James.galbraith

The criminal hacking group suspected of being behind the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which was shut down as a precaution in response, has published a new statement on its dark web site saying it is "apolitical." From a report: "We are apolitical, we do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for other our motives," the statement from the DarkSide ransomware group reads. The statement did not explicitly point to the Colonial Pipeline incident, but it was titled "About the latest news." Various outlets have reported that U.S. officials and private industry say DarkSide is behind the ransomware event. Dmitry Smilyanets, a cyber threat intelligence expert from cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, tweeted a screenshot of the statement on Monday. Motherboard verified the statement is available on DarkSide's dark web site. "Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society," the statement continues. The statement also indicated that the group may be making changes to how it operates and chooses targets. "From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future," it read.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports on "growing evidence — both anecdotal and in surveys — that a lot of people want to do something different with their lives than they did before the pandemic." In a piece titled "It's not a 'labor shortage.' It's a great reassessment of work," they argue that "The coronavirus outbreak has had a dramatic psychological effect on workers, and people are reassessing what they want to do and how they want to work, whether in an office, at home or some hybrid combination." A Pew Research Center survey this year found that 66 percent of the unemployed had "seriously considered" changing their field of work, a far greater percentage than during the Great Recession. People who used to work in restaurants or travel are finding higher-paying jobs in warehouses or real estate, for example. Or they want a job that is more stable and less likely to be exposed to the coronavirus — or any other deadly virus down the road... Economists describe this phenomenon as reallocation friction, the idea that the types of jobs in the economy are changing and workers are taking awhile to figure out what new jobs they want — or what skills they need for different roles... Even among those who have jobs, people are rethinking their options. Front-line workers are reporting high levels of burnout, causing some to seek a new career path. There's also been a wave of retirements as workers over 50 quit because they don't want to return to teaching, home health care or other front-line jobs. More affluent Americans say they are retiring early because their retirement portfolios have surged in the past year and the pandemic has taught them that life is short. They don't want to spend as much time at a desk, even if it is safe... [I]t's notable that the manufacturing sector has bounced back strongly, yet the industry has only added back about 60 percent of the jobs lost. This suggests many factories are ramping up automation in a way that allows them to do more with fewer workers. The overall expectation is still for hiring to pick up this summer as the economy reopens fully and more people are vaccinated. But the past year has fundamentally changed the economy and what many Americans want in their working life. This big reassessment — for companies and workers — is going to take awhile to sort out and it could continue to pop up in surprising ways.

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So Rudy “Up From His Head Come a Bubblin’ Crude” Giuliani, who represented Donald Trump in his effort to overturn the 2020 election, is now learning where Trump’s loyalties really lie—i.e., with the Adderall fairies whispering in his ear 24/7 about the impudent hobgoblins trying steal his pouch of magic beans.

Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills. When will these knuckleheads ever learn? Did Rudy think his preternatural ability to gross out his own intestinal flukes would somehow make Trump more likely to pay him? It hardly matters that you’d get better legal advice from an AOL furry chatroom. The man did the, erm, “work.” He deserves his payday.

But don’t tell Trump that. He’s stiffing Rudy. Not because Rudy did a terrible job—which he clearly did. But because this is how Trump treats everyone he’s indebted to.

From The New York Times:

As a federal investigation into Rudolph W. Giuliani escalates, his advisers have been pressing aides to former President Donald J. Trump to reach into a $250 million war chest to pay Mr. Giuliani for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

The pressure from Mr. Giuliani’s camp has intensified since F.B.I. agents executed search warrants at Mr. Giuliani’s home and office last week, according to people familiar with the discussions, and comes as Mr. Giuliani has hired new lawyers and is facing his own protracted — and costly — legal battles.

The seemingly never-ending saga of Republican fraudsters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman continues. These two losers have not stopped hitting new lows since coming on the scene as two-bit versions of already two-bit scam artists like Donald Trump and his “garbage can orbit.” They continue to make news because even though their actions would confine most other Americans to sentence after sentence in prison, they remain relatively free to continue to defraud the American public. Their latest alleged crime stems from racist robocalls they sent to Black voters in numerous states, that spread false voting information in a clear attempt to suppress Black votes. The racist robocalls were easily traceable to Burkman and Wohl as the two men had their full names added to the end of the calls.

In October, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced charges against the 22-year-old Wohl and 54-year-old Burkman. This was followed by charges in Ohio, and a civil rights lawsuit in New York for the pair of scumbags. Guess what? New York Attorney General Letitia James added a new piece of evidence in the case against Wohl and Burkman on Thursday. According to Forbes, a series of graphics and emails exchanged between the two men make it very clear that the robocall scheme was exactly as racist as one might imagine it was. With Burkman writing, “We should send it to black neighborhoods,” and excited reactions from Wohl to “getting angry black call backs,” as proof that their idea was working well, it isn’t looking good for these two.

In Attorney General James’ motion, filed on Thursday in the U.S. Southern District Court of New York, the AG says that while “discovery is in a very preliminary stage,” there is lots of evidence for the court to consider and any attempts by Burkman and Wohl’s attorneys to expedite the process does a disservice to the charges against them that include the “violation of several federal and New York laws.” 

The robocalls, targeting Black communities, falsely claimed that voting by mail would provide police, debt collectors, and the CDC with personal information, allowing those agencies to “track down old warrants,” “collect outstanding debts,” and “track people for mandatory vaccines.” The information contained in the calls was a complete fabrication, and this voter suppression tactic was so starkly racist in its execution it makes your head spin. According to the motion, more than 85,000 robocalls went out on August 26, 2020. Of those 85,000, 5,500 of those calls went out to the New York area. 

Wohl and Burkman demonstrated a clear racial animus in carrying out their robocall campaign. For example, on August 25, 2020, the day before the robocalls were placed, Wohl emailed Burkman attaching the audio file for the call and stating that “[w]e should send it to black neighborhoods...” The next day, after the calls were sent and received by thousands of  voters, Burkman emailed to congratulate Wohl, stating that “i love these robo calls...getting angry black call backs...win or lose...the black robo was a great jw idea.”

The “jw” in that last tweet stands for little jacob wohl.

Attorney General James’ motion also points out that the very script fo the robocall is filled with Wohl and Burkman’s racism. The voice of the calls is a woman who identifies herself as Tamika Taylor.

“Tamika Taylor” bears resemblance to Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed by police while sleeping in her home in Louisville,  Kentucky in 2020. When Breonna Taylor’s death became an important part of the movement for Black lives and racial justice, the media often misidentified Tamika Palmer as Tamika Taylor. 

The dumbtastic duo is facing multiple lawsuits and charges in no less than three states. A judge has already ruled against the two’s attempts to separate the trials, saying that it would not violate their Fifth Amendment rights to have concurrent trials taking place for the same actions. In recent weeks, Wohl and Burkman’s attorneys sounded as confused and unorganized as their clients, with implications that they would like Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s buddy Alan Dershowitz to testify for some nebulous constitutional reason—with no evidence that Alan Dershowitz was aware of this. 

One of the serious charges Wohl and Burkman face is a violation of Section 2 of the Ku Klux Klan Act, of “two or more persons [from] conspir[ing] to prevent by force, intimidation, or threat” any “citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote, from  giving his support or advocacy in a legal manner, toward or in favor of the election of any lawfully qualified person as an elector for President or Vice President, or as a Member of Congress of the United States.” It’s an important reminder that the laws that Burkman and Wohl broke are laws put into place not only to protect our democracy from general voter fraud, but to protect our country against white supremacist KKK terrorists trying to turn our country into a white ethno-fascist state.

You can listen to the robocall sent to voters in Detroit below.

Republican lawmakers in Tennessee are drawing criticism after blocking a resolution honoring out gay country music singer TJ Osborne in the state’s House of Representatives.

A group of GOP legislators led by state Rep. Jeremy Faison referred the measure, which passed in the House by a 63-23 margin, to a committee Monday, citing that he felt “like it needs to be” heard in a committee for review. “We have some concerns,” Faison said without citing what those specific concerns were. The Tennessee Holler pointed out that the committee Faison wants the measure sent to is closed for the year.

The measure’s co-sponsor, state Rep. John Ray Clemons, expressed concern about its future if it goes to a committee. “I think if it goes to committee, I don’t think it’s going to come back to the House floor,” Clemons told The Hill.

WATCH: “We have some concerns.” @JeremyFaison4TN and the @tnhousegop block a resolution to honor out gay country music star TJ Osborne of the @brothersosborne for no reason other than blatant bigotry and spite.

It passed the senate 30-0.
So much hate in our state. pic.twitter.com/feOo5tAG9f

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) May 4, 2021

TJ and his brother, John Osborne, responded to Faison’s statement on social media pointing out Faison’s hypocrisy. “We’ve lived in this state for over half our lives. [Faison] honored Ben Shapiro who doesn’t even live here,” the band tweeted. The brothers’ comments refer to Faison supporting similar legislation earlier this year honoring Shapiro’s decision to relocate the headquarters of The Daily Wire to Tennessee.

The resolution, which passed unanimously in the state Senate, honors Osborne, one half of popular country duo Brothers Osborne, for being a “trailblazer and a symbol of hope for those country music artists and fans alike who may have felt ostracized from a genre they hold dear.” Osborne became the first out gay musician signed to a major country music label when he came out in February.

We’ve lived in this state for over half of our lives. @JeremyFaison4TN honored Ben Shapiro who doesn’t even live here. Jeremy, let’s have lunch one day. On us. Would really like to know more about you as a person. https://t.co/00w2rdwCec

— Brothers Osborne (@brothersosborne) May 4, 2021

“A lot of SJRs are not heard in committees and we vote on them. We voted on a couple of them today, as a matter of fact,” said state Rep. Antonio Parkinson in response to Faison’s request. State Rep. Gloria Johnson offered similar thoughts on Twitter, saying that ten country music artists were honored in a similar fashion to what was proposed for Osborne last week “with no questions.”

“I am so disgusted with the bigotry in the [Tennessee] GOP,” Johnson said. “Tonight the [Tennessee] GOP refused top hear a resolution honoring a country musician because he is gay.” The passage of a resolution Wednesday honoring conservative pundit Tomi Lauren for moving to Tennessee drew further criticism for the treatment of the resolution honoring Osborne

The Osbornes also invited Faison to have lunch with them, stating they “would really like to know more about you as a person.” Faison seemingly accepted the offer, saying he “would be honored to break bread” with them.

Screenshot via YouTube/CBS Sunday Morning

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If you’re using texts for two-factor authentication, it’s time to change to an app. Here’s what you need to know.

When people ask me for security tips, I give them the basics. One is a strong and long password with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. (No, “Passw0rd!” is not good enough.) Each password should also be unique to each account (We love a good password manager!). And you always use two-factor authentication, or 2FA. (Don’t be like me, who didn’t have 2FA on her bank account until a hacker wired $13,000 out of it.) But the type of 2FA you use is also increasingly important.

Text-based 2FA, where a text with a six-digit code is sent to your phone to verify your identity, is better known and better understood because it uses technology most of us use all the time anyway. But it’s a technology that wasn’t meant to serve as an identify verifier, and it’s an increasingly insecure option as hackers continue to find ways to exploit it.

That’s why I recommend using an authenticator app, like Google Authenticator, instead. Don’t let the name intimidate you: There are a few extra steps involved, but the effort is worth it.

SIMjacking: Why your phone number isn’t good enough to verify your identity

By the time Mykal Burns got the security text from T-Mobile informing him that his SIM card had been changed to a different phone, it was already too late. In the 20 minutes it took Burns to get the SIM switched back to his phone, his Instagram account was gone. With access to Burns’s SIM card, the hacker simply asked Instagram to send Burns a password recovery text in order to take over Burns’s account and lock him out. All Burns could do was watch the hacker destroy that part of his online life.

“It had been wiped clean of the 1,200 or so photos I had shared since creating the account in 2012,” Burns, a Los Angeles-based television producer, told Recode.

SIMjacking, or SIM swapping, was famously used to take over Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey’s own Twitter account in 2019. But as Burns’s story shows, you don’t have to be a famous billionaire to be a target. If a hacker knows enough about you to convince your mobile carrier that they are you, an unsuspecting customer service representative might switch your SIM to them. There have also been cases of mobile carrier employees accepting bribes to switch SIMs, in which case a hacker wouldn’t have to know much about you at all.

Putting a PIN on your SIM might prevent some of this, but it’s not foolproof. And, as Vice reported in March, hackers have found other SMS exploits that don’t even require access to your SIM card.

“SMS, as a technology, has been around for a long time,” Marc Rogers, executive director of cybersecurity at Okta, an identity authentication technology company, told Recode. “It was designed to be a cheap way of sending messages. It wasn’t designed to be secure. And we built a bunch of security services on top of it. ... There are now more ways to compromise an SMS service than they can hope to fix.”

Basically, if you’re using texts or your phone number to verify your identity, it’s time to consider something else.

Authenticator apps — which are usually free — take a few more steps to set up than text-based authentication. Some people might find that — choosing and downloading another app, scanning QR codes, accepting tokens — to be too intimidating or simply not worth the extra effort. I’m here to tell you that it’s not intimidating, and it is worth it.

“That’s our whole purpose of really promoting these authentication apps,” Akhil Talwar, director of product management for LastPass, which makes a password manager and an authenticator app, told Recode. “They’re really easy to use, they’re super secure, and they’re also convenient. You’re just getting a push notification in some cases.”

How to choose and use an authenticator app

Authenticator apps work the same way text-based 2FA does, but instead of having a code sent to you via text, the code appears in the app. The code also changes every 30 seconds or so as an added measure of protection — it’s next to impossible for a hacker to guess at the right code when it changes so frequently. A hacker would have to be ridiculously lucky (anything’s possible, I guess) or have possession of your physical device to gain access to the code.

Several sites have recommendations for good authenticator apps and their respective features, which should help you figure out which one works best for you. Google Authenticator is one of the most popular and it comes from Google, so you can trust that it’ll be around for a long time and that the company knows what it’s doing to keep the app secure. But it’s also one of the most basic authenticator apps out there. If you’re looking for a few more features, Authy is highly recommended by most, has a nice interface, and lets you search within the app for a specific account (very helpful if you have a lot of accounts to scroll through), and is easier to switch to a new device than Google Authenticator. LastPass and 1Password’s authenticator apps can be linked to those companies’ password managers. And Microsoft’s authenticator — which, like Google, has the backing of a massive and long-running company behind it — is also a good choice.

“Three key things to think about when deciding on an authenticator app are the reputation and stability of the company that created it, the independent security reviews performed on it, and the ability to backup and restore the application in case of a lost or stolen phone,” Mathew Newfield, chief security and infrastructure officer at Unisys, told Recode.

Some authenticators have a push function where you simply confirm you’re trying to log into a site rather than remember and enter a six-digit code. But not all authenticator apps do this, and not all websites and apps support that functionality — at least, not yet. Some apps give you an option to have a backup in the cloud or to use the app across multiple devices, which you might be happy to have if your phone (and, therefore, authenticator app on it) breaks or is lost. Some apps have a search function so you can find the app you’re trying to log into easily — pretty helpful if you have a long list of logins.

“The one overarching rule is any authentication app is better than none,” Rogers, of Okta, said.

Once you’ve decided on an authenticator app and downloaded it to your device, it’s time to add your accounts to it.

In honor of our friend Burns, let’s use Instagram’s app as an example of how to connect your authenticator app to an account:

Go to Settings > Security > Two-Factor Authentication > Authentication App

From there, Instagram will ask to open your authenticator app and add your Instagram account automatically to it. You’ll then see a 6 digit code on the app. Enter that code on Instagram and you’re all set.

But you aren’t done. Instagram will then show you a set of backup codes. Write some or all of those down and keep them in a safe place (not on your phone) — you might need them to restore access to the app or website if you lose access to your phone and your authenticator app doesn’t have its own backup system.

Websites are a little different to set up. In honor of our other SIMjacked friend, Jack Dorsey, let’s use Twitter’s website as our example.

Go to Settings and privacy > Security and account access > Security > Two-factor authentication > Authentication app.

From there, you’ll be prompted to scan a QR code with your phone’s camera, which will open your authenticator app and add your Twitter account to it. If you can’t scan a QR code or the app won’t open correctly, you can also generate a code and enter it manually instead.

Back on Twitter’s site, click “next” and enter the six-digit code on your app. Again, remember to save Twitter’s backup code somewhere safe.

Now that you’re set up, when you log into Instagram or Twitter, you’ll be prompted to enter a code from your authenticator app. Open the app, get the code for the account you’re trying to log into, and enter that into the site or app. You can choose to do this every time you log into a site, or you can choose to only do it once if you’re using a device you trust. And that’s it.

Two very important and final things to remember

Once you’ve got the authenticator app up and running on an account, make sure you’ve disabled text-based 2FA and removed your phone number from the account (unfortunately, some apps and websites won’t let you do this). And don’t use your phone number as an account recovery backup option. After all, the whole reason why you’re doing this is that phone numbers make for poor identity verifiers.

Finally, if you’re getting a new phone, make sure you transfer your authenticator app from your old device to the new one. If your authenticator app requires that you have both devices in your possession to do this, make sure you plan ahead, or else you’ll have to rely on all those account backup codes to manually restore access to your accounts. Not good. Not fun. But still better than being hacked.

Again, this is going to be a little more work than relying on SMS-based 2FA, but think about what you stand to lose if your accounts are hacked. You may not realize how valuable some of those accounts — and the things on them — are until you lose them. Burns now uses an authenticator app wherever possible. He was able to get his Instagram account back after two days, thanks to a connection he had at Facebook. But he didn’t get back the 1,200 photos that were on his account — including those of his beloved dog, Bonnie, who died last year. His Instagram account is private now, and his use of it has been sparing.

“I have most of the original photos backed up from my phone, but gone are any photo edits (filters, etc.) I made in the app, whatever memories I attached in the captions, and any comments from others,” Burn said. “Pretty disappointing ... I didn’t really post anything to the account for a year after getting it back, and have only recently begun posting photos again.”

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Whether or not you’re closely versed in Colorado state politics, you’ve likely heard of Colorado state Rep. Richard Holtorf. For example, while speaking to the Denver Post, Holtorf identified himself as having had a Black, gay friend in college as a defense when called out for downplaying a Black colleague's concerns about racism at the Colorado Capitol. In February, Holtorf also told a colleague he should “let go” of his son’s murder. Disturbing no matter what, of course, but this colleague’s son, Alex Sullivan, was killed during the Aurora movie theater shooting.

As seen in a clip quickly going viral, the colleague in question—Democratic state Rep. Tom Sullivan—is unafraid to call out Holtorf's inappropriate and offensive comments. What did Holtorf say this time? While speaking on the House floor about an amendment to a bill he proposed, Holtorf was seemingly interrupted by a colleague and said, "I'm getting there; don't worry, Buckwheat, I'm getting there.” Perhaps picking up the absolute horror of the room, he added, "That's an endearing term, by the way.” Then Sullivan confronted him.

Holtorf repeatedly asked Sullivan why he was “yelling” at him, in just about the most typical reaction you might imagine coming from someone who just slurred a colleague and tried to play it off as a term of endearment. Back and forths became so heated, so fast, that Democratic state Rep. Leslie Herod had to diffuse the situation after another colleague had to try and hold Holtorf back and wave him away from the mic. Unsurprisingly, the session was called into recess. 

You’re probably wondering: Who was Holtorf referring to as “buckwheat”? We don’t know. What we do know, as Stephen A. Crocket Jr. pointed out at The Root, is that “white people don’t call other white people ‘Buckwheat.’”

Here is that clip.

Julián Castro pointed out that a teacher would be fired for making that comment, so why shouldn’t Holtorf be?

Democratic state Rep. Leslie Herod also tweeted about it, pointing out that she has to deal with it every single day.

Surprising no one, when Holtorf returned to the floor, he offered a meager apology, stating, “I apologize if I’ve offended anybody in any way. It is not my intent, ladies and gentlemen. If anyone would like to talk to me afterward, I’d be more than happy to visit with them," according to KDVR.

Here is a clip of Holtorf’s comment, as well as his apology, but with the reaction from his colleagues and recess cut out.

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The 16-year-old Black girl could never be the “perfect victim.”

After watching 15 seconds of police body camera footage last week, viewers of various races and political affiliations had made a decision: 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was “the aggressor” — the “fat,” “huge,” “knife-wielding attacker” and “maniac” who deserved to be fatally shot by the police on April 20 in Columbus, Ohio.

According to these viewers, Nicholas Reardon, the police officer who immediately shot and killed Bryant, who was holding a knife, was justified. That she was a teenager in the middle of an altercation, in which she was presumed to be defending herself, did not matter.

Reardon shot Bryant dead about 20 minutes before a judge announced that a jury found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd, a killing that catalyzed worldwide protests against police violence. For a moment, those seeking justice for Black life exhaled in relief, knowing that the officer who callously took Floyd’s life would be imprisoned.

But the cries for justice that applied to George Floyd did not ring out as loudly for Bryant. Even after it was discovered that Bryant was living in foster care, that she was in the middle of a fight with older women when police arrived, and that she was allegedly the one who summoned the police for help, people — some of the same people who called for justice in Floyd’s case — used police talking points to justify the four bullets that Reardon unloaded into Bryant’s chest. She was brandishing a knife, many pointed out, which meant the other Black women needed to be protected.

Crisis response experts noted, however, that deescalation tactics — like commanding Bryant to drop the weapon, physically getting between the women, or simply communicating with her — could have kept everyone alive. In many recorded encounters between the police and white people carrying weapons, for instance, officers didn’t shoot first or even reach for their guns — they successfully managed to peacefully apprehend the suspect.

Bryant’s death has become a debate that questions a child’s actions — and worthiness to live — instead of another example of the racism of policing and the institution’s failure to provide wholesome support, care, and safety for the communities it serves. The insistence that Reardon had no other option than to take Bryant’s life to save others — though he risked everyone’s life in the process — displays the lack of consideration and value that society places on the lives of Black girls and women.

Treva Lindsey, a professor of African American women’s history at Ohio State University, told Vox that there are those who won’t see Bryant as a victim but as someone who brought this on herself. And even for those who do see her as a victim, they’ll still victim-blame, erasing the systemic oppression — including that Black children are far more likely to be in foster care than their white counterparts, and kids in foster care are often exposed to high levels of violence — that brought her to being killed at the hands of the police.

“People will say ‘I’m really sad this whole scenario happened, but had she not had that knife …’ That becomes the ‘but,’ the qualifier, the caveat. And too often we have a caveat when it comes to defending, protecting, and caring for Black girls,” Lindsey said.

The debate over whether police should have shot a child

On the afternoon of April 20, Ma’Khia Bryant reportedly dialed 911. The call was dominated by screams, but the caller said that someone was “trying to stab us” and “put hands” on their grandmother. “We need a police officer here now,” the person said. Body camera footage shows that when officer Reardon exited his vehicle, there were seven people outside of the home.

There was yelling, and a girl could be seen falling to the ground after being attacked by Bryant and kicked by an unidentified man standing nearby. Bryant, holding a knife, then lunged toward a woman dressed in pink who was standing up against a vehicle. Just moments after asking “What’s going on?” Reardon pulled out his gun yelled, “Hey! Hey! Get down! Get down!” (prompting the woman in pink to run away) and fired four shots at Bryant. Bryant immediately slumped to the ground next to the vehicle.

Interim Columbus police chief Michael Woods called the shooting a terrible tragedy for all those involved but said department policy states that an officer can use deadly force against someone when they appear to be inflicting harm on another person. He explained that the officers did not use a taser because there was an immediate threat of death. In addition, the chief said that officers aren’t required to verbalize to bystanders that they are about to fire their weapon.

The Columbus Police Department has long disproportionately used excessive force against Black people, coming under fire in recent months for the police killings of Andre Hill, a Black man police shot in a garage, and Casey Goodson Jr., a Black man who was entering his home.

Almost 55 percent of the department’s use-of-force incidents targeted Black people who make up less than 30 percent of the population. Other reports show how racism is rampant within the department’s ranks. With renewed attention on the department, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is conducting a third-party investigation of Bryant’s shooting that will answer questions like what might have happened if Reardon did not shoot and what information he had upon approaching the scene.

Sill, many have already drawn their own conclusions. Bryant’s death sparked debate across media and social media about whether the officer should have shot the 16-year-old.

On Face the Nation, Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), a former Orlando police chief, vehemently defended the officers’ actions, saying that police are forced to make calls in the heat of the moment. “Everybody has the benefit of slowing the video down and seizing the perfect moment. The officer on the street does not have that ability. He or she has to make those split-second decisions, and they’re tough.”

On the popular radio show The Breakfast Club, host DJ Envy stated, “The whole situation is tragic and it’s sad because that system failed that young lady.” But he also added, “Every case is different, and in this case, if I pull up to a scene and see a girl chasing another girl about to stab a girl, my job as a police officer is to make sure that girl doesn’t get killed. And the law allows me to stop that killing or that stabbing by any means necessary.”

But as crisis interventionists pointed out, the police officer could have taken steps to deescalate the situation, savings all lives in the process. Psychologist Merushka Bisetty explained in an essay for Vox that children like Bryant may “present with aggression and an inability to self-regulate their emotions and, consequently, engage in behaviors that can seem aggressive or involve weapons,” but that doesn’t mean that these situations “require or should be met with violent force.” Instead, it’s the role of intervening professionals to stop an aggressive interaction from becoming fatal.

That the reaction to Bryant’s killing has turned into a debate about whether the use of force is justified is an attempt to “displace blame onto the victim and their family rather than on the systems that created situations that led to her death,” Bisetty, who has provided services in shelters, schools, and jails, wrote. “It is worth considering whether Bryant might have still been alive today if a mental health expert — or someone else trained in nonviolent deescalation — had responded to the call.”

It’s also worth considering whether the police officer would have fired shots if Bryant or the people involved in the altercation were white. There are countless examples of police peacefully apprehending white boys and men wielding weapons. Just last year police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, handed water bottles to and thanked 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a self-described militia member who carried an AR-15-style rifle during the unrest that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse was allowed to leave the scene after fatally shooting two people and harming another, though the police had been informed that he was the shooter.

In other cases, white men have verbally threatened police officers and pointed weapons at them. In those situations, the police did not reach for their guns at all or ever use them. In 2019, 19-year-old Matthew Bernard who killed two women and a child led Virginia authorities, who tried to stop him with mace and a stun gun, on a naked chase before they eventually took him into custody.

White women, too, often get a softer side of law enforcement handling. Several white women who were part of the Capitol insurrection on January 6 could be seen on video being peacefully escorted down the steps of the Capitol building amid the chaos. In a tense July 2020 Detroit-area encounter, a white woman in a minivan pointed a gun at a Black mother while the Black woman’s 15-year-old daughter watched and screamed nearby. When the police arrived after six 911 calls, they ordered the white woman out of the van, put her on the ground, handcuffed her, and took her gun, according to the police.

Black women aren’t treated with the same patriarchal protections, however problematic, that are afforded to white women, Lindsey points out. The idea that Black women should be handled with care because they are women just doesn’t exist.

“We see an incredibly disparate treatment gap between what white women experience with police and what Black women experience with police,” she said.

In police encounters, racism and sexism work against Black girls and women

The level of dismissal and scrutiny that Black female victims face when they die at the hands of the police is unmatched. Bryant’s name is no longer trending, and even though her funeral was Friday, headlines about the fatal incident have dwindled. What narrative there is surrounding fatal police violence and police brutality often centers Black cisgender men and boys, leaving out Black women, girls, and trans people.

The focus on Black men and boys is warranted since they face the highest risk of being killed by the police: About 1 in 1,000 Black men and boys in America can expect to die at the hands of police, according to a 2019 study, a risk that is 2.5 times higher than for white men.

Likewise, the same study found that out of all women, Black women face the highest risk of being killed by the police. Black women make up 20 percent (48 total) of the 247 women fatally shot by the police and 28 percent of unarmed killings since 2015, according to a 2020 Washington Post analysis. All of this research does not include violent encounters between Black women and the police that do not result in death — such as cases of sexual harassment and assault.

But the realities of these statistics often don’t make the front page, or any pages at all. The invisibility of Black girls and women persists, many scholars note, because they stand at the complex intersection of their gender and Black racial identity. When it comes to their blackness, they’re not recognized as a group that needs protection. And this coupled with their status as women means that they cannot be trusted or believed.

“We still read blackness through the lens of masculinity,” Lindsey told Vox. “The strange fruit hanging from the tree is still Black men.” As a result, when Black women end up in encounters with police, society always asks, “Well, what did she do wrong?”

Lindsey said that we’re entrenched in a narrative that the police violence against Black women “is more of a blip and not a pattern for an investment,” though police violence always had a penchant for Black life across all genders.

These ideas go back to slave patrols, progenitors of policing in the United States. It was Black women who were on “wanted” posters for escaping, Lindsey explained — like, for example, Harriet Tubman, who would have been killed by patrols for defying the state. And as Michelle F. Jacobs wrote in “The Violent State: Black Women’s Invisible Struggle Against Police Violence,” both Black men and women were killed, maimed and mutilated at the will of slave holders, but Black women were violently raped and sexually abused by both the slave holder and his employees as an economic necessity.

Jacobs points out that by the time the country gets to the Jim Crow era, stereotypes about Black women (they’re governed by libido and loose morals, are liars, and are aggressive) are solidified and become cemented in state policy. “Public benefits law, educational law, delinquency and neglect policy, and all aspects of criminal law have embedded the stereotypes as the normative foundation for how government evaluates, judges, and punishes Black women,” she wrote.

While state violence against Black bodies is often seen through the narratives of Emmett Till, Amadou Diallo, Mike Brown, and George Floyd, “What about Carol, Denise, Addy, and Cynthia — the four little girls bombed in Alabama?” Lindsey said.

Black women’s experience with the police — and the police’s desire to avoid accountability for killing — even gave birth to the intentionally passive term “officer-involved shooting.” In 1979, Los Angeles police officers shot Eula Love eight times in her front yard. The two officers were escorting a gas company employee to cut off her service.

According to the police, Love had a $22.09 money order for the gas company in her purse and a kitchen knife in her hand. One of the officers described Love as a “raging, frothing at the mouth, knife-wielding woman” and newspapers described her as “unemployed and overweight.” Love’s killing was one of the earliest instances in which police used the phrase “officer-involved shooting” to blur the truth, as opposed to the more direct language that the police shot and killed Love that is being advocated for today.

This decentering of the Black women’s experiences when it comes to state violence detracts from the bigger trends, forcing Breonna Taylor, whose name and face turned into a meme and unit of commodification, to become an exceptional case and not an example of a larger issue, Lindsey said.

Taylor’s death, in fact, only rose to prominence after video of Floyd’s death went viral. She was also perhaps the closest example we have of “perfect” Black woman victimhood since she was asleep in her bed when the encounter began. And yet people still found ways to blame her, claiming that she should not have engaged with a drug dealer who led police officers to her door that night.

Sandra Bland, another one of the more well-known recent cases of police violence against a Black woman, was blamed for being “combative” with the police when she was pulled over on a Texas road in 2015 for failing to signal a lane change. Police took Bland into custody at a local jail where she was pronounced dead, her death ruled a suicide. Right-wing commentators, white liberals, and people within the Black community itself said that Bland should have followed the police’s directions and not been confrontational in order to save her life.

For Black girls, criminalization and adultification start early. According to the 2017 Georgetown Law study “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” Black girls face “adultification bias” from as young as 5, which means adults perceive them to be less innocent and thus less worthy of nurturing, protection, and comfort. This too stems back to slavery, the report noted, since Black children were put to work as young as two and three years old and were punished for showing child-like behavior.

This can be seen in other instances of police violence against Black girls caught on camera. In a 2015 case of police brutality that went viral, an officer tackled, dragged, and pinned 15-year-old Dajerria Becton to the ground at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, after officers were called to the home over alleged trespassing. In February, police in Rochester, New York, pepper sprayed a 9-year-old Black girl after they responded to a report about “family trouble.” Video footage shows that the girl repeatedly screamed for her father as police handcuffed her. When she refused to get into the police vehicle, police pepper sprayed her. “Don’t do this do to me” she exclaimed, and officers responded “You did it to yourself.”

It is also how people have referred to Bryant. When Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther shared the news of Bryant’s killing on Twitter, he wrote of the 16-year-old, “a young woman tragically lost her life.” People immediately reminded him that she was “just a girl.”

As scholar and activist Brittany Cooper noted, it was a Black girl that helped the world see what happened to Floyd. Darnella Frazier was 17 when she recorded Floyd’s death and accompanied by her 8-year-old cousin who also witnessed the murder so that the world could eventually see it. Without these Black girls, the small dose of justice that brought many people relief last week would have likely never happened.

Justice begins with visibility and accountability

A reason why there is debate over Bryant’s death is that it is difficult to educate the public if stories like hers rarely make the news — so when they do, there are preconceived notions that preclude nuanced views about policing and the sanctity of Black girlhood.

“There’s definitely an internalization of misogynoir inside and outside of our communities,” Lindsey said, referring to the term coined by Moya Bailey to explain how anti-Blackness and misogyny manifest in Black women’s lives. “So even beyond the sheer hatred of Black women, people really don’t understand these stories. [Black women and girls] are not legible. So even when we gain visibility, like in the Ma’Khia Bryant case, her story will remain illegible to folks.” People will continue to see a knife-wielding suspect as opposed to a traumatized 16-year-old girl.

To address this problem, Black legal scholars and feminist activists, primarily Kimberlé Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie, launched the #SayHerName campaign in 2014 and released a corresponding report, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women,” to bring awareness to the forgotten victims of police brutality.

The report pointed out that Black girls as young as 7 (Aiyana Stanley-Jones) and women as old as 93 (Pearlie Golden) have been killed by the police, with officers escaping prosecution or conviction. “Say Her Name sheds light on Black women’s experiences of police violence in an effort to support a gender-inclusive approach to racial justice that centers all Black lives equally,” Crenshaw and Ritchie wrote.

But in the years since the campaign launched, people have muddled the meaning behind #SayHerName, even if inadvertently. The phrase has morphed into #SayHisName whenever a Black boy or man is killed by the police, and the collective #SayTheirNames became widespread in 2020 in the months following Floyd’s death to further elevate the movement for Black lives. But the crowding out of #SayHerName in favor of these other versions, takes away from the campaign’s original purpose and furthers the erasure of Black girls and women.

According to Lindsey, protests since Bryant’s death led by Black women, Black queer folks, and Black gender non-binary folks, have been ongoing. “There’s a good amount of non-Black allies and accomplices who have been present in this, but it still looks nothing like what we tend to see when Black men or boys are killed by police, in terms of sheer number,” she said.

Each time a Black girl, woman, trans, or gender nonbinary person is killed, it’s an uphill battle to bring awareness to their story. For Lindsey, the goal should never be to debate whether Black people are human or matter.

“It’s important for us to continuing highlighting and vocalizing how the inhumanity of white supremacy shows up in the lives of Black women and girls,” Lindsey said. “When we’re equipped with the full truth of how it operates, we have a better chance at rooting out the operating system of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.”

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Calling the Fox News channel a propaganda machine for the right wing of the country is a redundant truism. It may be true that the absolute is relative, and the relative is absolute, but relatively speaking: the on-air personalities at Fox News are about as smart as cobwebs in an attic that refuse to read. On Wednesday, Fox & Friends did their normal morning show where one guy smiles while saying stupid things, and two other people say stupid things while never cracking a smile.

Brian Kilmeade took time away from trying to connect the dots between Prince Phillip’s recent passing and the interview Prince Harry and Meghan Markle did with Oprah Winfrey, to interview middle school children about their school experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea here for Fox News, is to show how liberals aren’t helping children go back to school because liberals don’t want your kids to go to school. Or something. It’s hard to parse the million-mile-per-hour twister of logic the conservative sphere works inside of these days. The segment came with its own chyron that reads “Failing our Children,” where the “F” in “Failing” is made to look like a failing grade sign. Fun!

The interview doesn’t go the way Fox News planned.

The first child, identified as Mason Seder, “sixth grader in Philadelphia,” tells Kilmeade that he has yet to return to in-person school, but has been told that he will get to return starting next week. Kilmeade, like a bull in a classroom full of children, asks in his most accusatory fashion “How you doing? Are you learning anything?”

Seder responds that he has learned some things, he believes his “teachers are doing a great job, but it’s not what it could be if you’re in person.” Kilmeade, having cracked the code on how in-person learning is preferable to being in a fucking pandemic, then moves on to an eighth grader from California who is in a hybrid model, in class two days a week, the rest at home. Kilmeade prefaces his question to Lilly Rauzon by saying the danger in California is “infinitesimal.” Rauzon says that it is a lot to juggle and while she continues to do alright her brothers have been having a hard time. Rauzon, like every single person in America, says that it will be much better when kids can attend school full time once again.

Kilmeade’s job here is to take these children’s statements of facts, and try to spin them into outrage at liberals. But Kilmeade needs like 100 years of in-person schooling to be considered smarter than shoe polish, and he flabergastedly exclaims that he’s “never heard of this, you have to, you get your assignment and you do it at home????” I mean, of all the things to jump on that are problematic about virtual learning, having a homework assignment is close to, if not at the bottom on the list.

After asking another eighth grader from California, who says that while she is not failing she would probably do better in-person at school, Kilmeade goes back to Mason Seder, by asking this most convoluted question: “Mason, you’ve [sic] trying so hard to get your teachers and everybody to understand how bad it is learning at home, how close are you to getting back in the room? What do you miss most about not being in school?”

Seder, America’s hero today, says that he most misses seeing his friends and the after school activities in which he would normally participate. But Mason is optimistic about our future, saying that he knows we are “very, very close to getting back to school.” In fact, because Kilmeade doesn’t understand cause and effect, young Master Seder explains that “I think that the way our new president is handling things is a very good way, and we would not have gotten to this if it were still the last president.”

A single tear of joy and hope for humankind just rolled down my cheek.

Kilmeade, who has never met a smile, can’t let this attack on American values stand, saying “Really? It’s hard to believe because the last president was saying I want every kid back in school. So um,” and off to asking another student.

It’s pretty amazing.

You can watch the whole thing below. The fun starts at around the 26:45 mark:

“Employers can’t find the workers they need!!!!!” is one of the hot media trends of the last couple weeks, and it continues to be a load of nonsense blaming workers for the actions of employers. Let’s get it right up front: Questions to ask when you read one of these articles include, “How much pay are they offering?” and, “Have they tried raising the pay they are offering?” and, “During the pandemic, has this employer made workers feel unsafe?” and, “Does the data support these anecdotal accounts in suggesting there is a labor shortage?”

The most frequent scapegoat in coverage of the supposed labor shortage is the $300 a week in added pandemic unemployment benefits—Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte just announced he was cutting off the additional benefit to force people back to the workplace, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is requiring proof that people on unemployment are actively looking for work. Local news coverage filled with whining business owners continues to roll out steadily as well. But blaming the young people for not wanting [fill in the blank] kind of jobs is also a thing, as a recent CNN Business story on the hiring woes of manufacturers shows.

“We have a perception problem. People don't know the jobs are here or that these are jobs they want,” the executive director of The Manufacturing Institute said. Entry-level jobs that “pay well above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour” are going unfilled, CNN Business reports, in part because of competition from warehouses and distribution centers—except that since Amazon warehouse workers get $15 an hour for physically brutal labor, that gives us a ceiling on how “well above” the minimum wage these manufacturing jobs are paying.

Restaurant employers feature heavily in the “people are staying home because unemployment benefits are too high” genre of coverage, but a recent story by Nate Doughty of the Pittsburgh Business Times is an important entry in that genre. After Klavon’s, a local ice cream parlor, announced a raise from $7.25 to $15 an hour for new jobs, “It was instant, overnight. We got thousands of applications that poured in,” the manager said. “It was very overwhelming, very. People were coming in by the next day that it broke on the news, they were coming in, filling out paper applications. I was doing on-the-spot interviews.”

It took just a few days to fully staff the business for the summer. Klavon’s isn’t alone. The owner of The G.O.A.T. Sports Bar raised wages for front-of-house workers to a guaranteed $20 an hour—if they don’t make at least that much in tips, the business will bring them up to that level—and $18 an hour and a $500 bonus after 30 days of employment to back-of-house workers, up from an original offer of $15 an hour that didn’t draw enough applicants. And it’s not just pay, either.

“Really, we had to offer more than the rest,” said Josh Wyka, the sports bar’s owner. “The people who are looking to work, they were all looking for full-time hours and not everyone is able to offer that right now, so I've been able to be fortunate enough to snag some of those and be able to offer full-time hours upfront to begin with.”

Doughty also reports on a lumber yard that attracted applicants by stressing not just pay but job security and possibilities for internal advancement, and an amusement park that was able to add a sixth weekly day of operation after raising its advertised pay rates by $4 to $5 an hour.

Holy crap, what do you know, just in the Pittsburgh area alone there are all these businesses that got plenty of applicants! Someone tell the 84% of Pennsylvania restaurant operators who an industry group says are having trouble finding enough workers.

Then there’s the really big picture, which the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz takes on in this important Twitter thread, noting that “there is *always* a chorus of employers who claim they can’t find the employees they need. One reason for that is that in a system as large and complex as the U.S. labor market there will always be pockets of bona fide labor shortages at any given time.” But, she continues, it’s more common that the problem is employers not offering high enough wages. 

”The footprint of a bona fide labor shortage is *rising wages*. Employers who truly face shortages of workers will respond by bidding up wages to attract those workers, and employers whose workers are being poached will raise wages to retain their workers, and so on,” Shierholz writes. “When you don’t see wages growing to reflect that dynamic, you can be fairly certain that labor shortages, though possibly happening in some places, are not a driving feature of the labor market. And right now, wages are not growing at a rapid pace.”

It’s for that reason, Shierholz points out, that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said there’s not a labor shortage, because, “We don’t see wages moving up yet. And presumably we would see that in a really tight labor market.” And Shierholz’s EPI colleague Josh Bivens jumped in with the observation that average hours worked per week in food service has gone down in recent months—so restaurant employers aren’t even giving their existing workers extra hours. 

There’s no labor shortage. Unfortunately, there’s also no shortage of business owners whining about how too-high unemployment benefits are letting lazy bums stay on the couch rather than getting to work, and no shortage of credulous reporters willing to write those stories.

Democrats control the federal government, most cities and popular culture. But Republicans still own the states.

GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy located the problem on Tuesday morning with his top female deputy on the House leadership team: He was concerned about her ability to "carry out the message." In other words, House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney was refusing to lie about Donald Trump's 2020 loss, instead insisting that the election wasn't stolen or rigged or laden with fraud as Trump, McCarthy, and most House Republicans claim it was.

But twenty-four hours later, McCarthy and his No. 2, Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, had located a woman in their ranks who's perfectly willing to join the GOP leadership team in spreading the Big Lie: Trump toady Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York. Problem solved.

On Wednesday, a Scalise spokesperson released a statement supporting Cheney's ouster and calling for Stefanik to replace her. "House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda, and Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for Conference Chair," Lauren Fine said in a statement.

Trump, who is backing Stefanik's leadership bid, is thrilled with the shakeup. Stefanik voted against certification of the 2020 election, citing a series of fictional "irregularities" and other debunked claims, and Cheney has been a top target for Trump ever since she voted to impeach him over the Jan. 6 insurrection he inspired. 

In response to the news that the GOP leadership team had turned on her, Cheney spokesperson Jeremy Adler said, “Liz will have more to say in the coming days. This moment is about much more than a House leadership fight.”

You can say that again. Soon, the entire House Republican leadership team will be in lockstep, spreading the Big Lie in their effort to regain a House majority. Their entire caucus will be working in service of Trump, the baseless lies he has propagated about his 2020 loss, and a shared commitment to rejecting U.S. democracy and the will of the people. 

In addition, the battle over Cheney's seat in Wyoming will likely become the most high-profile proxy war between never-Trump establishment Republicans and Trumpers, reality-based Republicans and alternative-fact Republicans, pro-democracy Republicans and fascist Republicans. 

If House Republicans as a group didn’t already represent an anti-democratic assault on the American experiment in constitutional democracy, they certainly will now. And the fate of Cheney’s seat alongside McCarthy’s ability to secure a majority by demonstrating his fascist bona fides could serve as a harbinger of where the nation is headed. 

Since Joe Biden became president, several surveys have found a sharp rise in Republican pessimism about the economy.

This might seem surprising considering the national economy — which experienced one of its worst downturns thanks to the coronavirus pandemic — is now objectively improving. The United States added 916,000 jobs in March, smashing Dow Jones expectations and the unemployment rate is now at its lowest level (6 percent) in over a year. And economic forecasters now predict annual GDP growth in 2021 will soar to levels the country hasn’t witnessed in nearly 40 years.

Yet, despite these optimistic economic indicators, most Republicans say the economy is getting worse. On the one hand, this is to be expected, as political scientists have found that how we think about the economy is increasingly rooted in how we identify politically rather than in actual economic conditions.

Take this data from Civiqs daily tracking polls, which has asked Americans about the economy each day since June 2016. Americans’ perceptions of the national economy have changed wildly depending on whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House.

These shifts are particularly striking for Republicans when considering the actual state of the economy. Even after a prolonged period of growth in GDP, household income, employment and the stock market during Barack Obama’s presidency, about 70 percent of Republicans consistently thought the economy was getting worse in 2016 — nearly the same share who are now pessimistic about the economy’s trajectory under Biden. (By contrast, fewer than half of Republicans said the economy was getting worse at the height of the coronavirus recession, when the U.S. economy was in its worst shape since the Great Depression.)

And this disconnect underscores a key point that political scientists John Sides, Lynn Vavreck, and I have repeatedly made about the 2016 election: Despite a media narrative that attributed Trump’s political rise to widespread economic dissatisfaction and anxiety, it was partisan and race-based opposition to Obama’s presidency that drove public opinion about the economy. 

That’s confirmed by several studies showing economic distress was a weak predictor of support for Trump in the 2016 general election and understanding who switched from supporting Obama in 2012 to voting for Trump in 2016. To the extent that economic anxiety mattered in Trump’s rise, it tended to take the form of what we have called “racialized economics” — or the belief that undeserving minority groups are getting ahead while hardworking white people are being left behind. This attitude more than economic discontent pushed voters toward Trump, too.

But this didn’t stop the media from explaining away Trump’s support with stories about his voters’ apparent economic grievances. As The Washington Post reported, use of the phrase “economic anxiety” in American news coverage peaked in November 2016 — even prominent Democrats such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Biden put forth economic reasons to explain Trump’s victory. This focus on the ostensible economic underpinnings of Trump’s election was so widespread, in fact, that cable news actually devoted far more coverage to “economic anxiety” during the 2016 presidential campaign than they did during the 2020 election, when there was actually a global downturn in the economy.¹⁷

The economic anxiety explanation for Trumpism has been persistent, too. So much so that when political scientist Robert Pape began exploring the factors contributing to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, he expected to find that rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 recession. “[I]nstead,” The New York Times reported, “he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places … that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.”

While Pape’s statistical methods have been criticized, and his findings appear “obvious” to many, his expectation that Trump’s strongest supporters were still somehow motivated by the 2008 recession in 2021 underscores just how difficult it has been to dislodge unsubstantiated economic explanations for Trumpism. And with Republicans’ renewed economic anxiety likely here to stay throughout Biden’s time in the White House, it also raises an important question: Will we, as a nation, fall for the same trick once again?

There are myriad reasons why bottled water is problematic. Plastic containers are no good for the environment, the costs of bottled water continue to rise even though it is … water. Most importantly, the very existence of bottled water as a private business is only the result of our crumbling infrastructure and misuse of public resources. In recent years, the Nestlé company, and their egregious profiting off of public resources, has been in the news. Canadians have voiced their displeasure with the $14 per 1 million gallons of water the company reportedly pays to profit off of our northern neighbors’ drinking water. In California, Nestlé has been the focus of investigations over their over-pumping of San Bernardino National Forest water to produce their Arrowhead brand of bottled water.

At the end of April, California water officials took steps to stop Nestlé once again, drafting a cease-and-desist order that, if approved by the California Water Resources Control Board, will effectively stop their production. According to The Guardian, officials are using the very real drought that many parts of California are facing down as we go into the summer months. The cease-and-desist letter would greatly change the amount of water Nestlé (rebranded BlueTriton Brands earlier this year) is allowed to take out of California.

Nestlé makes a lot of money off of selling us all our own collective water supply. For decades they did so on an ancient permit that had expired in 1988. That permit, which was handed to them in 1978, was relatively archaic before the ink was wet, so you can imagine how disappointed environmentalists and others were when Federal Judge Jesus G. Bernal said that the National Forest Service could not stop Nestlé from continuing to bottle our water on a $524 a year permit.

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This latest move by officials comes after revisions to previous investigations that show Nestlé has far overstepped the boundaries of what they were even permitted to pump out of federal land in the first place. Specifically, the letter sent to the California Water Board points to a 2017 investigation alleging that the bottling company has taken, on average, 25 times the amount of water they are allowed to take. An example of how far afield they have gone: “Last year the company drew out about 58 million gallons, far surpassing the 2.3 million gallons per year it could validly claim.”

According to Arstechnica, this last statement is an argument that Nestlé has been fighting for some time, based in their original contact language versus today’s expectations.

A key contract from 1909 said the Arrowhead source would supply a bottled-water company with seven train cars of water per week. Nestlé, which bought those rights, said that tank cars from that era could hold 15,000 gallons. But Amanda Frye, a local activist, thought something was amiss, so she did some digging. After sifting through archives, she found buried in legal documents evidence that the actual train cars used carried 6,500 gallons—less than half what Nestlé claimed.

If the state board is successful in their attempts to have this number held up as the contract, Nestlé will find itself in trouble. At the very least they would face up to a $1,000 a day fine, or a $10,000 a day fine if the area is declared a part of the drought.  

There have been small victories, in towns like Kunkletown, Pennsylvania, where Nestlé pulled out after lawsuits were brought against Eldred Township Board of Supervisors that promised to expose the dirty dealings that went on with the bottling giant and zoning laws in the area. 

These victories have been few and far between for the very same reason, as local and state officials have been intimately involved with the billion-dollar water business for a long time. And Nestlé Waters has the money to, like other anti-environmental businesses, pay their own sets of scientists to say and cast enough doubt, and file enough motions in courts around the land, to push the can down the road. And they can do this because profits far outweigh the money they spend lobbying and tangling up the courts. 

Hopefully, this new move will, at the very least, force Nestlé to once again publicly expose their greed, and by doing so, bring about more positive organization and action against them.

In 2020, the number of Americans who said they belonged to a church, mosque or synagogue fell below a majority for the first time since Gallup began tracking this, according to a recent survey. About 20 years ago, 70 percent of Americans belonged to one of those houses of worship. Today, it’s 47 percent. While that doesn’t mean a majority of Americans are areligious, the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans has also been increasing and is now more in line with the share of evangelicals or Catholics.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke and Perry Bacon Jr. speak with political scientist and pastor Ryan Burge about how these trends are shaping our society and politics.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/nonreligious-americans-growing-political-force-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-77249899

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/house-democrats-wont-pass-reparations-77173366

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/policing-happen-77102704

Millions of Americans are not getting the second doses of their Covid-19 vaccines, and their ranks are growing. From a report: More than five million people, or nearly 8 percent of those who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, have missed their second doses, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is more than double the rate among people who got inoculated in the first several weeks of the nationwide vaccine campaign. Even as the country wrestles with the problem of millions of people who are wary about getting vaccinated at all, local health authorities are confronting an emerging challenge of ensuring that those who do get inoculated are doing so fully. The reasons vary for why people are missing their second shots. In interviews, some said they feared the side effects, which can include flulike symptoms. Others said they felt that they were sufficiently protected with a single shot. Those attitudes were expected, but another hurdle has been surprisingly prevalent. A number of vaccine providers have canceled second-dose appointments because they ran out of supply or didn't have the right brand in stock. Walgreens, one of the biggest vaccine providers, sent some people who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine to get their second doses at pharmacies that only had the other vaccine on hand. Several Walgreens customers said in interviews that they scrambled, in some cases with help from pharmacy staff, to find somewhere to get the correct second dose. Others, presumably, simply gave up. From the outset, public health experts worried that it would be difficult to get everyone to return for a second shot three or four weeks after the first dose. It is no surprise that, as vaccines are rolled out more broadly, the numbers of those skipping their second dose have gone up.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sen. Joe Manchin on Friday said that he did not support the D.C. statehood bill, a blow to advocates pushing to make it the 51st state after the legislation passed the House last week.

"If Congress wants to make D.C. a state, it should propose a constitutional amendment ... and let the people of America vote," the West Virginia Democrat told Hoppy Kercheval of West Virginia's MetroNews in a radio interview.

Manchin is the first Democratic senator to come out against the D.C. statehood bill, which Republicans are united against, although a small number of Democratic caucus members have not yet publicly backed the bill.

Even though the issue boasts a historic amount of Democratic support in the Senate, it won't succeed without Manchin's support in the closely divided chamber and with the existence of the legislative filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass the legislation.

Some Democrats who support the bill have conceded that it is not a top priority and said they are taking a more pragmatic approach and focusing on issues such as infrastructure.

Before the House voted on the bill last Thursday, which passed 216-208, Manchin had said that he was "still discussing it," adding that he had a lot of other things going on.

In the radio interview, he said that he had since taken a "deep dive" with his staff, looking at conclusions reached by the Justice Department under the Carter and Reagan administrations, as well as comments from then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. They all determined that D.C. statehood would require a constitutional amendment, he said.

Manchin cited the 23rd Amendment — which granted D.C. residents the right to vote, as well as Electoral College votes — as something that complicates the path to statehood, because lawmakers at the time opted against the idea. He added that taking congressional action would likely result in a Supreme Court challenge.

"Every legal scholar has told us that, so why not do it the right way and let the people vote to see if they want to change?" he said.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who has championed the legislation as D.C.'s sole voice on Capitol Hill, said that Congress could grant D.C. statehood without repealing the 23rd Amendment — something Manchin did not explicitly call for — and had the full authority to do so.

"Those who make such an assertion are conflating a policy choice and a constitutional requirement," she said in a statement Friday.

Despite Manchin's opposition, a spokesperson for Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the lead author of the Senate bill, said in a statement the senator remained "actively engaged with colleagues on both sides of the aisle and is confident this can reach the finish line by the end of this Congress."

“With a record amount of Senate cosponsors and support from the House and White House, Senator Carper feels that the stars are aligning to right this historic injustice," the spokesperson said.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Moscow) has often been the butt of jokes about his desire to please Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his disregard for Russian interference in U.S. elections or threats to U.S. troops. Johnson may be only one of the four Republican senators who chose to spend their July 4 vacations in Moscow chatting with Putin, but he was the only one who promptly returned and devoted himself to explaining how Russian interference in U.S. elections is no big deal.

More recently, Johnson has been famous for his attempts to bushwhack Dr. Anthony Fauci, attacks that have gone badly—and often hilariously—wrong. But that was just one part of Johnson’s overall coronavirus-denying, mask-scorning, vaccine-doubting routine, one that is still continuing as Johnson does his best to uphold Republican vaccine aversion. 

There’s no doubt that Johnson has a lot of nonsense on his plate, so it’s not surprising if he often has a hard time seeing reality. For example, there’s a Washington Post report that the FBI approached Johnson to tell him that he was being used as part of a Russian disinformation campaign to smear then-candidate Joe Biden. Johnson shrugged it off. After all, the FBI wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.

In one of those “elections have consequences” moments, it’s sobering to remember that at the time the FBI approached Johnson last year, Johnson was chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Once that’s sunk in, follow that up with the realization that the reason the FBI came calling was because Johnson was seriously considering Rudy Giuliani’s fantasies about Biden using his power as vice president to meddle about in Ukrainian politics so his son Hunter could collect a paycheck.

Everything that Giuliani was peddling had long been disproven. In fact, the whole claim was an upside down retelling of events that had played out entirely in public:

In 2016, the U.K. complained to the United States that Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin wasn’t cooperating in an investigation of Burisma Holdings, the same company where Hunter Biden was on the board. Rather than warping U.S. policy to protect his son, Biden went to Ukraine and demanded that Shokin be ousted and replaced by someone who would cooperate with the U.K. investigation. The International Monetary Fund and other U.S. allies backed Biden’s play. Within weeks, Shokin was out and a new prosecutor actually did open an investigation into Burisma. That investigation found some tax problems, assessed appropriate fines, and closed that investigation a year later. None of this was secret or mysterious, and both Joe Biden’s actions and Hunter Biden’s position were widely reported on at the time.

It wasn’t until after the election that “Clinton Cash” author and serial plagiarist Peter Schweizer took the pieces of the actual story, shuffled them together in a box, and tossed out a version that was designed to fit an all-Democrats-are-evil narrative. In the new version, Shokin was a hard-charging prosecutor out to stop the horrible Burisma and send Hunter Biden packing until Joe Biden came in to wave a $1 billion threat at a Ukrainian official and got Shokin sacked. And in this version, the role of the U.K., the IMF, and other allies are just … Well, they’re missing. 

None of it made any sense, which is why six days after Giuliani first published these claims in The New York Times, actual reporters dispatched to the scene by Bloomberg were able to confidently report that the only reason anyone in the Ukraine was going along with the lies was to please Trump. In fact, the whole thing was so fabricated that the “letter” Giuliani was waving around as proof had been written at least in part by Giuliani.

Many of those who lined up to hand Giuliani his “evidence” were, not surprisingly, pro-Russian officials and members of the former regime installed with the help of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Not only was supporting this conspiracy theory spreading discord in the United States—always good for Russia—it was also driving a wedge between the U.S. and allies in Ukraine. Even better for a nation that was already occupying a large slice of Ukraine and facing sanctions for that invasion.

So in the summer of 2020, the FBI went in to give Johnson a “defensive briefing,” letting him know that much of what he’d been pushing, and the key information behind his “investigation,” was actually Russian propaganda designed to smear Biden, weaken the U.S., and damage relations with a key ally. Johnson’s reaction was, “So what?”

Actually, that’s underselling the level to which Johnson dismissed the FBI’s concerns. After admitting to the Post that he did receive such a briefing, he declared he found it “completely useless and unnecessary.” Then Johnson went right on pushing the same conspiracy theories.

And to be fair, Johnson is likely telling the truth here. He probably did know that everything he was selling was Russian disinformation. And warning him to stop doing so really was worthless.

A new analysis of satellite imagery shows some 430,000 acres of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest have been wiped out so far in 2021.

This story is part of Down to Earth, a new Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

We’re just four months into the year and things are already looking bleak in the Brazilian Amazon.

About 430,000 acres of its lush, species-rich forests have been logged or burned so far in 2021, according to a new analysis of satellite imagery by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP). That’s an area roughly 30 times the size of Manhattan.

The analysis, published earlier this week, comes as Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is negotiating a deal with US officials to funnel what could be billions of dollars into his administration to eliminate illegal deforestation within the decade.

At President Joe Biden’s Climate Leaders Summit last week, President Bolsonaro vowed Brazil would become carbon neutral by 2050 and recommitted to net-zero deforestation by 2030 — a target his government had previously deserted. “We could not agree more with your call for establishing ambitious commitments on the climate agenda,” Bolsonaro said at the virtual event.

The US is among a handful of foreign governments that have been pushing Brazil to better protect its forests. But a large number of activists, organizations, and former environment ministers warn that giving money to the Bolsonaro administration won’t solve the problem, and could even make it worse.

Either way, the new MAAP report shows that the situation on the ground is dire, as the Amazon gets one step closer to a dangerous tipping point — beyond which it could dry out.

MAAP

Deforestation surged under Bolsonaro and Trump ignored the problem

Brazil was once a poster child for slowing rampant forest loss. For much of the last two decades, various policy and market interventions “achieved a huge reduction in deforestation in the Amazon,” Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute (WRI), wrote in a recent blog post. “Now we’re witnessing a heartbreaking unraveling of that success,” she writes.

Much of that unraveling has taken shape under President Bolsonaro, a populist and Trump ally who took office in 2019. In the first six months of Bolsonaro’s term, enforcement measures to protect the Amazon — such as levying fines and destroying logging equipment in protected areas — fell by 20 percent, according to a New York Times analysis of public records. He also cut funding to the main environmental agency, Ibama, and fired some of its officials. Meanwhile, critics say Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental rhetoric emboldened illegal loggers and land grabbers.

“Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is not the result of a lack of money, but a consequence of the government’s deliberate failure of care,” former Brazilian ministers for the environment Marina Silva and Rubens Ricupero wrote in an op-ed lambasting Bolsonaro on April 22. (The Brazilian government did not return a request for comment.)

Though the exact amount of deforestation varies by source, one thing seems clear: Forest loss has ratcheted up since Bolsonaro took office. “The size of the average deforestation patch experienced a substantial shift in the last two years in response to the current policies, increasing 61 percent in comparison to the average for the previous ten years,” Ralph Trancoso, a researcher at the University of Queensland, wrote in a paper published earlier this month.

Last year, amid an economic lull, primary forest loss in Brazil was up 25 percent compared to 2019, and much higher than any other country, according to WRI. (A spike in forest loss in 2016 and 2017 was mainly due to forest fires.)

Tim Ryan Williams/Vox

All the while, Trump — who withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement and sought similar environmental rollbacks in the US — did little to thwart the destruction. In 2019, for example, Trump backed Bolsonaro as the president rejected foreign aid for fighting wildfires that were raging across the Amazon, Politico reported. (Bolsonaro did issue a decree banning fires in the Amazon and mobilized the military to put them out.)

Even in a post-Trump world, however, there’s no sign that deforestation is slowing in 2021.

The high price paid for forest loss in the Amazon

The MAAP analysis shows that primary forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon amounted to roughly 433,000 acres this year through April 4, and much of it occurred in the southernmost regions of the ecosystem.

The data set is new, so there’s no comparison to the same period in prior years, but it indicates deforestation “remains high,” according to Matt Finer, who directs the MAAP project. (It’s also worth adding that deforestation tends to peak from July through September during the dry season when forest fires are more common.)

Joao Laet/AFP via Getty Images

Forest loss comes at a high price and runs counter to any plan to curb climate change, especially in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest home to vast amounts of carbon and biodiversity.

Deforestation undermines the Amazon’s ability to offset rising carbon emissions. In fact, a recent study suggests human activity has actually turned the Amazon Basin into a net emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. What’s even scarier is that it could trigger a runaway reaction that may turn regions of the rainforest into a savanna-like ecosystem, stripping it of its many benefits.

Could things change under Biden?

President Biden has made it clear that protecting the Amazon will be part of his ambitious climate change agenda, though it’s not clear how he’ll manage to do it.

At a debate last fall, Biden said foreign governments should provide Brazil with $20 billion in aid to stop deforestation. He added that the country should face consequences if forest loss continues unabated.

Bolsonaro called those comments “disastrous and gratuitous” on Twitter, according to AP. “The greed that some countries have over the Amazon is a reality,” he said. “But the confirmation by someone who is fighting for the command of his country clearly signals that he wants to give up a cordial and profitable coexistence.”

Mateus Bononi/Getty Images

But since Biden took office, Bolsonaro’s administration appears to have struck a much more conciliatory tone.

In the weeks leading up to the Earth Day Summit, officials from the Biden administration held closed-door meetings with Ricardo Salles, Brazil’s minister of the environment, to “find common ground,” the New York Times reported. And in mid-April, Bolsonaro sent a letter to Biden reaffirming a commitment to net-zero deforestation by 2030, in which he emphasized that such a goal would only be achievable with “substantial resources.”

What’s substantial? In an interview with the Wall Street Journal ahead of the summit, Salles said $1 billion “is a very reasonable amount that can be mobilized upfront.”

Critics warn Biden not to trust Bolsonaro and to avoid making a deal

President Bolsonaro is deeply untrusted by environmental and social groups, who have called him the Amazon’s “worst enemy.” They say that any deal with Bolsonaro will be bad for the Amazon and the people who live there.

“Negotiating with Bolsonaro is not the same as helping Brazil solve its problems,” nearly 200 organizations wrote in a letter to Biden in early April, pleading with him not to strike a deal until Bolsonaro’s administration shows tangible results.

“Any project to help Brazil must be built from dialogue with civil society, subnational governments, academia, and, above all, with the local communities that know how to protect the forest and the goods and services it harbors,” they wrote.

Other critics also point out that Brazil had millions of dollars for conserving the rainforest, but the Bolsanaro administration lost access to at least some of that money after it restricted operations of a key fund that received the aid.

Andrew Harnik/AP

The US and other governments have indicated that foreign aid would be contingent on Brazil drawing up a clear plan to curb forest loss that involves local communities. So far this year, however, Brazil seems to have made little headway toward that goal.

In the same week that Bolsonaro sent Biden the letter recommitting to net-zero deforestation, his administration changed the rules for fining environmental crimes that slow their payments, Mongabay reports. And while Bolsonaro said he’d double the budget for environmental enforcement during the Climate Leaders Summit, he approved a cut to the budget of Ibama a day later.

“What the government is missing is not cash,” the ministers wrote in the op-ed, “but a commitment to the truth.”

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice said Friday that he didn’t know of any examples of transgender athletes trying to gain an unfair advantage in sports despite signing a bill Wednesday barring transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s athletics.

MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle pressed the governor on the new law Friday morning, following up with Justice, a Republican, after he responded that he did not “have that experience exactly to myself right now" when asked for an example in his state where a transgender athlete gained an unfair advantage in women's or girls' sports.

"Can you give me one example of a transgender child trying to get an unfair advantage, just one, in your state? You signed a bill about it,” Ruhle said.

"No, I can't really tell you one," Justice said. “But I can tell you this, Stephanie… I coach a girl's basketball team and I can tell you... we all know what an absolute advantage boys would have playing against girls. We don't need that.”

Ruhle then asked why Justice made the bill a priority, pointing to West Virginia’s rankings near the bottom of states on its economy, education and infrastructure, among other things, according to U.S. News and World Report.

“I didn't make it a priority. It wasn't my bill,” said Justice, who declared earlier this week that he’d “proudly” sign the legislation despite warnings that the NCAA could pull postseason tournaments out of the state in response.

“Well, you signed it, sir,” Ruhle said.

“I think we only have 12 kids maybe in our state that are transgender-type kids,” Justice said. “I mean for crying out loud, Stephanie, I sign hundreds of bills, hundreds of bills. This is not a priority to me.”

"Alright then, sir, thank you," Ruhle said. "And please come back when, beyond anecdotal feelings as a coach, you can show me evidence where those young women are being disadvantaged in your state."

West Virginia’s new law is part of a wave of many Republican-leaning states pushing the issue that would restrict the rights of transgender athletes. The bill Justice signed bans transgender athletes from competition in female sports from middle school to college.

“Legislators across the country have failed to provide examples of issues in their states to attempt to justify these attacks, laying bare the reality that these are attacks on transgender youth that are fueled by discrimination and not supported by fact,” the Human Rights Campaign said in a statement after Justice signed the bill.

On Wednesday, Florida's legislature passed a similar bill, sending it to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' desk. The NCAA had warned states like Florida it could pull championships from areas if they don’t show all athletes “dignity and respect.”

President Joe Biden said he has not ruled out requiring all U.S. troops to get the coronavirus vaccine after the shots win final clearance from federal regulators, but cautioned that such a decision would be a “tough call.”

“I don’t know. I’m going to leave that to the military,” Biden told NBC News’ Craig Melvin in an interview that aired Friday, in response to a question on whether he would mandate the vaccine for U.S. service members once it is fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

“I’m not saying I won’t. I think you’re going to see more and more of them getting it,” Biden said. “And I think it’s going to be a tough call as to whether or not they should be required to have to get it in the military, because you’re in such close proximity with other military personnel — whether you’re in a quarters, where you’re all sleeping, or whether you’re out in maneuvers.”

The comments from the commander in chief come as the Pentagon has sounded the alarm about service members refusing the vaccine in large numbers, with roughly one-third of troops declining to take the shot as of February, according to congressional testimony from military officials. Earlier this month, the Pentagon reported that nearly 40 percent of Marines who had been offered the vaccine turned it down.

In March, a group of Democratic lawmakers demanded Biden make the vaccine a requirement for service members, while Pentagon press secretary John Kirby confirmed the military’s top brass was weighing a mandatory vaccination order.

“Obviously, we’re thinking about what happens when they become FDA-approved,” Kirby told reporters. “It would change the character of the decision-making process, about whether they could be mandatory or voluntary. But I don’t want to get ahead of that process right now.”

The skepticism of the vaccine within the military’s ranks mirrors the hesitancy the White House is trying to combat among a broad segment of the civilian population, as U.S. vaccine supply begins to outpace demand and shots have become available to all American adults 16 and older.

Although Biden announced last week that his administration had achieved its target of 200 million shots during his first 100 days in office, Republicans and younger, white Americans in rural communities remain particularly averse to the vaccine. According to a CNN poll released Thursday, roughly a quarter of American adults surveyed said they will not try to get the shot.

Three vaccines — from drugmakers Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — are currently in use in the U.S. under emergency authorizations from the FDA. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and Biden’s chief medical adviser, told CNN on Wednesday that he hopes the agency grants the shots full approval “very soon.”

Chris Attig, a parent who uses they/them pronouns, was arrested while testifying against an exclusionary, discriminatory anti-trans bill at the Arkansas statehouse on March 9. The bill, as previously covered at Daily Kos, would bar physicians from providing gender-affirming medical care to transgender and nonbinary youth. House Bill 1570, misleadingly called the “Arkansas Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act” would bar access to a wide range of gender-affirming treatments, including puberty blockers and hormonal therapy. As we know, this health care can literally be lifesaving for transgender folks of all ages, including youth. 

Attig spoke over their allotted two-minute time limit by about thirty seconds and claims that representatives of anti-LGBTQ hate groups, like the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, were able to speak far beyond the time limit without arrest. If you’re wondering what kind of radical language Attig was using, their statement included a message to transgender youth, for example: “No matter what happens here today, you are loved.” Words that are abhorrent apparently only to Republicans. Attig, who now faces a disorderly conduct charge, has given their first interview since their arrest.

In an interview with LGBTQ+ publication them. on Tuesday, Attig said they were shocked “sitting there in jail thinking that this is what happens when you speak to people about how their proposed laws are affecting your children.” Attig stressed that they “don’t want to hear it. They put you in jail.”

While making their statement, Attig described the anti-trans legislation as unconstitutional and introduced themselves as a business owner who “pays tens of thousands of dollars in taxes to this state and who employs transgender workers. … I am offended that you would squander our limited taxpayer resources paying lawyers to defend this infantile nonsense in federal court.” Attig, who is the parent of a 22-year-old transgender son, told lawmakers there are “more genders” and “more biological sexes” than they will ever understand. 

Attig also noted that “diversity and inclusion are good for business” and that “no economy in the history of the world has flourished under policies of hatred.” They also brought up North Carolina (likely in reference to the state’s transphobic bathroom bills) as an example of states losing business over exclusionary legislation. 

At two minutes, Republican state Rep. Jack Ladyman told Attig their time was up. Attig kept speaking from what appeared to be a prewritten statement, was told their time was up, and then lawmakers cut Attig’s mic. Security was directed to remove them as they continued to speak, and according to Attig, they were taken to the local jail in a police car, where they spent several hours. 

In speaking to them., Attig noted that this particular legislation won’t actually help their son, as he is no longer a minor. Still, however, Attig feels the need to be an advocate for transgender folks of all ages, telling the outlet: “Whether or not these laws are targeted at somebody above or below the age of 18, the singular message that they send is it is OK to bully and persecute people who are trans.” Attig summed up one of the big scale issues with these bills, saying, “It says, ‘The legislature is doing it, why can’t I?”

If this bill sounds strangely familiar, that’s because it got a lot of attention after Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed it in early April, citing its government overreach. Shortly thereafter Hutchinson’s veto, however, lawmakers voted to override his veto and make the bill into law. As of now, the bill would take effect in the state starting in July.

You can watch the video of Attig’s testimony below, which they uploaded to YouTube.

Congressional Republicans are expressing a lot of sorrow these days over the death of the bipartisanship they have so earnestly pursued. Sure, they spent an entire eight years seeking to block every legislative initiative that was ever even a twinkle in President Obama's eye, but that was two presidents ago.

Just because nearly all of them sold their constituents lies of widespread election fraud in 2020 and then most of them joined a lawsuit en masse to overturn the election, it doesn't mean they aren't willing to work across the aisle. Just because a mob of rabid Donald Trump supporters hopped up on GOP lies tried to violently overthrow the seat of the U.S. government and block a peaceful transfer of power, it doesn't mean they harbor any ill will toward President Joe Biden himself. Certainly, if the tables were turned, they wouldn't question the integrity of a party in which nearly 150 congressional members voted to deny certification of the results rendering Biden the rightful winner of the election. 

But now that Biden is president, Republicans have a lot of feelings about the importance of bipartisanship. As Biden's speech to a joint session of Congress approached, Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana—who voted against certification and became the sole member of GOP leadership to join the baseless lawsuit—offered, "What he says is going to be important, and I hope his speech is more focused on unifying as opposed to just having a go-it-alone strategy.” 

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who tried to talk Georgia officials into throwing out ballots in order to benefit Trump, just can't understand where it all went wrong. 

“The first 100 days have been about executive orders and reconciliation,” Graham said, noting that Biden used to be known as “a Steady Eddie” in the Senate. “I just thought, with Joe, he would turn the heat down a little bit. I don’t see the heat turned down at all.”

Who woulda thunk it, says a guy who literally tried to steal the election out from under Biden.

In the GOP response to Biden's address on Wednesday, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina repeatedly invoked bipartisanship and lamented how divisive Biden has been in his view.

"President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership. He promised to unite a nation. To lower the temperature. To govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted," Scott said. "Three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart."

In some ways, GOP protestations of Biden are starting to feel a lot more like sour grapes over the way the president has redefined bipartisanship. The truth is, Biden has been governing for "all Americans." Unlike Donald Trump, Biden rolled out an aggressive vaccination plan to every region of the country, no matter their partisan lean. Last year, Trump literally played politics with people's lives as the pandemic took hold of the nation.

Biden has also offered a series of proposals that continue to draw an astounding amount of bipartisan support. In fact, all three of his major proposals have typically polled in the 60s and 70s, often drawing solid support from Republican voters. So Biden has effectively written Republican lawmakers out of his playbook for essential governing.

The truth is, Biden, of all people, would likely be open to setting aside Republicans' repeated efforts to delegitimize his win and deny his presidency if they had any good ideas. In fact, he said as much in his address.

"I wanted to lay out, before the Congress, my plan before we got into the deep discussions," Biden said. "I’d like to meet with those who have ideas that are different — they think are better. I welcome those ideas. "

Then, in a nod to the fact that the Republican Party is fundamentally bereft of ideas, Biden added, "But the rest of the world is not waiting for us. I just want to be clear: From my perspective, doing nothing is not an option."

Of course, doing nothing is exactly what congressional Republicans excel at—that’s kind of a killer where bipartisanship is concerned.