James.galbraith

The police officer who shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright has been identified as Kim Potter, a 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center Police Department who recently served as the head of its police union. In body camera video, Potter can be heard shouting, “I’ll tase you,” and “Taser Taser Taser,” before instead shooting Wright with her gun. She is currently on administrative leave.

The medical examiner concluded that Wright “died of a gunshot wound of the chest and manner of death is homicide.” Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott has called for Potter to be fired, saying: “My position is that we cannot afford to make mistakes that lead to the loss of life of other people in our profession.”

Appearing on the Today show, Elliott sought to keep the focus on the fact that Potter killed a person, saying, “I can only speculate as to what the officer was thinking in that moment, but what I do know is that through the actions of the officer, this young man is dead and a mother is without a son, that much I do know, and that is I think the most important thing that we have to keep in mind here.”

Much of the news coverage now turns to the protests. A Dollar Tree store and a Speedway gas station were vandalized and looted, we learn. Protesters defied curfew. The National Guard is out in force. 

You know what? A young man is dead. His toddler son is left fatherless and his loved ones are grieving. All because he was pulled over—he thought for an air freshener on his mirror, the police now say for expired registration tags—and arrested because of a warrant for a missed court appearance on two misdemeanor charges, and during that arrest he had a moment of panic and tried to get back in his car. And in that moment Kim Potter thought that shocking him with a Taser would be the right way to deal with a scared, skinny boy, only she was so ragingly incompetent and so careless with the Black life before her that she pulled and discharged her gun instead.

That is what matters, not the windows at the Dollar Tree. And this not an isolated incident. It happened just 10 miles from where former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for the murder of George Floyd. It happened in the nation of Breonna Taylor and Tamir Rice and Walter Scott and Jacob Blake. Protest is more than a legitimate response. It’s a necessity.

As Elliott suggested to Today’s Savannah Guthrie in response to a question trying to refocus the story of Wright’s killing onto a “difficult night” of protests and concerns about “continued unrest,” what matters—why there’s protest—is that this keeps happening. “This is a tragedy for our city, for our community, in fact for our nation,” he said. “We’ve seen this far too many times, where a young Black man or woman is, you know, pulled over by police or encounters police and they end up dead. And what these young people who are protesting are asking is, ‘When will this stop?’”

Georgia’s new election restrictions have garnered no shortage of criticism thanks to provisions that directly impose additional burdens on voters, such as an ID requirement for absentee voting or a ban on distributing food or water to people waiting in line to vote. But equally importantly, the law opens up the possibility for elections to become more nakedly partisan.

In essence, the law provides a mechanism to transfer power currently vested in bipartisan or nonpartisan county election boards to the majority-Republican²⁷ State Election Board by giving the board the authority to suspend local election officials in up to four counties at a time and appoint a temporary replacement. County boards’ powers include the ability to decide challenges to voters’ eligibility and certify election results, meaning that a state-appointed election czar could theoretically invalidate a fair election by refusing to certify the results and throwing out thousands of supposedly questionable votes (the new law also allows people to challenge an unlimited number of votes). However, the State Election Board can only suspend local election officials after a hearing that must take place at least 30 days after the initial complaint, so in practice there probably would not be enough time after an election for partisan hardliners to coopt these powers and overturn an election.

A more realistic concern that Democrats have, however, is that the proviso could be used to target heavily Democratic, heavily nonwhite jurisdictions such as Fulton County, which includes much of metro Atlanta. A state appointee would have the power to condense polling places in these counties and offer less early voting than locals are accustomed to, disproportionately curtailing voting access in bluer parts of the state. The removal clause could also be used to retaliate against local officials who go further to promote voting than state officials would like, as DeKalb County did in the 2020 general election when it mailed absentee-ballot applications to all registered voters. (Such mass unsolicited mailings of absentee-ballot applications are now prohibited by the law as well.) 

And importantly, attempts to diminish local control of elections are not limited to Georgia. As part of the hundreds of election restrictions Republican legislators have proposed so far this year, at least 13 other states have passed or are considering bills that would handcuff local election officials (in some cases, literally).

• In Iowa, a package of recently passed voting restrictions makes it a felony for election officials to fail to perform their duties or disobey guidance from the (currently Republican) secretary of state. County election officials are also now subject to $10,000 fines for “technical infractions” of election law. The law also reins in county election officials’ discretion over how aggressively to promote early and absentee voting: They are barred from mailing absentee-ballot applications to any voter who didn’t ask for one, and they can’t open a satellite early-voting site unless a local voter specifically requests it.
• Similarly, a Texas bill that recently passed committee would make it a felony for election officials to pre-fill absentee-ballot applications, deliver an absentee ballot to anyone other than the person who requested it, alter election rules without the approval of the secretary of state, or even encourage people to apply to vote by mail — even those eligible to. Another bill, which has passed the state Senate, would also ban local election officials from encouraging people to vote by mail in any way, as well as from expanding voting access the way several blue counties did in 2020, such as 24-hour early voting, drive-through voting and, again, the mailing of unsolicited absentee-ballot applications. The bill would also require the secretary of state’s permission for counties to accept outside funding exceeding $1,000 for election administration, fine county election officials if they don’t purge noncitizens from the voting rolls within 30 days of being notified of a voter’s status and give the secretary of state the authority to purge voters from the rolls if county clerks don’t. A third bill, currently pending in committee, would also transfer the entire responsibility for registering voters and maintaining the voter rolls from county clerks to the secretary of state.
• Four bills appropriating local control of elections have already passed one chamber of the Arkansas legislature. One would make local election officials answerable to partisan county election boards;²⁸ another would refer possible violations of election law to the State Board of Election Commissioners, bypassing county officials. A third takes away county clerks’ power to designate vote centers, while the fourth prohibits the mailing of unsolicited absentee-ballot applications. A fifth bill, still in committee, would allow the State Board of Election Commissioners to take over local election administration. Though this last one may be the most blatant, the bills’ opponents see all of them as thinly veiled attacks on the sovereignty of Pulaski County, home to Little Rock and one of the few remaining blue counties in the state.
• A voter ID bill recently passed by the Missouri state House would allow the secretary of state to audit a local election authority’s voter rolls and identify names that should be purged; if the local authority doesn’t cooperate, the secretary of state can withhold funding from it. Similarly to its counterparts in other states, the legislation also states, “no use of mail-in ballots shall be authorized by any executive or administrative order.” Another bill would make it a misdemeanor for local election officials not to purge voters from the rolls within 10 days of receiving notice that they have died or become incapacitated.
• Bills have also been proposed to prohibit the mass mailing of absentee-ballot applications in Connecticut, Michigan, South Dakota and Tennessee. (South Dakota’s proposal was, however, voted down.)
• Bills in Arizona, New Jersey and New York would similarly ban mailing absentee ballots to anyone who didn’t request one.
• And legislation in Illinois and Wisconsin would ban the unsolicited mailing of both applications and ballots.²⁹

Most of these bills are not as aggressive as Georgia’s, but they all undermine localities’ ability to self-rule. In this way, Illinois State University political scientist Lori Riverstone-Newell told FiveThirtyEight, they’re part of an increasing trend of states preempting local government in order to retain power for themselves: Conservative legislatures, in particular, have passed several laws in recent years that limit the types of laws municipalities can pass, including sanctuary-city protections, anti-LGBT discrimination ordinances and minimum-wage increases (especially in the South). These laws can often have what Riverstone-Newell calls a “chilling effect,” where the mere threat of having their power taken away makes local officials afraid to govern as they see fit.

These laws often have racial undertones, too. For example, in Michigan, the state is allowed to appoint an “emergency manager” to take over the administration of local governments that are in distress — which has been used in recent years to remove local control from majority-Black Detroit and Flint (notably, emergency managers were accused of exacerbating the Flint water crisis). Similarly, because county election officials are chosen at the local level, laws that remove them in majority-minority counties specifically strip nonwhite citizens’ say over how their elections are conducted. And some, like the Texas bills that appear to be a reaction to diverse counties’ voting expansions in 2020, criminalize actions that make it easier for people of color to vote. “The part that I think is so concerning is the retaliation,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Look at who on the ground would actually be impeded [by these laws]. That suggests to me a real opposition to an expanded electorate.”

So no, not all of these laws include an actual mechanism for overturning elections. But the mere act of usurping the powers of local election officials threatens democratic values in and of itself. “That undermines our idea of intergovernmental relations … where we recognize there’s a vital role for local government within the federal system,” said Riverstone-Newell. “It’s such a strange thing that we’d want to put local governments in that position where they can’t respond to local needs and desires.” Pérez agreed: “They are taking away opportunities that election administrators have to go above and beyond the bare minimum requirements … and to consider facts on the ground and local needs when serving their voters.”

2nd Lt. Caron Nazario’s lawsuit shows policing’s systemic racial issues can’t just be boiled down to a few bad apples.

A violent, threat-filled traffic stop of a Black and Latinx Army officer, 2nd Lt. Caron Nazario, has drawn new attention to the scope of police misconduct as the world watches the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who killed George Floyd.

The incident, which took place in in Windsor, Virginia, in December 2020, has come under new scrutiny following the release of body camera footage, and after Nazario filed a lawsuit in early April against the officers who made the stop. Saturday, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced an investigation into what he called a “disturbing” incident.

Nazario has said he was driving through eastern Virginia when he saw flashing police lights behind him. He did not stop immediately, but turned his hazard lights on and proceeded slowly to a well-lit gas station. His decision to do so — as well as the tinted windows and temporary license plate on his new SUV — apparently caused officers to decide they were about to conduct a “high-risk traffic stop.”

Given this perceived risk level, officer Daniel Crocker stepped out of his police vehicle and immediately pointed his gun at Nazario’s car, shouting at the lieutenant to “get out of the car now.”

“What’s going on?” Nazario asked. “I’m honestly afraid to get out.”

“Yeah, you should be, get out now!” another officer, Joe Gutierrez, can be heard saying immediately after.

Despite Nazario’s questions, the officers didn’t tell Nazario why he was being pulled over: It was because they couldn’t see a license plate on his vehicle. The car was new; a temporary cardboard license plate had been taped to Nazario’s rear window.

Instead, they attempted to forcibly open Nazario’s door, even as Nazario maintained he did not have to exit his vehicle for a traffic violation. Gutierrez then pepper-sprayed Nazario four times, yelling at him to get out of the car as Nazario asked for help unbuckling his seatbelt. Once he was able to unbuckle himself, the lieutenant was forcibly pushed onto the ground.

“Can you please talk to me about what’s going on?” Nazario asked. “Why am I being treated like this, why?”

“Cause you’re not cooperating! Get on the ground! Lie down or you’re gonna get tased,” one of the officers can be heard saying; at one point, Gutierrez can be heard saying, “You’re fixin’ to ride the lightning, son.”

Ultimately, Nazario was not arrested; as paramedics arrived on the scene to treat Nazario for the pepper spray, Gutierrez said he’d spoken to the police chief, and the department planned to release the lieutenant without any charges.

“There’s no need getting this on your record,” Gutierrez is heard saying in the bodycam footage. “I don’t want this on your record. However, it’s entirely up to you. If you want to fight it and argue ... if that’s what you want, we’ll charge you,” Gutierrez said.

The offer, Nazario’s lawsuit alleges, was an attempted quid pro quo. The lieutenant claims he was told if he didn’t “chill and let this go,” officers would ensure his military record would be damaged. Nazario responded by telling the officers he would let his superiors know what happened.

Gutierrez said in the footage that would be understandable given “the climate we’re in, with the media spewing with the race relations against minorities,” but that any legal action by Nazario “doesn’t change my life one way or the other.”

Ultimately, the incident did change his life; he was fired following an investigation into the incident by the Windsor Police Department. His firing, however, raised the question of whether there are a few “bad apples” in policing, or if behavior like that he and Crocker displayed in December is part of a larger problem with policing.

Police misconduct is a systemic problem

Gutierrez’s firing came because his department found that “Windsor Police Department policy was not followed” during the traffic stop.

“The Town of Windsor prides itself in its small-town charm and the community-wide respect of its Police Department,” the department said in a Sunday press release. “Due to this, we are saddened for events like this to cast our community in a negative light. Rather than deflect criticism, we have addressed these matters with our personnel administratively, we are reaching out to community stakeholders to engage in dialogue, and commit ourselves to additional discussions in the future.”

The statement was markedly similar to a statement made by Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo about his former officer Derek Chauvin’s behavior the day George Floyd died. Testifying during Chauvin’s murder and manslaughter trial, Arradondo, and other law enforcement officials, were particularly impassioned in distancing his police department from Chauvin’s actions.

“That in no way, shape, or form is anything that is by policy,” he said on the stand. “It is not part of our training. It is certainly not part of our ethics or our values.”

As Vox’s Fabiola Cineas writes, statements such as these are part of an effort by police to avoid greater scrutiny into their practices:

While the officers’ testimony can be interpreted as a changing tide in an opaque culture, it’s likelier that the high-profile nature of the trial is forcing them to cast Chauvin as the bad apple — the one officer who doesn’t represent the broader department and system of policing, the one they need to throw out — as a way to avoid greater examination of police.

But when excessive force by police is observed everywhere, not just in Minneapolis, or in St. Louis, in Louisville or Rochester — but in Windsor, Virginia, a town some 50 miles west of Virginia Beach and home to just under 3,000 people, it only adds to the narrative that racist police violence is systemic. The steps taken by the Windsor Police Department are similar to all those testimonies by Minneapolis officers. An immediate distancing from Gutierrez, an admonition. Things like that don’t happen here.

The breadth of prominent incidents of bad policing makes it clear that there is something wrong throughout the US, and research has shown there is a national problem with traffic stops as well. The Stanford Open Policing Project found, after analyzing almost 100 million traffic stops in the US, that Black drivers are about 20 percent more likely to be pulled over by police for traffic violations. And once that happens, Black drivers are 1.5 to 2 times more likely to be searched than white drivers, even though white drivers are statistically more likely to have drugs, guns, or other contraband in their cars, according to the decade-long study, conducted by researchers at Stanford and New York University.

And there are a number of bad outcomes for Black drivers at traffic stops that highlight exactly why Nazario told the officers he was “honestly afraid to get out,” from the arrest of Sandra Bland to the death of Philando Castile, to a more recent example.

Sunday, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was killed near Minneapolis during a traffic stop by a police officer who mistook her taser for a gun after he stepped back into his vehicle following a brief struggle.

Nazario was not killed, but incidents like these show why he may have had reason to fear he might be.

Not only are American corporations readily ignoring Sen. Mitch McConnell's threats to shut their traps about voter suppression laws, now big law firms are getting active in the fight too.

Some 60 major law firms are uniting around an effort “to challenge voter suppression legislation and to support national legislation to protect voting rights and increase voter participation,” Brad Karp, chairman of the heavyweight law firm Paul Weiss, told The New York Times. 

Though the group has not been formally announced, Karp promised it would "emphatically denounce legislative efforts to make voting harder, not easier, for all eligible voters, by imposing unnecessary obstacles and barriers on the right to vote.”

The firms are teaming up with the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit organization that has been tracking Republican legislation across the country, to strategize about which laws to file legal challenges against. 

“We plan to challenge any election law that would impose unnecessary barriers on the right to vote and that would disenfranchise underrepresented groups in our country,” Karp said. As one might expect, that includes the Georgia law, which has invited a flurry of fallout already for both the state and the Republican lawmakers who passed it.

Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, told the Times the coalition of law firms put lawmakers "on notice" that unconstitutional and legally flawed laws will almost certainly result in legal pushback. 

“This is beyond the pale," Waldman said of the GOP suppression laws. "You’re hearing that from the business community and you’re hearing it from the legal community.”

Make no mistake, this is so far from over. On the heels of Major League Baseball pulling its All-Star Game from Georgia to protest the law, creators of the forthcoming Hollywood movie "Emancipation" about a runaway slave announced Monday that they would move production out of the Peach State.

"At this moment in time, the Nation is coming to terms with its history and is attempting to eliminate vestiges of institutional racism to achieve true racial justice," Antoine Fuqua, the movie's director, and actor Will Smith said in a joint statement. "We cannot in good conscience provide economic support to a government that enacts regressive voting laws that are designed to restrict voter access." 

But perhaps the biggest development emerging from the rash of GOP voter suppression laws sweeping the nation is the deepening rift between Republicans and the wealthy sector of voters and donors who have traditionally gravitated toward the GOP for decades.

We could be witnessing nothing short of a political realignment that stands to upend American politics as we have known it for more than a generation.  

In this fraught atmosphere, we want more voices speaking up for democratic values.

Marijuana legalization is sweeping states from Virginia to New Mexico. The writing is on the wall.

This 4/20, the US is nearing a tipping point of sorts on marijuana legalization: Almost half the country — about 43 percent of the population — now lives in a state where marijuana is legal to consume just for fun.

The past several months alone have seen a burst of activity as four states across the US legalized marijuana for recreational use: New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and, most recently, New Mexico.

It’s a massive shift that took place over just a few years. A decade ago, no states allowed marijuana for recreational use; the first states to legalize cannabis in 2012, Colorado and Washington, did so through voter-driven initiatives. Now, 17 states and Washington, DC, have legalized marijuana (although DC doesn’t yet allow sales), with five enacting their laws through legislatures, showing even typically cautious politicians are embracing the issue.

At this point, the question of nationwide marijuana legalization is more a matter of when, not if. At least two-thirds of the American public support the change, based on various public opinion surveys in recent years. Of the 15 states where marijuana legalization has been on the ballot since 2012, it was approved in 13 — including Republican-dominated Alaska, Montana, and South Dakota (although South Dakota’s measure is currently held up in the courts). In the 2020 election, the legalization initiative in swing state Arizona got nearly 300,000 more votes than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

Legalization has also created a big new industry in very populous states, including California and (soon) New York, and that industry is going to push to continue expanding. One of the US’s neighbors, Canada, has already legalized pot, and the other, Mexico, is likely to legalize it soon, creating an international market that would love to tap into US consumers.

The walls are closing in on this issue for legalization opponents — and quickly.

Many politicians have played it cautiously in response to these trends. While some high-profile Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have come out in support, Biden continues to oppose legalization. Republicans, including Trump, are almost entirely opposed.

But at this point, their refusal comes off more like a last gasp than a movement that can hold back the tide of change. At a certain point, lawmakers will have to follow public opinion or risk losing an election. And the public has spoken very clearly, time and again.

What’s less clear is how it’ll happen. Maybe it’ll be a slow, state-by-state battle before the federal government ends its own prohibition on cannabis, or maybe federal action will lead to a flurry of states legalizing. What has become clear is that legalization will eventually win, and the vast majority of states, if not all, will soon join the ranks of the legalizers.

Marijuana legalization is very popular

In the span of two decades, marijuana legalization has gone from a fringe issue to one the vast majority of Americans embrace.

In 2000, just 31 percent of the country backed legalization while 64 percent opposed it, according to Gallup’s public surveys. By 2020, the numbers flipped: The most recent Gallup poll on the topic showed that 68 percent supported legalization and 32 percent were against it.

There are a few possible explanations for the flip. The general failure of the war on drugs to actually stop widespread drug addiction (see: the opioid epidemic), as well as backlash to the punitive policies the drug war brought, left a lot of Americans craving new approaches. The public has come to see marijuana as not so bad — less harmful than legal drugs such as alcohol or tobacco. The advent of the internet likely sped up some of these conversations, too, and the spread of medical marijuana might have shown more Americans that the US can handle the drug’s legalization.

Gallup

Regardless, the trend toward support is found in basically every major survey on this issue, with polling groups consistently finding a strong majority backing of legalization, from the Pew Research Center (67 percent in 2019) to the General Social Survey (61 percent in 2018).

The trend toward legalization is found in the real world, too. Oregon voters rejected a legalization measure in 2012, only to approve a separate initiative two years later. Arizona voters said no to a legalization measure in 2016, only to approve another one four years later.

There’s even solid Republican support for legalization. Gallup found that a slim majority of Republicans supported it in 2017, 2018, and 2019; a majority opposed it in 2020, but the difference was within the margin of error, and a sizable minority of 48 percent still backed legalization. Pew also found a majority of Republicans — 55 percent — backed legalization in 2019.

This Republican support is also seen in the real world. In the 2020 election, Trump won Montana by 16 points and South Dakota by 26 points. In both states that same year, most voters approved legalization initiatives, with pretty strong margins of around 8 percentage points in South Dakota and 16 percentage points in Montana.

In other words, marijuana legalization has appeared on the ballot in four states dominated by Republicans: Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. It’s won in three of them, losing only in North Dakota. Marijuana legalization is 3-1 in solid red states!

There’s little reason to think that any of these trends will change soon.

There’s not much that can turn this around

There’s a world in which you could envision growing support for marijuana legalization suddenly collapsing. Maybe after Colorado, Washington, or a few other states legalized, things went really badly. Teen use went up, along with car crashes, crime, ER visits related to pot, and other bad outcomes. Voters see the error of their ways and change course.

But that just hasn’t happened. In the states that have legalized, things have generally gone fine. There were some concerns about marijuana-laced edibles in the early days, but those worries died out quickly as regulators instituted some new rules and retail outlets bolstered their advice to newbies about how to consume edibles. The gigantic rises in all the problem outcomes legalization opponents warned against never came to fruition.

A big tell here is how often politicians flip-flop to support legalization once their state legalizes and things go basically fine. In Colorado, then-Gov. John Hickenlooper in 2012 said he opposed the ballot measure, only to fully support legalization and brag about how his administration implemented it by the time he ran for senator in 2020. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who opposed legalization during his 2012 run, said in March that the one thing he’d do differently is “[embrace] this position of decriminalizing it earlier, had I known how successful this has been with not any really large increase in juvenile usage, which was a concern while we were debating this.”

There are also major forces that will continue to support legalization and encourage its expansion. The US marijuana industry is now valued at more than $18 billion, supporting the equivalent of over 300,000 full-time jobs, more than the total number of electrical engineers or dentists, according to the 2021 Leafly Jobs Report.

This is simply a big industry now, for better or worse. Any politician moving to shut it down risks incurring the wrath of hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs. And because it’s a promising industry, there’s a strong economic incentive — between additional jobs and tax revenue — for more states to embrace legalization.

Not to mention that this major new industry can now use its economic weight to directly back legalization measures, providing much-needed funding to help get them across the finish line. In this way, marijuana legalization’s success at the ballot box so far will lead to more success.

There are, of course, still major barriers to full legalization nationwide. Marijuana remains totally illegal under federal law, including in states that have legalized it under their own statutes. International treaties prohibit countries from legalizing marijuana for recreational uses (although with Canada, Mexico, and Uruguay moving to legalize, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares). Most of the US population still lives in a state that hasn’t legalized, and it will take a lot of time and effort in legislatures and ballot boxes to change that.

But it’s now very clear where the trends are heading. It might take several more years to become national reality, but marijuana legalization is here to stay.

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

The Supreme Court is serious about exempting religious conservatives from the law — even when their rulings could kill people.

For 30 years, the Supreme Court applied a simple rule when someone with a religious objection to a state law sought an exemption from that law. So long as the law applied equally to everyone, regardless of whether someone is religious or not, then everyone had to comply with the law.

As the Court held in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), religious objectors must follow “neutral law[s] of general applicability.”

Ever since Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court last fall, however, the Supreme Court has been rapidly dismantling Smith. On Friday night, the Court fired a bullet into Smith’s heart. It ruled that people of faith who want to gather in relatively large groups in someone’s home must be allowed to do so, despite the fact that California limits all in-home gatherings to just three households.

Although the Court’s new 5-4 decision in Tandon v. Newsom doesn’t explicitly overrule Smith, the decision makes it so easy for many religious objectors to refuse to comply with the law that Smith is basically a dead letter.

The Court’s new majority has accomplished what amounts to a revolution in its approach to religion and the law, entirely through cases brought by churches and other religious actors seeking exemptions from public health rules intended to slow the spread of Covid-19.

The Court is serious about giving religious conservatives broad immunity from the law — so serious, in fact, that it is literally willing to endanger people’s lives in order to achieve this goal.

What happened in Tandon v. Newsom?

Tandon is the latest in a series of decisions brought by houses of worship — or, in this case, specific worshipers — who wish to defy public health rules limiting the number of people who can gather for religious activity.

California limits gatherings in people’s homes to members of just three households. This is a blanket rule, applying to people who gather in a home for any reason, regardless of whether they do so to pray, to quilt blankets that they plan to sell on Etsy, or just to socialize with friends. So, under Smith, this rule would be lawful because it treats religious and secular actors exactly the same.

Nevertheless, a majority of the Court concluded that people who wish to gather in someone’s home for religious activity must be exempted from California’s public health rule. And, although the Tandon opinion does not explicitly repudiate Smith, it defines what qualifies as a “neutral law of general applicability” so narrowly that the term is basically meaningless.

“Government regulations are not neutral and generally applicable,” the five most conservative justices write in an unsigned opinion “whenever they treat any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise.” But the Court also defines what qualifies as “comparable secular activity” very broadly. (Although no justice signed their name to the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan dissented. So we know that the remaining five justices formed the majority.)

“California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise,” the majority opinion in Tandon claims, “permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts, and indoor restaurants to bring together more than three households at a time.”

As Justice Kagan explains in her dissent, there are three very good reasons why a state might treat these secular activities differently than a gathering in people’s homes. First of all, “when people gather in social settings, their interactions are likely to be longer than they would be in a commercial setting,” and the people at social gatherings are “more likely to be involved in prolonged conversations.”

Additionally, “private houses are typically smaller and less ventilated than commercial establishments,” and “social distancing and mask-wearing are less likely in private settings and enforcement is more difficult.”

But, ultimately, none of these distinctions mattered to the Court’s majority. The practical impact of Tandon is that, so long as many religious objectors can cite any secular activity that is treated differently than a religious activity — no matter how distinct those two activities may be — this Supreme Court is very likely to grant the objector an exemption.

Tandon is not an especially surprising decision — the Court reached a similar conclusion last November in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, a decision that I described at the time as a “revolutionary victory” for religious conservatives.

Even after Roman Catholic Diocese, two Republican-appointed judges — Judge Milan Smith, a George W. Bush appointee, and Judge Bridget Shelton Bade, a Trump appointee — concluded that California’s across-the-board restriction on in-home gatherings should remain in effect.

The Tandon decision, in other words, is a signal that even conservative lower court judges need to be more protective of religious objectors — even when those objectors seek legal exemptions that could help spread a deadly disease.

It’s not clear how Tandon will apply to faiths the Court’s majority disapproves

In theory, the decision in Tandon should apply to all religious objectors, regardless of which faith motivates such objections. In practice, however, the Supreme Court has not always been protective of people of faith who are unpopular in the Republican Party.

In Dunn v. Ray (2019), for example, the Court rejected a request from a Muslim inmate on Alabama’s death row to have an imam comfort him during his final moments. At the time, Alabama permitted Christians to have a pastor present during their execution, but not Muslims. So Dunn involved a straightforward case of religious discrimination.

In fairness, the Court recently backed away from its decision in Dunn, after the decision triggered a widespread backlash even from many conservative commentators (the National Review’s David French labeled it a “grave violation of the First Amendment”). But, at the very least, Dunn shows that this Court is instinctively less protective of Muslims’ religious liberty than it is of Christians.

The clearest example of this kind of religious preference is Trump v. Hawaii (2018), which upheld a Trump-era policy prohibiting nationals from several majority Muslim nations from entering the United States. The Court did so despite the fact that Trump and his inner circle repeatedly bragged about their plans to target Muslims, in violation of the Constitution’s ban on policies “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion.

In fairness, the Court based its decision in Hawaii largely on concerns that courts should be reluctant to interfere with a president’s decisions relating to national security. But it’s hard to imagine how the risk of allowing an immigrant from Yemen to enter the United States poses more of a danger to Americans than Covid-19 — and, indeed, before Justice Barrett joined the Court, a majority of the justices tended to defer to public health officials for much the same reason they defer to elected officials on matters relating to national security.

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2020), a case decided before Barrett joined the Court, public health decisions typically “should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’ which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”

As the Court’s about-face in the Dunn case suggests, there is some nuance to the Court’s approach to Muslim civil rights. The Court does sometimes rule in favor of Islamic plaintiffs in religious liberty cases. In Holt v. Hobbs (2015), for example, a unanimous Supreme Court agreed that Muslim prison inmates should be allowed to grow a half-inch beard if their faith requires them to do so.

But decisions like Dunn and Hawaii also suggest that the Court is more reluctant to grant relief to Muslims than they are to grant such relief to Christians. It remains to be seen, in other words, whether the hyper-protective rule laid out in Tandon will apply equally to all people of faith — or whether certain favored religions will receive special treatment.

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Another Black man was shot and killed by police on Sunday during what should have been a minor interaction, or one that shouldn’t have happened at all. What makes it especially horrifying, beyond the needless loss of life at the hands of the state, is that 20-year-old Daunte Wright was killed in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, just miles from where former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for murder in the killing of George Floyd less than a year ago.

As a picture of the problem of police violence toward Black people in the United States of America, 2021, “Black man shot and killed at questionable traffic stop 10 miles from the trial of a police officer for killing another Black man during an arrest for a minor alleged offense” says a lot.

Daunte Wright was apparently pulled over for an air freshener blocking his rearview window, though his father notes that his car had tinted windows, so it’s surprising police could see that much. In either case, as the ACLU of Minnesota tweeted, “We have concerns that police appear to have used dangling air fresheners as an excuse for making a pretextual stop, something police do too often to target Black people.”

After Wright was pulled over, police found he had an outstanding warrant and tried to arrest him. Wright tried to get back in his car and police shot him. He then drove for several blocks before the car crashed and he was pronounced dead at the scene.

According to Aubrey Wright, Daunte Wright’s father, this happened three miles from where the family lives as Daunte was going to get his car washed. Katie Wright, Daunte’s mother, recounted a phone call from him as he was stopped by police, and the call she got from Daunte’s girlfriend—who was in the car with him—afterward.

“He got out of the car, and his girlfriend said they shot him," Katie Wright told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “He got back in the car, and he drove away and crashed and now he's dead on the ground since 1:47. ... Nobody will tell us anything. Nobody will talk to us. ... I said please take my son off the ground.”

“I know my son. He was scared. He still [had] the mind of a 17-year-old because we babied him,” Aubrey Wright said. “If he was resisting an arrest, you could Tase him. I don’t understand it.” 

Daunte Wright was scared and police showed why he was right to be: Because he was in the hands of armed agents of the state who did not value his life. Because Black people in this country are too often killed for the most minor of alleged offenses, with police defending summary execution as a reasonable response to someone possibly having committed a minor crime.

”I am closely monitoring the situation in Brooklyn Center. Gwen and I are praying for Daunte Wright’s family as our state mourns another life of a Black man taken by law enforcement,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz tweeted.

Following protests, Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott declared a curfew overnight, schools in Brooklyn Center and nearby Brooklyn Park announced remote classes for Monday, and the National Guard—in Minneapolis for the Chauvin trial—was brought in. As always, we must remember to value the human life taken by police over the windows broken in the outpouring of grief and rage in response.

Google "has utilized a secret program to track bids on its ad-buying platform," writes the New York Post, "and has been accused of using the information to gain an unfair market advantage that raked in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to a report." The initiative — dubbed "Project Bernanke" in an apparent reference to former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke — was detailed in court filings in an ongoing Texas-led antitrust suit, which were initially uploaded to an online docket with incomplete redactions, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday... Lawyers for the Lone Star State argue, however, that the program was tantamount to insider trading, particularly when combined with Google's complicated, multi-layered role in the online advertising marketplace. The company operates simultaneously as the operator of a major ad exchange, a representative of both buyers and sellers on the exchange — and a buyer in its own right, according to the suit. By using Project Bernanke's inside information on what other ad buyers were willing to pay for space, Google could tailor its operations to beat out rivals and bid the bare minimum to secure ad inventory, the state reportedly alleges... Separately, the filings reveal more details about Jedi Blue — an alleged hush-hush deal in which Google allegedly guaranteed that Facebook would win a fixed percentage of advertising deals in which the social media giant bid... Google also admitted that the deal required Facebook to spend $500 million or more in Google's Ad Manager or AdMob bids in the pact's fourth year, and that Facebook agreed to make efforts to win 10 percent of the auctions in which it competed, the WSJ said. The arrangement appeared "to allow Facebook to bid and win more often in auctions," lawyers for Texas alleged in their filings.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk's Boring Company showed off its 1.7 mile loop of tunnel underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center this week, and Electrek writes that "it proved to be, well, quite boring... The vehicles are not going faster than 35 mph, and they are not being driven autonomously." CNET's headline even calls the tunnel "lame," complaining that the project "is quickly turning into Tesla cars driving people underground, rather than some sort of futuristic transport system." "Detractors say that makes The Boring Company's projects little more than reinvented subways with significantly less passenger capacity," adds Business Insider: Critics also point out that The Boring Company's noble aim of building congestion-alleviating tunnels under cities worldwide ignores the phenomenon of induced demand, which says that more roadways — even underground ones — will give way to more cars. But Jalopnik had probably the harshest reaction to the Vegas Loop, noting that the speed of the system is "about 10 mph less than the top speed of a 1908 Ford Model T," and calling it "about as exciting as a sheet of unpainted drywall discarded in a closed office park..." Musk's The Boring Company own the machines that dug the tunnels, and those machines, some of which were heavily modified by the company, are capable of using the excess dirt from the tunnel to turn into bricks, which is pretty cool, I guess. Raw, humid thrills of brick-making aside, all this really is are some Teslas driving in tunnels lined with LED lights. Sure, it's a 45-minute walk (correction, more like 20 minutes, sorry) on the surface and only a few minutes ride underneath, but the system is still remarkably bad at moving large numbers of people per hour, the metric normally used to evaluate mass transit systems. While it was originally intended to move up to 4,400 people per hour, fire regulations will limit the system to moving between 800 and 1,200 people per hour. That said, it looks like the company still states the 4,400 number, when used with 62 cars in the tunnel, though based on the safety issues, this does not seem likely. That's in the same ballpark as normal vehicular street traffic for private cars (600 to 1,600 people per hour) and a lot less than a dedicated bus lane (4,000 to 8,000 per hour) — hell, normal 60-passenger buses can do about 1,800 per hour, if we have them going back and forth every two minutes or so. A dumb old sidewalk can move 9,000 people an hour! But that's walking, which is what animals do, and it takes a while and has the potential to make you sweat. Proposed moving high-speed sidewalks, similar to the ThyssenKrupp ACCEL system used in the Toronto Pearson International airport, are expected to move about 7,000 people per hour, and such a system would be far cheaper and easier to build... As it stands now, we have a few Teslas driving around in long, narrow loops under the convention center, saving you a bit of walking but doing every other part of the job of moving people worse than almost any other solution. Business Insider's report adds that the Boring Company "aims to expand the system to other Las Vegas destinations, including the airport and downtown" — and that the company also in talks with Miami officials about a similar project.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brexit and suspicions of favoritism are fueling a conflict that has been simmering for years despite peace accords.

Rioting in Northern Ireland continued on Friday night, with demonstrators using gas bombs against the police and setting a car on fire in the capital of Belfast.

The night of violence marked the eighth straight day of demonstrations and unrest in five towns and cities across Northern Ireland — a trend that has some experts worried about the possibility that the region could be seeing a sustained resurgence of sectarian violence. Saturday, April 10, is the 23rd anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement that ended 30 years of such conflict, known as “the Troubles,” but unrest and violence has flared up from time to time ever since.

Over the past week, a double-decker bus has been hijacked and set on fire; masked youths have hurled homemade gas bombs at police; rival gangs have thrown bricks and fireworks at each other. So far there have been no deaths reported, but at least 74 police officers have been injured, and observers say that the period of turbulence marks the worst sectarian violence Northern Ireland has seen in eight years.

Most of the rioters are young people — some as young as 12, the Police Service of Northern Ireland told CNN. The violence has been concentrated in “unionist” communities, but conflict has also taken place in areas dividing unionist communities from “nationalist” neighborhoods. During the Troubles, unionists were largely Protestant and identified with loyalty to the United Kingdom, and nationalists were mostly Catholics, identified as Irish, and sought a united Ireland.

While conflict between the groups formally ended with the Good Friday Agreement, tensions and violence that hark back to the Troubles still resurface, and are often tied to concerns that one group holds undue influence or power over national affairs. The current set of clashes has become high-profile enough that the Biden administration released a brief statement expressing concern about rising violence.

Experts say there is not one clear explanation for the recent clashes, but that there are a few different factors — which may be feeding off of each other. Brexit and the sense in unionist communities that London is neglecting Northern Ireland by the terms of the agreement are one factor. Another issue is a recent decision by authorities to avoid prosecuting nationalist politicians for flouting Covid-19 protocols.

What is clear is that political observers see violence escalating at a worrying pace. “I think it’s very serious. It’s easy to see how things can escalate and hard to see how things can calm down,” Katy Hayward, a professor of political sociology at Queen’s University, Belfast, told the New York Times.

There are multiple factors driving the unrest in Northern Ireland

Conflict and violence between unionists and nationalists dates back decades. But the most recent spate of violence seems to be, at least in part, a response to a specific flashpoint in the relationship between the two communities.

A great deal of the initial violence came after state prosecutors decided last month they would not charge the leaders of nationalist party Sinn Fein for breaking Covid-19 regulations in June by attending the funeral for Bobby Storey. Storey was a former top member of the Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary group that waged a violent campaign against the British and for a reunified Ireland during the Troubles.

Many unionists perceived the decision to not prosecute the members of the party as a sign of political favoritism, given that unionists were told to cancel their traditional Twelfth of July parades last summer, and the loaded symbolism surrounding the funeral. The decision sparked outrage and protests.

“This is happening because of the PSNI [Police Service of Northern Ireland] and the judiciary system’s appeasement of republicans,” said Ian Edwards, a resident of the Shankill Road, a Protestant community, referring to the nationalists who favor a united Ireland.

Experts say another major factor fueling the anger and protests is the way that many in Northern Ireland feel betrayed by the terms of Brexit — the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union — which was completed at the beginning of this year. Some unionists feel blindsided by the British government, which they believe has left them in the lurch, as the New York Times reports:

Under an agreement in a protocol struck by [British Prime Minister Boris] Johnson, Northern Ireland was given a special economic status that leaves it straddling the United Kingdom and the European Union trade systems.

However, it also imposes some new checks, particularly on goods flowing from mainland Britain to Northern Ireland — something that is anathema to unionists who want equal treatment with the rest of the United Kingdom.

Despite the deal he signed up to, Mr. Johnson promised that there would be no new “border in the Irish Sea,” and, glossing over the looming difficulties, his government did little to prepare opinion in Northern Ireland for the changes.

Yet on Jan. 1, when the post-Brexit trade rules came into force, businesses faced new paperwork and some British companies stopped moving goods to Northern Ireland, causing some shortages on supermarket shelves. Amid rising tensions, checks on goods were halted temporarily after threats were made against customs staff.

In other words, Northern Ireland unionists feel they’ve been misled about the terms of Brexit and the economic impact it would have on them.

Another complicating factor is that the period around the Easter holiday often features “increased communal conflict,” Politico notes, because of Irish Republican Army commemorations among nationalists in Northern Ireland on the one side and unionist parades on the other.

Further complications may be coming from criminal groups who might be trying to add to the chaos and exploit tensions over Covid-19 restrictions in order to cause problems for law enforcement.

There’s a complex array of factors that could explain what’s contributing to the current chaos — and given that swirl, it could evolve further in the future.

The president’s new commission has a lot of fans — in the Federalist Society.

In 2014, Judge Thomas Griffith authored an opinion in Halbig v. Burwell that could have wrecked Obamacare’s insurance markets in over 30 states and potentially stripped health coverage from millions of Americans. Griffith’s court eventually vacated his ruling against Obamacare, and the Supreme Court rejected Griffith’s reasoning in King v. Burwell (2015) — but not before the Halbig decision plunged the Obama administration, health care advocates, and patients into a year of terror that Obamacare would be gutted.

On Friday, President Joe Biden announced that he would sign an executive order creating a “Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.” Griffith — who retired from the federal bench in 2020, allowing former President Trump to choose his successor — is one of several prominent conservatives on this commission, which the White House says Biden appointed to “provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform.”

Yet, while the author of one of the most significant attacks on Obamacare in the last decade is on Biden’s commission, none of the leading academic proponents of Supreme Court reform were appointed (the overwhelming majority of the commission’s three dozen members are law professors or political scientists).

Biden initially said in October he would convene a commission of leading academics to study possible reforms to the Supreme Court. At the time, Biden was torn between liberal activists who were enraged by Senate Republicans’ efforts to ensure that the GOP could control the Supreme Court, and Republican critics who accused Democrats of wanting to add seats to the Supreme Court in order to undo those efforts by the GOP.

Rather than take a position on whether to add seats to the Supreme Court, Biden ultimately punted the question until after the election with his promise to appoint a commission.

Now he has appointed such a commission and, measured solely by its intellectual firepower, the names on the commission are impressive. They include some of the nations’ most prominent legal academics, such as Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe.

But the commission does not include law professors Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman, authors of a highly influential proposal to expand the Supreme Court to 15 justices and have the key members of the Court be chosen in a bipartisan process that is intended to make the Court less ideological. And it does not include Aaron Belkin, a political science professor and leader of Take Back the Court, a pro-reform organization. In choosing the members of this commission, the White House appears to have prioritized bipartisanship and star power within the legal academy over choosing people who have actually spent a meaningful amount of time advocating for Supreme Court reforms.

(I reached out to the White House for comment about several of the concerns raised in this piece, but have not heard back from them as of this writing. We will update this piece to include the White House’s comment if they respond.)

When the White House released the list of commission members on Friday, it swiftly won praise — from members of the conservative Federalist Society. Evan Bernick, a right-libertarian law professor at Georgetown, praised the commission as a “powerhouse lineup of scholars.” Stephen Sachs, a Duke Law professor who won the Federalist Society’s Joseph Story Award in 2020, called the commission “an astonishingly well-balanced list.”

Ilya Somin, a libertarian law professor at George Mason University, wrote shortly after the commission’s membership was announced that “the composition of the Commission is also bad news for advocates of court-packing, who may have hoped that it will produce a report endorsing the idea.”

So, if the White House’s goal was to allay concerns among conservatives that President Biden might try to diminish the Republican Party’s influence over the judiciary, this commission appears to have accomplished that goal.

How we got to this point

Not that long ago, the idea of adding additional seats to the Supreme Court in order to change its partisan makeup was considered very radical. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed doing so in 1937 in order to neutralize a Court that frequently struck down New Deal programs on spurious legal grounds, but his proposal was unpopular and ultimately went nowhere.

Yet several crucial events happened in recent years that convinced many Democrats that the federal judiciary is unfairly stacked against them. In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February of that year, Senate Republicans refused to even give a confirmation hearing to President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, now-Attorney General Merrick Garland.

At the time, Republicans claimed that it was inappropriate to confirm a Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.

But then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September of 2020, and Republicans immediately abandoned the position that they invented in order to justify scuttling Garland’s nomination. Trump’s nominee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was confirmed just eight days before the 2020 election, which threw Trump out of office.

In the interim between Garland’s unsuccessful nomination and Barrett’s successful one, Democrats endured two other significant traumas. The first was that Trump became president, despite receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Republicans also controlled the Senate for the entirety of Trump’s presidency — but they only controlled the Senate thanks to malapportionment. The Democratic “minority” in the Senate represented millions more Americans than the Republican “majority” during Trump’s presidency.

Indeed, all three of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the country.

The second trauma was the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was credibly accused of attempting to rape Dr. Christine Blasey Ford while Kavanaugh and Ford were both in high school. Kavanaugh responded to these allegations with an angry rant before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he seemed to threaten retaliation against Democrats for repeating the allegations against him — “what goes around comes around,” Kavanaugh told the committee.

All of this contributed to a sense among Democrats that the Court has become too partisan, and led many prominent Democrats to conclude that radical action was necessary to prevent a GOP-led Supreme Court from dismantling voting rights and otherwise entrenching Republican power.

Yet, when candidate Biden was asked about whether he’d support radical reforms such as adding seats to the Supreme Court, he initially said he opposed these reforms. After Ginsburg’s death, he took a more agnostic stance, saying that, while he’s “not been a fan of court-packing,” his approach to the issue would depend on how the Barrett confirmation fight played out.

Now that Barrett’s been confirmed, however, Biden appears to be signaling with his new commission that significant reforms to the Supreme Court will not be on the table.

Why a milquetoast Supreme Court commission matters

Court-packing is not something that anyone should do lightly. If Democrats did add seats to the Supreme Court in order to change its partisan balance, the result most likely would not be widespread acceptance of the newly liberal Court’s decisions. It would be massive resistance from Republicans.

As Justice Stephen Breyer recently warned during a lecture at Harvard Law School, “structural alteration [of the Court] motivated by the perception of political influence” will erode trust in the Court’s decisions.

Yet, while Breyer is correct to warn that significant reforms to the Supreme Court are likely to undermine the Court’s legitimacy, the mere threat of court-packing can serve an important function. If the justices believe that President Biden may send them six new colleagues if the Court dismantles what remains of the Voting Rights Act, then those justices may be less likely to dismantle the Voting Rights Act.

A healthy fear of a Democratic majority could lead the Supreme Court to become less partisan.

But Biden’s new commission sends the opposite message. With so many prominent members of the Federalist Society praising the commission right out the gate, it’s clear that conservatives do not feel threatened by this commission. And the justices themselves are just as capable of looking at the list of names that Biden picked and seeing that this commission is unlikely to support significant reforms.

President Joe Biden is creating a commission to consider the possibility of expanding or reforming the Supreme Court. The bipartisan commission is created in an executive order being signed Friday, and will have 180 days to report back. The commission is not tasked with offering specific recommendations, however.

As Biden recently described the commission’s purpose to CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, “I will ask them to, over 180 days, come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system, because it’s getting out of whack.”

The White House announcement of the commission’s formation describes its purpose as “to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals.” As part of that, “To ensure that the Commission’s report is comprehensive and informed by a diverse spectrum of views, it will hold public meetings to hear the views of other experts, and groups and interested individuals with varied perspectives on the issues it will be examining.”

Here’s the fundamental state of play going into this process:

And, of course, the remaining conservative justice never recuses himself from cases despite being married to a conservative activist who raises hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors whose identities remain secret.

Biden’s commission is stocked with incredibly impressive legal scholars, former judges, former government officials, and lawyers who have appeared before the Supreme Court. The Republican members include a Hoover Institution fellow who was an official in the George W. Bush administration and a former judge nominated by George W. Bush. Obviously none of this will cause Republicans to accept one word the commission produces. That doesn’t change the urgency of the matter.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday ordered a series of "immediate actions" to address the threat of extremism in the military, including a review of the armed forces' definition of extremist behavior, standardizing questionnaires to screen recruits and developing procedures for veterans to report extremist activities after they leave service.

The actions come after a 60-day "stand down" that Austin ordered in early February following the violent Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump. The crowd of rioters that day included dozens of current or former military personnel affiliated with right-wing extremist groups.

Austin also established a Countering Extremist Working Group that he tasked with implementing the new actions as well as developing additional procedures over the coming months.

The group was empowered to identify further ways to improve screening of recruits and personnel currently serving in uniform, any modifications that are needed to the Uniform Code of Military Justice or additional training programs.

The new high-level body, which will include representatives from across the military, will issue a report in 90 days.

"The vast majority of those who serve in uniform and their civilian colleagues do so with great honor and integrity," Austin wrote in his order, "but any extremist behavior in the force can have an outsized impact."

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters that Austin, who met with the heads of the military branches earlier Friday on the recent stand downs, said the Pentagon chief also wants the new working group to address whether the Pentagon needs to outlaw membership in specific militant groups.

"One consistent thing he heard is the force wants better guidance," Kirby said, describing "a hunger for more information and context of what we're talking about here."

Of particular concern, Kirby added, is the role of veterans who leave the military and join militant organizations.

"What we need to do and focus on more is how we prepare the transitioning members to be aware of that interest in them and to know what it looks like and what it feels like, what it sounds like when these groups are trying to recruit them," Kirby said.

Tucker Carlson has been building quite the record for peddling white nationalist ideas to his supposedly mainstream audience: whitewashing the effects of far-right terrorism, claiming that white nationalism is a liberal hoax, regurgitating ecofascist themes about immigrants, defending far-right Capitol insurrectionists, even endorsing the idea that conservatives are heading toward an embrace of fascism. On Thursday, he topped all that.

Appearing on Fox News Prime with host Mark Steyn, Carlson launched into a defense of white nationalist “replacement theory” placed in the context of the immigration debate, claiming that Democrats are “trying to replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the Third World.” It was a performance so egregious that Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted: “Tucker must go.”

Steyn had introduced Carlson with a misleading portrayal of Delta Air Lines’ opposition to Georgia’s new voter suppression law, complaining that their polices opened the United States’ door to a flood of immigrants. He then asked Carlson to explain why the government was giving preferential treatment to “people who shouldn’t be in the country in the first place.” Carlson responded:

Now I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term “replacement,” if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it! That's true.

Look, if this was happening in your house, if you were in sixth grade for example, and without telling you your parents adopted a bunch of new siblings, and gave them brand new bikes, and let them stay up late or helped them with their homework and gave them twice the allowance that they gave you, you would say to your siblings, “You know, I think we’re being replaced by kids that our parents love more!” It would be kind of hard to argue against you because, look at the evidence!

So this matters on a bunch of levels, but on the most basic level, it’s a voting-rights question. In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.

Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, White replacement! No. This is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they’re importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?

What Carlson is doing is spouting “replacement theory,” a strain of right-wing thought predicated on the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory claiming that white people are being selectively “replaced” by nonwhite immigrants, a gradual “invasion” intended to wipe out white civilization orchestrated by a cabal of nefarious “globalists” and Jews. It’s a subset of a larger white nationalist belief in “white genocide,” a supposed conspiracy by nonwhites, leftists, and Jews to destroy “white Western civilization.”

It also has been credited with inspiring multiple acts of mass murder and terrorism: Robert Bowers’ attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; Brenton Tarrant’s attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019; and Patrick Crusius’ attack on Hispanics at a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019, among others.

Greenblatt’s tweet responded to Carlson that “‘replacement theory’ is a white supremacist tenet that the white race is in danger by a rising tide of non-whites. It is antisemitic, racist and toxic. It has informed the ideology of mass shooters in El Paso, Christchurch and Pittsburgh.”

He added: “Tucker must go.”

This is not the first time that Carlson has made exactly these claims: He has touted the same theory regarding immigrants “replacing” current voters in various segments in the past couple of years. (It is, naturally, an utterly specious claim: Voting requires citizenship, meaning those new immigrants are not eligible even to apply for five years; the naturalization application process then typically takes 15 months. Moreover, the 700,000 new citizens who take the oath every year—after which they may finally vote—represent only 0.2% of the total U.S. population.)

Carlson already has a remarkable record of dabbling increasingly in white supremacist rhetoric dating back to 2006, including recently unearthed recordings of his ramblings on radio. His greatest hits include a regurgitation of neo-Nazi propaganda about “white genocide” in Africa, not to mention his mutual promotion of the white nationalist website VDare. There is a reason white supremacists love Carlson’s show, and why they assiduously watch it in hopes of picking up pointers.

His attacks on immigrants not only are wildly distorted when it comes to the supposed facts that he spouts—many of which are outright falsehoods—but they are also deeply toxic to democracy and its foundations. As Philip Bump observes in The Washington Post:

What is more likely to happen—and, indeed, what has happened in the past—is that many Hispanic immigrant families will increasingly identify as more broadly American and as White. Just as the Lombardis became the Carlsons and the Boumpasses became the Bumps, many new migrants to the United States will eventually simply become another part of the American population. We don’t blink at Rudolph W. Giuliani being a high-profile political figure, but it seems likely that Americans would have 150 years ago. This opportunity to be part of a united nation is, to most, part of the American ideal.

As of Thursday, Civiqs showed 41% of Republicans saying that they would definitely not accept a COVID-19 vaccine, while another 10% remain unsure. With the remaining Republicans saying they will accept the vaccine down to just 18%, red states are starting to see a problem that the rest of the nation would love to have—a vaccine surplus. As The New York Times reports, Mississippi alone is now sitting on tens of thousands of doses that they’re having a hard time giving out.

With just 25% of adults vaccinated, Mississippi is lagging well behind most of the nation when it comes to vaccinating its citizens. But that’s not because of a lack of vaccine. The state voted 58% for Donald Trump in 2020. If that number accurately reflects those Mississippians who consider themselves Republicans, that’s 23% of the state either giving a definite “no” to the vaccine. Add in the small percentage of Democrats and independents who are shunning the vaccine, subtract the percentage already vaccinated, and all those doses in Mississippi are rolling around the state, looking for the less than half the population willing to take a jab.

Mississippi may be ahead of the pack when it comes to opening vaccines to everyone and still having trouble giving away shots, but it’s not alone. Other states across the south—particularly Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee—are also showing low rates of vaccination, in part because of vaccine that has gone unused at events in heavily Republican areas. Governors in Ohio and Oklahoma have also warned that they’re having trouble finding takers for vaccine.

As weeks go on and Republicans’ anti-science position keeps them from accepting the vaccine, not only is it a threat to effectively getting vaccine to those who want it, but the sheer number of unvaccinated Republicans may mean that the nation cannot reach levels required for herd immunity, no matter how much vaccine is rolled out.

Over a month ago, a vaccination at a rural county in Missouri saw 1,500 doses of vaccine go unused.  That county went for Donald Trump by 84%. It wasn’t a singular event. Of 2,000 doses sent to another event, only 648 were used. At least four mass vaccination events run by the Missouri National Guard in rural areas had hundreds of unused doses. At the same time, urban areas like St. Louis were seeing hundreds of applications for every dose of vaccine that became available. 

Urban areas in St. Louis and Kansas City were getting less doses per population than rural areas, in part because state officials made assumptions that Black populations in those cities would be reluctant to accept the vaccine. Similar assumptions were made in Atlanta, where officials deliberately reduced allocations on the assumption that Black communities would reject the vaccine. Nationwide, Black and Latinx communities are still being shortchanged when it comes to doses of COVID-19 vaccine. 

However, actual polling data—along with on the ground experience—shows that Black acceptance of the vaccine is actually much higher than in white communities. Eventually, both Gov. Mike Parson in Missouri and Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia were forced to admit that demand was actually higher in urban areas with a higher Black population, but not until after thousands of doses of vaccine had gone unused at a time when the rising count of cases and new, fast-spreading variants threatened a “fourth wave” of cases. On Thursday, WorldOMeters logged over 80,000 new cases in the U.S. for the first time since February.

The 33.7% of Americans who have so far received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine is definitely not enough to make a noticeable dent in the rate of transmission, and even had hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccines been delivered to areas of high demand sooner, it wouldn’t have made much difference in terms of the nation. However, it certainly would have made a difference to the hundreds of thousands who have been exposed to risk due to poor assumptions, and poor decisions, about vaccine demand.

At this point, only 18% of Republicans say “yes” they still want COVID-19 vaccine. In just over a month, the United States is likely to be in the position of a vaccine surplus. It’s an enviable position (as well as one that ethically demands the U.S. send vaccine to less privileged nations). We’re not there yet.

There has been some assumption that Republicans, while saying they didn’t want the vaccine, would quietly take it anyway. That’s not happening. Instead, actions being taken by Republican governors to completely reopen states like Mississippi, Florida, Texas, and Georgia is sending a highly visible signal that the vaccine simply isn’t needed. Because everything is fine. Meanwhile, when Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis have gotten vaccinated, they done so quietly. Almost secretly. Out of the public eye and without a single announcement.

Add in social media conspiracy theories ranging from standard anti-vax complaints to Bill Gates-centered Q-sense, and whatever pressure to get vaccinated Republicans might feel to get vaccinated is being easily countered. The rate of Republicans saying they want to get vaccinated has barely waved since before the first vaccine became available last year.

In the past, there’s been a tendency to point to anti-vax sentiments as something that afflicts the left, and some pundits are still making that assumption today. But really, that has not been the case for some time. At this point, Republicans are an astounding ten times more likely to say no to something that should be completely apolitical. It’s a marker of just how deeply an opposition to basic science and medical facts has become integral to the whole Republican identity.

Overall, 21% of Americans say they won’t get the vaccine, while another 8% are unsure. If everyone else gets vaccinated—adults and children—that should be just enough to get the nation to something approaching herd immunity. But it will be close, especially considering the increased contagiousness of recent variants. Republicans aren’t done threatening the nation’s health when it comes to COVID-19.

A vaccine hero

While Republican vaccine rejection may be both frustrating and worrisome, The New York Times also contains a wonderful story when it comes to COVID-19 and those awesomely effective vaccines. That’s because they have an article focusing on University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Katalin Kariko. The 66-year-old grew up in Hungary, migrated to the U.S., then, like way too many women in science, she found herself eternally exiled to the ragged edge of research. 

Year after year, Dr. Kariko was forced to seek a new position working for one of the more established scientists in control of Penn’s labs. She found those positions, but it was never a sure thing. And as she bounced from one project to another, she has never made more than $60,000 a year. 

But through it all, Dr. Kariko had a steady obsession: Messenger RNA. She was convinced that mRNA technology provided infinite possibilities. She just had trouble convincing those men who controlled the labs, and who had their own, less radical, projects to push. Every time she found someone who made a great partner for her ideas, it seemed they were just a few years from either retiring or moving on to a job elsewhere, leaving her to start over again and again.

It took decades before she paired with Dr. Drew Weissman on the idea of using mRNA in vaccines. Specifically, in an HIV vaccine. At long last, that research is showing spectacular results. MRNA vaccine are also going into the arms of billions around the world in the forms of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. 

“My dream was always that we develop something in the lab that helps people,” said Dr. Weissman. “I’ve satisfied my life’s dream.”

Dr. Kariko celebrated the news about the efficacy of mRNA vaccines by eating a box of chocolate-covered peanuts. Then she got back to work.

When Democrat-run cities try to run things their way, Republican-run legislatures move to stop them.

Republicans who claim to stand for 'election integrity' are treating their voters like idiots.

With their opposition to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, Republicans are doubling down on a core bet they’ve made for his presidency: that the GOP can maintain support among its key constituencies while fighting programs that would provide those voters with tangible economic assistance.

Last month, every House and Senate Republican opposed Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, even though it delivered significant benefits to working-class white voters, the GOP’s foundational voting bloc, including increased health-care subsidies and expanded tax credits for families with children. That pattern is repeating with the infrastructure plan, even though it directs billions of dollars to rural communities, which are indispensable to Republican political fortunes.

That resistance represents a political gamble, because the proposed benefits—including $1,400 stimulus checks, and rural broadband in the infrastructure plan—are large enough and visible enough that voters may be more likely to feel them in their daily life than most legislative actions. Republicans “are going to have to explain how they are voting against the interests of their base, because I think there [would] be meaningful impacts” on their voters from the plans’ provisions, says Jeff Link, a Democratic consultant who led a research project last year that tried to improve his party’s performance among rural voters.

For now, at least, the GOP appears utterly undeterred. Republican consultants I’ve spoken with express confidence that, despite the two plans’ benefits, they can discredit them—either by focusing on elements of the plans that may be unpopular with conservative audiences, or by changing the subject to culture-war confrontations, such as the surge of undocumented minors at the border.  

Biden “is going to be disappointed” in how GOP-leaning constituencies react to these programs, David Kochel, a veteran Republican consultant based in Iowa, told me. “All of the negative partisanship and cultural motivation is going to be out of his control, and Republicans and the conservative-media machine [are] going to continue to fill” GOP voters’ heads “with all of these left-wing priorities” that are part of these packages. Both plans “are so big, there is so much in there, they will be a target-rich environment,” Kochel continued. “And voters will be able to rationalize that ‘I did like getting this new bridge, but I don’t like that we had to spend $2 trillion to get it.’”

[Read: Why an infrastructure deal everyone wants may fail]

Even many Democrats, such as Link, agree that Republicans may not immediately suffer for opposing these initiatives. But longer term, Democrats see more of an opening because assistance will be flowing so visibly that voters may note tangible effects contradicting the negative portrayals from GOP leaders and conservative-media voices. When policies are still being debated and “we are talking about hypotheticals, it is very hard for Democrats to get past the right-wing media landscape,” says Matt Hildreth, the executive director of RuralOrganizing.org, a group that argues for progressive causes in rural America. “After things pass, I think [it’s] a fundamentally different thing, especially when we are talking about policies that will impact people in their daily lives.”

Both the stimulus package and the infrastructure proposal are so expansive that they essentially replace “either/or” politics with “both/and”: They provide large-scale benefits to traditionally Democratic groups as well as to Republican communities and constituencies.

For progressives, for instance, the stimulus’s major calling card is that it’s expected to drive the largest reduction in child poverty since at least the Great Society of the 1960s. But the bill is also unusual in how far its key benefits reach into the middle class, including its $1,400 stimulus payments, its provisions increasing Affordable Care Act subsidies (while simultaneously broadening eligibility), and, above all, its huge expansion of the child tax credit, which will be fully available to married couples earning up to $150,000 annually.

Low-to-middle-income white Americans, many of them without college degrees, will be among the major beneficiaries of those programs, social-policy analysts predict. According to an analysis provided to me by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, at Columbia University, 95 percent of children in families headed by a white parent without a college degree will receive benefits from the expanded child tax credit. The average benefit for those families will be more than $1,800 over the next year. That’s a higher share of beneficiaries than among white people with a college degree—and a larger benefit. Non-college-educated white people will derive benefits from the plan that are comparable to those that Black and Latino families will receive, the analysis found. “The child allowance is going to be a near-universal program, and in the short term, people well into the middle class will benefit," Irwin Garfinkel, the center’s co-director, told me.

The expanded ACA subsidies likewise substantially reduce premium costs for low-income working families, many of them white Americans without a college degree. “The increased premium help benefits a broad cross-section of the population buying their own insurance, from workers in low-wage jobs without benefits to middle-class small-business owners and farmers,” says Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

The infrastructure plan that Biden unveiled last month shows the same expansive reach, channeling substantial aid to both Democratic- and Republican-leaning places. Mark Muro, the policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, told me that it would provide an enormous boost for the country’s major metropolitan areas, which have become the backbone of the Democratic coalition in virtually every state. “There seems to be clear effort to [make] overdue investments in the nation’s core big-city productivity platforms,” Muro said. He cited repairs and upgrades to roads, bridges, public transit, and airports, all of which “are critical for the productive economy of big cities on the coasts and in the interior.” Big metros, he said, will also gain from the plan’s significant investment in research and development, which could catalyze further growth in the Information Age industries driving cities’ and inner suburbs’ growth.

At the same time, many other measures are structured to “help heartland midsize cities gain traction,” Muro told me. Biden’s plan includes a Great Society–style alphabet soup of programs to promote innovation and community development in rural areas (such as new regional innovation hubs outside major population centers), and huge sums for big, New Deal–style rural public-works projects: $10 billion for upgrading water systems in rural or tribal communities; $2 billion for affordable rural housing; and $20 billion for fixing smaller, rural bridges. (With its heavy climate emphasis, the plan focuses on repairing existing roads, rather than carving out new highways, which rural leaders often support.)

Towering over all those commitments, the bill’s most visible component in rural communities is likely to be Biden’s call for spending $100 billion to ensure 100 percent broadband access, which is now completely unavailable for about one-third of rural residents and spotty for many more. Although local-government officials in rural America have long lamented the lack of broadband access, the deficiencies have become more glaring since the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses to shift their operations online and forced kids to learn remotely. “It’s a huge issue,” says Link, who is based in Des Moines. “Part of the reason why Iowa pushed so hard” to get in-person schooling back in place “is because they didn’t want to expose the fact that there are so many people without internet access … It’s just not possible to do distance learning for thousands of families.”

Even that doesn’t exhaust the list of potential benefits for rural places in the two big economic plans Biden has announced so far. His call for requiring all utilities to generate 100 percent of their electricity from carbon-free sources would spur huge investment in solar and wind power, much of which is in rural communities and has already become a major source of income for farmers in states such as Iowa and Kansas. The second half of his jobs plan, which will be released sometime this spring, is expected to fund two years of tuition-free community college, a crucial source of economic advancement in many small towns.

The question for Democrats is whether all of these programs build a ladder tall enough to lift them from a very deep hole in rural America. Although Biden performed slightly better among rural voters last year than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, he still carried only one-third of the vote in America’s most rural counties, according to The Daily Yonder, a website that focuses on rural issues. Kochel says so many factors reinforce the GOP’s advantage among rural voters that Democrats are unlikely to overcome them even with substantial direct assistance. “I’m not sure politics is working like that right now,” he argued. “It’s much more cultural, particularly for these rural voters, so I don’t think there is a price to be paid” for voting against it.

[Read: The Biden agenda doesn’t run through Washington]

Many Republican legislators with big rural constituencies, such as Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, are already building a defense for an eventual “no” vote: They claim they would support the portions of the plan most popular among their voters, but are opposing the package because it also includes “every progressive wish list item under the sun,” as Ernst wrote recently. And as debate over the infrastructure bill intensifies in the weeks to come, Republicans may focus less on trying to discredit the proposal than on diverting their voters—by keeping their attention on disputes that widen the cultural gulf between them and the Democratic Party, such as undocumented immigration and police reform. “Don’t underestimate the power of conservative media to shape this into a [cultural] narrative Biden cannot fight,” Kochel told me.

One asset Democrats have in this struggle is time. However successful Republicans are at tarnishing Biden’s programs at the outset among core GOP voters, Biden has an opportunity to change those perceptions through the actual implementation of his plans. Even during the putative honeymoon period at his presidency’s start, Biden’s approval rating among rural and non-college-educated white voters has remained stuck at only a little over one-third. But the stimulus package has drawn substantial support in polls even from Republican voters, and those numbers could rise even more as families feel the effects of the aid. Likewise, if Democrats can pass Biden’s infrastructure program this summer, that will leave plenty of time before the next two elections to start repairing bridges and roads, and to break ground on new water systems, new wind and solar installations, and new broadband facilities. Even small gains in nonurban areas from such initiatives would fortify Democrats’ position in states near the tipping point of American elections, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, Hildreth told me. “I think we are maybe a decade from having a majority in critical rural counties, but we just need to cut margins right now,” he said. “Literally the motto is ‘Lose less.’”

By proposing these mammoth economic plans that direct substantial assistance to Democratic and Republican constituencies alike, Biden is placing his own bet, one that Democrats from Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey’s generation would recognize: that he can win back blue-collar and rural white voters drawn to conservative messages on culture and race by addressing their kitchen-table economic concerns. It’s difficult to imagine how a Democrat could put more money behind that stake than Biden has in his stimulus package and is proposing in his infrastructure plan. It’s also difficult to imagine how Republicans could place a bigger bet on their capacity to discredit or distract from new federal programs that directly benefit so many of their own supporters. Few dynamics may shape the 2022 and 2024 elections more than which side’s wager pays off.

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SMBC eventually became nonstop propaganda for a new religious movement called Sad Buddhism.

Today's News:

The Rachel Hollis controversy points to bigger problems in white women’s self-help.

Earlier this week, influencer and bestselling self-help author Rachel Hollis apologized for appearing to compare herself to Harriet Tubman. “I know I’ve caused tremendous pain by mentioning prominent women — including several women of color — whose struggles and achievements I couldn’t possibly understand,” the author of Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing wrote in an Instagram post. The post served as her second apology over the controversy, which has been roiling on social media for nearly two weeks.

Hollis’s ill-fated Harriet Tubman comparison emerged in a now-deleted TikTok video posted in late March, in which she responded to charges that when she talks about “this sweet woman” in her employ who “cleans the toilets,” she sounds “unrelatable.”

“What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable?” Hollis asked rhetorically. “No, sis. Literally everything I do in my life is to live a life that most people can’t relate to.”

After outlining some of the ways in which she sees herself as exceptional, including her willingness to wake up at 4 am and fail publicly when she has to, Hollis comes to her conclusion: “Literally every woman that I look up to is unrelatable,” she says. “If my life is relatable to most people, I’m doing it wrong.”

The video’s caption reads, “Harriet Tubman, RBG, Marie Curie, Oprah Winfrey, Amelia Earhart, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai, Wu Zetian … all Unrelatable AF. Happy Women’s History Month.”

For many observers, the post appeared clumsy at best and racist at worst. Was Hollis really saying that her struggles to build a brand as a lifestyle guru — a brand built on the sense she has created that she is just like her fans — was the same as Harriet Tubman escaping slavery and then going back to help other enslaved people escape? And was she really trying to tell her followers that she never wanted to be relatable after selling thousands of books telling them all the ways in which she was the same kind of person they were? And was she really doing it while simultaneously referring to her housekeeper as the “woman who cleans her toilets”?

“EVERYONE works as hard as you do,” wrote one Twitter responder, “especially the woman on her hands and knees scrubbing your toilet while you prance around making videos abt how much better you are than she is & call it ‘work.’”

“The privilege to fail so majorly so often is one I, or any Black woman, do not have,” said the self-help author Luvvie Ajayi Jones on Instagram. “People try to destroy us for much less. Meanwhile, she goes to sell 2 million books without effort while saying appalling things. She still has 1.7 million followers. That is privilege.”

On April 4, Hollis made her first apology — but it was an apology that displaced all blame for what happened onto those who, Hollis said, had misinterpreted her, and a “team” that had failed to do its job correctly. In a now-deleted Instagram post, she maintained that she had not actually been comparing herself to any of the women that she had mentioned, and that “to believe that because I mentioned them, I am comparing myself to them is ludicrous.”

She added that she had waited so long to respond to the backlash over her original video because she believed her “team” when they said they could handle things, and instead, “I should have listened to my gut.”

In the face of widespread criticism, Hollis would eventually delete this apology and replace it with another. “I am so deeply sorry for the things I said in my recent posts and the hurt I have caused in the past few days,” she wrote, adding, “By talking about my own success, I diminished the struggles and hard work of many people who work tirelessly every day.”

The Rachel Hollis controversy has had legs for a few reasons. There’s the hypocrisy of an influencer claiming that her goal has never been to be relatable, when relatability is at the core of her brand. There’s the implication that her achievements as a self-help author are on the same level as the achievements of women like Harriet Tubman. There’s the casual dehumanization involved in referring to a housecleaner as someone who “cleans the toilets.” There’s Hollis’s insistence that the reason other people are not as successful as she is — including, we would have to presume, her housecleaner — is that they are not working as hard as Hollis is at her job as a lifestyle and self-help influencer.

But the controversy is also lasting as long as it has because it is in certain ways unsurprising.

It has become bizarrely common in recent years for prominent figures in the quasi-feminist “lean in, girl” corporate white women’s empowerment movement to compare their own struggles to the much higher-stakes obstacles faced by famous women of color.

Hollis herself has cycled through variations of this controversy before. In 2019, she appeared to plagiarize multiple inspirational quotes on her Instagram, mostly quotes from women of color. She’s fond of sassy white lady use of African-American Vernacular English, from her choice to call her imagined interlocutor “sis” in the Harriet Tubman video to the title of the Girl, Wash Your Face franchise.

But Hollis is not the only white figure who has appropriated the struggles of women of color to dress up her own. Ivanka Trump’s 2017 self-help book Women Who Work used a quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, about an enslaved woman who killed her baby in order to prevent the child from being taken into slavery, to introduce the idea that women who work are sometimes slaves to their schedules.

And this sense of appropriation goes all the way to the roots of the self-help movement Hollis champions. Hollis’s Girl, Wash Your Face brand is based on the idea of wellness and self-care, on the notion that putting in the work to care for one’s self is a brave and radical act, and that it can look as simple as, well, washing your face.

But when self-care was invented, it was an explicitly political act. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,” wrote Audre Lorde in A Burst of Light and Other Essays in 1988, in a phrase that has now been reproduced on inspirational Instagrams across the internet. “It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Lorde’s self-care was different from the bath bombs and yoga classes today’s wellness influencers prescribe. Lorde was a Black lesbian poet who got a single mastectomy after she was diagnosed with cancer. She was someone who our culture treated as disposable, and she was trying to love herself and care for herself anyway, with honesty, in the best way that she could.

So self-care for Lorde meant refusing to get a breast implant or wear a false breast after her mastectomy. It meant insisting on dressing and grooming herself well, even single-breasted, as a sign that she valued herself when the world refused to value her. That insistence on self-care was genuinely subversive and anti-capitalist — and it was part of how Lorde readied herself to engage in political activism. She took care of herself so that she could find the strength to change the world.

The wellness and self-care at the center of Hollis’s brand is not about changing the world, and it is not anti-capitalist. It is about buying stuff, and specifically about buying Hollis’s books and tickets to her retreats ($65 a ticket for the virtual version).

“Wellness is being commodified,” wrote the influencer Rachel Cargle on Instagram in response to the Hollis controversy, urging her followers to “meditate AND call your senator. Go to yoga AND vote.”

In the caption of her text post, Cargle added, “The issue I have with many celebrated white wellness spaces and women’s empowerment influencer or brands is that they oddly seem to equate ‘success’ to getting what white men have and wielding that power in the exact same oppressive inhumane way that white men have been doing for generations.”

The issue Cargle identifies is, in the end, the biggest act of appropriation in the entire corporate white feminist enterprise, the whole project that Hollis is selling. It’s the decision to take a political movement built to deconstruct our existing systems of power — and use it to do nothing but support the status quo.

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Microsoft is finally releasing a 64-bit version of OneDrive, roughly 14 years after the first 64-bit version of Windows was released. Engadget reports: In an announcement spotted by Windows guru Paul Thurrott, the company says the new version of OneDrive will help those who need to transfer large files or many files at the same time since 64-bit systems can access more resources than their 32-bit counterparts. "We know this has been a long-awaited and highly requested feature, and we're thrilled to make it available for early access," the company said. "You can now download the 64-bit version for use with OneDrive work, school, and home accounts." One thing to note is the preview is currently only available on x64 installs of Windows. If you own a computer like the Surface Pro X -- and therefore have Windows 10 on ARM installed on your system -- you'll have to wait. Microsoft recommends you continue using the 32-bit version for the time being.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I am very excited to announce the completion of a project I've been working on for the past couple months: THE BEST OF DEATHMOLE. I picked 12 of my favorite songs I wrote from years past, re-recorded them, and have now put them out on my Bandcamp page. If you like what you hear, I'd greatly appreciate you buying a copy. Thank you for listening. (it's also on Spotify but I basically will make zero dollars if you only listen on Spotify, just saying)

Cesaire McPherson appeared in a photo with Merrill and another woman back in November 2018, on Merrill’s Facebook page. Merrill wrote in the post: “I was delighted to see my friends Cesaire McPherson and Melissa Isaak today during their visit to the State Capitol! They have a strong interest in fairness in government and transparency in the political arena! They are committed to supporting candidates who support families first!” 

McPherson gave a recording of a statement to AL.com saying, “I don’t want to say anything other than here’s the proof that John Merrill is a liar. Here’s the true John Merrill.” Why did Merrill so quickly turn around and admit he hadn’t “become the man that I have been before”? According to AL.com, it might have had something to do with the 17-minute recording McPherson furnished them with, purporting to be a conversation between Merrill and McPherson where they discuss doing a lot of sex together.

Merrill is best known around these here parts for his time in the Alabama state legislature where he worked hard to make it harder for Alabamans to vote and championed grotesque anti-immigrant laws, drug testing welfare recipients, and intense pro-birther legislation—and did that all while supporting the full repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Merrill argued that Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight for civil rights would be cheapened if Merrill allowed “somebody that’s too sorry to get up off of their rear end to go register to vote.” In that same interview, Merrill explained that “I’m not attracted to lazy people or sorry people or people who don’t want to get involved.” I guess he’s most attracted to not lazy people who aren’t his wife? 

Like a lot of men hiding behind religion, Merrill reportedly attempted to say it was God that he was hoping would save him from continuing his affair with McPherson. During the conversation reviewed by AL.com, this exchange took place:

“I am not able to stay away from you, so that’s the reason why I have to have help in order to do that … the help is coming from the Lord,” he said.

“You already went against your marriage … So you’ve already done it, you can’t take that back, you can’t change it,” McPherson said.

Two years ago, during an appearance at the monthly Dekalb County Republican Breakfast Club, Merrill explained that the LGBTQ community and the focus on changing cultural understanding was eroding our country’s morality: 

“[T]hat’s what we’ve allowed to happen,” Merrill said. “How have we allowed it to happen? There are no more good TV shows on like ‘Gunsmoke,’ ‘Bonanza,’ ‘The Virginian,’ ‘Andy Griffith,’ ‘I Love Lucy.’ We don’t have those shows anymore. We’re too interested in homosexual activities. We’re too interested in seeing how this family’s finding a way to mess on this family or to see how people are trying to date on TV, or having wife-swapping on TV. That’s what we watch. When we push back against that, and we quit allowing it to be in our homes – that’s how those changes have occurred because we’ve allowed them to slowly but surely come into our lives.” 

Sounds like someone needs to start watching Gunsmoke again, I guess? It would be comical if sociopaths like Merrill didn’t leave a wake of emotional destruction affecting any and all women in his life.