James.galbraith

New evidence suggests a connection that can help us understand the emergence of Western religion.

We’re in the middle of a psychedelic renaissance.

Mainstream books like Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (2018) and a wave of promising research on the therapeutic potential of psychedelics have produced a ton of interest in a class of drugs once considered taboo.

But a new book, The Immortality Key, has opened up a fascinating discussion about the historical role of psychedelics in the Western world, going all the way back to ancient Greece. The best way I can describe it is to say it’s an old-fashioned detective story, like The Da Vinci Code, only it doesn’t suck and it’s about the little-known history of psychedelics and Christianity’s rise in the Greek world 2,000 years ago.

The author is Brian Muraresku, a lawyer and classicist, who spent about 12 years exploring how the ritualized use of psychedelics in Greece spilled into early Christianity. While Muraresku doesn’t argue that Christianity was founded on psychedelics, he does suggest that they played a role — one largely unknown up to this point. The nature of that role is hard to pin down because the evidence is so scant and we’re just beginning to piece it all together, but there are good reasons to think that psychedelics were a central feature of early Christian sacraments.

I wanted to talk to Muraresku, not just about the influence of psychedelics on Christianity but also about how different the religion might look today if some of the mystical sects that used psychedelics had become the defining voices in the church. It’s a question worth asking, Muraresku says, because if psychedelics played such an important role in the religious lives of early Christians and Greeks, it’s possible they could be part of something like a religious revival today.

You can hear our entire conversation in the week’s episode of Vox Conversations. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Sean Illing

Was Christianity founded on a psychedelic sacrament?

Brian Muraresku

That’s the million-dollar question I spent 12 years of my life trying to find out. There’s some very compelling evidence for the use of ritual psychedelics in antiquity. I mean, I spent all these years trying to tease out the hard scientific data for the use of that sacrament. And what I think that we have at the moment are some very compelling clues.

Sean Illing

Okay, let’s step back and work our way to early Christianity. Tell me about the Temple of Eleusis and the use of psychedelics in ancient Greece, which is the culture in which Christianity emerged.

Brian Muraresku

I refer to the Temple of Eleusis as the spiritual capital of the ancient world. It exists from about 1500 BC to the fourth century AD. It calls to the best and brightest of both Athens and Rome for close to 2,000 years. And I sometimes say it’s like the real religion of the ancient Greeks.

They had this temple dedicated to a goddess and her daughter, Demeter and Persephone. And they would make this long pilgrimage from Athens, 13 miles northwest, up to Eleusis, and they would drink this magic potion called the Kykeon. And what little testimony survived, because this was all secret, speaks about this epiphanic, beatific vision that these initiates witnessed in this altered state, that somehow turned them into immortals. So you went there as a human being, and you walked away convinced of your immortality.

The testimony that did survive universally speaks of a vision. And so it raises the question, what kind of vision was this? Was this some spectacle, some theatrical performance? Or was there something in that magic potion — the Kykeon — that produced this vision or some combination of all of the above?

And so in 1978, this relatively controversial theory claimed that this magic potion was some primitive beer that was spiked with ergot. Ergot is the natural fungus from which Albert Hoffman himself was able to synthesize LSD all the way back in the 1930s.

Ergot grows on grains, and if our relationship with grains and barley and wheat and rye goes back at least 12,000 or 13,000 years, it stands to reason that some of that naturally infected grain could have made its way into a very intentional potion, to create these visions. But there was no hard scientific data to really prove that one way or the other for decades and decades.

Sean Illing

How significant was Eleusis to Greek culture?

Brian Muraresku

There was the sensibility that whatever was found in Eleusis was the key, was the glue, that held ancient Greece together. And not just Greek civilization, but human civilization more broadly.

So there was a belief that whatever was encountered there was a kind of salve for humanity, something that kept the species in check, kept us in balance with nature. And I know that all sounds crazy, and I don’t think we can say that democracy or the arts and science were birthed at Eleusis, but it was clearly a cipher for the irrational and the Greeks held it in great esteem. Whether it was through these visionary cults, or through these contemplative meditative exercises, there was the sensibility that life was far more mysterious than it seems at first blush.

Sean Illing

How all this bleeds into the origins of Christianity is fascinating. What was the most compelling evidence you found of the use of psychedelics in these early Christian sacraments?

Brian Muraresku

The first half of my book really hangs on what I consider a pretty spectacular find, and it just largely went ignored for 20 years. I was looking for evidence to support that controversial theory from 1978 that the Greeks were drinking some LSD-like beer, for lack of a better phrase. And so I went digging into these archaeo-botanical journals looking for any scrap of evidence for exactly that, and wound up finding it.

It turns out there was this Greek colony in what today we call Spain, and it was a sanctuary in the middle of nowhere where these mystery rites were taking place. In the sanctuary they found lots of remnants of the mysteries, like terracotta heads that seemed to have belonged to Demeter or Persephone, and a very Greek altar that came from mainland Greece. But they also found these little ceremonial vessels, these tiny chalices that look like a Holy Grail.

Researchers took these little chalices and tested them under optical microscopy and turned up the evidence for an ancient beer that was spiked with ergot. I mean, it fits precisely this crazy theory from 1978. And the only reason no one’s really heard of it is because this find was published in Catalan, the language of the archeologist, who has been on-site there since 1990, and she’s still there today.

I went out of my way to find something similar that could fit within Christianity, and lo and behold, also from 20 years ago, outside Pompeii, there was this ancient pharmacy that was unearthed. Inside the wine jars that were found there was a really unique witchy wine that was mixed with what seems to be opium, cannabis, and henbane, which is one of these very hallucinogenic Solanaceous plants. And in there also were the bones of lizards.

So there’s a potion straight out of Macbeth just sitting there in Pompeii, dated to 79 AD, exactly when the first generations of Christians would have been showing up south of Rome, to celebrate the earliest versions of the mass. It doesn’t tie this psychedelic tradition to Christianity specifically, but I think it’s proof of concept that the more testing we do, and the more excavations we do, we’re likely to find more organic evidence tying these traditions to the earlier Christians.

Sean Illing

There is evidence that the Church was aware of these mystical sects and actively suppressed them. What were they afraid of?

Brian Muraresku

I think it’s the same reason why Gnosticism itself disappeared. Gnosticism was a heretical version of Christianity that also disappears at around the same time in the fourth century AD when the Temple of Eleusis was destroyed. There are basically two ways to look at that.

One is that the Church was frightened of the idea of people being able to mediate or curate their experience with the divine in a way that obviated the structure of the Church. If you can go and find God in a glass of wine, what do you need the priest and the bishop for?

The other thing is that none of this stuff was really written down. We’re talking about consciously curated oral traditions and they’re bound to disappear unless there’s a strong structure or bureaucracy supporting them.

Sean Illing

If the mystics became the defining voices of the faith, how different might Christianity look today?

Brian Muraresku

It would look different and I’m not sure it would have survived the way it did. I’m not sure a female-led, mystical Christianity would have inflamed the imagination of the planet and would have come to colonize so much of the world the way the patriarchal church did — which fought so hard to spread the gospel to the Americas and to Africa and Asia, often at the expense of Indigenous people who were caught in the crossfire.

And if you think about it, a mystical Christianity is just going to be very different. If you’re the person who’s attracted to psychedelics, to this esoteric lore and literature, you may not find yourself participating in the Sunday Eucharist every week. You’re the person who might be attracted to a different contemplative version of the faith, a version of the faith that I learned from the Jesuits. But I still do think there’s value in reanalyzing the history of this faith because there’s a place for this contemplative mysticism, even today.

Sean Illing

I was raised Catholic, but it never stuck, and one of the reasons was that the Church seemed so obviously about power. It’s a human institution, and like all human institutions, it’s largely about its own preservation. So I couldn’t see God there, I could only see humans using God. But the Christianity I read about in your book is very different, and I wonder if you think God, in some sense, needs to be saved from the Church and if psychedelics might be a tool in that project?

Brian Muraresku

Oh! That’s a big question. There are lots of people who find God in the Church. And I want to be clear, I think there are lots of people who find comfort in the mass just the way it is. Whether it’s in Catholicism, or Orthodoxy, or Protestantism, or evangelical Christianity, Mormonism, I mean, there are so many different threads to unwind here. And for many people it works just fine. There’s a great sense of community and comfort.

But it’s also true that whatever is happening at that climactic moment of the mass just isn’t resonating the way it used to. Like you, there are many people who are interested in a more direct experience, and that could’ve been a very big part of the success of the early Church. We don’t have 100 percent certainty over what was happening in those dining rooms and those catacombs of early mystical Christianity, but it was something very intense and meaningful to the point that people were willing to die for it — were willing to risk being thrown to a lion for professing faith in Jesus.

I do think that psychedelics in a responsible setting under the right conditions do seem to evoke mystical experiences in people, experiences that are authentically sacred. Are psychedelics an end in themselves? I don’t think so. But as the beginning of a life of dedicated introspection, a path to love of self and others, yeah, I see a lot of evidence for that.

Sean Illing

How did this book change your view of psychedelics? Do you see them as more than a drug, as some kind of spiritual technology?

Brian Muraresku

I’m still a psychedelic virgin, and part of the reason for that is a lot of this stuff is still illegal. Oregon is the first jurisdiction in the country to decriminalize all drugs, and they’re beginning to regulate psilocybin for therapeutic purposes. I don’t think it’ll be the last state. So it’s very weird that some of these historical clues are coming to light at a time when we’re rethinking our relationship with these drugs. Where I land after all this research is basically back to the way we used to talk about psychedelics before the war on drugs.

When I read Aldous Huxley writing in the 1950s, I’m blown away. When I read other early scholars like Huston Smith, perhaps one of the most influential religious scholars of the 20th century, who was actually one of the participants in the Harvard psilocybin project in the 1960s, I’m blown away. Smith described his psychedelic experience as a powerful cosmic homecoming, and later described his experience with mescaline as like plugging a toaster into a power line. So before the war on drugs, these scholars were writing openly about this stuff and trying to figure out how it fit into society. And in a really weird way, I think that we’re back in those waters.

We’re trying to figure out what this means for the future of medicine, what it means for the future of religion, philosophy, society at large. I think the next 10 years are going to prove to be really transformational, not just for the United States, but for the rest of the world.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will not be releasing its guidance for vaccinated Americans on Thursday as originally planned, according to two senior administration officials with knowledge of the situation.

After a series of meetings and calls with senior officials on the White House’s Covid-19 task force and the Department of Health and Human Services over the last two days, the CDC was told to “hold off on releasing” the recommendations, one of those sources said. The reason is still unclear but one senior administration official said the guidelines were still being finalized.

Another official said the CDC had put together the guidelines over the last several weeks and was preparing to go through the final clearance process before the stop was put in place. A new draft of the guidelines was circulated last Friday and then again early this week. Top health officials originally were supposed to sign off on the language Wednesday.

A third senior administration official expected that the guidelines would be released “soon.” A fourth said major guidelines on Covid-19 often go through "rigorous deliberations" in the last few days before their release.

“CDC’s guidance will not be posted tomorrow because we have not finalized it here at CDC. Once it is final, we will publish and disseminate it,” said Jason McDonald, a spokesperson for the agency.

There is no evidence to suggest that the Biden White House is trying to suppress the CDC guidelines or override the judgement of CDC scientists.

But officials inside the nation’s health agencies are on edge after years of repeated political interference from the Trump administration, which notoriously cut the CDC out of critical policy conversations on Covid-19. And Trump appointees at HHS routinely interfered in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, as first revealed by POLITICO.

The CDC’s guidelines for vaccinated people, as described to POLITICO earlier this week, were supposed to say that those who had received a full course of vaccine could socialize with other vaccinated people in small groups in the home without masks. But the guidelines said that vaccinated individuals should continue to adhere to mask and social distancing guidance in public. The guidelines were also set to include various scenarios for immunized people to consider, including travel.

As inoculations ramp up, Americans are eager to begin to return back to normal. And while CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has repeatedly said the country needs to continue to remain vigilant, the draft advice was going to offer Americans a glimmer of hope — that the U.S. was headed in the right direction.

The guidelines were originally conceived when the U.S. had just two vaccines available, from Moderna and Pfizer, one of the senior administration officials said. The FDA recently authorized use of a vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, and the administration is in the midst of sending millions of doses to states across the country. But even though the Moderna and Pfizer shots are given as two doses, and J&J’s as one, it takes about 14 days after the final dose of each for immunity to develop.

CDC’s guidance was set to come out at a time when the White House and Biden’s Covid-19 task force is trying to push back against governors in Texas and Mississippi who have rolled back mask mandates and are fully reopening their economies. Since those announcements Tuesday, several White House officials, including the president himself, have denounced the decision. During a press gaggle Wednesday Biden said the move to relax public health measures reflected “Neanderthal thinking.”

Adam Cancryn contributed to this report.

Former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao repeatedly used her staff and her position of power to boost the reputation of her shipping magnate father and otherwise aid her family, the Department of Transportation's inspector general concluded in a report released Wednesday.

The internal watchdog faulted Chao for four kinds of ethics violations, including planning to bring relatives on an official trip to China and requiring DOT's public affairs staff to help market a book written by her father. It found she also had employees handle personal errands such as shipping Christmas ornaments.

Some of the inspector general's conclusions back up reporting by POLITICO and The New York Times on the deep entanglement of Chao's family with her work at the agency.

The IG's report and related documents "demonstrate that Secretary Chao used her official position and taxpayer resources for the benefit of herself and her family,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, in a statement late Wednesday. "Secretary Chao’s flagrant abuse of her office provides further evidence that additional ethics and transparency reforms are needed.”

Investigators from the IG’s office referred their findings to the Justice Department’s U.S. Attorney’s Office and its Public Integrity Section in December, but both offices declined to open criminal investigations.

Chao, who left office in January, was one of the most experienced Washington insiders in then-President Donald Trump's cabinet — and certainly no novice when it comes to federal ethics rules. She had previously spent eight years as President George W. Bush's Labor secretary.

The government watchdog didn’t find evidence to back up other allegations against Chao, including suggestions that DOT was steering disproportionate amounts of grant money to Kentucky, the state that her husband, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has represented since the 1980s. Chao focused on that aspect of the report in her response to the IG's findings.

"This report exonerates the Secretary from baseless accusations and closes the book on an election-year effort to impugn her history-making career as the first Asian American woman appointed to a President's Cabinet and her outstanding record as the longest tenured Cabinet member since World War II," a Chao spokesperson said in a written statement.

But the report cited evidence that Chao had, indeed, used her power in ways that advanced her family's interests. Among the report's findings are:

— Chao made extensive plans to include family members in stops she planned to make on a trip to China in 2017, including visits to Shanghai Maritime University and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, both of which received funding from her family's charitable foundation. The Times has first raised ethics questions about the trip, which the department ultimately canceled.

— She told DOT public affairs staff to help her father, James S. C. Chao, a New York City-based shipping magnate, with marketing for his book, along with developing — and in some ways helping to implement — a media strategy surrounding his work. Chao directed her staff to help arrange a book signing as part of the China trip, and the staff was involved in curating a list of his awards and helping edit his Wikipedia page, the report says.

— Chao and DOT staff used a DOT-owned lighting kit for an interview about her father and his book which took place in New York City. Afterward, the agency's media center staff was unable to find the kit.

Chao did agree to refrain from scheduling media events involving her family without consulting with DOT’s ethics office, the report noted. This occurred after POLITICO reported in 2018 about a series of media appearances she had made with her father, in which she promoted his personal story, his shipping business and his book.

She also asked her staff to inquire about the status of a work permit application for a foreign student studying at a U.S. university who had received an award from her family's philanthropic foundation, the inspector general found. And the report concludes that Chao used DOT resources and staff for personal tasks, such as checking on repairs at a store for her father and having DOT employees send Christmas ornaments to her family.

"Please call the [redacted] owners and tell them to expedite," Chao wrote in one email to a department staffer regarding the repair.

"I used to go into the store with Dr. Chao... tell them I am SOT," she added, using an abbreviation for "secretary of transportation."

Language describing the item that was being repaired or what store was involved is blocked out in the publicly-released version of the report.

The report includes a response to investigators in which Chao, through then-DOT general counsel Steven Bradbury, referred to a previously written memo on "filial piety" that Bradbury had authored on her behalf.

The memo, dated Sept. 24, 2020, notes that expressing respect toward one's parents is a "core value in Asian communities."

“If the Secretary focused only on herself in media interviews or in cultural or social interactions involving Asian communities and neglected any mention of her parents or inclusion of her one living parent, her father, with these audiences, her reputation and stature as a government official would be diminished considerably in the eyes of many Asians and Asian Americans,” Bradbury wrote in the memo.

House Transportation Chair Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), one of two lawmakers who requested the investigation, welcomed the report but faulted its timing and the lack of consequences for Chao.

“While I commend the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General for conducting this review, I am disappointed that it was not completed and released while Secretary Chao was still in office,” DeFazio said in a statement. “I am even more disappointed that the Department of Justice declined to further pursue the matters that the IG’s office substantiated in its investigation.”

The inspector general didn’t find evidence to back up other allegations of misconduct by Chao. Those include several raised by POLITICO’s reporting that involved DOT's pattern of providing discretionary grant money to Kentucky.

The inspector general also looked at the frequency of meetings between Chao and her top officials with Kentucky leaders, but wrote that there is “no standard by which to judge whether the number of meetings from one’s home state is so excessive as to raise ethical issues.” The IG also found no “irregularities” in the department’s grant awards to Kentucky, though it noted ongoing criticisms of the lack of transparency in DOT’s grantmaking process.

The inspector general’s office had already opened a preliminary review of Chao’s potential misuses of her office before the committee asked it to. The office decided there wasn’t enough evidence to warrant a formal investigation into grant awards or Chao’s financial interest in Vulcan Materials, a company that produces crushed stone and asphalt, but moved forward with a formal investigation into “potential misuses of position.”

President Joe Biden's Transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, was quick to distance himself from his predecessor's ethics woes.

Buttigieg "made it a point to have an ethics briefing during his very first day on the job," a DOT spokesperson said when asked for comment about the IG report on Chao. The spokesperson added that Buttigieg "is committed to upholding the highest ethical standards for himself and his team at the Department of Transportation."

As Disney prepares to release "Raya and the Last Dragon" in theaters and as a premium on-demand title this Friday, CEO Bob Chapek says that he thinks the experimentation his studio and others in Hollywood are doing with releasing movies during the pandemic will permanently change the movie business. From a report "The consumer is probably more impatient than they've ever been before," Chapek said during a Q&A at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference, "particularly since now they've had the luxury of an entire year of getting titles at home pretty much when they want them. So, I'm not sure there's going back. But we certainly don't want to do anything like cut the legs off a theatrical exhibition run." Disney previously released its remake of "Mulan," initially a March 2020 theatrical release, as a premium title for $29.99 for Disney+ subscribers while Pixar's "Soul" went from being a theatrical June 2020 release to a Christmas Day release on Disney+ at no extra cost. [...] Disney has yet to show an exact number of days it would like to shorten the theatrical window to, but Chapek's remarks suggest that the hybrid release strategy Disney is using for "Raya" may be a model it continues to explore while it waits for the box office to return to normal. Once it does, Disney has a very good reason not to leave movie theaters behind, as the studio grossed a record $11.1 billion worldwide in 2019 off of films like "Avengers: Endgame," "Frozen II," and a CGI remake of "The Lion King." "This is a fluid situation and it's fluid for two reasons: The short term impact of COVID on the number of screens open and on consumers' willingness to go back, but also the fundamental changes of consumer behavior, which might be more profound," Chapek said. "We are watching very carefully... to see how long term those preferences are going to shift. and that's why we talk about flexibility so often."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are the TikTok deepfake videos of Tom Cruise doing magic and playing golf a threat to global democracy? Not exactly. "[T]he reality is that they took a lot of time, technical expertise, and the skilled performance of a real actor," reports VICE News. "Rather than predicting a dark future of disinformation for the masses, they're simply another example of what can be done with significant time and resources." From the report: The Tom Cruise videos, posted on the @deeptomcruise TikTok account, have been viewed over 11 million times on the app and millions more times on other platforms. The videos were suddenly deleted from the TikTok account on Wednesday morning, shortly after VICE News contacted the people who produced them. They show the fake Cruise playing golf, falling over while telling a story about former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and finally, doing a close-up magic trick with a coin. There's no question the videos are really good. When scanned through several of the best publicly available deepfake detection tools, they avoided discovery. That led many to claim that a new threshold had been reached in deepfake sophistication, and that social media would soon be overwhelmed with similar videos. But that kind of analysis fails to take into account the amount of time, money, and skill it took to produce these videos. They are the work of Belgian visual effects artist Chris Ume, who is part of a group known as Deep Voodoo Studio, a team of the world's best deepfake artists assembled by the creators of the hit TV show "South Park," Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The team worked with English actor Peter Serafinowicz to produce a 2020 YouTube show called "Sassy Justice," which featured multiple deepfakes of celebrities and politicians. The Tom Cruise TikTok videos required not only the expertise of Ume and his team but also the cooperation of Miles Fisher, a well-known Tom Cruise impersonator who was behind a viral video in 2019 that purported to show Cruise announcing his candidacy for the 2020 election. Ume has even detailed some of the highly complex and involved technical processes he had to go through to produce previous deepfakes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How many Democrats understand the urgency of protecting democracy?

Sixty-two percent of voters want Congress to pass the $1.9 trillion bill as soon as possible.

This week, the Covid-19 relief bill heads to the Senate, where it’s poised to face significant opposition from Republican members who think the measure is too big and wasteful. Democrats, meanwhile, have emphasized how much people are still struggling given the fallout from Covid-19, and note that this bill is commensurate with that need.

Because of this disagreement, it’s very possible that the relief legislation ends up advancing solely with Democratic support. And according to a new poll from Vox and Data for Progress, most voters — including nearly half of Republicans — believe lawmakers need to pass the $1.9 trillion bill as quickly as they can.

Per the survey, the majority of likely voters overwhelmingly favor quick passage of the larger Covid-19 relief bill pushed by Democratic lawmakers rather than a more targeted bipartisan option. Democrats have proposed a $1.9 trillion package featuring $1,400 stimulus checks, a weekly $400 boost in unemployment insurance, and $350 billion in state and local aid. The $618 billion Republican bill — championed by a group of GOP lawmakers — would focus on vaccine funding and offer less in stimulus checks along with reduced unemployment support.

Overall, 62 percent of voters back passing the $1.9 trillion stimulus package as soon as possible, while 31 percent said they supported a targeted bipartisan option. Similarly, 83 percent of voters said it was more important to get people the help they need than for lawmakers to find consensus on a stimulus package. Only 12 percent said getting to a bipartisan package was a bigger priority. Democrats and independents were more likely to favor swift passage of the $1.9 trillion plan, while Republicans were more divided, with 47 percent for doing so and 47 percent for a smaller option.

These results suggest there’s broad support for Democrats’ larger stimulus proposal, and show that many people care more about getting aid to people who need it than they do about ensuring the package is a bipartisan one.

The result is a reminder that many Americans are facing economic difficulty — 18 million people were receiving unemployment aid as of late January — and are relying on additional relief to navigate the ongoing fallout.

Interestingly, while bipartisanship wasn’t as important for most with respect to stimulus, respondents still valued the concept when asked about it more broadly, with 49 percent of likely voters saying it was important to them, while 39 percent said it was not a top priority. When surveyed on this, Republicans (52 percent) and independents (52 percent) were more likely than Democrats (43 percent) to say that bipartisanship still mattered a great deal to them.

These results indicate that a plurality of likely voters place high importance on bipartisanship in theory, but that when it comes to Covid-19 aid, obtaining much-needed help could outweigh that.

The polling was conducted between February 19 and 22 and surveyed 1,527 likely voters. It has a 3-point margin of error.

One of the central disagreements between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is coming into focus: voting rights. House Democrats are poised to pass an expansion of voting rights, while at the state level, Republicans have put forward more than 250 bills restricting voting.

Unless Senate Democrats end the filibuster, Senate Republicans will block the For the People Act. State Republicans will definitely pass many voting restrictions. In fact, in Georgia, state election officials already said in December that they would start interpreting a law that bans “the giving or receiving of money or gifts for the purpose of registering as a voter, voting, or voting for a particular candidate” as banning groups from handing out bottles of water or pizza to people waiting in long lines to vote. As if someone is going to go wait in an hours-long line because they might get a bottle of water or slice of pizza out of it.

This is a fundamental conflict in the views of the two parties, and Republicans have said again and again why they want to make it harder to vote or to have your vote counted: It helps them win.

A lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party explained that again in Supreme Court arguments this week. Asked “What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?” by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the lawyer replied, “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”

It’s that simple for Republicans. If they can find a way to disqualify a type of vote that is more likely to go to a Democrat, they want to disqualify that entire type of vote.

The voting rights bill Democrats are trying to pass, meanwhile, would make it easier for everyone to vote. It would require states to carry out automatic registration of eligible voters and same-day voter registration, to have 15 days of early voting, and to allow no-excuse absentee voting. It would restore voting rights for returning citizens and limit purges of voter rolls. It would create a public financing system for congressional campaigns and revamp the useless Federal Election Commission. It would restrict gerrymandering by having redistricting carried out by independent commissions. It would bring dark money into the light.

So: registering more people to vote, giving people more ways to vote, drawing congressional district lines fairly rather than according to partisan benefit, preventing billionaires from secretly buying elections. Republicans are outraged. 

According to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the For the People Act is an attempt by Democrats to “tilt the playing field in their side’s favor.” No, Mitch, if Democrats tried to, say, institute automatic voter registration only in cities of more than 100,000 people while closing voter registration sites in rural areas, that would be an attempt to tilt the playing field in their side’s favor. That would be tailoring restrictions to partisan ends as Republicans have done again and again, whether by closing drivers license offices in heavily Black areas, as happened in Alabama in 2015, or pushing a bill banning Sunday voting so that Black churches can’t do Souls to the Polls voting drives, as Georgia Republicans are in the process of doing right now.

“Democrats want to use their razor-thin majority not to pass bills to earn voters’ trust, but to ensure they don’t lose more seats in the next election,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. This is a thing he said after every single House Republican voted against a COVID-19 relief package with massive public support, with Senate Republicans contemplating procedural maneuvers to drag it out as long as possible before a final vote. This is the state of play as McCarthy wants to lecture Democrats on not passing bills to earn voters’ trust?

Mike Pence, too, is taking this opportunity to try to grovel his way back into the good graces of the Republican base after he so foully betrayed them by obeying the law and presiding over the certification of President Biden’s win. “After an election marked by significant voting irregularities and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law, I share the concerns of millions of Americans about the integrity of the 2020 election,” he writes at the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal. The “concerns” that Donald Trump created by relentlessly lying for months in an effort to wipe out his big loss in November. 

It’s truth vs. lies. Democracy for everyone vs. partisan efforts to disqualify the other side’s voters. Democrats vs. Republicans.

The arrests and indictments in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol are now up to 257 and counting. And as they continue to mount and the evidence in these cases becomes public, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of what happened that day—both the larger picture of who participated in the assault, as well the more detailed story of how they conspired to make their invasion plans work.

George Washington University’s Program on Extremism compiled data from all 257 cases and assembled a detailed analysis of the event based largely on information from the court filings. The details contained therein are telling and important, but its broader conclusion—namely, that the universe of domestic right-wing extremists who came together on Jan. 6 has grown massive, is constantly expanding, and now poses a greater threat to American society than overseas jihadists—may be the most significant takeaway.

“Over the last few years, in fact, we have witnessed a remarkable growth of what is commonly referred to as domestic extremism,” the study reports. “The term is used in American law enforcement and policy circles to distinguish it from foreign extremism, a category that refers largely to individuals inspired by or linked to jihadist groups. But it is a term that encompasses an extremely broad and ever-expanding plethora of groups and ideologies, including armed militias and committed conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis and isolated anti-government militants with few common denominators beyond hate and propensity for violence.

“This universe has existed in America for decades, has grown more diverse, vocal, and violent in recent years, and has seized on current events such as the pandemic, rising community and law enforcement tensions following the death of George Floyd, and the presidential election to pose an even greater threat to American society.”

The study found that the people charged so far are a diverse group dominated by men—221 of them, accompanied by 36 women. More than 90% arrived in Washington from outside the area, representing a total of 40 states and 180 counties around the U.S. The counties with the largest numbers of cases included Los Angeles County in California, Franklin County in Ohio, and Bucks County in Pennsylvania.

About 33 people had a military background, and of those, 36% had ties to militant extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Moreover, the federal prosecutions so far have zeroed in on each of these two organizations as the major militant networks that planned the insurrection ahead of time, and took concrete steps to make it happen.

Leaders of established domestic violent extremist groups issued orders or directives to members of their groups, encouraging them to travel to Washington in advance of the siege. Individual group members answered the call, contacting one another to coordinate logistics, methods, and plans of action in the weeks before January 6th. Unlike individuals in the other categories, not only did these militant networks plan to attend protests on the 6th, but they are also alleged to have planned in advance to breach the Capitol and, in many cases, conduct violence inside the walls of the building.

The single case that best illustrates this part of the dynamic is Ethan Nordean’s. Federal prosecutors’ case against the Seattle-area Proud Boys leader was laid out in even greater detail this week in court filings, which portrayed him as playing a central commanding role in the Proud Boys’ successful assault on the police perimeter keeping the crowd out of the Capitol that day.

"Following the arrest of the Proud Boys' Chairman on January 4, 2021, Defendant was nominated from within to have 'war powers' and to take ultimate leadership of the Proud Boys' activities on January 6, 2021," a Monday court filing arguing to keep Nordean imprisoned read.

"Defendant—dressed all in black, wearing a tactical vest—led the Proud Boys through the use of encrypted communications and military style equipment, and he led them with the specific plans to: split up into groups, attempt to break into the Capitol building from as many different points as possible, and prevent the Joint Session of Congress from Certifying the Electoral College results," prosecutors added.

A key component of the Proud Boys’ planning involved distributing Chinese-made Baofeng multifrequency radios to key members to remain in touch during the attack on the Capitol. The men intentionally forsook attendance at Donald Trump's speech at the Ellipse railing against the election so that they could get in position to overtake the Capitol, the filing said, by marching around the building and taking up positions at an entrance that was lightly manned by police.

The Proud Boys left a money trail in order to obtain equipment for their plans that prosecutors cited in detail. This included direct messages on social media that Nordean exchanged with someone who wanted to donate a tactical vest, and public, crowdsourced efforts to obtain equipment. Prosecutors said Nordean also exchanged private messages with people regarding the effective use of “military-style communications equipment,” and he received pledges of equipment, including bear mace and steel plates, from two people. On Jan. 2 and 3, Nordean also communicated with someone seeking to contribute $1,000 to the Proud Boys’ “travel fund,” the filing says.

Prosecutors also noted the Proud Boys' plan not to wear identifying uniforms or colors: "By blending in and spreading out, Defendant [Nordean] and those following him on January 6 made it more likely that either a Proud Boy—or a suitably-inspired 'normie'—would be able to storm the Capitol and its ground in such a way that would interrupt the Certification of the Electoral College vote. Defendant understood full well that the men he was leading as he charged past law enforcement and onto the Capitol grounds were likely to destroy government property, or attempt to do so."

Nordean and his close cohorts face grave conspiracy charges that could bring them long prison terms, prosecutors say, because of the central role they played: “Defendant’s position with the Proud Boys is that of giving instructions, not receiving them.”

Federal judge Timothy Kelly, overseeing the case involving Dominic Pezzola, one of Nordean’s chief cohorts that day, said the men’s actions were egregious enough to warrant pretrial detention.

“It was an almost unique attack on the crown jewel of our country, the peaceful transfer of power,” Kelly said. “When you put it that way, and I think it’s very fair to put it that way, it’s almost a unique assault on America, on American history.”

The GWU report notes that the accused insurrectionists face as many as 17 counts on their indictments, with charges ranging from trespassing and illegal entry, to conspiracy against the U.S. government and assault of law enforcement officers.

It also observed the central role played by social media in the charging evidence. The report found that 15% of extremists publicly indicated their intent prior to storming the Capitol; some 68% of them documented their crimes in real time.

The report’s authors also recommended a series of concrete steps in response to the attack:

• It urged Congress to establish a nonpartisan Domestic Extremism Commission to identify any systemic national security and policy failures.
• The intelligence community should learn more about the response leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, it recommended, with the goal of finding effective measures to prevent the violence.
• Finally, the authors urge the administration to use existing structures to improve information sharing between the federal agencies tasked with combating violent extremism.

Why an imaginary "canceling" of Dr. Seuss gets blanket coverage on Fox News.

A new analysis reveals the human toll of the failure to raise the minimum wage.

The risks of reopening too quickly, explained.

It’s the season, it seems, for proclaiming premature victory in the war against Covid-19.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) all but declared the Covid-19 pandemic to be over on Tuesday afternoon: He announced he was lifting the mask mandate he put in place last summer and rolling back pandemic-related restrictions so businesses could return to full operations.

“Texas is OPEN 100%,” Abbott tweeted. “EVERYTHING.”

A few minutes later, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) announced that he’d be doing the same thing, ending the mask mandate ended and fully reopening businesses (though K-12 schools would still be under certain limitations). Reeves said that, as a conservative, he’d always been reluctant to have government mandates in place, but he’d felt it was necessary. Now, as more people are vaccinated and cases decline from the winter peak, he says he’s putting the responsibility back in people’s hands. If you get infected with Covid-19, there would be a hospital bed available to you in Mississippi, Reeves pledged — though you should try not to get infected.

But while the announcements from red-state governors have drawn most of the attention, blue states have also trumpeted similar moves recently. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has in recent weeks permitted restaurants to open for indoor dining and movie theaters to start screenings again, at a limited capacity. San Francisco will soon allow indoor dining, and museums and theaters will open their doors again.

The optimism reflected in these reopening plans is understandable. Cases and hospitalizations are down significantly from their winter peak. More than 50 million people have gotten at least their first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.

But they might also be premature, experts warn, especially when taken to an extreme, as in Texas and Mississippi. Texas currently has 11.2 percent of its Covid-19 tests coming back positive, a rate that suggests significant community spread. The state is also seeing a high number of daily new cases per capita, as is Mississippi, another troubling indicator of the virus’s saturation.

“We risk another rebound of cases if people act like it’s over,” Tara Smith, a public health professor at Kent State University, told me. “I’m worried about complacency as cases decrease — it seems we haven’t yet learned the lessons of the pandemic, that if you start trying to return to ‘normal’ too soon, cases creep back up again.”

Some modulation in our precautions makes sense. The people most vulnerable to Covid-19 are also the ones getting most of the vaccines; the Biden administration announced this week that more than half of Americans over 65 have received at least one dose. People should know that it’s safe for small groups of vaccinated people to congregate (as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently said) and the warming weather should permit more outdoor activities, which experts say are safer. State and local governments, with guidance from the feds, are trying to figure out how to safely resume in-person instruction in schools.

But hasty reopening while a large number of people are still unprotected means a higher likelihood of persistent spread and more cases, which inevitably lead to more hospitalizations and deaths. More spread also presents opportunities for the new, more infectious variants to spread and develop.

“We are in the race between the virus/variants and vaccines,” Wafaa El-Sadr, a Columbia University epidemiologist, told me, “and the future depends on the scale up of vaccination and prevention of transmission to avoid evolution of new variants.”

To borrow her metaphor, we may be in the final stretch of the race — but we aren’t across the finish line. The country is entering a fraught period for pandemic policy, as complacency from lower caseloads and the urge to reopen could given the virus one last chance to surge before there is widespread immunity.

Why experts are worried about states reopening too quickly

The improvement in America’s Covid-19 outbreak over the past few weeks is significant.

Texas is down from averaging about 23,000 daily cases in mid-January to 7,700 today. About half as many people are in the hospital now as there were six weeks ago. Mississippi has seen its numbers fall to roughly the same degree

Nationwide, the trends have been downward — but that progress may be slowing. The number of new cases has barely budged over the past week: The daily average for new cases was 68,038 on February 23 and was 65,468 on March 2. Hospitalizations are still falling at a steady pace (down 29 percent over the past two weeks), but they may soon start to plateau too if cases do. Current case numbers are still at about the same level as the summer surge last year.

And the ongoing loss of life is still at a level most people would have considered unacceptable as recently as last fall, before the terrible winter surge, with 2,000 deaths still being reported on average every day. The Biden administration is now saying the US will have enough vaccines for every adult by May, but at a 2,000-deaths-per-day pace, that would mean by the end of May another 175,000 deaths would be added to the 515,000 already dead if fatalities plateau at current levels.

“Each time we’ve reached a new and unprecedented surge in this epidemic, we quickly normalize it,” Kumi Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me. “It’s understandable to want to take comfort in seeing a downward-trending line. But if you pan out to what trends in hospitalizations and deaths have looked like over the past year, it’s clear that we’re still at a very worrying place.”

By the metrics valued by experts, most US states still have widespread outbreaks. A test positivity rate of 3 percent or less is considered the threshold for keeping coronavirus spread under control; 40 states have a positive test rate higher than that. Or, looking at new cases per capita, the New York Times’s tracker says that 13 states — including Texas and New York — as well as DC have a high number of new cases and the number is staying high.

As the new virus variants, which appear more infectious, continue to become more dominant, the risk is that spread could accelerate again before the country has time to vaccinate enough people to reach herd immunity. (The goal is generally 75 percent of people vaccinated or more; about 15 percent of Americans have gotten at least one dose to date, and, going by confirmed cases, about 10 percent of Americans have already been infected with Covid-19, though the real number is probably higher than that.)

That would mean more severe illnesses and more deaths. Sustained spread also creates the natural petri dish from which other variants could emerge.

The possible scenarios vary pretty widely, based on my conservations. It could be that seasonality and increased protection for the most vulnerable leads to a spring in which, yes, there are still outbreaks among younger populations (which probably means more cases of “long Covid,” experts say, and an increase in hospitalizations) but deaths continue to tail off. And once the younger cohorts start to get vaccinated, severe illness continues to disappear and even the people who do get sick are able to recover at home.

But a worst-case scenario looks more like this, according to Bill Hanage at Harvard: The B.1.1.7 variant (which is more virulent and transmissible) continues to emerge, as do the P.1 and B.1.351 variants (which can reinfect people with prior immunity). The vaccine rollout slows, and the virus starts surging again.

Under this scenario, Hanage says, “large outbreaks result in younger age groups who remain unvaccinated. They are especially concentrated in people with risk factors for exposure, like the ‘essential workers’ who are still denied PPE and get hit hard all over again. This is made worse by inequities in vaccine distribution.”

Which future we actually live through will depend in part on each of us as individuals, especially if more states follow Texas and Mississippi’s lead and roll back official restrictions.

How to prevent this stage of the US outbreak from being any worse than necessary

The effect of these restriction rollbacks remains to be seen. Reeves said that local governments in Mississippi could reestablish their own mandates if they thought it was best for their communities. Businesses would be allowed to maintain restrictions if they so choose. The governor portrayed his action as delegating the responsibility to cities, businesses, and individuals. But the state would no longer be the primary enforcer. Abbott likewise urged Texans to be safe, even as he rolled back the state’s pandemic rules.

Already, mask adherence varies, even within a state. About 95 percent of people surveyed in urban Harris County, Texas, say they wear masks most or all of the time when they go out in public, according to Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi Group. In Abilene, a small city in the middle of the state, the number is closer to 85 percent.

The compulsion to give people outlets to escape quarantine and to allow businesses to begin recouping is understandable and even desirable. We are in fact living in a new reality: Cases have dropped 82 percent among nursing home residents since vaccinations began.

As Zeynep Tufekci argues in the Atlantic, the message to the public should be that some activities are safe (outdoors, masked, distanced) and restrictions should be targeted to actual risk (don’t close playgrounds, maybe do close or restrict mass indoor gatherings). Clear guidance for vaccinated people on what they should or shouldn’t do is another way to allow people to take advantage of the real improvements in the fight against the pandemic without inviting another surge.

The worst outcomes — deaths and hospitalizations — should continue to drop as more people gain protection, so long as these new variants aren’t allowed to run wild because some stop taking precautions just because a state mask mandate is no longer technically in place.

The country is on the verge of another inflection point in the pandemic. But what distinguishes this from the prior ones is the Covid-19 vaccines. They can accelerate a safer end to Covid-19, if we give them time to work.

“The difference is that we now have the promise of the vaccines,” El-Sadr told me. “The optimism associated with the vaccines has changed the calculus.”

Sign up for The Weeds newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll get an explainer of a big policy story from the week, a look at important research that recently came out, and answers to reader questions — to guide you through the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration.

America’s vaccine rollout has improved. Now it’s time to ensure we all make it to the finish line.

All of a sudden, the news on the US Covid-19 vaccine front seems immensely positive. It’s so positive, in fact, that the words Americans have been waiting to hear now seem true: You will almost certainly get a vaccine soon.

President Joe Biden shared the good news on Tuesday. As he told reporters, “We’re now on track to have enough vaccine supply for every adult in America by the end of May” — two months earlier than the July timeline he gave before.

It’s not just Biden. Last month, Anthony Fauci, the top federal infectious disease expert, said he expected it to be “open season” for vaccines in late May or early June. Over the past few weeks, experts I’ve talked to have also sounded increasingly positive about the prospects of every adult in the US getting a shot in the next few months.

The national vaccination numbers reflect that: The US is now averaging 1.9 million shots administered a day as of March 2, up from less than 1 million in mid-January. Even if that number doesn’t improve — which seems unlikely — the current rate puts the country on track to hit herd immunity, when enough people are immunized to stop the spread of the virus, by the end of the summer.

None of this is guaranteed. There are still major questions about how this will all play out, from questions about when exactly states will ease their vaccination criteria to whether manufacturing and distribution will really manage to keep up. Different states, counties, and even cities will likely have different experiences.

So, unfortunately, it’s not clear when, exactly, any particular person will finally get a shot. We just don’t know yet.

The good news is also not a sign that we should collectively relax on following the basic precautions against Covid-19, including masking and physical distancing, just yet. Vaccines will likely let us get our lives back to normal — and if you’re vaccinated and want to privately meet with other people who are vaccinated, that’s probably fine.

But as a society, and particularly in public settings, it’s important we wait until the vast majority of people are vaccinated to truly ease up: With thousands of people still dying every day from Covid-19, the precautions we’ve all heard about over the past year remain crucial for saving lives — potentially tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of them. (So it’s concerning that some states, like Texas and Mississippi, are now moving to reopen and end restrictions, including mask mandates.)

Still, that shouldn’t obscure the fact the vaccine news is very good. A finish line is finally visible with this pandemic. Now it’s on us and our leaders to make sure as many of us make it there as possible.

The vaccine rollout has improved dramatically

Early on in America’s vaccine rollout, the news wasn’t good.

Across much of the country, there were reports of equipment breaking down, inadequate staffing, and vaccine doses going unused. After boosting the research and development of vaccines, former President Donald Trump’s administration appeared to do little to nothing to ensure the inoculations were actually distributed — instead dropping off doses with states, and letting them figure out the rest. When Biden first said he wanted to get 1 million vaccines administered a day, that goal seemed ambitious in the context of a messy rollout.

Then things quickly started to improve. States and cities began to get better at distributing shots — fixing logistical hurdles, in some cases simplifying state criteria to maximize speed, and, as a result, turning more of the vaccine supply they got into shots in arms. The federal government offered more support: The billions in funding Congress approved in December started to roll out, and the new Biden administration offered more proactive guidance while steadily increasing the supply of vaccines delivered to the states.

Today, the US has swept way ahead of Biden’s original goal of 1 million vaccines a day. The country is now averaging more than 1.9 million shots administered a day (after a temporary slowdown late last month due to the winter weather), and looks likely to reach an average of 2 million a day this week. Based on what drug companies have promised, the US will likely hit a supply capacity of at least 3 million vaccines a day this month.

While there are still crucial, unresolved questions about whether and how federal, state, and local governments will actually turn that supply into shots in arms, the past few weeks of better distribution offers some confidence it’s possible, even likely, that they will manage.

Our World in Data

To put those numbers in context: At the rate of 2 million shots a day, the US will reach what scientists expect to be herd immunity — around 80 percent of the country vaccinated — in the late summer. At 3 million a day, the country could reach herd immunity by mid-summer, giving us the second half of summer to, hopefully, enjoy a life a lot closer to the pre-pandemic normal.

Many important questions remain: Will the vaccine manufacturers actually deliver on their promises? Will the federal government ship out the vaccine supply quickly, and support states and localities in actually administering those doses? Will states, counties, and cities be able to handle the rapid rise in distribution? Will new Covid-19 variants affect the efficacy of the vaccines? (So far, the early research suggests the vaccines are still effective against the variants, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.)

And, perhaps most importantly, will enough Americans want to get vaccinated? Surveys show that roughly 30 percent of Americans are hesitant. If that holds up, it would likely be enough to eliminate the chance of true herd immunity, especially since every adult will have to get vaccinated to reach the required threshold as long as a vaccine isn’t available for kids yet.

On a more individual level, there’s a lot of uncertainty about when, exactly, one will be able to get a shot. States have eased their criteria for who can get vaccinated at different rates. Some are still working on what the next phase of distribution will look like, much less the phase after that. So whether any individual person who is not in one of the current priority groups will get a shot in March, April, or May — or even later — will likely vary from state to state.

But we can say, with at least some certainty, that the country is on track to make a vaccine available to all adults this summer or earlier.

Now is not the time to ease up on Covid-19 precautions

Along with the good vaccine news, we’ve also had some positive news in other areas of Covid-19 in the past few weeks: The number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have dramatically dropped from their all-time peaks following the holidays. The US isn’t in the clear yet — in a concerning sign, the drop in cases started to level off last week — but it’s certainly in much better shape than it was just a few weeks ago.

Now, some state officials, including in Texas and Mississippi, have responded by lifting Covid-19 restrictions, including limits on reopened businesses and mask mandates.

But experts say it’s still too soon. In response to Texas’s announcement that it was ending its mask mandate and other restrictions, Peter Hotez at the Baylor College of Medicine told the Houston Chronicle, “I would recommend holding off. Let’s wait another two weeks.”

This is in many ways a repeat of the same mistake the US has made throughout the Covid-19 pandemic: When things get better, the country is too quick to loosen up — before spread is contained to a truly manageable level. So there’s enough virus still out there, as people start gathering again, to jump from person to person. This fueled one surge of Covid-19 after another back in the spring, summer, and fall — making the US’s epidemic one of the deadliest per capita among wealthy nations — and it seems to be happening once again.

It’s particularly grim now, though, because the finish line to this pandemic is finally in sight. This is something experts have emphasized for some time now: If we know the end is just a few months away, then we should make every effort to hold down Covid-19 infections until then — to ensure as many people make it through to the finish line as possible. But to do that, the public and its leaders have to remain vigilant. The US has simply not done that since the start of the pandemic.

That’s not to say that getting vaccinated won’t open up new possibilities for you. Based on the current evidence, the vaccines are very effective at protecting the vaccinated, and they do appear to reduce at least some risk of infection and transmission. The evidence is strong enough that experts say it’s probably fine to hang out with other people who are vaccinated and, yes, give them a hug.

But beyond the individual level, society still needs to maintain some restrictions to protect the people who haven’t gotten a vaccine yet. That means continued physical distancing and masking in public settings.

To put it simply: We’re almost to the point where those kinds of restrictions are in the past. But not quite yet.

Sign up for The Weeds newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll get an explainer of a big policy story from the week, a look at important research that recently came out, and answers to reader questions — to guide you through the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration.

The debate over Dr. Seuss, explained.

On Tuesday, the publishing imprint Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it would cease publishing six books by Dr. Seuss that include offensive images. In the statement, which was published on the author’s birthday, the publisher said it reached its decision after working with a panel of experts, including educators, in the service of its mission “of supporting all children and families with messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion, and friendship.”

The six shelved books are all comparatively obscure works in the Seuss canon: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. Beloved classics like The Cat in the Hat and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! remain untouched. But the decision, which caused enormous uproar across the right-wing infosphere, is part of a larger debate raging across the children’s literature community.

For decades, the works of Dr. Seuss (real name Theodor Seuss Geisel) have been considered both iconic childhood classics and bastions of liberalism. They are lauded for their celebration of all that makes us different, and Seuss books like Horton Hears a Who and The Sneetches appear frequently in anti-racism curricula for children.

But in recent years, the Dr. Seuss brand name has lost some of its shine. Read Across America Day, an annual day of programming designed by the National Education Association to get kids excited to read, is traditionally held on or around March 2, Geisel’s birthday. It usually features a lot of Cat in the Hat paraphernalia and other beloved Seuss branding. But when the NEA’s contract with Dr. Seuss Enterprises ran out in 2018, it chose not to renew the terms, leading to a lot less Dr. Seuss merch getting distributed to different schools. And this year, the NEA has pivoted away from Dr. Seuss entirely. Instead, it’s using Read Across America Day to spotlight children’s books by authors of color.

And now Dr. Seuss Enterprises has decided to cease publishing six of Dr. Seuss’s books, all of which include racist caricatures.

Notably, in If I Ran the Zoo, the narrator declares his intention to put a “chieftain” (illustrated as a man in a turban) on display in the zoo; a pair of African characters are portrayed as monkeys; and a group of Asian characters, described as “helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant” from “countries no one can spell” carry a caged animal on their heads. The other books contain similar Orientalist caricatures.

Other questionable imagery runs throughout Dr. Seuss’s work, including some of his most beloved classics. And outside of his children’s books, in his career as a political cartoonist and advertiser, Dr. Seuss frequently drew racist caricatures and used racial slurs in his captions.

So as the children’s literature community grapples with how to make its canon more diverse and inclusive, Dr. Seuss has come in for particular reexamination. These books have become a case study of sorts for what to do with brand name authors as the social context surrounding their work shifts. Or, more specifically: What do you do with a set of adored classics that explicitly promote values like tolerance and love for everyone — but that are also seeded through with racist ideas?

Some of Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons were unabashedly liberal and ahead of their time. Others were wildly racist.

Dr. Seuss’s work for adults includes some pretty unambiguously racist images. Husband-and-wife team Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens, who run the Conscious Kid Social Justice Library, developed a study of Dr. Seuss’s history of racism that features a small sampling.

One ad Dr. Seuss drew for Flit insecticide featured a disgusted white woman saying to a Black man, “You hold a job, Worthless? Say, ni**er, when you hold a job a week, mosquitos will brush their teeth with Flit and like it!’” Dr. Seuss tended to draw Black people as cannibals or monkeys, and they weren’t the only racial group he caricatured.

Beginning well before the lead-up to World War II, Dr. Seuss frequently drew Japanese people with animalistic features who were violent threats to America, referred to them as “Japs,” and captioned them with jokey lines that replaced their Rs with Ls. “Velly Scary Jap-in-the-Box,” reads the caption for one cartoon of a Japanese man crawling out of a box labeled “JAP WAR THREAT.” He also drew caricatures of Jewish people with oversize noses causing chaos everywhere they went by demanding lower prices.

Notably, Dr. Seuss also drew cartoons decrying Jim Crow laws, the policies of Nazi Germany, and American isolationism. Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons, Maus author Art Spiegelman writes in the foreword to the 1999 book Dr. Seuss Goes to War, “rail against isolationism, racism, and anti-semitism with a conviction and fervor lacking in most other American editorial pages of the period.” In fact, Dr. Seuss, Spiegelman argues, drew “virtually the only editorial cartoons outside the communist and Black press that decried the military’s Jim Crow policies and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-semitism.”

Dr. Seuss was on the right side of history in many ways — and he also drew a lot of really virulently racist stuff. That’s his legacy as a cartoonist.

But what does that background mean for his legacy as a children’s author?

There are very few characters of color in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. The ones that do appear are racist caricatures.

There aren’t that many racial caricatures in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books, mostly because there aren’t that many nonwhite characters in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. In their study, Ishizuka and Stephens counted 45 characters of color among the 2,240 human characters who appear in Dr. Seuss’s 50 books, which works out to just 2 percent. Notably, all of those characters are male. There are no girls or women of color in the Dr. Seuss canon.

And when characters of color do appear in these books, they appear as racial caricatures. In their study, Ishizuka and Stephens found that all 45 characters of color were either subservient, exotified, dehumanized, or some combination of the three. Dr. Seuss’s characters of color drive carriages for whip-wielding white characters, dress in turbans and “rice paddy hats,” and never speak out loud. Most of them are Orientalist caricatures, and the two that aren’t are those African characters drawn as monkeys in If I Ran the Zoo.

And Dr. Seuss’s interest in racial caricatures influences some of the rest of his work in ways that are no longer visible to casual readers — especially when it comes to the Cat in the Hat, that icon of Seussian madcap humor and surrealism.

There’s a classic origin story for The Cat in the Hat. According to Seuss biographers Judith and Neil Morgan, Dr. Seuss was inspired by a trip to his publishers. He had been assigned to write a reading primer that would get reluctant readers eager to learn, and he found himself struck by the appearance of the elevator operator: a woman wearing white gloves with a sly smile. It’s this woman, the legend goes, who inspired the Cat.

In his book-length study Was the Cat in the Hat Black?, English professor Philip Nel notes that the woman in question, Annie Williams, was Black. And Nel argues that Dr. Seuss, who performed in minstrel shows in college, used Williams as the basis for a character whose iconic look would be rooted in the imagery of the American minstrel show and blackface.

“The Cat’s umbrella (which he uses as a cane) and outrageous fashion sense link him to Zip Coon, that foppish ‘northern dandy negro,’” writes Nel. “His bright red floppy tie recalls the polka-dotted ties of blackfaced Fred Astaire in Swing Time (1936) and of blackfaced Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms (1939). His red-and-white-striped hat brings to mind Rooney’s hat in the same film or the hats on the minstrel clowns in the silent picture Off to Bloomingdale Asylum.”

To be clear, I am not arguing that The Cat in the Hat is definitely racist, or that someone has to be racist to read The Cat in the Hat to their kids. (I would, though, suggest that this context makes that plot line in the sequel where the Cat smears black ink all over the house and then the kids yell at him to kill the stains kind of uncomfortable, in light of the racial history of the way Black people, dirt, and ink are associated in American pop culture.)

But the example of the Cat in the Hat is illustrative. It shows how a man steeped in racist ideas and imagery could end up reproducing the same imagery in a medium as innocent as a book designed to teach kids to read, all while espousing liberal ideals about tolerance and love for all. And it shows how that imagery can swim subliminally through our popular culture, divorced from its context, without our ever quite being fully aware that it’s there.

Contrary to Fox News’s claims, neither the National Education Association nor Dr. Seuss Enterprises is attempting to cancel Dr. Seuss. The six remaindered books are obscure also-rans in his canon, and the rest of his much-beloved classics remain in print, in bookstores, and in school libraries. His books will still be taught in schools. He continues to be the rare author so iconic that his pen name is a literal brand name.

But the children’s literature world is in the middle of figuring out exactly how central Dr. Seuss should be to its ecosystem as our culture reevaluates the racist ideas that run very clearly through his adult work and arguably through his work for children. And, by extension, it is in the middle of sorting out how it wants to handle the many other pieces of beloved children’s literature that include harmful racial attitudes: books like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, with its fraught treatment of Indigenous peoples; the Narnia books, with their deeply uncomfortable Middle Eastern villains; the redface fantasies of Peter Pan.

These books are institutions in children’s literature, books that people dream about introducing their kids to. And now the progressive wing of the children’s literature world is working to find ways to situate those books in the landscape of children’s literature that will let kids appreciate them without getting blindsided by their racism.

That’s complex work, not easily reducible to a handful of outrageous sound bites for either side of the political aisle. But it’s unlikely that as children’s literature struggles with this dilemma, anyone is going to be appreciably hurt because they cannot find an in-print copy of McElligot’s Pool.

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Texas and Mississippi on Tuesday issued separate executive orders to lift their states’ mask mandates and give all businesses the green light to reopen at full capacity, casting off restrictions meant to curb the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We must now do more to restore livelihoods and normalcy for Texans by opening Texas 100 percent,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement announcing the executive order, which will take effect March 10.

“Make no mistake, COVID-19 has not disappeared, but it is clear from the recoveries, vaccinations, reduced hospitalizations, and safe practices that Texans are using that state mandates are no longer needed,” he said.

The announcements from the Republican governors come at a time when coronavirus cases and deaths have plateaued in the U.S., after hitting record numbers in January, and on the heels of good news for vaccination supply and distribution.

“Starting tomorrow, we are lifting all of our county mask mandates and businesses will be able to operate at full capacity without any state-imposed rules,” Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi wrote on Twitter. “Our hospitalizations and case numbers have plummeted, and the vaccine is being rapidly distributed. It is time!”

Over the weekend a third vaccine, manufactured by Johnson & Johnson, joined the country’s stable of vaccines authorized for emergency use, as vaccination rates are expected to well exceed President Joe Biden’s goal of 100 million shots in the first 100 days of his administration. Several states across the country have taken these signs as justification to accelerate their reopening plans.

Other states, including Montana and Iowa, have also lifted their mask mandates. In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker announced on Monday that restaurants in the state would no longer have to adhere to capacity limits, although other restrictions, such as its mask mandate, are still in place.

However, health officials have warned against states taking too much action to loosen their restrictions or eliminate them altogether, as coronavirus variants continue to spread globally.

Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Monday that she was “deeply concerned” that the recent decline in cases had seemed to stall as daily cases are still around the 70,000 mark.

“70,000 cases a day seemed good compared to where we were just a few months ago,” she said at a news briefing. “But we cannot be resigned to 70,000 cases a day, 2,000 daily deaths.”

“Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases, with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained,” she continued. “These variants are a very real threat to our people and our progress. Now is not the time to relax the critical safeguards that we know can stop the spread of Covid-19 in our communities, not when we are so close.”

Certain states continue to do worse than others. A Feb. 26 internal briefing document from the Federal Emergency Management Agency showed that four states, including Texas and Mississippi, were in the “red zone,” defined as having a positivity rate over 10 percent. The other two states were Oklahoma and New Hampshire, according to the briefing, which cited CDC data and was obtained and reviewed by POLITICO.

On Tuesday, Biden announced that there would be enough vaccine supply for all U.S. adults by May, shortening the timetable from a previous July target date. However, he reiterated his plea for Americans to wear masks despite the country’s progress in battling back the pandemic.

“I’ve asked the country to wear masks for my first 100 days in office,” he said in a speech to address the pandemic. “Now is not the time to let our guard down. People’s lives are at stake.”

Later Tuesday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris didn‘t mince her words while virtually addressing the House Democratic caucus: “Real leaders agree. People still need to mask up and stay distanced.“

A senior administration health official told POLITICO that the White House believed the Texas and Mississippi announcements — posted on Twitter within 30 minutes of each other — were a “coordinated effort” by Republican governors, and that it expected to see similar announcements in the coming days.

Clay Jenkins, the Democratic judge of Dallas County, said in a Zoom news conference after Abbott’s announcement that the governor did not consult with local officials before the announcement, adding that he believed Abbott was bowing to political pressure on the right to lift the orders before it made sense for the state.

“It doesn’t take much of a shift in [mask] compliance to set us back months and months, to set us back in herd immunity,” he said.

However, Dave Carney, Abbott’s political consultant, told POLITICO that the Texas governor had intended to issue the executive order a few weeks ago, but that it was delayed by the deadly winter storm that plunged the state into freezing temperatures and caused widespread power failures.

“This has nothing to do with politics and had to do with what facts on the ground are,” Carney said. “The restrictions were put in place to deal with availability of ICU units. That is not an issue anymore.”

Abbott, who has served as governor of the nation’s second-largest state for the past six years, has long harbored national ambitions. But mask mandates and other coronavirus restrictions have become less popular among Republican base voters as cases have plummeted, and Abbott could end up competing with smaller-state governors who have championed a laissez-faire approach to the pandemic.

This past weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., the crowd of activists cheered Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Kristi Noem of South Dakota — two governors staking out possible 2024 presidential lanes — for the more limited restrictions they have implemented over the past year.

Carney, however, said that Abbott was not interested in running for president the next cycle, adding that the governor was “focused on what is going on in Texas right now.”

“He has done nothing secretly or publicly to get anything prepared for 2024. This is media myth,” Carney said. If the governor were interested, he added, Abbott would have attended the conservative confab.

DeSantis, whose state hosted the conference, described Florida as “an oasis of freedom” compared to other states during the pandemic.

But while Abbott has taken a backseat to those governors in Fox News Channel appearances, he has broader political experience. Outside of former President Donald Trump, he’s the Republican Party’s strongest fundraiser: He had $38 million in cash on hand for his bid for a third term next year, as of the end of 2020.

A former state attorney general for 12 years before ascending to the governorship, Abbott has been a statewide elected official in populous Texas since 2002 — compared with DeSantis and Noem, who had brief, less remarkable careers in Congress before winning elections for governor in 2018.

Steven Shepard and Erin Banco contributed to this report.

After a tough few weeks, Tanden announced she’s withdrawing her nomination as OMB director.

President Joe Biden has lost his first Cabinet-level pick.

Neera Tanden, the embattled nominee for Biden’s Office of Management and Budget director, has officially withdrawn her nomination for the position after days of uncertainty over whether she had enough votes to be confirmed in the US Senate.

“Unfortunately, it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation, and I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities,” Tanden, the president of the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, said in a statement released Tuesday.

With her withdrawal, Tanden becomes the first nominee to a White House Cabinet post to be sunk by her old tweets, which were sharply critical of a number of lawmakers. Biden’s administration had emphasized the historic nature of Tanden’s nomination; she served in President Bill Clinton’s White House and had experience running a major think tank, and if confirmed, she would have been the first woman of color and first Asian American woman to lead OMB.

But much of Tanden’s résumé was overshadowed by her proliferous online posting — at least 1,000 tweets raking both Republicans and leftist Democrats over the coals — that Tanden quietly started deleting in November 2020.

Tanden’s decision comes after an intense few days of trying to win over Republican senators whose votes she needed to get confirmed. In a Senate where Democrats have a one-vote majority, Tanden needed Republican support given she had already lost a critical Democratic vote she needed in West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who recently announced he’d oppose Tanden’s confirmation.

Tanden and the Biden White House had been holding out hope that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), might flip and give them the one vote they needed. Indeed, up until Tanden officially withdrew her nomination, Murkowski had told reporters she was still undecided on the nomination.

Biden released a statement accepting Tanden’s resignation, and mentioned that he’d like to find another spot for her in his administration, one where she wouldn’t need Senate confirmation.

“I have the utmost respect for her record of accomplishment, her experience and her counsel, and I look forward to having her serve in a role in my Administration,” Biden said in the statement.

Biden’s administration could have a quick replacement for Tanden

On Tuesday, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young had her confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Budget Committee. And it went much better than Tanden’s had weeks prior.

Young is a former staff director for the House Appropriations Committee, with deep ties to the Hill and respect from lawmakers and staffers on both sides of the aisle. Also importantly, she does not have a Twitter account.

While Republican senators had plenty of spent time admonishing Tanden for her social media posts in her hearing, they had relatively glowing things to say about Young.

“Everybody who deals with you on our side has nothing but good things to say. You might talk me out of voting for you, but I doubt it,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Young during her Tuesday hearing.

With Republicans looking likely to vote to confirm Young, the Biden administration may well want to move her up to Tanden’s spot. Some Republicans, including Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Richard Shelby of Alabama, had already said they’d vote to confirm Young if she were Tanden’s replacement.

And with congressional Democrats looking poised to soon pass a major Covid-19 stimulus bill through Congress using budget reconciliation, the Biden administration will likely want to quickly confirm a head of OMB — a key office tasked with planning and overseeing the implementation of the federal budget once Congress passes it.

Tanden’s dilemma demonstrates the tricky math of an evenly split Senate and the power of individual senators to stymie pieces of Biden’s agenda. Even though Tanden did plenty to anger the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party over the years, moderates were ultimately the ones who sank her.

The reason MAGA-loving Republicans lie so obviously and remorselessly is really pretty simple: It works.

The two most brazen falsehoods they keep repeating to justify the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection—“the election was stolen” and “antifa did it”—are in fact widely believed by Republican Donald Trump voters, over 70% of whom ardently believe the first claim, and some 58% of whom lap up the latter lie as well.

And as far as they’re concerned, that’s all that matters: They have a narrative for Trump supporters to tell themselves and each other. Because that’s really the only audience for their lies that matters to them. Who cares if the rest of the world knows it’s all bullshit? In their alternative universe, the only thing of consequence is undying support for Trump.

Indeed, the two lies contradict each other narratively speaking: If the election was stolen, why would antifa want to invade the Capitol? But logical consistency is meaningless in their alternative universe. What matters most is muddying the waters so they can evade consequences for their innate violence, mainly by resorting to the hoary rhetorical manipulation of claiming that critics are “waving the bloody shirt.”

The New York Times examined this week how the “antifa did it” lie was generated and then spread. It began, as the story documented, even while the Capitol invasion was under way, thanks mainly to a bogus story in the Washington Times that was corrected about 24 hours later—more than enough time for the lie to get on its horse and gallop around the world a couple of times. The usual suspects for right-wing disinformation—Gateway Pundit Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and Laura Ingraham—all had helpers among Republican elected officials, notably congressmen Matt Gaetz of Florida and Mo Brooks of Alabama, as well as Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson.

The piece accurately captures the dynamic: The lies are all eventually debunked and many of their progenitors wind up recanting and correcting, but by then the lies have already circulated widely and have been eagerly adopted as accurate by people who never see the often subdued corrections that follow. Moreover, on social media, the original sensational lies attract huge audiences and are widely shared while the mostly meat-and-potatoes corrections get only a fraction of their audiences.

While some have backed away from the claims, others have doubled down—notably Johnson, who asserted once again that antifa was responsible for the violence during a Senate hearing last week. Johnson, reading from an account by J. Michael Waller in The Federalist, claimed the “great majority” of protesters had a “jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor.” He blamed the deadly violence on “plainclothes militants, agent provocateurs, fake Trump protesters, and a disciplined uniformed column of attackers.”

The “antifa did it” theorists, including Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas, have turned to the particular claim that an African American man they linked to Black Lives Matter (BLM), John H. Sullivan of Utah, played a central role in the insurrection.

There’s just one problem with this story: It has, once again, been thoroughly debunked. Sullivan, as The Washington Post reported in detail, is a man who initially attempted to organize BLM protests in Utah outside of the existing African American protest community. In short order, a person was shot during one of his events and then Proud Boys began showing up to support his protests. Among BLM activists, he was widely regarded as a duplicitous “double agent.” His last organized protest of the summer was a pro-gun rights rally featuring large numbers of far-right militiamen, including Oath Keepers.

The Times story, as analyst J.J. McNabb adroitly observes, also overlooks a central aspect of the narrative: The radical right actually began building it on social media well before the Jan. 6 insurrection. First, conspiracy theorists began circulating rumors that antifa would disguise themselves as Trump supporters for the Jan. 6 rally, but would be identifiable by the backward MAGA hats they intended to wear. Then, Proud Boys began talking among themselves about arriving in disguise at the Jan. 6 event dressed up in antifa-style “black bloc” gear.

The latter idea had real logistical flaws since other Proud Boys might mistake the disguised participants for the real thing and assault them. The strategy the Proud Boys eventually settled on for Jan. 6 was to eschew their usual black polos and red MAGA hats for ordinary street clothes, instead adopting orange armbands as their group identifier.

Many of those same Proud Boys are now under arrest and awaiting trial for their roles in the insurrection. Indeed, as the indictments have mounted and the evidence provided by investigators has been introduced, it’s become abundantly clear that the Jan. 6 crowd was a combination of militant right-wing extremists who planned to invade the Capitol and perhaps to take hostages, and a rabid mob of older Trump supporters who believed they were participating in a patriotic “revolution” that day. Most of them, in fact, are insulted by the attempt to give antifa credit for what they believe was their good work.

Conservatives—and their supposed ideology of “personal responsibility”—in fact have a long and colorful history of gaslighting the media and the public with narratives that turn reality on its head, bullies into victims, and victims into bullies. It’s how they can look the public in the eye and tell them without blinking that last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were much worse than the Capitol siege. As Laura says, Republicans’ lies are all easily disproved: The reason they need so many of them is just to keep the public discourse flooded with them.

It’s difficult to gauge the success of any movement aimed at affecting widespread and systematic change. That’s especially true for the Black Lives Matter movement, which has what can feel like the insurmountable aims of eradicating white supremacy and fighting police brutality in Black communities. But as difficult as it is to quantify the movement’s success, it’s just as difficult to ignore its impact. A new study cited in the Scientific American found that in cities where Black Lives Matter protests had been staged, police killings dropped an estimated 20% between 2014 and 2019.

Travis Campbell, the author of the study and an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, concluded in his research that Census areas with Black Lives Matter protests saw about 300 fewer police homicides. "BLM protests also increase the probability of a police agency having body-cameras, expand community policing, and reduce the number of future property crime-related arrests, which may partially explain the lethal force reduction," Campbell said in the study. Aldon Morris, a sociologist at Northwestern University, posed the question before the Scientific American of whether Black Lives Matter protests have been generating change. It’s an “inescapable” yes based on the study, Morris said, adding that “protest matters—that it can generate change.”

Founded in 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement took shape in response to the acquittal of a Florida man accused of murdering a Black child. Trayvon Martin, 17, was wearing a hoodie on his way back from a convenience store to purchase candy and juice on Feb. 26, 2012, when George Zimmerman, who considered himself a neighborhood watch volunteer, shot and killed the child. Zimmerman alleged he felt threatened and a jury believed him, finding the then 28-year-old man not guilty on all counts against him. The next year, a former Ferguson, Missouri, cop Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teen only stopped initially for walking in the street on August 9, 2014. Wilson wasn't even charged let alone convicted. “With the world watching the unrest, BLM would quickly push the issue of police violence towards black people into the fore of American discourse,” Campbell wrote in his study. “As BLM became a national movement, the movement garnished controversy from both allies of American politics for using sometimes violent protest tactics.”

However controversial the tactics—and the movement’s call to defund police agencies even attracted criticism from former President Barack Obama for being too off-putting—the Black Lives Matter movement has attracted vital attention from legislators. “A slew of reforms has followed, such as the United States Department of Justice distributing 21,000 police body cameras to law enforcement during 2014 and eight cities were issued consent decrees to improve policing,” Campbell wrote.

Campaign Action

Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren reintroduced a bill on Monday to end qualified immunity, a legal protection freeing government officials from guilt in lawsuits unless they have violated a “clearly established” statutory or constitutional right. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation and the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 50 activist groups, drafted sweeping legislation in The BREATHE Act, which Gina Clayton-Johnson, the bill’s creator simply described as “a bill that invests” in a Vox news interview last month. “It’s about making sure that states and local places have what they need in order to provide for the safety of their communities,” Clayton-Johnson said. “And we divest from the very things that have been harming and stand as an impediment to safety.” 

The BREATHE Act promises to end life sentences, get rid of mandatory minimums in sentencing, and repurpose a portion of public safety and defense budgets for investment in communities of color, all issues that became central aims of protests last summer. Thousands of people took to the streets domestically and internationally following the death of George Floyd, a Black father who died on May 25 in police custody after a white Minneapolis cop kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes. So fed up with the cycle of abusive and deadly policing, Black Lives Matter made its initial call on May 30 to defund the police and instead invest in “education, mental health, and non-carceral and non-punitive community-led systems and programs,” the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation said in its 2020 impact report. “This was our vision.” Nine months after its initial call, the Black Lives Matter movement had so successfully spread its mission that even a top physics society pledged not to meet in cities with records of racist policing.

Physicist Philip Phillips, also a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, drafted a letter with colleague Michael Weissman that appeared in both Physics Today and Science. In it, the researchers asked scientific communities to refuse to hold their annual meetings in cities with records of racial profiling, according to the scientific journal Nature. At least one group, the American Physical Society answered the letter's request and announced in November it would consider police conduct when choosing cities to meet in for its more than 55,000 members, the journal reported.

“It occurred to me that meetings held in cities are putting Black and brown people at risk if they aren’t choosing with anything in mind about what are the policing practices,” Phillips told Nature.

Governments, organizations, and businesses throughout the country have made statements of support and initiated plans to better support and respond to the needs of Black communities. Etsy and Amazon created webpages on their sites to highlight Black-owned companies. Uber Eats announced it would waive delivery fees for Black-owned restaurants through 2020. And you’d be hardpressed to find a serious presidential contender in the 2020 election that didn’t have a plan for Black America.

Aislinn Pulley, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Chicago, told Scientific American an especially important result of the movement is the push to collect better data on police killings. Pulley has kept a list of those who have died in interactions with the Chicago Police Department since 2011. “It’s extraordinarily important to have concrete data of the numbers of incidents that involve police violence of all stripes, from killings to torture to being held incommunicado in police stations to people who died in custody,” she told the magazine. “We didn’t have access to that data prior to the movement—and we still have only partial access.”

She said of the Black Lives Matter movement that it can take satisfaction in its impact on policing. “We should use that knowledge to know that the work we’re engaged in—the movement, the advocacy, the organizing—is what we need,” Pulley told Scientific American. “And that needs to expand and get broader, so we can join much of the rest of the world in having zero police killings.”

[An all-too-rare sanctions order from a federal court. ]

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued an unusual and interesting opinion today in Larry E. Parrish P.C. v. Bennett. The opinion by Judge Griffin begins:

In this action, Larry E. Parrish, P.C., a Tennessee law firm (the "Parrish Firm") sued three judges of the Tennessee Court of Appeals because they allegedly made false statements in a written opinion resolving an appeal to which the Parrish Firm was a party. Plaintiff claims that the false statements were a violation of its Fourteenth Amendment rights, but as a remedy, it seeks no damages or injunctive relief—instead, requesting only a declaration that defendants violated its constitutional rights.

The district court, however, granted defendants' motion to dismiss, reasoning that it was "not a close issue" that it lacked jurisdiction, and that even if it had jurisdiction, dismissal was required by judicial immunity and the relevant statute of limitations. Finally, even ignoring these sizable defects, the district court concluded that the facts pleaded by plaintiff were insufficient to state a claim. Now on appeal, plaintiff primarily challenges the district court's rulings regarding jurisdiction and judicial immunity. We affirm the judgment of the district court and direct plaintiff and plaintiff's counsel to show cause why sanctions should not be assessed against them on appeal.

That last little bit—the order that the plaintiff and plaintiff's counsel show cause why they should not be required to pay sanctions—is quite unusual. In my view, show cause orders threatening to impose sanctions are too unusual, as courts are generally too reluctant to impose sanctions on attorneys who file frivolous or vexatious lawsuits.

The underlying facts are quite something. The Parrish firm was hired by Ms. Strong to file a malpractice claim against her prior attorney, but this action was dismissed because the Parrish firm missed discovery deadlines. Ms. Strong apparently refused to pay, and the Parrish firm sued. Ms. Strong counterclaimed, and prevailed in the trial court. The Parrish firm appealed, and was apparently sufficiently upset with the resulting appellate court decision that the Parrish firm sued the judges on the appellate panel seeking a correction of allegedly false claims in the appellate opinion. Unable to obtain relief in state court, the Parrish firm turned to federal court, eventually leading to today's opinion.

On the substance, the Sixth Circuit found the Parrish firm's arguments to be "unpersuasive at best, and nearly incoherent at worst," and easily concluded that the federal courts lack jurisdiction to hear their claims. Wrote Judge Griffin:

we conclude that the complaint failed to present a justiciable case or controversy because plaintiff requested a ruling only on whether the past actions of defendants were right or wrong, which could not affect the present relationship between the parties. In other words, plaintiff sought only an advisory opinion from the district court as to whether its constitutional rights had been violated. The court therefore lacked an Article III controversy to adjudicate.

On the question of sanctions, Judge Griffin wrote:

defendants request that we sanction the Parrish Firm and Larry Parrish individually under 28 U.S.C. § 1927 and Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38.

Rule 38 provides that we may assess "just damages and single or double costs" in response to a frivolous appeal, either upon a motion from the opposing party or if the court gives notice and an opportunity to respond. Fed. R. App. P. 38. Generally, an appeal is frivolous if "it is obviously without merit and is prosecuted for delay, harassment, or other improper purposes." Barney v. Holzer Clinic, Ltd., 110 F.3d 1207, 1212 (6th Cir. 1997) (quoting NLRB v. Cincinnati Bronze, Inc., 829 F.2d 585, 591 (6th Cir. 1987)). But an appeal may also be frivolous if it is filed out of "sheer obstinacy—when the only issues in the case clearly have been resolved against the appellant." Anderson v. Dickson, 715 F. App'x 481, 489 (6th Cir. 2017) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); see also Wilton Corp. v. Ashland Castings Corp., 188 F.3d 670, 676 (6th Cir. 1999) ("Sanctions are appropriate where the appeal was prosecuted with no reasonable expectation of altering the district court's judgment and for purposes of delay or harassment or out of sheer obstinacy." (internal quotation marks and citation omitted)). Similarly, § 1927 provides: "[a]ny attorney . . . who so multiplies the proceedings in any case unreasonably and vexatiously may be required by the court to satisfy personally the excess costs, expenses, and attorneys' fees reasonably incurred because of such conduct." 28 U.S.C. § 1927. We have imposed § 1927 sanctions where "an attorney objectively 'falls short of the obligations owed by a member of the bar to the court and which, as a result, causes additional expense to the opposing party.'" Red Carpet Studios Div. of Source Advantage, Ltd. v. Sater, 465 F.3d 642, 646 (6th Cir. 2006) (quoting Ruben v. Warren City Sch., 825 F.2d 977, 984 (6th Cir. 1987)).

It appears that those standards have been met here. First, we agree with the district court that the jurisdictional defects presented by the complaint were "not . . . close issue[s]," and plaintiff's arguments on appeal did not narrow the issues in any meaningful way. And beyond those flaws, the appeal appears frivolous because plaintiff has not provided any cogent argument to explain why the statute of limitations did not bar his claim, nor how the complaint pleaded facts to plausibly establish a Fourteenth Amendment violation—two additional grounds the district court gave for granting the motion to dismiss. In other words, even if plaintiff had prevailed on the two issues it briefed (jurisdiction and judicial immunity), we would still affirm the district court's dismissal of the complaint because the Parrish Firm has forfeited case dispositive issues by failing to raise them for review. Finally, we share the district court's concern for attorney Parrish's penchant for calling state judges' integrity into question seemingly whenever they disagree with him.

Accordingly, defendants may file an affidavit setting forth their reasonable costs and attorneys' fees incurred by this appeal not later than fourteen days after the issuance of this opinion. Once defendants' affidavit is filed, plaintiff and plaintiff's counsel shall have fourteen days to show cause why they should not be sanctioned, addressing both Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38 and 28 U.S.C. § 1927.

As noted, it's somewhat rare for a federal appellate court to issue such an order. Perhaps it will not be so rare in the future. I can think of a few recent cases in which sanctions might be justified.

Here’s today’s Republican Party in a nutshell: Arizona Republicans censured Cindy McCain for endorsing Joe Biden for president. When Rep. Paul Gosar spoke at a white nationalist conference, the Arizona Republican Party was silent.

Gosar showed up at the America First Political Action Conference on Friday night, serving as its surprise keynote speaker at the same time as the House was debating COVID-19 relief. At that event, he was followed by conference organizer Nick Fuentes, who called the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol “awesome” and “light-hearted mischief.”

“If America ceases to retain that English cultural framework and the influence of European civilization, if it loses its White demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ, then this is not America anymore,” Fuentes said.

Gosar then appeared at the more moderate CPAC on Saturday—where the stage was totally accidentally in the shape of a Nazi symbol—and offered a weak denunciation of “white racism” as “not appropriate.” 

Arizona’s Republican Party is not alone in embracing the far-far-far right. Republican committees in North Carolina and Louisiana censured Sens. Richard Burr and Bill Cassidy for voting to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection. Michigan Republican Party co-chair Meshawn Maddock was one of the organizers of an April event in which armed militia members tried to enter the floor of the state Senate. She also helped send 19 buses full of Trump supporters to Washington, D.C., for Jan. 6.

Then again, this is Donald Trump’s party, and in his own CPAC appearance, Trump vowed to purge the party of anyone who dares to stand against him. And that is inextricably tied to Trump’s white supremacist agenda. He’s taken the party from being one that operates in racist dog whistles and writing policies that are officially color blind but create or exacerbate racial disparities to being one where a member of Congress shows up at a white nationalist event and his state’s Republican Party has nothing to say about it.

How completely can Trump remake the Republican Party in his own image after costing it the House, the Senate, and the White House? So far, the answer seems to be like 95%.

Biden didn’t mention Dr. Seuss in his Read Across America Day statement. All hell broke loose from there.

Conservative media turned 2021’s National Read Across America Day into an epic culture war meltdown.

On Tuesday morning and into the afternoon, programming on Fox News and Fox Business ceaselessly harped upon the purported “cancellation” of legendary children’s author Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, as the latest example of woke liberalism run amok — conveniently ignoring the fact that Dr. Seuss has not, in fact, been canceled.

“The cancel culture is canceling Dr. Seuss,” lamented Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade, adding later, “It’s out of control.”

“People are too scared,” echoed co-host Ainsley Earhardt. “They don’t want to be involved in all of this, so they’d rather just cancel it all ... the places we are going in this country right now.”

This Fox & Friends segment wasn’t an isolated incident. Before 9 am Tuesday, Dr. Seuss had been mentioned more than 30 times on Fox News and Fox Business. Fox Business host Stuart Varney even touted Dr. Seuss’s alleged cancellation as one of the big stories of the day.

Dr. Seuss was an even bigger topic on Newsmax — a Trumpier, further right alternative to Fox News — where it was mentioned more than 20 times during the network’s Wake Up America morning show.

Given what they were being told, viewers of the two networks could be excused for believing that the Dr. Seuss controversy is the biggest news story of the day.

And it didn’t stop with the morning shows. A Fox News reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki a question during Tuesday’s briefing about why Biden didn’t mention Dr. Seuss in his statement commemorating Read Across America Day, and Fox News then tried to spin Psaki’s response (she referred the reporter to the Department of Education) as some sort of scandal. (Fox News hasn’t responded to a question seeking comment about its Seuss coverage, as this is published.)

In a world where 2,000 Americans are still dying each day from Covid-19, and Congress is grappling with issues like a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill and major voting rights reforms, this level of focus on Dr. Seuss would be silly no matter what. But making it even more ridiculous is the fact that five minutes of research indicates all the outrage is much ado about very little.

Dr. Seuss hasn’t been canceled

The right-wing outrage over Dr. Seuss can be traced back to a February 26 article in Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire publication about a left-wing educators group that encouraged public schools to stop “connecting Read Across America Day with Dr. Seuss,” citing “racial undertones” in some of his books. The two are linked, as the National Education Association has previously used March 2, Geisel’s birthday, as an opportunity to encourage literacy.

At least one school district — the Loudoun County public school system in northern Virginia — did indeed decide to try to separate Read Across America Day from Dr. Seuss, providing guidance to schools “to not connect Read Across America Day exclusively with Dr. Seuss’ birthday.”

The Daily Wire cited this guidance as evidence that Dr. Seuss was being “canceled.” In response to the outrage the article generated, Loudoun County schools released a statement trying to correct the record.

“Dr. Seuss books have not been banned in Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS),” it says, adding later: “We continue to encourage our young readers to read all types of books that are inclusive, diverse and reflective of our student community, not simply celebrate Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss books have not been banned and are available to students in our libraries and classrooms, however, Dr. Seuss and his books are no longer the emphasis of Read Across America Day in Loudoun County Public Schools.”

Then, on March 1, President Joe Biden released a statement about Read Across America Day that broke with years of precedent by not mentioning Dr. Seuss. This led to headlines like, “Biden CANCELS Dr. Seuss.”

More fuel was added to the right-wing outrage fire on Tuesday, when Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company that publishes and licenses the author’s work, announced that six Seuss books will no longer be published because they portray people of color “in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Why is this reevaluation of Dr. Seuss happening now? In part, it has to do with a 2019 study conducted by a nonprofit linked with Read Across America Day called Learning for Justice that concluded Seuss’s works traffic in “Orientalist tropes” and “anti-Blackness.” Here’s a key expert from that study:

Of the 2,240 (identified) human characters [in 50 Dr. Seuss books], there are forty-five characters of color representing 2% of the total number of human characters.” Of the 45 characters, 43 exhibited behaviors and appearances that align with harmful and stereotypical Orientalist tropes. The remaining two human characters “are identified in the text as ‘African’ and both align with the theme of anti-Blackness.” It’s also important to note that each of the non-white characters is male and that they are all “presented in subservient, exotified, or dehumanized roles,” especially in their relation to white characters.

That study led to a reevaluation of some of Seuss’s work, including the six books that Dr. Seuss Enterprises is no longer publishing. But there is no indication this private company’s decision resulted from pressure from the “woke mob,” and it’s not as though Dr. Seuss’s works are being pulled from the shelves of libraries and bookstores.

Conservatives aren’t about to let facts get in the way of their narrative

It’s perfectly reasonable to reassess classic works of culture through the prism of the prevailing values of today. Doing so does not mean that those works have been “canceled” or are worthless — it just means being honest about the ways in which they have fallen short in terms of inclusivity and respect for other people.

But in the months since Donald Trump lost the presidency, right-wing media and Republican members of Congress have leaned into so-called “cancel culture” as a way to make the case against Democrats without having to discuss policy or really anything of substance at all. Instead, Republicans have used insinuations that Democrats want to prohibit traditions that are central to conservative identities. In short, they’re stoking the grievances of their base.

The last week has seen a couple noteworthy examples of this. Perhaps most absurdly, right-wingers spent days getting mad about Hasbro’s purported cancellation of Mr. Potato Head.

It turned out that all the fuming over Mr. Potato Head rested on a misinterpretation of a Hasbro press release. While the brand is now being referred to as “Potato Head,” Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head are not being “canceled” by the company — they will live on as characters in the broader Potato Head universe.

Yet even after Hasbro cleared up the confusion, conservatives at CPAC kept bringing up Mr. Potato Head’s pronouns as an example of liberal woke-ism gone wild.

By Tuesday morning, the Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head claims had merged into a single object of right-wing performative outrage. During a Fox & Friends interview, for instance, Donald Trump Jr. used a question about Dr. Seuss to rail against liberal “cancel culture” in general.

This might seem silly — and it is. But Republicans and their media enablers use this sort of culture war grievance to avoid talking about real issues, including those they advocate for that are unpopular.

One egregious example of this came during Fox & Friends First’s interview on Tuesday with Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC). Despite the fact that both BuzzFeed and the Washington Post published exposés in recent days detailing numerous accusations of sexual harassment against him, Cawthorn was not asked a single question about that. Instead, he was given an opportunity to complain at length about the fake cancellation of Dr. Seuss.

Later Tuesday, as FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before a Senate committee about the January 6 insurrection and how it was an instance of right-wing domestic terrorism, Fox News was the only network to not cover it live.

Instead, they talked more about cancel culture and Dr. Seuss.

And Fox just kept going with even more panel discussions about cancel culture well into Tuesday afternoon. By Tuesday evening, it was even the lead story on Fox News’s website.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) completed the circle of right-wing disinformation by using a floor debate over voting rights legislation to complain about Dr. Seuss in the sort of soundbite tailor-made for additional Fox coverage.

“First they outlaw Dr. Seuss and now they want to tell us what to say,” he lied.

Beyond the silliness of using overhyped culture war issues to distract from real issues, there are a couple of ironies in the right-wing obsession with “cancel culture.” First, as writer Charlotte Clymer pointed out on Twitter, schools are much more likely to ban books with LGBTQ themes than they are books containing racism or bigotry.

And second, despite the racial insensitivity of some of his books, other works by Dr. Seuss indicate he wouldn’t identify with the agendas of right-wing politicians who are now using him as a cudgel.

From Fiona Macdonald’s 2019 BBC piece “The surprisingly radical politics of Dr. Seuss”:

Describing Dr Seuss’s wartime output [during World War 2] as “very impressive evidence of cartooning as an art of persuasion”, [graphic novelist Art] Spiegelman explains how they “rail against isolationism, racism, and anti-semitism with a conviction and fervor lacking in most other American editorial pages of the period… virtually the only editorial cartoons outside the communist and black press that decried the military’s Jim Crow policies and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-semitism”. Dr Seuss, he argues, “made these drawings with the fire of honest indignation and anger that fuels all real political art”.

That Fox News is lying isn’t really news — after all, the network has spent weeks misleading people into believing that recent widespread power outages in Texas are somehow an indictment of the Green New Deal.

But that the network is making this big of a deal over Dr. Seuss on a day when so much else is happening illustrates how much the network is still struggling to establish an identity for itself in the post-Trump world. And it’s also a reminder of how far it’s willing to go to construct an alternative reality for its viewers, where the most important things are their grievances.

Sign up for The Weeds newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll get an explainer of a big policy story from the week, a look at important research that recently came out, and answers to reader questions — to guide you through the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration.

PayPal is said to be in the process of buying Curv, a technology firm that powers the secure storage of cryptocurrency, news outlet CoinDesk reported Tuesday, citing three sources familiar with the situation. From the report: Israeli news outlet Calcalist reported Tuesday that Curv was being sold for between $200 million and $300 million, without naming the buyer. "PayPal is buying Curv for $500 million," a source from within the digital asset custody space told CoinDesk on Monday. "From where I'm hearing it, I'm pretty sure it's true." Several people in the cryptocurrency space have said PayPal, which made an entrance to the crypto space last year, turned its attention to Curv after talks to buy crypto custody and trading firm BitGo fell through last year. PayPal offered $750 million in cash for BitGo, two sources familiar with the deal told CoinDesk. Bloomberg has corroborated the talks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A case challenging Harvard’s admissions policy gives a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court the vehicle it needs to end race-conscious admissions.

Last week, a conservative group led by a prominent skeptic of laws seeking to cure racial injustice formally asked the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policy for undergraduates.

The plaintiff in Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College presents its lawsuit as a bid to vindicate the rights of Asian American applicants to Harvard — though Harvard rejects the overwhelming majority of undergraduate applicants, the rejection rate among Asian Americans is especially high. But the implications of this suit go far beyond Harvard or the lawsuit’s implications for people of Asian descent.

The Harvard case is the first major affirmative action suit to reach the Supreme Court since Republicans gained a 6-3 majority on that Court, and it’s the first such case to reach the justices since Anthony Kennedy’s retirement in 2018. Kennedy had unexpectedly cast the key vote to uphold an affirmative action program in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2016).

Kennedy is gone now, as is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the Court’s new majority can potentially use the Harvard case to end all race-conscious admissions programs altogether.

No one questions that race plays some role in Harvard’s admissions decisions. While Harvard only accepts a tiny fraction of its applicants — in 2019, it received 35,000 applications for about 1,600 slots in its freshman class — an extraordinary Black or Latino student is more likely to be accepted than an equally extraordinary white or Asian student.

But the case presents fundamental questions about what it means to live in a pluralistic society, and what role elite institutions should play in fostering such a society. Admission to Harvard is often a ticket to the highest echelons of an undergraduate’s chosen field. And a federal court found that forbidding Harvard from considering race in its admissions program could “reduce African American representation at Harvard from 14% to 6% and Hispanic representation from 14% to 9%.”

Without affirmative action, future generations of presidents, judges, CEOs, and scholars would likely be less Black and less Latino.

The men and women who do graduate from elite schools, moreover, would likely emerge more sheltered and less able to succeed in a diverse society, if affirmative action is struck down. As the Supreme Court explained in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), “numerous studies show that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and ‘better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals.’” A Harvard graduate is more likely to succeed in their chosen profession if they learned to interact with and appreciate people of diverse backgrounds while they were still in college.

The case against affirmative action is fairly straightforward. In the Supreme Court’s own words, racial classifications are “not consistent with respect based on the unique personality each of us possesses.” They necessarily cause individuals to be given or denied opportunities based on a trait that they cannot control, and that does not reflect their worthiness of something as precious as a seat in Harvard’s freshman class.

But the insight of cases like Grutter is that society as a whole benefits from greater diversity in elite institutions. The fundamental question in Harvard, in other words, is whether society’s collective interest in having a leadership class that respects and draws from all parts of the nation justifies giving a slight advantage to individual college applicants from certain racial backgrounds.

In the likely event that the Supreme Court agrees to hear this case (four justices must agree to place the case on the Court’s argument calendar), Harvard’s admissions program could well have a rough ride ahead.

The Supreme Court has surprised experts who predicted doom for affirmative action in the past — it did so most recently in the Fisher case. But the Court is also more conservative now than it’s been at any point since the 1930s. And the most moderate member of the Court’s conservative majority, Chief Justice John Roberts, is an outspoken opponent of race-conscious policies.

How affirmative action in university admissions works

For nearly half a century, the Supreme Court has placed tight limits on universities that wish to consider race when admitting students, and cases like Grutter and Fisher made those limits even tighter. Universities may not use quotas that set aside a certain number of seats for applicants of color, and they may not use formulas that grant a mathematical advantage to every applicant from a certain racial background.

In practice, affirmative action often functions as a tiebreaker when a university is trying to decide among multiple applicants, each of whom is likely to succeed at that institution.

At any selective university there will be three kinds of applicants. The first consists of applicants who are so exceptional that they are all-but-certain to be admitted regardless of the nuances of the university’s admissions policy. The second consists of applicants who are so far below the university’s ordinary standards that they have little, if any, chance of being admitted.

Harvard has long denied that race plays much of a role in deciding the fates of these first two groups of applicants. But Harvard filed a brief in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the first affirmative action in university admissions case to reach the Supreme Court, explaining that race does play a role in deciding whom to admit from a third group of applicants.

This third group, which Harvard described as “the large middle group of applicants who are ‘admissible’ and deemed capable of doing good work in their courses,” consists of applicants who are likely to thrive at an institution like Harvard but aren’t so exceptional as to be virtually guaranteed admission.

Universities unavoidably need to make choices among this third category of applicants that have nothing to do with a particular applicant’s worthiness to attend a particular school. Suppose, for example, that the tuba player in Harvard’s orchestra is graduating this spring. If two equally qualified applicants apply to Harvard’s incoming class, one of whom plays the tuba and the other plays the clarinet, Harvard might choose to admit only the tuba player because that applicant fills a particular need for the school.

That doesn’t mean that tuba players are inherently more valuable than other musicians, or that they are more deserving of admission to Harvard.

The theory underlying decisions like Grutter is that the racial demographics of a university class is much like an orchestra. Just as an orchestra made up of a diversity of instruments will produce richer, more nuanced symphonies than a band consisting entirely of woodwinds, a student body made up of students from diverse racial, economic, geographic, and other backgrounds will receive a superior education to students who spend their university years surrounded by people just like themselves.

As Grutter explained, “major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.”

This vision of affirmative action as a tool to foster diversity that benefits white and nonwhite students alike emerged from the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Bakke.

Bakke involved a medical school that set aside 16 seats in its 100-person class for racial minorities. This, according to Justice Lewis Powell’s controlling opinion, was not allowed. Under this system, “white applicants could compete only for 84 seats in the entering class, rather than the 100 open to minority applicants,” and Bakke held that every applicant must be able to compete for every seat, regardless of their race.

Yet, while Bakke rejected quotas or other mathematical formulas that set applicants of color apart from white applicants, it also held that “race or ethnic background may be deemed a ‘plus’ in a particular applicant’s file.” As Powell wrote, “the file of a particular black applicant may be examined for his potential contribution to diversity without the factor of race being decisive when compared, for example, with that of an applicant identified as an Italian-American if the latter is thought to exhibit qualities more likely to promote beneficial educational pluralism.”

Indeed, Powell specifically praised Harvard’s then-existing admissions policy in his Bakke opinion. As Harvard described that policy at the time, “the Committee has not set target-quotas for the number of blacks, or of musicians, football players, physicists or Californians to be admitted in a given year,” but it does pay “some attention” to whether a particular applicant is likely to make the student body more diverse.

“A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer,” Harvard explained in an amicus brief that was also joined by three other elite universities. “Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.” And so, in deciding whom to admit from among the “large middle group of applicants,” Harvard gave a preference to applicants who would bring greater diversity to their student body.

It’s worth noting that past cases such as Bakke, Grutter, and Fisher all involved public universities, which are prohibited by the Constitution from engaging in certain forms of race discriminations. Harvard is a private institution and is thus unbound by the Constitution, but the Supreme Court has said that a federal civil rights law — Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — imposes the same restrictions on private universities that the Constitution imposes on public institutions. So a decision to strike down Harvard’s affirmative action policy would have implications for all university admissions policies.

How Harvard’s admissions policy works now

The admissions policy at issue in the Harvard case resembles the policy that Powell praised in its broadest strokes. Harvard still views race as a “plus” factor that can benefit certain applicants, while shying away from mathematical formulas or quotas. But its admissions policy has been revised somewhat since the 1970s, in part to ensure that it complies with decisions like Grutter and Fisher.

As a federal appeals court explained in an opinion upholding Harvard’s admissions program, Harvard employs 40 admissions officers who read the tens of thousands of applications submitted by students hoping to join the school’s undergraduate class. (For the class of 2024, there were 40,248 applicants and 2,015 admissions.) At the first stage of the admissions process, each application is read by at least one admissions officer, who rates the students along six dimensions: “academic ratings, extracurricular ratings, athletic ratings, school support ratings, personal ratings, and overall ratings.”

For the first five of these categories, race plays no direct role in determining an applicant’s rating — although it can play an indirect role in determining a student’s “personal rating” if, for example, a student of color tells a particularly compelling story about how they overcame racism to succeed academically. Race can play a role in a student’s overall rating, however, through a process Harvard refers to as “tips.”

As the appeals court described this process, “tips are plus factors that might tip an applicant into Harvard’s admitted class.” A student who would otherwise be rejected might be “tipped” into the pool of accepted applicants for myriad reasons, including “outstanding and unusual intellectual ability, unusually appealing personal qualities, outstanding capacity for leadership, creative ability, athletic ability, legacy status, and geographic, ethnic, or economic factors.”

Data suggests that a sizable percentage of Harvard’s Black and Latino undergraduates received an offer of admission because of this “tips” system. According to the Harvard plaintiff, if you group all Harvard undergraduate applicants into deciles based on their academic record, Harvard still rejects more than 85 percent of applicants in the top decile. But it accepts more than half of Black applicants in this elite decile and just under a third of the highest-performing Hispanic applicants.

Yet, according to the appeals court, Harvard’s admissions policy is consistent with decisions like Bakke and Grutter. Among other things, the Court explained, “Harvard’s admissions process is so competitive that race is not decisive for highly qualified candidates,” and its process “does not weigh race so heavily that it becomes mechanical and decisive in practice.”

The overwhelming majority of applicants to Harvard are rejected, regardless of their race. In Harvard’s system, race is one of many factors that can help the university choose among a pool of applicants that it’s already determined to be among the best students in the country.

The case against affirmative action

Though the Harvard plaintiff makes some arguments that Harvard’s system is inconsistent with Grutter, their primary argument is that Grutter is “grievously wrong” and should be overruled.

Indeed, the Harvard plaintiff opens its petition asking the Supreme Court to hear this case with a quote from Chief Justice Roberts: “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” The Harvard plaintiffs would have the Court implement a view that Roberts has long advocated — that any consideration of race is odious, regardless of what a particular race-conscious policy seeks to accomplish.

Roberts articulated his approach to race very early in his tenure as chief justice, in his plurality opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007). Parents Involved concerned two school districts’ attempt to desegregate their schools by giving small preferences to some students on the basis of race.

Instead of assigning all students to the public school closest to their home, for example, a Seattle school district allowed students to rank which schools they would prefer to attend. If too many students chose a particular school, students who would increase the racial diversity of that school were given a slight preference.

Roberts deemed this effort to foster diversity within public schools as akin to Jim Crow. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he proclaimed at the end of his opinion, after arguing that racial classifications are inherently poisonous, regardless of their intent:

If the need for the racial classifications embraced by the school districts is unclear, even on the districts’ own terms, the costs are undeniable. “[D]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” Government action dividing us by race is inherently suspect because such classifications promote “notions of racial inferiority and lead to a politics of racial hostility,” “reinforce the belief, held by too many for too much of our history, that individuals should be judged by the color of their skin,” and “endorse race-based reasoning and the conception of a Nation divided into racial blocs, thus contributing to an escalation of racial hostility and conflict.” As the Court explained in Rice v. Cayetano, “[o]ne of the principal reasons race is treated as a forbidden classification is that it demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit and essential qualities.”

If you read this paragraph, it’s not hard to see how Roberts may be sympathetic to the plaintiffs in Harvard. The premise of cases like Grutter is that the benefits of diversity within elite universities justify a departure from the ordinary rule against racial classifications. But the premise of Roberts’s opinion in Parents Involved is that such classifications are so inherently toxic that the benefits of race-conscious policies can never exceed the risks.

For the past 43 years, the Supreme Court has policed the bounds of university admissions, believing that those universities could help build a more diverse leadership class without opening up the Pandora’s box that Roberts is so afraid of. But when Roberts wrote his opinion in Parents Involved, the Supreme Court was still closely divided on questions of race. As it considers the Harvard case, it now has a 6-3 conservative majority.

The Supreme Court has surprised us before in its affirmative action decisions, and it may well do so again. But given what we know of Roberts’s views and the new majority he has to work with, affirmative action’s days in university admissions may be numbered.

I need everyone to watch Veneno, a stunning HBO Max series about storytelling and survival.

Sometimes, when we’re lucky, we get a TV show like Veneno — the kind of show that jolts you awake and makes you pay attention. The kind that makes you think about the countless ways we tell stories and all the possibilities we haven’t yet staked out. The kind that gives you the power to see the world differently and makes your senses tingle. The kind that makes you want to talk about it with anyone and everyone.

This kind of TV show, unfortunately, doesn’t come around often enough. And that’s why, I suppose, I’m writing about Veneno, an eight-episode, one-season HBO Max original series that I fully believe is the best television show of the last year.

Veneno, in practical use, is the Spanish word for venom. But it’s also the nickname of one Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez or “La Veneno,” a real-life, Spanish transgender singer and celebrity who rose to prominence in the mid-’90s after appearing on one of Spain’s popular late-night TV shows. Veneno is about her life, and all its joys and complications.

“Sultan, courtesan, Indian-like Pocahontas, but with a shark,” she tells a reporter when she’s asked to describe herself in the first episode (the show, which is in Spanish, is available to stream with English subtitles or English dubbing). “The shark … It’s between my legs. What else would the shark be?”

What Veneno makes clear is that at the time, sex work was one of the only acceptable professions for trans women. So on the margins of society, Cristina created her own life where she could be La Veneno and write the rules of her own existence. Within that existence, she can be whoever she wants to be — a sultan, a courtesan, Pocahontas — in ways that broader society would never accept (and maybe she didn’t always have the courage for).

Fantasy and beauty are redemptive; they are power.

Courtesy of HBO Max

Veneno is very much about Cristina as it chronicles her childhood, the trauma she endured, how she learned to overcome said trauma, and how she built a persona and wielded a sense of lethality to survive. But the series also examines her effect on other people: what this uncontrollable woman meant to the queer community, particularly transgender men and women, who watched her fight so many of their own internal and external battles in the public eye.

That perspective materializes through the eyes of a teenage Valeria Vegas, a college student who seeks to learn what happened to the La Veneno she saw on television as a kid. She catches up with La Veneno, whose glamour and glitz have given way to older age and a purple bathrobe she wears in the daytime. Valeria is not fully out herself when she meets her hero, and the show explores their parallel journeys about finding acceptance and what we learn from our chosen families.

Through flashbacks and shifts to present day, the two relive La Veneno’s life: the regrets, the joys, the excitement, the nemeses, the embarrassments, the volatility, and maybe — finally — the peace, because Vegas wants to write La Veneno’s biography.

That biography — ¡Digo! Ni puta ni santa. Las memorias de La Veneno (Not a Whore, Not a Saint: The Memories of La Veneno), which the real-life Vegas published in 2016 — serves as source material for the series. Vegas is credited as a writer on the show’s eight episodes and some of La Veneno’s real-life friends even play themselves.

Perhaps fittingly, the larger-than-life adult Cristina is played by three outstanding actresses, each one covering a different time period in her life. Jedet Sánchez, Daniela Santiago, and Isabel Torres play three largely different roles (Santiago gets to embody La Veneno at her splashiest, right when she becomes a star), but each one imbues her with dignity and humanity. Torres, in particular, will take your breath away as an older Cristina, wistfully looking back at the life she lived but never letting it slip into unmitigated sentimentality.

In many ways, Veneno is already groundbreaking just by its existence because of the way it confronts an utter lack of representation in the status quo. Shows about the trans experience and primarily about trans characters are few and far between (trans actors play the trans people in Cristina’s story). We’re still at a point where cisgender actors are stumbling through apologies for considering and taking transgender roles in movies and on TV. Sex work is still a topic the media struggles to get right. That Veneno is a breakthrough for television is both a compliment and an ugly truth about the progress the medium still needs to make.

But the revelations in Veneno don’t stop at representation.

Thematically, Veneno has a lot in common with the recently released It’s a Sin and the earlier FX series Pose (the latter of which accounts for the bulk of trans representation on TV). Emotionally, I’d also compare it to director Pedro Almodovar’s movies. One of my friends said it was like Tim Burton’s Big Fish, if Big Fish was about Paris Is Burning and directed by Almodovar — a perfect description, provided you’re familiar with all those references.

And yet, Veneno is quite simply its own beautiful thing.

Creators Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo have found a way to tell a story that so specifically nails the complexities of queer identity and insecurity in a way that feels so familiar to people who have lived that experience. It’s evident in moments as slight as Valeria’s body language, which tightens when she’s around her family, contrasted with the way she unspools when she’s in Cristina’s apartment. But it’s also present in scenes that are weightier and more honest, like the ones that depict the destructive ways Cristina copes with grief.

Their magic is finding a way to portray these difficult emotions without compromising the depth of Cristina’s lived experience.

The series is never cruel to Cristina, but it doesn’t paint her as infallible either. Veneno realizes that Cristina, like all of us, are architects of our own lives. The way each of us sees the world is a result of how we discern between reality and fantasy.

For queer people especially, that fantasy becomes more important when faced with a reality that doesn’t have space for you. Perhaps, like Cristina, you embrace the strength of storytelling to become the courtesan, the sultan, or the shark and find your own power — to invent your own legends about having affairs with princes, to will yourself to believe in magic and happily ever afters, like living for eternity on a Grecian island.

Ambrossi and Calvo acknowledge Cristina’s fantasies as such, playing with magical realism one moment and flanking it with the starkness of reality the next. The disconnect between our actuality and our dreams is purposely harsh, and maybe even painful. But at no moment do they ever deny how important fantasy is to La Veneno’s existence, and how understanding it is vital to understanding our own.

Veneno is streaming HBO Max. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

Increasing the minimum wage is the latest example of a Democratic policy that would do the most for those living under Republican state governments.

They'll try anything they can think of to keep Democrats from the polls, whether it's likely to work or not.

Republicans in the U.S. House last week unanimously opposed President Biden’s economic stimulus bill, even though polls show that the legislation is popular with the public. The U.S. Senate will consider the bill soon — and it looks like the overwhelming majority of Republicans in that chamber will oppose it as well. And it’s not just the stimulus. House Republicans also last week overwhelmingly opposed a bill to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. And the GOP seems poised to oppose upcoming Democratic bills to make it easier to vote and spend hundreds of billions to improve the nation’s infrastructure. All of those ideas are popular with the public, too.

“Duh,” you might say. Of course, the party out of power opposes the agenda of the party in power. Democrats did that during former President Donald Trump’s four years. Republicans did it during former President Barack Obama’s two terms. The parties just disagree on a lot of major issues.

You’ve seen this movie before, right?

This sequel is a little different, actually. Obama’s health care bill was only hovering around majority support as it moved through Congress. Trump’s proposals to repeal Obamacare and cut corporate taxes were downright unpopular. In contrast, Biden and the major elements of his agenda are popular. And the Republican Party isn’t, which helps explain why it was swept out of power in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

So if an unpopular party uniformly opposes popular policies in the run-up to 2022 and 2024, is it buying itself a ticket further into the political wilderness?

Not necessarily.

There are several reasons to think that opposing popular policies won’t hurt Republicans electorally, and conversely, that implementing a popular agenda won’t necessarily boost Biden that much.

The first reason that congressional Republicans can afford to oppose popular ideas is one that you have probably read a lot about over the last several years: The GOP has several big structural advantages in America’s electoral system. Because of the Electoral College, Trump would have won the presidency with around 257,000 more votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, even though he lost nationally by more than 7 million votes. The Senate gives equal weight to sparsely populated states like Wyoming and huge ones like California, so the chamber’s 50 Democratic senators effectively represent about 185 million Americans, while its 50 Republican senators represent about 143 million, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser recently calculated. Gerrymandering by Republicans, as well as the weakness of Democrats in rural areas, makes it harder for Democrats to win and keep control of the House even when most voters back Democratic House candidates. That’s what happened in 2020.

Put all that together, and congressional Republicans are somewhat insulated from the public will. In turn, the advantage for Biden and congressional Democrats of being closer to the public’s opinions is blunted.

Second, electoral politics and policy are increasingly disconnected. More and more Americans vote along party lines and are unlikely to break from their side no matter what it does. Some scholars argue that voters’ attachments to the parties are not that closely linked to the parties’ policy platforms but rather more akin to loyalty to a team or brand. And partisanship and voting are increasingly linked to racial attitudes, as opposed to policy. So GOP-leaning voters may support some Democratic policies but still vote for Republican politicians who oppose those policies.

Third, the last several midterm elections have all been defined by backlashes against the incumbent president. You could argue that there’s nothing inevitable about this, and that former President George W. Bush (Social Security reform, Iraq War), Obama (Obamacare in 2010 and its flawed rollout in 2014) and Trump (Obamacare repeal) all did or proposed controversial things that irritated voters. Maybe if Biden sticks to popular stuff he’ll buck the trend. But it could instead be the case that voters from the president’s party tend to be kind of fat and happy in midterms, while the opposition is inspired to turn out. So even if Biden does popular things, GOP voters could be more motivated to vote in November 2022.

Fourth, voters may like a president’s policies in the abstract but still think he isn’t doing a good job or that his policies aren’t that effective if those policies aren’t bipartisan. Think of this as the Mitch McConnell theory.

Early in Obama’s first term, the last time Democrats had control of the House, Senate and the presidency, the Kentucky senator and others in the GOP leadership came up with a strategy of trying to get as few congressional Republicans as possible to back then-President Obama’s ideas. As McConnell said publicly back then, he viewed voters as not especially attuned to the day-to-day happenings in Washington. Instead, he said, they evaluate a president in part based on whether his agenda seems divisive, particularly a president who campaigns on unifying the country (as both Obama and Biden did). That allows the opposition party to create the perception of division simply by voting against the president’s agenda.

Put another way: The opposition party can guarantee a lack of bipartisan support — and then criticize the president for lacking bipartisan support.

Maybe history won’t repeat itself. But being the “Party of No” in the Obama years resulted in the GOP winning the House, the Senate and then the presidency from 2010 to 2016. It is totally logical that a party still led by key figures from the Obama era (McConnell and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy) would think total opposition to a Democratic president would work again.

The fifth reason is a more complicated one: Swing voters may not swing to the party with the most popular policies — either because they don’t engage with politics in that way or because they are motivated by non-policy concerns. The Democratic Party and much of the media (either implicitly or explicitly) approach American politics using a “median voter” model of political success. That model goes like this: Some voters hold mostly liberal views, some hold mostly conservative views and then some hold views somewhere in the ideological middle. Candidates and parties who hold more centrist views will do better electorally because they will win the backing of voters in the ideological middle, as well as those on either the left or right.

Following this median voter approach, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Biden spent 2019 and 2020 pushing ideas that were popular with the party’s base and voters in the middle. They avoided stances — such as defunding the police or Medicare for All — that were not as popular. This view seems intuitive. And it’s hard to argue that it’s wrong — Democrats won the House, Senate and presidency in 2018 and 2020 following this approach. And it’s likely that Democrats would have done worse if they fully embraced unpopular ideas.

Where this gets more complicated is when considering the magnitude of this median approach. There’s clearly some electoral benefit in pursuing a more popular agenda, all else being equal. But how big is it? It’s not at all clear that Republicans suffer a lot from opposing popular ideas or proposing unpopular ones. And it’s not at all clear that Democrats gain significantly from running on things that poll well. Trump didn’t really pursue the median voter much in the 2020 election cycle — think of how he expressed skepticism about mask-wearing last year, contradicting the views of a clear majority of Americans, or how he pushed to put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court, even as polls suggested that most Americans wanted to let the winner of the presidential election choose the replacement for the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’s not that Trump did only unpopular things, but he did not seem to be courting the majority of the public’s support in his policy moves during his campaign or much of his tenure in office.

I think that’s why many in the media and in politics, myself included, were inclined to believe polls that showed Trump trailing in the high single digits around Election Day. It fit this general median voter model — Trump had governed in an unpopular way, punctuated by his handling of COVID-19, and it made sense to think that voters in the middle of the electorate would punish him severely.

Trump lost, but his 4.5-percentage-point defeat nationally was closer than most polls suggested.

Why didn’t Trump face a bigger backlash? Well, the partisanship of the electorate no doubt played a big role. There were a ton of voters who were never going to back a Democrat, no matter how moderate the candidate or how many controversial stands Trump took.

That said, it’s possible that the median voter concept either wasn’t that sound in the first place or is increasingly outdated. As FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman has written, there are swing voters — but they aren’t necessarily centrists who choose the candidate closest to the middle. Swing voters often have either a hodgepodge of views (some on the left, some on the right) and/or don’t have strongly defined views at all. That doesn’t mean that either party should nominate an extremist — it’s likely someone with extreme views will turn off more swing voters more than a candidate closer to the middle. But it suggests that a candidate who positions themself in the center may not reap large electoral benefits.

“If liberals were right about how politics worked, Donald Trump should never have been possible, and his party should have suffered crushing, generational defeats in the wake of his election, especially last November,” said Will Stancil, an expert on civil-rights law and policy who works at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity.

He added, “Politics is as much irrational, emotive factionalism as anything else. But liberals only seem capable of understanding it as an orderly marketplace of ideas and will contort themselves in pretzels to preserve the fiction that voters’ commitments are rational and mechanical.”

Furthermore, taking popular stands may not matter that much if voters don’t hear about it. Or if they don’t factor those stands into how they vote. So it’s likely that some Americans either didn’t know about Biden’s popular policy stands in 2020 or didn’t focus on them when they decided how to vote, instead thinking more about the negative things about Biden circulating in conservative media or among QAnon believers. Biden and Trump aren’t on the ballot in 2022. But you can see how Democrats might again run on a bunch of policies that poll well, assume that they are reaching a big bloc of voters in the ideological middle but end up not doing that well among swing voters.

“Arguing that Democrats’ push for popular policies or Republican opposition to them is going to sway voters’ views of the parties relies on an unspoken assumption that accurate news of who is supporting what will actually reach voters,” said Lara Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh. “But it’s the right wing that dominates the ‘last mile’ communications infrastructure into millions of Americans’ homes: the memes shared in Facebook groups, the radio personalities who are known and trusted,” she said.

Democrats could gain seats in next year’s midterms and win the presidency in 2024 because they are touting popular ideas and the GOP is opposing them. They might have the right strategy. But it’s not obviously true that their approach will work. Republicans are making a somewhat counterintuitive bet that opposing popular bills won’t kill them electorally — and there are a lot of good reasons to think that they are right.

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