It’s 2021. It was never okay to do blackface before—and it sure as hell isn’t okay now. Despite this, some people just never learn, do they? A Virginia city councilman is facing backlash after wearing blackface as part of his Halloween costume, but that’s not all: After being called out on it he, defended it as part of an apology.

It all began when Faron Hamblin shared a photo of himself dressed as the character Randy Watson, lead singer of fictional music group Sexual Chocolate. Dressing like the iconic character from Eddie Murphy’s film Coming to America is not an issue; the issue is that Hamblin, a white man, slathered himself in brown makeup in an attempt to look Black.

Apparently, he didn't realize the issue with his actions and happily posted a photo on social media. It has since then been deleted—but not before screenshots of it circulated online. NBC News affiliate WWBT was able to capture screenshots of the photo before it was removed.

“You could depict a character without smearing paint on yourself to change your race, especially to black,” one Reddit user said of the image. “I would’ve recognized Randy Watson without the blackface as long as he had the Soul Glo.”

Of course, there was online uproar. How could there not be? What Hamblin did was not appropriate and unacceptable. Anyway, the backlash prompted Hamblin to offer a non-apology apology on his Facebook account … which, like the original photo, he deleted. Again, not without screenshots captured by NBC12, in which Hamblin wrote, “I made a post that hurt a lot of folks and that was not my intention.” He added that he was devastated that people considered him a racist.

“Folks I made a post of me dressed like the movie character Randy Watson. For those of you who know the movie, Randy is a [B]lack man. So I dressed the part. Suit, hair and, yes, my makeup was brown. Many saw it degrading, which I did not. I did it to show my love for the character and the movie. But since I’m white, it’s considered by some as offensive to dress as a [B]lack person,” he wrote, according to NBC12 screenshots.

Let’s just go back to one line of his “apology”: “Many saw it degrading, which I did not.” He also pointed out that it’s only offensive because he’s white. No—it’s offensive and wrong no matter what race you are. So basically he is defending his use of blackface. But that’s not the worst part, as he continues to dig a deeper hole. He even brings up the fact that Eddie Murphy played a Jewish man in the movie.

“I can’t speak for the Jewish community and I’m sure some were offended. But Eddie showed his freedom of expression. He never meant any ill harm to the Jewish community,” he posted.

I’m sorry: Is he unaware that there are Black Jews? Yes, Murphy may have been playing a white man, as Hamblin said, and by no means am I saying that his portrayal cannot be offensive to the Jewish community. But dressing in blackface is not the same. Of course, the ignorance doesn’t end there: Hamblin then compares himself to comedian Dave Chappelle, who has been criticized as being transphobic.

Again, Hamblin doesn’t seem to understand what he is doing wrong, but instead is using his “apology” to defend himself and bring up other controversial incidents that have nothing to do with him.

“Like Eddie, or Dave Chappelle, I don’t go around walking on eggshells, worried about hurting someone’s feelings,” Hamblin posted. “But I never intended for this to be a racist issue.”

He clearly doesn’t understand the racist history of blackface and its role in oppressing Black people.

“Black face minstrelsy originated from people who came to the South and observed Black people dancing, and the way that they entertained…They thought it would be fun to use black cork or shoe polish to blacken their faces and then perform,” Dr. Andrea Simpson, a political science professor and diversity dean at the University of Richmond, told WWBT.

“When you don’t know what the history is, it may seem to you based on your knowledge of where we are today, it may seem to you that this is harmless and we’re all just having fun, but in doing that, we’re actually hurting people,” Simpson said.

While now deleted, according to WWBT the councilman’s “apology” was met with “tons of comments mostly from people asking why he’s apologizing at all.”

On Friday, The Undercurrent TV creator Lauren Windsor published the last of three videos showing a conversation with Republican attorney John Eastman. Eastman, who authored a plot to have Mike Pence declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election by simply refusing to count electoral votes from states that Trump lost, went back to his gilded hammock in the vast network of ring-wing “institutes” following the Jan. 6 insurgency. 

Once he was clear of the Trump White House, Eastman tried to downplay the whole idea that he had been seriously pushing Pence to overturn the election, throw the nation into chaos, and install Trump as dictator for life. Earlier this month, he told National Review that the whole thing was just a kind of thought experiment. Instead, Eastman claimed that he had only drafted up his how-to-destroy-democracy plan at the request of “somebody in the legal team. I just don’t recall.” 

Eastman himself took the stage on Jan. 6 at the Stop the Steal rally, telling the roaring Trump fans that Trump’s team had caught voting machines changing votes in real-time and that thousands of spare votes had been packed away in Georgia both during the presidential results and Senate ballots “until they know how many they need” to beat Trump. Eastman also stood at Rudy Giuliani’s elbow as Trump’s attorney explained how Eastman’s plan to overturn the election was “perfectly legal.”

Despite all that, he told the reporters at National Review that the whole thing was “not viable” and that attempting to pursue the plan he presented to Trump and Pence in the Oval Office would have been “plain crazy.” 

Eastman said that until Windsor hit the right’s “greatest constitutional expert” with some sold fangirl fawning. And that’s when Eastman seriously changed his tune.

When Eastman was given no more than a few seconds of reassurance that he was among a MAGA-loving crowd, he quickly went from dismissing his plan to dismissing Mike Pence as an “establishment guy” who ruined everything by not going along.

Then, in part two, Windsor caught Eastman not only pressing a claim that CNN had paid Antifa to infiltrate the insurrection and capture images of violence, but she also recorded him doing what so many Republicans seem to be doing these days—flinging his arms around the Proud Boys and claiming violent white supremacists as Trump’s core supporters.

And in the final installment, Eastman explains how he and Trump personally leaned on 300 state legislators in an attempt to get them to sabotage democracy. But, sadly found that they all lacked the “spine” to get with the Trump now, Trump forever plan.

While the video is now available at The Undercurrent, all of it is likely to get some serious network air time when Eastman makes his expected appearance before the House Select Committee.

[A surprising grant of certiorari places a high-stakes regulatory case on the Court's docket, with profound implications for EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases.]

Today the Supreme Court granted multiple petitions for certiorari seeking review of an opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluding the Environmental Protection Agency has broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants under the Clean Air Act. The grants are somewhat surprising because the EPA is not currently defending or seeking to enforce any such regulations, but suggest the Court is interested in clarifying the overall scope of the EPA's regulatory authority, while potentially resolving some questions about agency authority more broadly at the same time. (I previously blogged on the petitions, and suggested they would not be granted. Oops.)

The petitions all sought review of the D.C. Circuit's opinion invalidating the Trump Administration's repeal of the Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan (CPP) and adoption of the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE). In its decision, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit concluded the EPA had far more regulatory authority than the Trump Administration admitted, and that the rescission of the CPP was arbitrary and capricious. Nonetheless, the D.C. Circuit panel did not require the EPA to readopt the CPP, and the Biden Administration has indicated it will start over from scratch and draft new regulations.

Although the Biden Administration has not yet proposed regulations of its own, the grant is bad news for them because a) the EPA will not know the scope of its regulatory authority here until the spring, and b) whatever authority remains will almost undoubtedly be less than what the EPA would like. It is unlikely the Court would have granted certiorari unless at least four justices were sufficiently concerned with the D.C. Circuit's expansive interpretation of the EPA's regulatory authority that they saw the need to intervene now. In this sense, by giving the Biden EPA all the regulatory authority it could have hoped for, the D.C. Circuit might have given the justices an inviting target. The fact of the grant is also further support for my argument that regulatory strategies for controlling greenhouse gas emissions are more vulnerable and brittle than alternatives, such as the adoption of a carbon tax.

This case could be tremendously significant beyond the question of the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases because (as detailed below) the questions presented encompass both the immediate question of what authority the EPA has under Section 7411 of the Clean Air Act, but also the broader question of how prescriptive Congress must be when delegating broad regulatory authority to federal agencies. This gives the Court room to refine and expand the "major questions" doctrine (as I have suggested it might want to do), as well as to perhaps identify some of the outer limits on delegation more generally.

Here is a quick rundown of the petitions accepted and the questions they present.

West Virginia v. EPA

In 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d), an ancillary provision of the Clean Air Act, did Congress constitutionally authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to issue significant rules—including those capable of reshaping the nation's electricity grids and unilaterally decarbonizing virtually any sector of the economy—without any limits on what the agency can require so long as it considers cost, nonair impacts, and energy requirements?

North American Coal Corp. v. EPA

Whether 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d), which authorizes the EPA to impose standards "for any existing source" based on limits "achievable through the application of the best system of emission reduction" that has been "adequately demonstrated," grants the EPA authority not only to impose standards based on technology and methods that can be applied at and achieved by that existing source, but also allows the agency to develop industry-wide systems like cap-and-trade regimes.

Westmoreland Mining Holdings LLC v. EPA (corrected)

Whether 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d) clearly authorizes EPA to decide such matters of vast economic and political significance as whether and how to restructure the nation's energy system.

[The Court did not grant certiorari on a second question presented in this petition.]

North Dakota v. EPA

Can EPA promulgate regulations for existing stationary sources that require States to apply binding nationwide "performance standards" at a generation-sector-wide level, instead of at the individual source level, and can those regulations deprive States of all implementation and decision making power in creating their Section 111(d) plans?

Given the range and wording of the questions presented, the Court will have the ability to address the scope of EPA's authority in a narrow, technical way (relying on the Clean Air Act's text) or in a broad way, focusing on whether and how Congress may delegate broad regulatory authority to federal agencies, or somewhere in-between. Whichever way the Court goes, this will undoubtedly be the most important environmental law case on the Court's docket this term, and could well become one of the most significant environmental law cases of all time.

NOTE: The Court inadvertently identified the wrong question presented for which certiorari was accepted in the Westmoreland Mining petition. The Court has corrected and reissued the order, and I've updated this post accordingly.

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According to updated CDC guidelines, people with compromised immune systems may get a fourth mRNA COVID-19 shot. CNN reports: The CDC authorized a third dose for certain immunocompromised people 18 and older in August. It said a third dose, rather than a booster -- the CDC makes a distinction between the two -- was necessary because the immunocompromised may not have had a complete immune response from the first two doses. A study from Johns Hopkins University this summer showed that vaccinated immunocompromised people were 485 times more likely to end up in the hospital or die from Covid-19 compared to most vaccinated people. In small studies, the CDC said, fully vaccinated immunocompromised people accounted for about 44% of the breakthrough cases that required hospitalization. People who are immunocompromised are also more likely to transmit the virus to people who had close contact with them. The US Food and Drug Administration has also authorized booster shots of all three available vaccines for certain people and that would include the immune compromised, the CDC says. Research showed that a booster dose enhanced the antibody response to the vaccine in certain immunocompromised people. That would make for a fourth shot at least six months after completing the third mRNA vaccine dose. At this time, the CDC does not have a recommendation about the fourth shot. People should talk to their doctors to determine if it is necessary, the CDC says. People who are immunocompromised who got the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot should get a booster at least two months after their initial vaccine. People who choose a Moderna vaccine as a booster, even if they received a different vaccine as the first dose, should get the half-dose sized shot that was authorized as a booster for Moderna's vaccine, the CDC said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The hidden benefits of the Democrats' new plan to tax the superrich.

Private prison profiteers have for years subjected immigrants they detain for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to forced labor. In states including California, Georgia, and Washington, immigrants have been paid as little as $1 a day to cook, clean, and maintain these facilities, in what immigrant and human rights advocates have called a “scheme to maximize profits.” Now, a court is ordering one of those private prison profiteers to pay up.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said on Wednesday that a federal jury determined GEO Group violated the state’s minimum wage laws in paying immigrants detained at the Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWIPC) $1 a day for their forced work. The statement said the jury has ordered the private prison profiteer to pay detained immigrants the minimum wage, or higher. The judge overseeing the case will also determine “how much GEO unfairly gained from its wage law violations spanning more than 15 years,” which could total millions, the Associated Press (AP) said.

“At trial, several former and current GEO staff testified that GEO chose to pay detainee workers only $1 per day, despite the fact that GEO knew it had the ability to pay more,” Ferguson’s office said. Prison Legal News reports that GEO Group reported revenues of $2.477 billion in 2019 alone. “Detainees perform most of the work necessary to run the facility,” Ferguson’s office continued, including food service, laundry service, cleaning, and maintenance. “Detainee workers even provide thousands of haircuts per year at the center’s barbershop, staffed entirely by detainees.”

This forced work has often been erroneously referred to as “voluntary,” even as detained immigrants have said in other lawsuits challenging the $1 wage that they were “threatened with solitary confinement and the loss of access to basic necessities, like food, clothing, products for personal hygiene, and phone calls to loved ones” if they refused to work. Detained immigrants have also said they have had no choice but to work, in order to purchase basic items from the commissary. 

“After a two-and-a-half-week trial, the jury decided the multi-billion dollar company must pay all its workers Washington’s minimum wage of $13.69 or more,” Ferguson’s office said. “Now, it is up to U.S. District Court Judge Robert Bryan to determine how much GEO unfairly gained from its wage law violations spanning more than 15 years. The Attorney General’s Office is requesting that this payment reimburse detainee workers and Tacoma community members.”

The release said the latter is intended for “job seekers in the community surrounding the detention center who may have lost employment opportunities because of GEO’s practices.” In an ideal world, we’d move away from having to depend on private prisons locking up immigrants for the federal government in order to create jobs. Especially when it relates to a facility like NWIPC.

Just this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warned GEO Group about a toxic chemical used to clean numerous surfaces and microwaves widely used by immigrants at the facility. The EPA had already found GEO Group violated the law by misusing toxic chemicals at another one of its sites in California. “Migrants who participated in the ‘volunteer’ work program were given HDQ Neutral in 32-ounce spray bottles and mop buckets, often without safety labels or instructions attached, without being required to wear the necessary protective equipment when handling the industrial pesticide,” Earthjustice said at the time. Notice that “volunteer” bs again.

Both California and Washington leaders have taken significant steps to end the use of for-profit prisons in their states. In the former, a law passed in 2019 was hailed as “a model for the rest of the nation.” GEO Group sued, of course, initially losing following an October 2020 ruling from a George W. Bush-appointed judge. However, a recent ruling from a panel of conservative judges has for now blocked the law. It’s unclear if that has yet been appealed. In Washington, a law signed into place earlier this year also phases out for-profit detention, including NWIPC. “Washington has not supported use of private prisons, and this bill continues that policy by prohibiting private detention facilities from operating in the state,” Gov. Jay Inslee said, according to the AP.

Private prisons should not exist—and in the meantime, these companies need to pay up for their abuses. “This multi-billion dollar corporation illegally exploited the people it detains to line its own pockets,” Ferguson said in the statement. “Today’s victory sends a clear message: Washington will not tolerate corporations that get rich violating the rights of the people.”

If it isn’t suspicious enough that Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped millions of dollars worth of stocks a week before the economic trash fire ignited by the COVID-19 pandemic, new information has come to light that he advised his in-law to do the same. 

According to a new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, Burr spoke with brother-in-law Gerald Fauth for a little less than a minute, but long enough for Fauth to immediately hang up and call his broker and sell between $97,000 and $280,00 worth of shares in six companies.

Per reporting by ProPublica, Fauth, a member of the National Mediation Board, dumped his stocks the same day as Burr, but the new information was released in an effort by the SEC to impel Fauth into complying with a subpoena he’s stalled on for more than a year. He claims to have a medical condition that inhibits him from complying. 

The new SEC filing indicates that there’s an ongoing investigation of insider trading by both Burr and Fauth, accusing Fauth of “a relentless battle” to elude the subpoena, and alleging that Burr had private information about the economic tsunami poised to hit the U.S. in the wake of the pandemic based on his role at the time as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as well as through staffers who were intimately involved in the government’s response to the virus. 

Burr sold off between $628,000 and $1.72 million in stocks on Feb. 13 in 33 transactions, according to ProPublica. 

But the most egregious of his actions was lying to the public about how well the pandemic was being handled, even writing an op-ed on Feb. 7 assuring Americans that “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus, in large part due to the work of the Senate Health Committee, Congress and the Trump Administration.” And we all know how that turned out—741,000 people are dead in the U.S. in large part due to the lack of handling from former two-time impeached, one-term President Donald “It’s Going to Go Away” Trump. 

Also, according to a secret recording obtained by NPR, Burr warned a group of bigwigs at a social club of the coming economic disaster that would hit thanks to the coronavirus. 

“There's one thing that I can tell you about this. It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything we've seen in recent history. It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic,” Burr said. 

“As the chairman of the intel committee, there's no message I could come with today that would have been uplifting,” he added. “Every company should be cognizant of the fact that you may have to alter your travel. You may have to look at your employees and judge whether the trip they're making to Europe is essential or whether it can be done in a video conference. Why risk it?”

Of course, Burr denies he used his inside information and claims he made his stock decisions based on public information. 

On Wednesday, Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina went to his Twitter account and wrote, “What’s the biggest lie a politician has ever told? Biden said that the $3.5 TRILLION spending bill will cost zero dollars.” This was quite a swing for one of the world’s most useless legislators. Cawthorn is a guy whose entire, very short, very mediocre career is filled to the brim with nothing but lies, racism, sedition, and easily verifiable mythologizing of his origin story. Cawthorn continues to be willing to just do what the rest of his GOP elders do: Accomplish nothing and take credit for things done in spite of you.

This came one day after Cawthorn made a short speech on the House floor calling on President Joe Biden to investigate Dr. Anthony Fauci for lying about the “Wuhan virus,” and demanded an answer to the question, “Why the hell are Americans funding the torture of puppies in Africa?” Real quote—I’ll put it below. The Twitterverse was not having it.

First things first: A guy who mostly lies asking what’s the biggest lie out there requires embodying a special form of narcissism.

That’s a reference Cawthorn made about being accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy before the car crash that took away the use of his legs occurred. That was a lie. He was rejected from the U.S. Naval Academy before that terrible accident.

And then here’s another lie.

But it’s also important to remember the real painful lies Americans have had to endure the past few years, ones that more than half the country knew were lies, but a large swath of citizens continue to seemingly believe.

It’s also important to remember that Cawthorn’s history of lying is really gross.

Here are some lies that helped contribute to hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and 1 out of every 500 U.S. children losing a primary caregiver, like a parent or grandparent.

And then there’s the scam that people like Cawthorn represent.

Big. Lie.

And if you want to watch Cawthorn talk about “torturing puppies in Africa” and stopping “demon doctors,” here is your clip.

Despite the increasing awareness of language and what is offensive and wrong to say, some individuals seem to be out of the loop. While everyone should be aware of the language they use, politicians—especially some GOP individuals—don’t seem to care. They seem to use slurs knowing how offensive and wrong they are. To make matters even worse, a recent incident occurred during a hearing about racial inequity. (Talk about bad timing.) After a presentation to the legislature on the racial wealth gap on Oct. 20, state Sen. Dave Rader, a Republican member of the Oklahoma Senate, used the term “yellow families” to describe Asian Americans, the Associated Press reported.

This not only left those at the meeting stunned, but resulted in backlash on social media as the video of the incident went viral. Of course, when asked about the term, Rader not only defended his use of it but has yet to apologize.

"It wasn't 'til well into your presentation did you go to yellow families. You left yellow families out for quite a while,” Rader said in reference to a presentation by Damion Shade, a policy analyst at the Oklahoma Policy Institute.

Shade corrected Rader by using the term "Asian Americans," to which Rader responded: "You use Black term, White term, Brown term so I was just gonna jump in there with you."

This followed Rader using the phrase "Asian distraction" instead of "Asian Americans,” at which he was corrected again and justified his remarks by saying: "Because their experience has been totally different than many um, than many others that have come over."

This response, as noted by views of the video, perpetuated the “model minority” myth—a stereotype that claims all Asian Americans are likely to achieve socioeconomic success and are less likely to experience negative effects of racism and inequality in comparison to other races. Rader was thus slammed online for not only his use of the term “yellow,” but for perpetuating this stereotype.

Historically the word “yellow” has been used as a derogatory term to refer to East Asians. It stems from the “yellow peril,” an ideology where white folks claimed things from Asia were a great threat to the white world. Historians and other academics found that this ideology, amongst other forms of xenophobia, influenced U.S. policies on the basis “that Chinese people as a race, no matter where they are, are disease carriers.” As a result, anti-Asian laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 were enacted to block Asian immigration, and the term “yellow,” which was often associated with illness, was tied to Asian Americans.

Many individuals reacted to Rader’s comments, calling them upsetting. This includes local Oklahoma Rep. Cyndi Munson, ​​the first Asian American woman elected to office in the state.

“I remember people asking me if my dad had ‘yellow fever’ because my mother is Korean,” Munson told KFOR. “While it may not be intentional, that doesn’t mean that harm isn’t caused.”

Others also noted the setting and type of meeting the phrase was used in. "It's troubling that he said it but it's troubling that he doubled down," Alicia Andrews, the chair of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, told KFOR. "The study was about racial inequities and here we are talking about his misuse of language."

But according to Nick Singer, an activist with Oklahoma Progress Now, comments against Asian Americans were not the only offensive remarks Rader made during the hearing.

"Even his word choice, as abhorrent as it is, it's the ideas underneath it that he tried to articulate in his very brief comments that are in my opinion far more problematic.

"He also makes comments about Black family structure, trying to suggest Black families didn't succeed because they didn't stay together."

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time an official has used inappropriate language to describe Asian Americans. Another Republican senator came under fire earlier this month for using the term "you and your people" while speaking to Lucy H. Koh, a Korean American judge.

Koh is the first U.S. district court judge of Korean descent and the first female Korean American federal judge in the United States. Nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, if confirmed, Koh would be the first Korean American woman to serve as a federal appellate judge.

Elected officials should know better and realize words matter.

Patti Hidalgo Menders, president of the Loudoun County Virginia Republican Women’s Club, is the worst kind of Karen. She believes that teaching the racist history of America makes white kids feel bad, and Black and brown kids fall into victimhood—therefore it simply shouldn’t be taught. 

In her recent interview for Showtime’s Circus, Menders starts off by describing her county as the wealthiest in the country by saying that “there’s not a lot of racism,” but then contradicts herself, saying, “If you talk about that less, you’ll notice the division less.”   She explains that diversity and inclusion training “becomes less about merit and it becomes more about, oh, we gotta give the people of color this advantage. Let’s keep feeling sorry for them. I don’t look at the person based on their skin color. I look at them based on their character.” 

Then she has the caucasity to say that Black men in America aren’t judged by the color of their skin, but by “how they’re dressed,” “their actions,” and “how they respect others.” Adding that if a “kid is pulled over by a cop, does it matter what color they are? Or is it the respect they give to that police officer?” So, police brutality against Black and brown citizens is about respect and not racism. Glad we cleared that up. 

By the way, Menders is not just another suburban mother of six, fighting against Virginia’s equity and inclusion curriculum in schools, she’s also a GOP strategist. She may attempt to pass herself off as one of “Virginia’s leading activists,” but in reality, she’s working to help get Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin elected. 

Menders says she thinks parents should decide whether or not kids are taught about racism rather than their teachers making the decision. 

Menders told Circus’ Alex Wasner that she supports Youngkin because he’s not pushing the “racism narrative.” But here’s the thing: Menders is the one pushing the racism narrative by denying the actual historical fact that racism exists in this country and around the globe. And no matter how hard she wants to pretend it doesn’t, by twisting the arms of Loudouners to sign school board recall petitions for officials who support teaching real live history, actual facts will remain. 

Menders and other parents across the nation have made diversity and inclusion curriculums and critical race theory the devils white people don’t want to face. It makes them feel guilty, they say, or it’s divisive.

According to the Brookings Institute: “CRT does not attribute racism to white people as individuals or even to entire groups of people. Simply put, critical race theory states that U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race.” 

As Daily Kos has covered, Republicans are eager to attack trans folks via a handful of approaches at the state level. Banning trans girls from participating in girls’ sports teams, for example, tends to get a lot of national media coverage. In addition to the anti-trans sports bills, however, state lawmakers have tried to stop trans people of all ages from updating their birth certificates as well as pushing legislation that would bar physicians from prescribing gender-affirming, age-appropriate medical care. The latest state to introduce such legislation? Ohio.

The disturbingly titled (and misleading) bill is called the Save Adolescents from Experiment Act (“SAFE”), also known as HB 454. Republican Reps. Diane V. Grendell and Cary Click introduced the bill, which would punish medical professionals for providing potentially lifesaving gender-affirming health care to trans minors—even if the youth has parental consent, as reported by the Ohio Capital Journal. 

HB 454 aims to bar trans youth from receiving any kind of puberty blockers, surgeries, and hormonal treatments, even if parents or guardians approve of them. The bill would require public and private school teachers, nurses, and therapists at schools to out trans youth to their parents. In fact, school staff wouldn’t even be able to suggest that the youth in question keep their identity from their parents, which is dangerous for obvious reasons.

In terms of insurance, it would bar private insurance, plus Ohio Medicaid, from covering gender-affirming care for minors. Physicians who provide this care anyway could be charged with “unprofessional conduct,” which could potentially open physicians to being sued for providing such care. It could also lead to physicians getting in trouble with medical licensing agencies.

"My fear is that there are consequences that while the adults in the room are fighting about who gets to say what about what their future is, the children are the most affected and could tragically take some action to end their own lives because they do not feel the support that they need," Democrat Nickie Antonio, who serves as the assistant minority leader for the Ohio Senate, told Spectrum News in an interview.

Parent Claudia Longo spoke to local outlet WKYC about the legislation and how it would impact her 17-year-old child, who, according to Longo, was around 10 when he started talking about his gender and identity. Since then, Longo says they’ve found him a supportive mental health team and have started doing research and reading more to learn how to be supportive and affirming. 

“They're making it so hard for them as it is,” Longo told the outlet in reference to the anti-trans bill. “It is already hard.” She added that gender-affirming treatments are not decisions “parents are making in a rush.”

The bill suggests that there hasn’t been enough research done on gender-affirming care, but we actually already know gender-affirmation can be legitimately lifesaving. Plus these are not experimental treatments being prescribed on the fly; it’s age-appropriate and safe care on a case-by-case basis. In general, gender-affirming care has massive support from actual health care professionals and experts—you know, the people who actually know what they’re talking about.

“This bill attempts to ban evidence-based medical treatment that is supported by medical professionals, including but not limited to the American Academy of Pediatricians, the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association,” Maria Bruno, public policy director for Equality Ohio, explained according to Cleveland.com. 

But we know Republicans don’t really care about trans people one way or another—they just think they’ve found a vulnerable group to scapegoat, and they’re sticking with it. 

Sign the petition: Demand the Senate pass the Equality Act and protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination.

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Only in America are the rules so skewed in favor of some people, while others never catch a break. State Sen. Gene Suellentrop, a Wichita, Kansas, Republican is one of those lucky few Americans who dodged a legal bullet thanks to the color of his skin and the position he’s fortunate enough to hold. 

After pleading no contest to two misdemeanor charges Monday following his March arrest for driving the wrong way on an interstate while drunk out of his mind, Suellentrop made a plea deal agreeing to two days in jail and one year of probation. 

The Kansas Reflector reports Suellentrop was driving at nearly 100 mph a the time of his arrest, and when he was eventually stopped, he was incoherent and reeked of booze.

An affidavit obtained by CNN at the time of his arrest describes an entitled drunk using his political power, failing to respond to commands while barely able to walk. 

"Walking to the Intoxilyzer room he struggled with keeping his balance and I had to hold him by the arm," read the affidavit. When requesting a breath sample, he refused, saying, "I don't feel the need to do so," the affidavit read. Officers were forced to obtain a search warrant to get a blood sample. Suellentrop was “aggressive” and called one of the officers a “donut boy.”

He was eventually transported to the Shawnee County Jail, but then released without bond after the arrest report was found to be “missing critical information.” 

When an arrest warrant was issued 10 days later, the senator turned himself in. 

Suellentrop was sentenced to 48 hours in the Shawnee County Jail and will begin serving his sentence Nov. 18.

The judge suspended a six-month sentence for the DUI conviction and 90 days for reckless driving, according to the Kansas Reflector, and the former state Senate majority leader will have to participate in eight therapy sessions and take a substance abuse class. However, eventually, he will be eligible to have the convictions expunged from his record. 

At least two of the senator’s constituents thought his sentence was a little underwhelming given he drove the wrong way on an interstate for over 70 miles, reaching a speed of nearly 100 mph at times. 

“A felony is considerably different than this little tap on the arm,” Jane Byrnes told the Kansas Reflector. “We were hoping to witness equal justice here today, what anybody else would have gotten,” Michael McCorkle added. 

Now, if you’re wondering how Suellentrop’s case was handled in comparison to a Black American man’s case (and not even an average Black citizen, but one with money), look no further than the DUI arrest and sentencing of Ray Donovan actor Pooch Hall. 

Hall, identified as Marion Henry Hall in a Los Angeles district attorney's news release, admitted to driving under the influence with his 2-year-old son in his lap.

The actor was arrested in 2019 in Burbank, California, after his car hit a parked car. He pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor for driving with a blood alcohol level of .08%, and another charge of child endangerment. He was sentenced to three years of probation, a mandatory three-month residential alcoholic treatment program, and one year of parenting classes. His license was suspended for six months. 

Needless to say, there’s inequity in sentencing and nothing shows it more clearly than the senator versus the actor … who just happens to be Black. 

In May of 2007, the nation’s largest coal company—Peabody Holdings—spun off its properties in West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana to a new company: Patriot Coal.

In October 2021, Johnson & Johnson spun off a company called LTL Management and gave it one of their most iconic products.

What do these two things have in common? Corporate bankruptcy law. Corporations are by their nature artificial structures set up to protect investors and corporate executives from taking personal responsibility for their actions. But there are some aspects of corporate bankruptcy law that turn that up to 11. Because here’s how the rest of these two stories play out.

What Peabody spun off to Patriot were its oldest mines, oldest miners, and generations of retirees who were entitled to both pensions and black lung benefits. In 2013, Patriot Coal filed for bankruptcy, asking the court to “slash healthcare and pension benefits for about 13,000 union workers.” At the same time, Peabody made it clear that “it no longer owes benefits to Patriot retirees.” A bankruptcy judge agreed, saying that Peabody “was relieved of that burden.” 

What Johnson & Johnson spun off to LTL Management was even simpler: baby powder. Not just the product, but all the lawsuits and all the responsibility related to claims of asbestos in Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder products. Two days after LTL Management was created, it was in federal court filing bankruptcy. And now Johnson & Johnson says it’s been relieved of dealing with lawsuits over the powder.

And now, as a bankruptcy expert explains to NPR, “Johnson & Johnson doesn't have this liability anymore. They pushed all of it into the company they created just to file for bankruptcy."

Corporations spin off other corporations all the time. It can happen when the corporation gets too broad and needs to focus on a core business. It can happen when a technology or investment creates an opportunity that might grow into something new. But all too often, corporations create spin-offs to act as dust bins—bins into which they can deposit their obligations to workers, local governments, lawsuits, environmental cleanup … everything.

In some cases, like that of Peabody and Patriot, there are obligations to keep the spin-off running for a certain length of time. In others, like Johnson & Johnson and LTL Management, the funding provided at the outset covers that obligation. But the key thing in both cases is that these spin-offs are designed to fail. They’re set up with full knowledge that the obligations they carry far exceed any assets they’ve been given.

Peabody knew that the aging mines, old equipment, and undeveloped properties it handed to Patriot could never support the pensions and health care benefits it owed to over 13,000 miners. Johnson & Johnson knows that the $2 billion it provided to LTL won’t come close to meeting the tab for the thousands of lawsuits currently underway around its powder products.

Everyone knew that going in. That’s why they do this.

The result in the case of Johnson & Johnson, as NPR’s bankruptcy expert makes clear, is that  "consumers can't recover [damages] against a big solvent company. They have to recover against this smaller fictional company ...”

A smaller, fictional company with limited assets that are slipping down the drain with every lawsuit, settlement, and passing hour. Which makes for the kind of situation in which injured women are tempted to take far less than they deserve before the last drop runs out of the bucket.

As Rep. Katie Porter tweeted last week, Johnson & Johnson knew that some bottles of its baby powder were laced with asbestos, but kept it a secret for decades. And now, “Tens of thousands of women with ovarian cancer are suing, and the company wants to shield its assets.”

This kind of situation shows again just how much power corporations have when compared to individuals. Not only do their massive assets give them far more ability to go to court, stay in court, and drag on cases for years or decades, but the ability to create a dust bin spin-off allows them to shed responsibilities and move on without a backward glance.

Johnson & Johnson’s Chief Financial Officer Joseph Wolk explained the maneuver to investors in a call last week, pitching it as a way to defend the massive company from those bad women who have suffered as a result of a contaminated product.

"There's an established process that allows companies facing abusive tort systems to resolve claims in an efficient and equitable manner," Wolk said. "It's really the bankruptcy courts that will ultimately decide this. It's not plaintiff attorneys. It's not Johnson & Johnson.”

Bankruptcy courts have demonstrated again and again that they’re incredibly deferential to corporations. So long as companies have tagged the right bases in setting up their get-out-of-obligations-almost-free spin-offs, there’s an extremely good chance that a bankruptcy judge will side with them and inform those who had a claim against the original company that they’re simply out of luck.

Another way that corporations are privileged far beyond normal people is that they get to engage in extensive court-shopping. For example, Johnson & Johnson is headquartered in New Jersey. However, it formed LTL Management in Texas to take advantage of how laws in that state allow for a high-speed shift in both assets and obligations. Then J&J attorneys climbed on a plane to file bankruptcy in North Carolina, assuring that their case will be heard in a district where they feel like they’ll get the best results.

All of which seems like a big f##k you to women facing ovarian cancer possibly related to the use of Johnson & Johnson’s product.

Many of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States pay no taxes, and a distressing number of those in Congress seem to be happy about that idea. But it shouldn’t be too much to ask that when these corporations cause harm, they aren’t able to simply toss off a born-to-fail spin-off and keep on going without so much as a regret.

Author's note: The reason I’m so familiar with the situation at Peabody is that I was employed by a subsidiary of Peabody Holdings at the time of the Patriot spin-off. However, I was never a corporate officer and hold no inside knowledge of the spin-off, assets, or obligations involved.

Republicans have failed constituents again and again amid the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic, whether it’s about mask mandates, anti-vaccine hysteria, or unsafe school guidelines. In the face of more than 700,000 deaths in the United States alone, Republicans have been more than happy to distract from their mistakes by using whatever they can to get people mad about, well, someone else. A Republican favorite? Trans folks.

Daily Kos has covered numerous anti-trans bills that have cropped up (in both traditionally red and traditionally blue states, by the way) across the nation. While many of these bills have fizzled out in committee, some have gone through both the statehouse and state Senate and been signed into law by the state’s respective governors. The latest example of this tragedy comes to us from Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed an anti-trans sports bill into law, barring trans girls from participating on girls’ sports teams, as reported by The Texas Tribune. 

Abbott signed House Bill 25 into law on Monday, along with 18 other bills. HB 25 requires public school student-athletes from kindergarten through grade 12 to participate on the sports team that aligns with their gender assigned at birth, not necessarily corresponding with their actual lived identity. So if a student, for example, uses she/her/hers pronouns while in the classroom and is identified that way by peers, teachers, and family, she’d still be forced onto the boys’ team. That’s disturbing and problematic for obvious reasons. Even an updated birth certificate isn’t enough under this wildly transphobic new law—updated birth certificates would only be admissible if revisions were made because of a clerical mistake.

As of now, the bill is set to take effect on Jan. 18. Republicans who bolstered the legislation have claimed their rationale rests in feminism and women’s rights, suggesting that trans girls are potentially dangerous to cisgender girls and, in the big picture, that trans girls are not “really” girls. Feminism, mind you, includes all girls, both trans and cis. Republicans championing women’s rights rings fundamentally hollow, especially in a state like Texas, where some of the most restrictive anti-choice legislation in the country is alive and well. 

It’s unclear how to reach people who are so willing to push and pass such discriminatory legislation. In Texas, for example, we’ve seen dozens upon dozens of folks come to speak and appeal to lawmakers in person, even during the pandemic. We’ve seen both parents and children offer testimony about the dangers of this legislation and what it means to them to participate fully in life, which, for many young people, includes playing sports and spending time with teammates. 

Socialization is essential for youth, and given the high rates of depression, anxiety, and bullying reported among trans children and teenagers, it’s especially cruel to isolate trans athletes from opportunities to bond and build positive relationships. We also know sports can lead to opportunities for scholarships and careers or serve as motivation to stay in school or achieve certain grades. As always, we know one thing for sure: Cruelty is the point.

Sign the petition: Demand the Senate pass the Equality Act and protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination.

A new ad for Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin features a solemn, almost anguished white woman talking about the wrongs done to her and her child by former Virginia governor and current Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe. There’s one key piece of information the ad very conspicuously doesn’t provide, though, and Virginia voters really need to hear about it.

“When my son showed me his reading assignment, my heart sunk,” Laura Murphy says in the ad. “It was some of the most explicit material you can imagine.” She recounts how, at her urging, the state legislature passed a bill requiring public schools to give parents the opportunity to reject “sexually explicit” reading assignments, only to have then-Gov. McAuliffe veto it.

Daily Kos has identified six fantastic progressive candidates, up and down the ballot, running to keep Virginia blue next month. Can you donate $1 to each of these Daily Kos-endorsed candidates now?

Sounds bad, right? Some of the most explicit material you can imagine … I mean, were Virginia schools assigning Hustler magazine as reading material? Nowhere in the one-minute ad does she identify the book that distressed Murphy so much that she pushed for the law to be changed, the material that she showed to lawmakers who “couldn’t believe what I was showing them. Their faces turned bright red in embarrassment.” 

There’s a reason for the omission. That book was Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel based on a true story in which a woman who had escaped slavery only to be tracked down and captured killed her own child rather than allow her to be returned to slavery. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It was cited a few years later when Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It routinely shows up on lists of the greatest American fiction of the 20th century. It makes regular appearances on the AP Literature exam.

Gosh, I wonder why the Youngkin campaign didn’t make sure everyone in Virginia knew which book had upset the face of their ad so much. Beloved is a difficult book, to be sure, because its subject matter—which is a part of U.S. history—was more than difficult. It was monstrous. But the book is a modern classic for a reason. 

“It’s not about the author or the awards,” Murphy said back in 2013 when she was pushing to have Beloved banned from Fairfax County schools. “It’s about the content.” Her son, a senior Advanced Placement English student at the time he was assigned the book, had nightmares about it.

“It was disgusting and gross,” he told a reporter. “It was hard for me to handle. I gave up on it.” When liberal parents or parents of color object to having their kids exposed to racism or sexism, conservatives squawk about “snowflakes” and shout “f#ck your feelings.” But when a high school senior finds it “hard for me to handle” reading about slavery, his mom tries to get the law changed to protect him. Blake Murphy, by the way, seems to have grown up to be a Republican Party lawyer, in case anyone is wondering where this family is coming from.

For Laura Murphy’s part, she claimed, “I don’t shelter my kids, but I have to be a responsible parent.” And as everyone knows, being a responsible parent who doesn’t shelter their kids extends to seeking to have one of the greatest novels of the 20th century banned so that your high school senior doesn’t encounter something too hard to handle—something he’s likely to encounter on his AP exam. Other books she wanted to see banned included Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (Hmm … three of the four books she wanted banned were by Black authors. Isn’t that interesting?)

A letter urging McAuliffe to veto the bill—which was signed by the American Booksellers for Free Expression, Association of American Publishers, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, National Council of Teachers of English, the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom, Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, and the Children's and Young Adult Book Committee of PEN American Center—argued that the bill “would prejudice educationally valuable content, undermine the quality of public education in Virginia, and contravene important First Amendment principles,” and noted: “The bill is silent on what content would be labelled ‘sexually explicit,’ or how that term would be defined. On its face, however, the term is vague and could apply to a great deal of classic and contemporary literature, including Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, the Bible, and most works by William Shakespeare.”

This is the culture war Glenn Youngkin is trying to win with in Virginia. This is the wedge he hopes will clear the way to restricting abortion, making it harder to vote, and enacting a laundry list of other Republican priorities. 

Please give now to help defeat Glenn Youngkin and keep the Virginia state legislature blue.

President Joe Biden is expected to name acting Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel to lead the agency permanently, three people familiar with the decision said late Monday — giving her a key perch to shape Democrats’ broadband and net neutrality agenda.

Biden is also expected to nominate progressive net neutrality advocate Gigi Sohn, a former FCC official, to the open Democratic seat on the commission, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision is not yet public. The people said the White House has begun telling lawmakers about the imminent announcements.

The moves, which could be announced as soon as Tuesday, would give Democrats a majority on the five-person panel for the first time during Biden’s presidency, ending a 2-2 partisan stalemate that has stymied much of the progressive agenda for the FCC. That includes a restoration of the agency’s Obama-era net neutrality rules, which prohibited internet providers from blocking and throttling consumers’ internet traffic.

But the decisions come relatively late in Biden’s term: Of his predecessors, only Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon waited as late as September of their first year to tap their FCC chair. And unless the Senate confirms Rosenworcel and Sohn by the end of December, Republicans are poised to gain a 2-1 majority on the commission come January.

Biden is also expected to nominate longtime tech lawyer Alan Davidson to head the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a key post for setting the executive branch’s policies on issues like wireless spectrum use and 5G, the people said.

Key context: The White House’s expected endorsement of Rosenworcel is likely to give more momentum to her efforts to close the digital “homework gap” and expand broadband using new subsidy programs created during the pandemic.

A nod to progressives: Biden’s choice of Sohn for the open Democratic seat would be the latest prominent gesture toward progressives. He had previously placed antitrust advocate Lina Khan in charge of the Federal Trade Commission and hired fellow anti-monopolist Tim Wu for a top economic advising role in the White House.

Sohn staked out a robust defense of net neutrality during the Obama years and was a top adviser to former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler. She previously co-founded and led the left-leaning Washington advocacy group Public Knowledge.

Rosenworcel and Sohn have previously been at odds in some key fights, despite having many policy views in common. One of Sohn’s Obama-era causes was a controversial attempt to open the cable set-top box marketplace to more competition. Rosenworcel, who opposed that plan, used her tie-breaking vote on the commission to spike the effort.

Rosenworcel’s recent supporters include education and public safety groups as well as union workers, along with lawmakers including Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Reps. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.). In September, 25 members of the Senate Democratic caucus told Biden that he should pick Rosenworcel to avoid risking the success of his broadband expansion ambitions.

Now the clock starts: Confirming these nominees would mean a mad dash for Senate Democratic leadership over the next two months.

Although Rosenworcel can immediately assume the permanent chair role, her term on the FCC lapsed in 2020, which means she must leave at the end of this year unless the Senate confirms her to a new five-year term.

Republicans would probably use the confirmation process to discourage any revival of net neutrality. They argue that that the GOP repeal of the policy in 2017 has not led to any of the horror stories that net neutrality advocates warned about, such as ISPs manipulating or blocking their customers’ internet traffic.

And the telecom lead at the Commerce Department: For the NTIA role, the people familiar with the decisions said, Biden picked Davidson — a veteran tech lawyer who has worked since 2018 at Mozilla, the company that launched the Firefox browser. There, Davidson helped handle the company’s data privacy and open internet portfolio.

He also spent years at other top tech posts — including at Google, whose former CEO Eric Schmidt is a strong Biden supporter and is active on a bevy of tech issues from 5G to artificial intelligence. He was Google’s first emissary to Washington, opening its D.C. office in 2005 and holding the title of director of public policy for a half-dozen years, which included lobbying for the search giant.

NTIA is likely to play a central role in shaping Biden’s agenda around broadband connectivity and 5G wireless technology, including on questions of security involving the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, as well as tech issues like data privacy. Under the bipartisan infrastructure plan that passed the Senate in August, the Commerce Department would also be in charge of giving out $42 billion in grants to states to support the build-out of broadband infrastructure.

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As COVID-19 vaccination mandates start being more widely enforced, the vast majority of people are getting on board—in fact, a significant majority of adults were already vaccinated before mandates were put in place. But the very small percentage of people refusing to be vaccinated, at the cost of their jobs, is getting the headlines, as if people who refuse to be vaccinated are the new Trump voters in Midwestern diners.

From The Wall Street Journal to The Washington Post to USA Today to NPR to Fox News (and Fox News, and Fox News again), these stories make the small percentage of people doing something dangerous to themselves and everyone around them into the story, rather than the majority of people who got vaccinated right away or the potentially very interesting group of people who didn’t want to get vaccinated but did do so because of mandates. That group, too, outnumbers people leaving their jobs over this. But major media outlets aren’t interested in hearing from them.

And we can’t trust what we read about the refusers. Take this New York Times piece looking at the “sizable, unwavering contingent” of vaccine refusers (less than 5% of people in most cases) through interviews with six of them. One of them is Josephine Valdez, who the Times fails to tell us is a Trump-supporting anti-vaccine activist who has participated in an attack on a coronavirus testing site:

That’s a far cry from the regretful public school paraprofessional the Times describes giving up her job and moving back in with her parents despite the pleas of her “distressed” students to get vaccinated and stay on the job. In this case, we didn’t even get a reliable thumbnail sketch of the person who led off a major article. 

That glaring omission then casts doubt on the stories of the other people interviewed. Some of them, like Valdez until you find out her background, seem highly sympathetic if misguided as they are portrayed by the Times. They include a gym cleaner who has left her job and worries about pulling her daughter out of school if students are required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in addition to all the other vaccines that are already required. There’s also a special education teacher who worries about the effects of vaccination on the child she is breastfeeding (although the best available evidence is that getting vaccinated will help protect that child). But since we had to go to Twitter to learn that Valdez is out there tearing down a testing site, how do we know the Times didn’t get played equally badly by some of the other people in the piece?

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that at least some of these people have sincere worries. What do we learn from them, at least as they are quoted in this article, about how to understand their reasoning and their sources of information? Not much. Interesting questions might include the sources of misinformation and disinformation that made them so frightened of vaccines that hundreds of millions of people have taken safely. Pregnant women and new mothers face a barrage of anti-vaccine fearmongering that would be very much worth a look. Black people have generations of reasons to distrust health care providers, and those reasons continue today. There’s the pernicious influence of Fox News and Facebook. If people are so fearful, where is that coming from? But reporters don’t seem to be asking that, or reporting it if they do. 

Of course, that would require the media to look at itself. It would require the media to take on the powerful forces spreading vaccine disinformation, from Republican lawmakers to Facebook. It would require serious investigation and analysis rather than shallow interviews.

It’s not just The New York Times, by any means. Huge amounts of attention have gone to around 1,900 public workers in Washington State who have left their jobs rather than be vaccinated. But Ctrl Alt-Right Delete’s Melissa Ryan offers important context for those 1,900 people, who are 3% of their workforce. “I understand that rebellion makes for a more buzzy story but while 3% is a number worth noting, it’s not really a dramatic reduction,” she writes. “Especially in the context of the Great Resignation, which has also been widely reported. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.9% of Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in August of this year. The 3% of state workers who opted to resign or be terminated is in line with that number.”

There are fascinating stories to be written about who, exactly, is willing to leave their job rather than be vaccinated for this specific disease versus all of the other diseases for which vaccination has long been required. What are their sources of information? What about the Atlanta hospital that hired a New York nurse on a two-month travel shift after she lost her previous job for refusing to get vaccinated? Again—and I cannot say this enough—what about the people who complied with mandates despite having previously hesitated?  Instead, the actions of a very small minority are treated as the story about an issue that has major implications both for public health and for our understanding of misinformation and disinformation. And, yeah, all too often, serious activists and even Republican operatives slip unidentified into these average-worker-on-the-street kinds of stories.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson is set to meet with AT&T leadership at the company’s Washington, D.C. headquarters today to discuss AT&T’s relationship with One America News (OAN). Johnson condemned AT&T after a Reuters investigation published earlier this month found that a lucrative contract with AT&T-owned platforms was responsible for 90% of OAN parent company Herring Networks, Inc.’s funding, and that AT&T even had a hand in creating OAN when it launched in 2013.

“We are outraged to learn that AT&T has been funneling tens of millions of dollars into OAN since the network's inception,” Johnson said. “AT&T has as a result caused irreparable damage to our democracy.”

OAN head Robert Herring Sr. revealed in a 2019 deposition obtained by Reuters that AT&T executives were the ones who approached him about founding OAN. “They [AT&T] told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

Herring hasn’t been shy about the editorial freedom and support AT&T has given his far-right network since then. During an interview on OAN last week, Herring showered AT&T with praise and even called on viewers to thank the company.

A full video of the interview also shows Herring outright lying about the controversy surrounding the Reuters report. When pressed by correspondent Pearson Sharp, Herring said that “all of our funding comes from the Herring Networks.” Technically true, but much of the funding Herring Networks received appears to come from that AT&T contract.

OAN began airing on U-Verse in 2014. It only started appearing on DirecTV in 2017 after parent company Herring Networks settled a case with AT&T over AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV in 2015. Herring Networks claimed that AT&T had gone back on an oral agreement that would allow OAN to be broadcast on DirecTV once the acquisition went through.

AT&T cited the settlement as the only reason DirecTV even broadcasts OAN. “When we acquired DIRECTV, Herring pressured us for months to carry OAN. We rejected their offer and in response, Herring Networks sued us, claiming we deliberately intended to injure Herring,” the company said in a statement. “Only as part of the settlement of that lawsuit did DIRECTV consent to a commercial carriage agreement with OAN four years ago.”

OAN is available on other providers, including Verizon FiOS, GCI, and CenturyLink Prism. Those companies appear to be facing minimal backlash compared with AT&T. One source told media consultant Timothy Burke that 20% of the DirecTV cancellations they’d received were because of AT&T’s support for OAN.

AT&T really has been hit in the pocketbook lately. The company’s stocks have been on a steep downturn since the Reuters report was published Oct. 6, though investors have been wary to hold onto it since the company announced a merger with Discovery Inc. in May. Last week, MarketWatch reported that AT&T was headed for an 11-year low. AT&T’s Q3 earnings call today didn’t exactly give it the boost the company was expecting, either. The stock rose slightly then continued tumbling and is currently .85% lower than it was when markets closed yesterday.

Last month, CEO John Stankey said the company would focus on a “multi-year effort” to rehabilitate its image. Sticking with OAN doesn’t exactly help with that. It remains to be seen what AT&T will do about Herring Networks following the meeting with Johnson. For now, many customers are more than happy to pull the plug on DirecTV and other AT&T-owned ventures instead of waiting for an answer to come.

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When Donald Trump rolled out TRUTH Media, his brand new social media platform for deplorables, the clock started ticking on how soon it would crash and burn—like Parler, Gab, and pretty much every right-wing alternative to Twitter. 

TRUTH Media got off to a bumpy start when Wall Street investors discovered that they were actually investing in TRUTH Media’s parent company, Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG). Most of TMTG’s funding came from Digital World, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) created with the purpose of acquiring an already-existing private company, thus taking the private company public. The investors in a SPAC don’t often know the identity of their target—and at least one investor has already decided to head for the exits after learning that he was bankrolling Trump.

Trump might have been able to survive that. However, in the last 24 hours, a development has come to light that might be harder for him to weather. It seems that TMTG lifted the code for TRUTH Media without properly crediting the code’s author. And the author is already making noises about taking Trump to court.

TRUTH Media claims to be built on “proprietary” source code. But Gizmodo’s Lucas Ropek noticed that a number of early users of TRUTH Media discovered unmistakable similarities between TRUTH Media’s code and that of the open-source social media platform Mastodon.

According to VICE, one of those early users, Mikael Thalen of The Daily Dot, tweeted a screenshot of a parody Trump account he created. Mastodon’s official Twitter couldn’t help but acknowledge the similarities.

Later, another user tweeted out a screenshot of the raw code, which amounted to a smoking gun.

In and of itself, this isn’t a problem. Mastodon has an extremely lenient open source policy which allows users to modify Mastodon’s code for their own purposes—provided that they give credit to Mastodon and make their forked code available for public inspection. Predictably, Trump and friends didn’t do any of this.

Mastodon founder and lead developer Eugen Rochko told VICE that, based on the screenshots he’s seen floating around social media, TRUTH Social “absolutely is based on Mastodon”—and its claims to be based on proprietary software when it really isn’t would amount to “a license violation.” He even discovered another smoking gun—a 404 page using Mastodon’s mascot. 

Rochko told Talking Points Memo that he is seeking legal counsel on the matter. If he does sue, Trump wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Claiming that his site’s code is proprietary despite overwhelming evidence that it isn’t? Did he seriously think no one would sniff this out? Suffice to say that if Rochko does take Trump to court, he could really draw blood.

I initially thought that TRUTH Social would be taken down after its users inevitably threaten violence, leading it to be booted off Apple and Android and effectively rendering it impotent. But it’s possible that something as simple as stolen code could potentially add this to the long list of failed Trump ventures.

Pass the popcorn.