they were winning by a lot, moderate White Americans saw it as a game they were winning by only a little,” the researchers wrote, “and conservative White Americans saw it as a game they were losing.”

Of course, race and partisanship are intertwined: The vast majority of Republicans are white, and indeed, if we look at the same question by race, we see similar patterns:

Worryingly, these trends may be increasing after Biden’s inauguration. PRRI didn’t ask the same question again in 2021, so we can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison there. But according to Pew’s 2021 survey, the share of Republicans — including “leaners,” i.e., Americans leaning toward one party or the other — who said there is at least “some” discrimination against white people was 63 percent. This includes 26 percent who said there is “a lot” of discrimination against white people, which looks like an all-time high.

We say “looks” because the polling data we have is messy. If we compare the Pew data to past Pew data (so that the methodology and question wording is consistent), we see an increase from 2019 (16 percent) to 2021 (26 percent) for the share of Republicans saying white Americans face “a lot” of discrimination. Those are only two data points, of course. We’ll need more polling to know how to interpret that result for sure.

Still, other recent polls have yielded similar findings with different questions. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, using a summer 2021 poll conducted by Project Home Fire and InnovateMR, found that only 38 percent of Trump voters either somewhat or strongly agreed that white people have advantages over people of color (compared with 87 percent of Biden voters). Moreover, 84 percent of Trump voters expressed concern that bigotry against white people will surge in the coming years. Meanwhile, only 38 percent of Biden voters felt the same way.

What’s striking is how these perceptions persist even in the face of extraordinary evidence to the contrary. We have already discussed some domestic evidence about the persistence of racial discrimination against minority groups. Additionally, on the international stage, we see anti-Black racism manifesting even during a war: Journalists monitoring the invasion in Ukraine have reported that Black people are being violently removed from trains trying to get people to safety.

What could be fueling an increase in these views? Following Trump’s loss in 2020, the Republican Party leaned further into messages that paint Republicans and white people as victims of an overzealous movement for racial justice. For example, Fox News coverage of critical race theory — a decades-old framework for legal scholarship — surged during the Virginia gubernatorial campaign, according to a Newsweek analysis, only to quickly and starkly dip following Republican Glenn Youngkin’s win. And several pundits pointed to education and critical race theory as reasons for his success. Republicans have also found a seemingly successful political strategy in attacking and amplifying race-related buzzwords, such as “woke,” once used in activist circles. And as FiveThirtyEight contributors Hakeem Jefferson and Victor Ray pointed out on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, the current narratives of victimization and the associated backlash to racial progress are some white people’s way of reckoning with the changing times.

Sommers underscored the gravity of leadership’s role in these processes when we talked with him: “If we’ve learned nothing else in the last five or so years, it’s just how influential top-down attitudes are. When leaders around the country and at a regional level are using racist or vulgar language themselves, that seems to move the needle on what’s considered normative and acceptable behavior in our society.”

If we want to address the inequities that continue to plague and divide our society, white Americans — and in particular, white Republicans — will need to move away from the victimhood narrative and acknowledge our current reality. And the extent that the inequities can be muted or even mitigated depends heavily on what politicians choose to emphasize in the narratives that they construct about the state of our union. The success of minorities does not mean victimization for white Americans. Without recognition that we can all succeed — and that the nation will be better off for it — the patterns of disparities we have discussed throughout will continue to persist, and we will all be worse off for it.

With a single tweet, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida proved once again why there are few men more qualified than he to embarrass the Sunshine State. He couldn’t just let a well-trained journalist announce that he would be seeking reelection this year. He had to try and add a little razzle dazzle. "It’s chose your fighter time,” Gaetz tweeted on Saturday with a link to a Northwest Florida Daily News article. “I’m you’re [sic] Florida Man!"

And with that, the mockery began.

RELATED: Another revelation for Rep. Matt Gaetz as latest witness says he was in the room where it happened

“Stay in school kids,” one Twitter user, Amy Lou, cautioned. “You won't embarrass yourself with 3rd grade grammatical errors, and could earn your way to a Congressional seat instead of having your dad buy your way there 😃” 

Steven Specht, a Democrat who attempted unsuccessfully to unseat Gaetz in 2016, told Mother Jones in a 2019 interview that Matt, a third-generation politician, “would be an assistant manager at Walmart if it weren’t for his father."

Don Gaetz, Matt's father, sold his hospice company for $400 million in 2004 and had a net worth of $25 million by the time he ran for Senate in 2006, Mother Jones reported. When it was Matt Gaetz's time to run for office, he raised almost $480,000, nearly five times more than his rivals raked in. "Many people who had backed Don Gaetz donated to his son that year, including the biggest monied interests in the district: local real estate developers, health care companies, and a Pensacola beer baron," writer Stephanie Mencimer said in the Mother Jones piece.

Mencimer laid out exactly what the younger Gaetz has to offer his constituents. The short answer is nothing.

The longer answer: After less than a year on the job at a law firm, he was pulled over for speeding in his dad's BMW on the way home from a nightclub on Okaloosa Island. Allegedly smelling of alcohol, he refused a breathalyzer and was arrested. All charges against him were later dropped. 

"Gaetz’s driving record is the subject of many jokes in his district,” Mencimer wrote. “In 2014, he rear-ended one of his constituents while talking on his cellphone."

Ken Russell, a Democrat hoping to challenge Sen. Marco Rubio this year, reminded Twitter users that also on Matt Gaetz’s political resume is a history of denying best efforts to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Russell tweeted: "BREAKING NEWS: Florida man goes on 3 year tirade denying science and pretending that we live in 1950’s America."

Majid Padellan, a blogger and influencer who goes by "Brooklyn Dad" on social media, added to the list spotlit allegations that Gaetz is guilty of statutory rape involving a 17-year-old girl—allegations that the congressman has, of course, denied.

“BREAKING: Matt Gaetz will be running for reelection on a ‘Florida Man who uses Venmo to pay for sex with underaged girls’ platform,” Padellan tweeted.

Matt Gaetz is also the subject of a Justice Department investigation in which he is accused of paying a teen to travel out of state with him, The Washington Post reported. 

RELATED: Matt Gaetz took trip to Bahamas where flight, hotel, and women were provided by 'ganjapreneur'

Padellan said in another tweet: “Matt Gaetz shouldn't be in Congress voting against measures to hold (Vladimir) Putin accountable. He should be in prison.”

The GOP is trying to win votes with a wave of “anti-woke” bills.

Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country are taking up anti-trans and anti-abortion bills at a shocking rate, as lawmakers seize on an enforcement mechanism first tested by Texas’s SB 8.

Multiple states — including Florida, Idaho, and Texas — have enacted, or hope to enact, new and draconian restrictions, including banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy (functionally equivalent to an outright ban on abortion), or banning gender-affirming health care for transgender children.

Such legislation is part of an existing trend — just last year, the US passed at least 106 abortion restrictions, making it the single worst year for reproductive health care access in the country’s history — but one that’s growing. In states like Missouri, lawmakers are pushing the envelope with legislation intended to expand abortion restrictions even outside of the state.

Legislation regarding transgender youth, in particular, has also increased. In April 2021, Republican lawmakers in Arkansas passed Act 626, becoming the first state to outlaw gender-affirming treatment for trans youth (the bill is currently being blocked by a federal court order). Other states have since followed suit: A month later, Tennessee lawmakers passed a slew of anti-trans bills, including the state’s own ban on gender-affirming treatment for trans minors. And this year, Alabama is pushing one of the most extreme anti-trans health care laws to date with legislation that would jail doctors who provide health care treatment or perform gender-affirming procedures to trans minors.

“There has been an explosion of these bills,” Cathryn Oakley, who tracks legislation for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, told Mother Jones. She said that out of more than 130 anti-trans bills introduced in the country this year, at least 38 would deny trans children access to gender-affirming health care.

Part of the explanation could lie in an increasingly conservative Supreme Court. Though the constitutionality of many new state-level restrictions may be questionable at best, the 6-3 conservative bench may prove more receptive to Republican arguments.

There’s also an overtly political component, however. Out of power on a federal level and hoping to reclaim control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans have signaled that they view legislation targeting trans children as good politics for them.

Those factors mean that such bills are continuing to gain ground in Republican-controlled states, and continuing to grow in scope — despite the harm they may pose to people who can get pregnant and to trans people.

Anti-abortion and anti-trans laws are getting more extreme

The success of Texas’s SB 8 has introduced an entirely new wave of anti-abortion legislative tactics in the US, which in some cases has also been extended to anti-trans measures.

SB 8, which was signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last year, not only bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy but also deputizes citizens to enforce it, allowing any person to bring a civil lawsuit against an entity who “aid or abets” in an abortion procedure for damages of at least $10,000. The law is facing multiple legal challenges, but it’s currently in effect and appears likely to stay that way.

Since then, Republicans in other states are using a similar enforcement mechanism to underpin even more draconian measures. Idaho lawmakers, copying Texas’s abortion ban, are pushing a bill that not only bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy but uses a similar bounty-style component that would allow family members of rapists to sue medical providers who perform an abortion on the rapist’s victim. Lawmakers in Missouri have also followed the Texas model for a proposed anti-abortion bill, adding a dangerous provision that would force pregnant individuals to carry ectopic pregnancies to full term, which health professionals have made clear are 100 percent fatal if left untreated.

The argument for these anti-abortion laws hinges on the belief that a fetus should be considered a functioning human because its heartbeat can be heard on ultrasound (Texas’s SB 8 bill is also referred to as “the heartbeat law” by its proponents). But this claim has been repeatedly debunked by medical professionals, who explain the term “fetal heartbeat” is misleading. Any activity captured in an early gestation ultrasound is “actually electrical activity, and the sound that you ‘hear’ is actually manufactured by the ultrasound machine,” not a human heartbeat.

Wendy P. Romero/Long Visual Press/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

With the upcoming Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, expected to be handed down by June or July, the right to an abortion could be eliminated entirely at the federal level — likely only increasing the proliferation of harsh state-level restrictions.

The accelerating extremism behind Republican anti-abortion laws is equally on display when it comes to legislation targeting trans people, and particularly trans children.

There are literally hundreds of anti-trans bills currently in the works across at a state level, but a handful of these laws have grabbed national attention due to their severity.

Among the most extreme is Alabama’s anti-trans bill, which has two notable components. First, it criminalizes doctors who provide hormone treatments and other gender-affirming care to trans teens, an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Second, the bill requires teachers and staff to out transgender students whose trans identities are not already known to their parents. The bill has already passed the Alabama Senate and is expected to be approved by the House.

In Texas, parents of trans children are in danger of being investigated for “child abuse” following an order by Abbott, which criminalizes parents who allow their kids to receive gender-affirming treatment. The policy is currently on hold after a district court injunction, but it represents yet another new tactic for anti-trans lawmakers.

Specifically, Texas’s anti-trans policy is unusual since it was not passed through state legislation but enacted based on a non-binding opinion from Attorney General Ken Paxton, as a way to circumvent the governor’s lack of authority to put out such an order.

Republicans pushing new anti-trans measures often claim parents and health care professionals are “pressuring” young children into undergoing gender-affirming surgery which they argue could cause irreparable harm to the child, like infertility.

Advocates and doctors, however, say the reality is different. Research shows providing accessible gender-affirming health care to trans youth have an overall positive effect on young people, reducing the likelihood of depression and suicide among transgender youth.

And Texas’s new policy is poised to cause very real harm to trans children. Claudio, the parent of a trans teen in Texas, told Vox’s Nicole Narea pseudonymously that prior to coming out, “my child was suicidal. My child was hospitalized in a mental hospital because of suicidal ideation. And the moment they told us that they were transgender was the moment that they started getting better. A lot of the time, you don’t get to choose. Your kids are who they are.”

The endgame to these laws may be political for Republicans

Strict abortion restrictions in the US are part of a decades-old ideological project by the right, and anti-trans laws are nothing new either. In addition to a conservative Supreme Court majority apparently friendly to such restrictions, though, political expediency is giving the current surge of lawmaking additional traction.

As Katelyn Burns, a MSNBC columnist who has previously written for Vox, explained to Slate this month, “we are seeing institutional pushback against this order because I think a lot of people see this what it really is: posturing for a primary campaign that Abbott is facing against a much more conservative candidate.” (Abbott won his primary by a comfortable margin this month.)

Abbott strategist Dave Carney also admitted as much to reporters earlier this month, describing Texas’s policy of investigating the parents of trans children for “child abuse” as a “a 75-80% winner,” according to a tweet by Texas Tribune reporter Patrick Svitek.

“That is a winning issue,” Carney reportedly said. “Texans have common sense. This is why the Democrats across the country are out of touch.”

Similar considerations may also be playing into legislation in other states. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are both widely thought to have future presidential aspirations — particularly if the 2024 Republican field doesn’t include former President Donald Trump — and their states have advanced harsh new legislation this year.

In Florida, DeSantis is expected to sign a ban on all abortions after 15 weeks, which recently passed the state legislature. South Dakota lawmakers have also advanced a Noem-backed bill sharply limiting access to abortion pills in the state (though it’s currently tied up in court), and Noem last month signed a bill banning transgender girls from participating in high school and college sports that align with their gender identity.

The political weight behind such measures is relatively new: As recently as 1984, data suggests, a person’s political affiliation was not closely tied to their position on abortion. But by 2020, the gap between pro-choice Democrats and anti-abortion Republicans had widened tremendously, reaching a 59 point-difference among “strong partisans, the group most likely to vote in primary elections.”

There is also evidence that racial attitudes have become closely intertwined with a person’s position on issues like welfare, gun control, immigration, and even abortion, which may explain why recent laws resonate with GOP base voters. Such identity politics, Republicans hope, could be a winning strategy to take back power in 2022.

It’s unclear, however, whether that will translate to general election contests, despite Carney’s claim. Such policies may play well with Republican primary electorates — as Abbott apparently calculated ahead of his gubernatorial primary earlier this month — but polling suggests Texas-style attempts to limit access to gender-affirming health care are sharply unpopular overall.

In one poll conducted last month by Data for Progress, 63 percent of all voters — and even 46 percent of Republicans — said they supported leaving decisions about health care “to children who identify as transgender, their parents, and their doctor” rather than the state.

Support for the right to an abortion is also high — according to a CNN-SSRS poll from January, 69 percent of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade.

So far, those numbers don’t appear to be impacting Republican fervor for new anti-trans and anti-abortion restrictions — but it raises the possibility that increasingly extreme Republican lawmakers could face a backlash rather than a political boost.

In the meantime, though, such measures are causing real harm. “It I don’t know how much risk we’re going to be willing to take, so at some point, we might decide to cut our losses and pick up and leave,” Claudio, the Texas parent of a trans teen, told Vox. “Persecution scares you extra.”

Marco Rubio is defending the Florida GOP’s reprehensible ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, adopting the right-wing talking point that the legislation is actually about parental rights, Washington Blade reports.

But as Daily Kos’ Marissa Higgins has succinctly written, the bigoted legislation is in reality about “stamping out LGBTQ+ identities, people, and histories from public school classrooms,” and Marco Rubio knows that perfectly well. Of course, his enthusiastic support for this anti-LGBT law is no surprise. Disgusting, but no surprise.

It’s a waste of time to expect better from a man who in 2006 called adoption by loving same-sex parents a “social experiment.” Oh, but people change, and plenty of Democrats held anti-gay views too, his supporters might insist. Sure, but as of 2015, Rubio had refused to comment on the matter, even after the courts “effectively struck down the gay adoption ban in 2010,” BuzzFeed reported.

It’s a waste of time to expect better from a man who as a presidential candidate hired noted homophobe Eric Teetsel, who once “bemoaned the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision as ‘further obscuring the truth about the immorality of homosexuality,’” Think Progress reported in 2015. Teetsel is currently chief of staff to insurrectionist Josh Hawley. 

It’s a waste of time to expect better from a man who said he would not seek another term to the Senate, but then used the Pulse mass shooting as an excuse to break that promise.

“I’ve been deeply impacted by it,” Marco claimed, according to a Talking Points Memo report in 2016. “When it visits your home state and it impacts a community you know well, it really gives you pause to think about your service to your country and where you can be most useful to your country." Marco was so, so, so deeply impacted by the murders of LGBT people that he then spoke alongside anti-LGBT activists just weeks later. 

One scheduled speaker, Pastor Ken Graves, “preaches against ‘militant homofascism’ that he says ‘seeks to take over our land and make it Sodom’ and argues that gay people cannot build happy families because they are ‘depressed,’” Right Wing Watch reported at the time.

"The event I will be speaking at in Orlando is a gathering of local pastors and faith leaders,” a defensive Rubio would claim in response to criticism, verbally wagging his finger at us in his usual manner. “Leave it to the media and liberal activists to label a gathering of faith leaders as an anti-LGBT event. It is nothing of the sort.” Of course, our bad for looking at the words, actions, and record, and using those to come to a conclusion.

To make the point, The American Independent reports that just days after the Florida GOP approved the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, “Rubio posted a Bible quote from the Book of Isaiah about Sodom and Gomorrah—two ancient cities that LGBTQ rights opponents often cite to condemn same-sex relationships: ‘Hear the word of the LORD, princes of Sodom! Listen to the instruction of our God, people of Gomorrah!’” Is that Sen. Marco Rubio or Pastor Ken Graves?

To mostly quote Marco Rubio, let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Marco Rubio doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing.

RELATED: Rubio, still 'reeling' over the Orlando shooting, defends headlining a premier anti-LGBT event

RELATED: Ignoring emotional pleas from openly gay colleague, Republicans pass Don't Say Gay bill

RELATED: Just hours after passing Don't Say Gay bill, Florida GOP to vote on targeting asylum-seeking kids

Tom's Guide tested a Mac Studio workstation equipped with an M1 Ultra with the Geekbench 5.4 CPU benchmarks "to get a sense of how effectively it handles single-core and multi-core workflows." "Since our M1 Ultra is the best you can buy (at a rough price of $6,199) it sports a 20-core CPU and a 64-core GPU, as well as 128GB of unified memory (RAM) and a 2TB SSD." Slashdot reader exomondo shares their results: We ran the M1 Ultra through the Geekbench 5.4 CPU benchmarking test multiple times and after averaging the results, we found that the M1 Ultra does indeed outperform top-of-the-line Windows gaming PCs when it comes to multi-core CPU performance. Specifically, the M1 Ultra outperformed a recent Alienware Aurora R13 desktop we tested (w/ Intel Core i7-12700KF, GeForce RTX 3080, 32GB RAM), an Origin Millennium (2022) we just reviewed (Core i9-12900K CPU, RTX 3080 Ti GPU, 32GB RAM), and an even more 3090-equipped HP Omen 45L we tested recently (Core i9-12900K, GeForce RTX 3090, 64GB RAM) in the Geekbench 5.4 multi-core CPU benchmark. However, as you can see from the chart of results below, the M1 Ultra couldn't match its Intel-powered competition in terms of CPU single-core performance. The Ultra-powered Studio also proved slower to transcode video than the afore-mentioned gaming PCs, taking nearly 4 minutes to transcode a 4K video down to 1080p using Handbrake. All of the gaming PCs I just mentioned completed the same task faster, over 30 seconds faster in the case of the Origin Millennium. Before we even get into the GPU performance tests it's clear that while the M1 Ultra excels at multi-core workflows, it doesn't trounce the competition across the board. When we ran our Mac Studio review unit through the Geekbench 5.4 OpenCL test (which benchmarks GPU performance by simulating common tasks like image processing), the Ultra earned an average score of 83,868. That's quite good, but again it fails to outperform Nvidia GPUs in similarly-priced systems. They also share some results from the OpenCL Benchmarks browser, which publicly displays scores from different GPUs that users have uploaded: Apple's various M1 chips are on the list as well, and while the M1 Ultra leads that pack it's still quite a ways down the list, with an average score of 83,940. Incidentally, that means it ranks below much older GPUs like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070 (85,639) and AMD's Radeon VII (86,509). So here again we see that while the Ultra is fast, it can't match the graphical performance of GPUs that are 2-3 years old at this point — at least, not in these synthetic benchmarks. These tests don't always accurately reflect real-world CPU and GPU performance, which can be dramatically influenced by what programs you're running and how they're optimized to make use of your PC's components. Their conclusion? When it comes to tasks like photo editing or video and music production, the M1 Ultra w/ 128GB of RAM blazes through workloads, and it does so while remaining whisper-quiet. It also makes the Mac Studio a decent gaming machine, as I was able to play less demanding games like Crusader Kings III, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Total War: Warhammer II at reasonable (30+ fps) framerates. But that's just not on par with the performance we expect from high-end GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090.... Of course, if you don't care about games and are in the market for a new Mac with more power than just about anything Apple's ever made, you want the Studio with M1 Ultra.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Researchers testing repurposed drugs against Covid-19 found that ivermectin didn't reduce hospital admissions, in the largest trial yet of the effect of the antiparasitic on the disease driving the pandemic," reports the Wall Street Journal: Public-health authorities and researchers have for months said the drug hasn't shown any benefit in treating the disease.... The latest trial, of nearly 1,400 Covid-19 patients at risk of severe disease, is the largest to show that those who received ivermectin as a treatment didn't fare better than those who received a placebo. "There was no indication that ivermectin is clinically useful," said Edward Mills, one of the study's lead researchers and a professor of health sciences at Canada's McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. "That finding is consistent with long-standing FDA claims that ivermectin showed no benefits in clinical testing and could be dangerous in large doses," reports the New York Daily News. These new findings "have been accepted for publication in a major peer-reviewed medical journal," notes Seeking Alpha.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden's indecision on student loan debt could dampen turnout with a key constituency ahead of the midterms: younger voters.

While White House officials have indicated he may extend the freeze on student loan payments for the fourth time, Biden’s lack of certainty ahead of another looming deadline is causing heartburn across the president’s party.

Advocates in close touch with the White House are impatient, arguing that even if Biden ultimately moves forward with another payment suspension by the May expiration date, it’s becoming increasingly tough for them to inspire restive young voters to match their record 2020 or 2018 turnout levels. And Democratic lawmakers are pressing Biden to give millions of borrowers more than a month’s notice when deciding on an extension, which prevents them from going over a financial cliff.

The ultimate answer, both advocates and Democrats say, is for Biden to finally use his executive authority to fulfill a campaign promise to eliminate at least $10,000 in student debt for every borrower. And they’re hoping he does it before November.

The issue is one in a long list of pledges Biden extended during his campaign that advocates, particularly those representing young voters, say the president is dragging his feet on. Increasingly, they worry that along with addressing climate change and countering GOP assaults on voting rights, the lack of broad action on spiraling student debt will send a signal to Gen Z and millennials that Biden and his party are unwilling to use all of their available powers to make immediate and meaningful changes that affect their pocketbooks and futures.

“The White House doesn't seem to get that their base isn’t just old white people who want to hear ‘Fund the police,’” said Max Lubin, co-founder and chief executive of Rise, Inc., referencing Biden’s recent State of the Union address. “It’s young and racially diverse and we need student debt cancellation and climate action for young people to have a fair shot.” Rise, Inc. is a nonprofit organization that advocates for free college.

Some 55 percent of eligible voters aged 18-29 voted in 2020 compared to roughly 44 percent in 2016. Similarly in 2018, roughly 28 percent of young voters cast ballots compared to 13 percent in 2014. Young voters proved pivotal for Biden in key swing states with narrow margins of victory like Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, according to Tufts University's Tisch College Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning.

White House officials huddled with outside activists and policy experts last week, and several attendees told POLITICO they left the meeting without a clear indication of what the president would do on student loans — and no commitment that he would act anytime soon. It’s been nearly a year since Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, said the White House was just a “few weeks” out from expecting a memo on the administration’s legal powers to wipe away federal student loans. And still, no such memo has surfaced. Nor have details about what such a memo — if it exists — has concluded.

But unlike the previous extensions, the latest push is coming in an election year where those working to motivate young people contend the lack of attention could bring disastrous results.

Meanwhile, private lenders are pushing for a restart in student loan payments, which further complicates the politics of a student loan freeze.

Biden has long been skeptical of his power to forgive even $10,000 in debt and prefers Congress take that action. But opposition to Biden’s signature economic social plan from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) leaves little hope among most Democrats that they can pass the biggest pieces of Biden’s domestic agenda, let alone debt relief, before November.

At its roundtable, officials from the Domestic Policy Council and Office of Public Engagement talked to advocates about youth priorities for 2022. White House aides pointed to Biden’s actions on equity as evidence they’re listening to young voters and attentive to their needs. But Lubin, whose organization focuses on college affordability and other student and youth issues, recalled telling administration officials that “they are not doing many things that young people can actually feel.”

“And if you can’t describe to me how young people feel the impact of your executive action on equity, then I don’t really know why they would expect them to support or even understand what that policy is,” he added in an interview.

Earlier this month, Klain told the “Pod Save America” podcast that Biden would likely extend the freeze on debt collection. Klain also appeared to indicate that repeated extensions give the White House time to address Biden’s “executive branch question” on what amount of student debt and what power Biden has to forgive it.

“That’s something we’re going to deal with later on,” he said.

Education Department officials dropped an extension hint of their own by instructing companies that manage federal student loans to hold off on sending required notices to borrowers about their payments starting.

Still, young voters don’t see the debt extension as anything close to approaching a fulfillment of Biden’s ambitious promise. And taking so long even to confirm that they are headed in that direction is leaving borrowers in a lurch.

Edwith Theogene, senior director of advocacy for the Center for American Progress’ youth engagement arm, pointed out that the debt freeze started under former President Donald Trump, leaving young voters “looking for more to happen.”

“We don't exactly 100% know what the administration is going to do,” Theogene said. “Our concern [is about] the people that are going to be impacted by this situation and how we can get results. We're always waiting with bated breath to know what's going to happen next.”

When advocates again pushed the White House last week to take executive action on student debt, officials were noncommittal, thanking them for their time and adding that they are “invested in prioritizing the interest of young people,” said Theogene, who joined the meeting.

Biden has taken narrower steps to forgive debt for disabled borrowers, public service workers and defrauded students, though the total for all categories combined is a fraction of what is owed by the broader public. Vedant Patel, a White House spokesperson, also reiterated that no one has been required to pay “a single dime” of federal student loans since Biden took office.

“We are building a student loan system that works for borrowers and provides them the relief authorized by Congress that has proven elusive for far too long,” Patel said. The targeted relief along with the student loan payment “pause,” he added, has “given some breathing room to borrowers.”

“The Education Department will continue working to ensure a smooth transition to repayment, and the administration continues to look into what debt relief actions can be taken administratively,” he said.

Advocates and lawmakers are hopeful that if Biden moves to forgive at least $10,000 in loan debt via executive order that he won’t stop there. They also believe that he has the power to restore defaulted borrowers to good standing and ensure borrowers can easily access income-driven repayment plans.

Still, Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.), said, “there are a lot of people that are still waiting” for Biden to issue an executive order forgiving student debt.

“We did what people told us to do: Go to college, get a good job, start a career and a family, but it's holding us back,” she said. “This is holding back generations of people.”

When asked which actions might be most important for progressives leading up to the midterms, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) told reporters canceling student debt might be at the top.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said on a conference call following the release of the Progressive Caucus’ call for executive actions that the cancellation of student debt could help drive an economic recovery.

“We’re continuing to push very hard on student loan debt. We know that, you know, we think there’s a good chance for a continued extension of the pause,” she said. “But we also think that we should cancel this debt and a significant portion of the debt and that it would really drive economic recovery, and racial equity, because so much of student loan debt is significantly worse for Black folks than then for white folks.”

For now, Williams said the top thing Biden’s administration needs to do is make sure borrowers are prepared for a restart of payments. Student loan debt, Williams said, is the second-most pressing issue she hears about from her Atlanta-based constituents, where the racial wealth gap is yawning, right behind voting rights. In recent meetings in her district, Williams said she’s pointed to her own efforts on student loan debt, but also to Biden’s work to fund historically Black colleges and universities, along with other measures impacting young people that she stressed shouldn’t be overlooked.

Still, advocates and some Democratic lawmakers note that in major aid packages negotiated in Congress key provisions aimed at making college more affordable were sacrificed early on. An executive order alone is unlikely to be a cure-all for Democrats’ turnout problems, but they view it as perhaps the clearest step Biden could take on his own over the next few months and one that could be felt immediately.

“It's not a silver bullet, but there is something to keeping your word. And the days of engaging young people and engaging black people and engaging Latino folks when it's time to vote by saying everything you want to hear and then not doing it are over,” said Kristin McGuire, executive director for Young Invincibles, a nonprofit that works to amplify the voices of young people in the political process.

“This is one of those moments where the administration has a real opportunity to make good on a promise that was made very loud and boldly on the campaign trail, and young people were listening,” McGuire added. “And so not only are young people listening, they're waiting for that response; they're waiting for the action to happen.”

Forgiving student debt may not be a panacea for Biden and Democrats' young voter woes, but it ranks high on the list of priorities for that voting bloc. Tom Bonier, chief executive of the Democratic data firm TargetSmart, said that last year’s elections in New Jersey, Virginia and polling all point toward depressed youth turnout come November.

In Virginia, Democrats were stunned by former Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s loss in the gubernatorial race last fall. In a new analysis, Bonier attributes it largely in part to a drop in young voters. In 2017 young voters made up some 9.7 percent of the electorate compared to 14.6 percent in 2020. But in 2021 that dropped to 9.1 percent.

“There wasn't a scenario where Terry McAuliffe could have won with that level of youth turnout,” said Bonier, who said Democrats are unlikely to see a youth vote rivaling the last midterm that ushered the party into a commanding House majority. “For Democrats to hold on to control of the House and the Senate, we don't have to hit exactly those 2018 highs but we do need to get close to them.”

Forgiving student debt, Bonier said, would help.

“Student debt is really limiting opportunities for millions of young voters who would unsurprisingly feel demoralized if they had an expectation of some action and progress on that front and they haven't seen it materialize,” he said. “I would put that issue likely at the top of that pyramid in terms of the issue that could have potentially the most impact [on] youth mobilization and motivation heading into the midterms.”

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.

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ewwww

Noted insurrectionist and treason-curious Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has decided to bring some QAnon seasoning to the disgustingly and blatantly racist appeals for opposition to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackon’s Supreme Court nomination. In a long and slimy Twitter screed that does not merit linking to, Hawley suggests that Jackson isn’t just “soft on crime”—the dog whistle Republican narrative—but has coddled sex offenders and in particular pedophiles.

Hawley went so far as to say that “her record endangers children,” a charge that has probably already been picked up on by the worst of the worst QAnon conspiracy theorists who feed the right-wing media. Expect it to show up on Fox News any minute now.

That makes Sen. Dick Durbin’s attitude a little too dismissive. The Judiciary Committee chair told Politico: “I don’t believe in it being taken seriously … I’m troubled by it because it’s so outrageous. It really tests the committee as to whether we’re going to be respectful in the way we treat this nominee.”

Yes, yes it does. Particularly when Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—after that screed from Hawley was posted—lied through his teeth, telling conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that “I think Judge Jackson will be treated respectfully. I think the questions will be appropriate.” No. The questions will not be appropriate. Hawley just proved that, and McConnell needs to be pressured into holding him to account for that.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates responded appropriately. “This is toxic and weakly-presented misinformation that relies on taking cherry-picked elements of her record out of context—and it buckles under the lightest scrutiny.” The full statement:

Judge Jackson’s is a proud mother of two whose nomination has been endorsed by leading law enforcement organizations, conservative judges, and survivors of crime. This is toxic and weakly-presented misinformation that relies on taking cherry-picked elements of her record out of context—and it buckles under the lightest scrutiny. It’s based on a report unanimously agreed to by all of the Republicans on the US Sentencing Commission, on selectively presenting a short transcript excerpt in which Judge Jackson was quoting a witness’s testimony back to them to ask a question, and on omitting that her rulings are in line with sentencing practices across the entire federal judiciary regarding these crimes. In the overwhelming majority of her cases involving child sex crimes, the sentences Judge Jackson imposed were consistent with or above what the government or U.S. Probation recommended.

There is the problem that when you are explaining, you are losing. But what Bates says is all true, and it’s what Democrats need to bring to next week’s hearing for Jackson: the facts. But they have to bring those facts with anger and fire and ferocity. They have to be prepared to humiliate the worm Hawley (and Ted Cruz, and Tom Cotton, and Marsha Blackburn—the very worst of the Republicans are on this committee) to the utmost.

That means some discipline and some coordination among Democrats, which is far too often missing in these hearings. They’re generally too enamored with the sound of their own voices and the rare opportunity to carry on in front of national television cameras to actually be effective.

They can take some inspiration from Twitter. For example, using this:

This shit has to be called out for what it is. Forget the “comity” of the Senate hearing room. Forget the pomp and circumstance of the hearing room. When the likes of Hawley tries to advance this kind of malevolent bile, Democrats need to be united in attacking back and exposing it.

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Inside the bubble, Biden is weak, Trump is strong, and his extortion of Ukraine never happened.