James.galbraith

Gov. Ron DeSantis’s plan to make it harder to vote by mail, briefly explained.

In the 2020 presidential election, more Floridians than ever before voted by mail. Now, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to make voting by mail more difficult.

At a news conference in Palm Beach on Friday, DeSantis, a Republican, announced a proposed slate of new voting restrictions that would make it more difficult for voters to receive and return mail-in ballots in future Florida elections.

In doing so, he joined a wave of state and local officials who have worked in the months since the 2020 general election to introduce new voting restrictions, arguing these policies will make voting more secure.

Specifically, DeSantis called on the Florida legislature to address “ballot harvesting” (when mail-in ballots are collected for delivery at a drop-off location) and ballot drop boxes, to ban mailing out ballots to voters who haven’t requested one, and to tighten the rules around requesting a ballot so that requests must be made every election year.

Currently, a request for a vote-by-mail ballot is valid for two general election cycles, according to the Florida ACLU; DeSantis’s proposed change would mean that voters have to do so more frequently, potentially raising the logistical barriers to voting by mail.

DeSantis also lauded Florida’s voting system in his speech, arguing the state had the most “transparent and efficient election anywhere in the country,” and pointing out that Florida — which went for former President Donald Trump in November — counted ballots far more quickly than some states. But he claimed the new measures are necessary in order to ensure election integrity.

“We need to make sure that we continue to stay ahead of the curve,” DeSantis said Friday. “We need to make sure that our citizens have confidence in the elections.”

It’s unclear, however, whether his proposed changes, if passed into law, would do much to aid those goals.

Many of the policies DeSantis proposed are essentially already in place in his state: Florida does not currently permit the mass mailing of unrequested vote-by-mail ballots, and the state also has substantial restrictions on “ballot harvesting” already in place, something which DeSantis admitted in his speech.

“We’re not a big ballot-harvesting state as it is,” he said. “But any type of loopholes, or any type of room where that could be abused, we want to make sure that we address it.”

Trump has previously attacked ballot harvesting as “rampant with fraud,” which it isn’t, and the practice is a frequent Republican hobbyhorse. According to NPR, however, Trump himself had his Florida vote-by-mail ballot submitted by a third party in 2020.

DeSantis also suggested Friday that Florida might need to find ways to tighten its existing signature match law, which requires the signature on an absentee or vote-by-mail ballot to match the voter signature already on file.

“If there needs to be ways to bolster the signature verification,” DeSantis said, “then we need to do that as well.”

Signature verification laws, however, can be problematic: Signature mismatches can be highly subjective, as the Atlantic’s David Graham reported last year, and voters of color, among other demographics, often have their ballots rejected at a far higher rate than white voters.

“Fraud is exceedingly rare,” Graham points out. “The much greater danger is that legitimate ballots will be thrown out.”

Overall, Florida’s 2020 election — like the elections held by all other states — proceeded without any unusual irregularities or sweeping fraud; it is unclear how DeSantis’s proposals would improve on the current system.

It is clear, however, that they fit squarely with a national trend in the aftermath of the 2020 election cycle: After losing control of not just the presidency, but the Senate, Republicans across the country are moving to make voting more difficult.

The Republican solution to losing an election is to make it harder to vote

In the months since the presidential election, Republicans state legislatures have leaned into Trump’s baseless election fraud rhetoric and moved quickly to impose new voting restriction.

Specifically, according to a February report from the Brennan Center for Justice, “Thirty-three states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020).”

Some of those bills, such as a measure in Georgia that would end early voting on Sundays, unabashedly target Black voters, who played a major role in Democrats claiming control of the Senate. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explained Friday, the change “would be a blow to Black churches that host ‘Souls to the Polls’ get-out-the-vote events” on Sunday, in which parishioners are transported by church leaders to polling places after services.

Others, such as a Republican-backed bill in Arizona that would require all vote-by-mail ballots to be notarized, would make it harder for anyone to cast an absentee ballot.

Many of the states where Republicans are pushing new voter restrictions, including Arizona and Georgia, will be sites of competitive Senate races in 2022.

Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly will be seeking a full six-year term in 2022 after winning a special election in 2020, as will Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who won his seat in a special election runoff in January this year.

And Republicans will be defending seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa — all three states where Republicans have moved to implement new voter restrictions — as well as Florida, where Sen. Marco Rubio will be up for reelection.

Despite the flurry of new bills, however, it’s not a sure thing that Republicans will succeed in passing new voter restrictions into law. In some states, such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Democratic governors could veto any such changes.

And even in Georgia, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion as well as the legislature, one anonymous Republican strategist told the Washington Post that such measures could backfire. “There’s still an appetite from a lot of Republicans to do stuff like this, but it’s not bright,” he said. “It just gives Democrats a baseball bat with which to beat us.”

At the national level, Democrats also have their own plan to expand voting rights and protect voters: the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which is named for the late civil rights activist who represented a Georgia district in the House until his death last year.

According to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the bill would restore major swaths of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — portions of which were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013 — in order to “protect all Americans’ right to vote.”

There’s also the For The People Act, which was reintroduced on the first day of the new Congress in 2021. If passed, the bill would expand early and mail-in voting, make it easier to register to vote, and put an end to partisan gerrymandering, among other changes.

“You know that our work is far from finished,” Lewis said in 2019. “It makes me sad. It makes me feel like crying when people are denied the right to vote. We all know that this is not a Democratic or Republican issue: It’s an American one.”

For a crowd that pretends to stand for “personal responsibility,” the right-wingers and so-called conservatives who make up the Republican Party sure seem to have a weird aversion to admitting their own mistakes.

This latest fiasco in Texas is just one of nearly daily examples. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was probably about five years old when the modern Texas power grid was put into place, is responsible for millions of Texans suffering without power this week. Somehow we’re supposed to blame the complete lack of winterization of the same power grid—a task solely within the control of Texas’ Republican legislature and governors for the past two decades—is failing because of the “Green New Deal,” a law that doesn’t exist now and has never existed. Somehow renewable energy, which supplies a measly 10% of all Texas power plant consumption, is at fault.

Sen. Ted Cruz jaunts off to Cancun, leaving his Texas constituents to fend for themselves without power in subzero temperatures. But it’s not like he’s responsible: No, he’s blaming his kids.

This is really quite the pattern lately. Let’s start in reverse order, shall we?

Thousands of people wearing Trump garb and using Trump flags as weapons assault the U.S. Capitol. Most of them are caught on film and boasting about their insurrection on social media. Upon arrest, most of them claim they were lured into attacking the Capitol by Donald Trump. As a result, five people die.

Who does the conservative media say caused the riots? “Antifa!”

Trump gets his ass kicked in the 2020 election. Could it have been a) because of the hundreds of thousands of dead Americans?; b) because he showed not a shred of empathy?; c) because he was the most criminal, racist, misogynistic, incompetent president in American history?; d) because he had no achievements to speak of that helped the American people?; or e) all of the above?

No, it was “Election fraud! Stop the Steal! Dominion!”

Over 500,000 people in this country, more than any other, die from the novel coronavirus. Trump was president for the vast majority of those deaths, and his lackeys were in charge of coordinating a federal response.

Who is responsible? “China! The World Health Organization!” 

Who should get the blame? “Andrew Cuomo!” Why? Because New York nursing homes!” 

Would that have changed anything about the federal response? “Didn’t you hear me? Andrew Cuomo!!!”

Meanwhile, unemployment, hunger, and evictions skyrocket as businesses close. Could it be because of Trump’s gross mismanagement of the worst pandemic ever to hit the country? “No, it’s the Democratic governors!“

Why? “Because they should have left their businesses open!.” Wouldn’t that have doubled the number of deaths? “No! Hoax! Flu!”

Trump is impeached. Is it because he tried to extort a false story out of Ukraine to damage Joe Biden? And that was akin to bribery? And he tried to cover it up? 

No, it’s because of “Hunter Biden. It’s all on a laptop somewhere ... We’ll get back to you.”

Millions of people protest in the streets of America for Black Lives Matter. Why are they protesting? Maybe because of bad, violent, racist cops? “No, it’s Black people’s fault cops use so much force! Portland! Blue Lives Matter! Portland! Antifa! Look, they broke a window in Portland?”

Republicans get hammered in the 2018 midterms despite gerrymandering the entire country. Was it because a) of Donald Trump; b) they had no ideas except tax cuts for mega-corporate CEOs; c) Donald Trump; or d) Donald Trump? “No, none of those reasons, and to prove it we’re going to double down on Donald Trump!“

It goes on and on. Global financial collapse? “It was all the fault of poor Black people buying houses they couldn’t afford!”

Katrina?“It was that Black mayor’s fault! He should have used the schoolbuses!”

Just once, I’d like to hear a conservative say, “Man, we really f*cked up, or “Totally our fault, folks,” or “We made a big mistake here.”

But that may never happen. Because being a member of the “personal responsibility” party means you’re never, ever responsible for anything.

Wholesale power plans left Texans on the hook for thousands of dollars after prices spiked.

In Texas this week, freezing temperatures overwhelmed the state’s power grid, triggering rolling blackouts, multi-day power outages — and, catastrophic electric bills.

According to the Dallas Morning News, some Texans have been hit with power bills totaling as much as $17,000 for only a few days of electricity, many times more than the usual cost of power in Texas.

Specifically, it’s Texas residents who rely on a wholesale power plan, rather than a fixed-rate plan, who have seen their bills climb after the demand for power jumped dramatically across the state this week as Winter Storm Uri struck and temperatures plunged. Texas, which has a deregulated electricity market, has a number of providers, both wholesale and fixed rate.

Fixed-rate customers pay an agreed-upon rate for their power, but wholesale buyers pay a variable rate; whatever the current price per kilowatt-hour of electricity is. Wholesale power plans, such as those offered by Texas energy company Griddy, can be attractive because during good weather, a customer on a variable plan will pay less than one on a fixed-rate plan, according to Public Utility Commission of Texas spokesperson Andrew Barlow.

The problem is, weather isn’t always good — in Dallas on Tuesday, the low temperature was 4 degrees Fahrenheit, colder than in Anchorage, Alaska.

That freezing weather led to rolling blackouts throughout the state amid an increased demand for power; in turn, that demand caused prices to spike, with wholesale rates soaring to about $8,800 per megawatt-hour in the Dallas area on Wednesday.

According to Reuters, the wholesale rate before this week’s storm was only about $50 per megawatt-hour. On Wednesday, Texas’s Public Utility Commission moved to cap wholesale prices at $9,000 per megawatt-hour, or $9 per kilowatt-hour.

Griddy, the wholesale power company that has faced the most rancor from customers online, warned customers on Monday that their rates could climb precipitously with the onset of cold weather — but those warnings didn’t come in time for many Texans to change to a new service provider, the Dallas Morning News reported Friday, and people were still caught off guard by their power bills.

“$5,000 for five days is outrageous,” Dallas resident DeAndré Upshaw told Morning News reporter Maria Halkias Friday. “No one could have anticipated this except the people who manage the service and the power grid.”

The winter storm was not the first time wholesale customers in Texas have been stuck with large bills due to unexpected weather; in 2019, a heat wave caused a spike in power usage — and a sudden increase in wholesale prices — that left many Texans paying hundreds of dollars more than they expected for power. But for some Texans, the current situation is worse by several orders of magnitude, and comes at a difficult time economically, with the US in the midst of a pandemic-related recession.

According to The Verge, “4.8 million Americans were unable to pay at least one energy bill last year and received a disconnection notice from their utility company.” Texas’s supersized wholesale power bills are sure to make that problem more acute in the aftermath of the storm.

As Texas struggles to recover from the winter storm — President Joe Biden approved a major disaster declaration for the state on Saturday — it’s unclear what comes next for Texans who got stuck with astronomic energy bills.

In a Friday statement, however, Griddy said that it was “seeking customer relief” from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages most of the state’s power grid, and from the state’s Public Utility Commission.

“Griddy is continuing these efforts and is committed to crediting customers for any relief received, dollar-for-dollar,” the company said. Failing that relief, customers could be on the hook for thousands of dollars worth of bills.

Gigantic electric bills are just part of Texas’s power problem this week

Texas has been in unique difficulty this week in part because of the state’s unique power system: Unlike the rest of the lower 48, most of the Lone Star State relies on ERCOT’s independent, internal power grid, which provides about 90 percent of the state’s electricity.

As Vox’s Umair Irfan explained earlier this week, it’s been a hard week for that grid, even though Texas is “the largest oil, natural gas, and wind energy producer” in the country. Demand has far exceeded supply, which is what led to rolling blackouts and dramatically higher prices.

According to Irfan:

The sudden cold snap this weekend put the state’s ample resources to the test, with demand reaching a record high peak for the winter, more than 69,000 megawatts. That’s 3,200 MW higher than the previous record set in 2018.

As demand reached new heights, the supply of electricity fell drastically in the past few days, far below what operators expected. Ordinarily, ERCOT plans for winter to be much warmer and anticipates a lower energy demand. Power providers often schedule downtime and maintenance during the winter months to prepare for the massive annual surge in electricity demand in the hot Texas summer. The state’s ample wind and solar energy resources are also diminished in the winter, so ERCOT doesn’t depend on them to meet much of the demand they anticipate.

Texas’s power grid was also hobbled by lower-than-usual electricity supply after natural gas pipelines froze in the winter weather, and as energy production dropped off across the board. This put the state in an even worse jam, and also contributed to high power prices.

Texas’s decision to remain on an independent grid dates back more than 80 years, according to NBC, and was intended to keep Texas utilities free of federal regulation. It’s succeeded on that count — but at the cost of not being able to borrow power from other states in a crisis.

“The Texas power grid is really an island,” Rice University professor Daniel Cohan told Vox earlier this week. “Whatever happens in Texas stays in Texas.”

As of Friday, things were getting back to normal with the Texas grid, though the state is still facing water and food shortages. ERCOT ended emergency conditions and returned to normal operation; the number of people without power fell to just about 58,000, as of late Saturday afternoon, rather than millions.

For Griddy customers and other Texans on a wholesale plan, however, the effects of the storm will linger in the form of gigantic power bills.

“I don’t have that type of money,” one Texas resident, Akilah Scott-Amos, told the Daily Beast this week. “I now owe Griddy $2,869.11. This is going to put me in debt, this is going to mess up my credit. Are they going to cut me off? In the middle of this ongoing crisis?”

Enlarge (credit: Jayson Photography / Getty Images)

A previously undetected piece of malware found on almost 30,000 Macs worldwide is generating intrigue in security circles, and security researchers are still trying to understand precisely what it does and what purpose its self-destruct capability serves.

Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload on any of the infected 30,000 machines, leaving the malware’s ultimate goal unknown. The lack of a final payload suggests that the malware may spring into action once an unknown condition is met.

Also curious, the malware comes with a mechanism to completely remove itself, a capability that’s typically reserved for high-stealth operations. So far, though, there are no signs the self-destruct feature has been used, raising the question of why the mechanism exists.

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A federal judge has ruled that Citibank isn't entitled to the return of $500 million it sent to various creditors last August. Kludgey software and a poorly designed user interface contributed to the massive screwup.

Citibank was acting as an agent for Revlon, which owed hundreds of millions of dollars to various creditors. On August 11, Citibank was supposed to send out interest payments totaling $7.8 million to these creditors.

However, Revlon was in the process of refinancing its debt—paying off a few creditors while rolling the rest of its debt into a new loan. And this, combined with the confusing interface of financial software called Flexcube, led the bank to accidentally pay back the principal on the entire loan—most of which wasn't due until 2023.

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This is fine

All right, we have to do it. We have to spend a few moments celebrating these new accomplishments by the forever hapless but somehow still-sociopathic Sen. Ted Cruz, a man who once had presidential aspirations but who now spends his days humiliating himself and those around him, chipping away at his own integrity in what appears to be a spirited game of Dog Turd Jenga.

Oh, Ted. What are you, even?

As we all now know, Ted Cruz was caught taking a flight to the resort town of Cancun, Mexico, during (1) a massive natural disaster in his home state that caused much of the state to lose power and is now resulting in citizens dying in their homes and (2) a global pandemic that has killed 500,000 Americans, closed schools, shuttered businesses, and prevented many Americans from seeing their friends or loved ones for something approaching a full year now.

When caught, Ted blamed his young children. "Like millions of Texans, our family lost heat and power too," says Ted. "With school cancelled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon."

You've heard of the general edict between politicians and press to "leave the children out of it." This is the other edict: When in political danger, throw your youngest daughter at reporters and bolt.

Now, there are sev-er-al problems with Cruz's statement up there, and that's being generous. Cruz previously said that his home did not lose power, suggesting he was selflessly hosting the neighbor children who were not so fortunate. The airport pictures show Cruz with a rather significant amount of luggage for a supposed one-night stay, but we will be good sports and presume that he is merely moonlighting as a Texas drug mule or that he never, ever leaves the country without a two week supply of his favorite canned soups.

Fine. But then there's the rather bigger problem of Ted Cruz, a United States senator, willingly declaring that despite a deadly global pandemic, his kids got bored during a school break and insisted daddy spirit them off to Mexico for funsies, which he of course did, but of course he had to shepherd them there himself before, um, turning right around and coming back. Really now? Really? The rest of us are conducting half our lives over Zoom to keep ourselves and our neighbors safe during a plague while the senators ostensibly in charge of these things are letting their daughters organize their own international superspreader events? Outstanding. Just outstanding.

By far the biggest flaw with Ted's claims here, however—and it is a doozy—is that an airline-knowledgable reporter was quickly able to check with a source and reports that Cruz's original United Airlines tickets originally had him booked to return Saturday. Ted Cruz is, apparently, just brazenly lying his confederate beard off on this one.

I realize that does not really come as a surprise to anyone, given that the current crop of propaganda-spewing Republicans quite literally uses lying as means of governance and therefore lies about absolutely everything, all the time, but it still needs to be said that this yellowbellied Texas lungfish blamed a weekend Cancun vacation on his kids, then lied to everyone in his state about how Actually he was just tagging along to show them how to work the hotel vending machines.

Nope. It seems Cruz had, among senators, a very particular reason for being outraged at the notion that the Senate might have to hear evidence in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump for longer than a few days. Cruz had an international beach trip planned for the Senate break, and didn't intend to let a probe of whether a former president attempted to have his vice president and a good chunk of the presidential line of succession killed in a coup attempt interfere with that.

Oh, and apparently he didn't even tell his staff where he was going, which was the reason his staff had no immediate response when pictures began flowing in of their boss leaving the damn country. The last time that happened we learned that a certain Republican governor had an Argentinian mistress, but not before his staff had piped up with a cover story claiming he was off hiking the Appalachian Trail on—shoulda done a little research on that one, kids—National Nude Hiking Day.

You may, at this point, be almost close to maybe having a microscopic bit of sympathy for Ted Cruz in the form of at least being embarrassed on his behalf for being such an amazingly craven little sea squirt. Don't bother. Once the Jan. 6 seditionist had been caught and had to book a quick flight back to Texas in order to pretend that he gave two biscuits about his voters freezing to death in their homes, one of the things his staff quickly made sure of was to contact the Houston Police Department to arrange for their "assistance" at the airport when he got back.

Sure, it's not like anyone in Texas has anything better to do right now. Surely there're some spare officers available to guide Cruz through an airport terminal and fend off anyone who wants to ask for more details about his international pandemic superspreader sleepover.

Cruz has managed to be a truly amazing human being these last few years, and that should not be taken as praise. He has managed to throw every member of his family, from his father to his wife to his children, under ye olde tour bus in his various attempts to slither through a political career. He has both Trump's sociopathic unwillingness to stick to the truth and a personality so magnificently awful that he could save 10 orphans from a burning orphanage and still somehow come out of it more hated than he was when he went inside. Above all, he somehow managed to maneuver himself into playing a central role in the biggest seditious anti-government conspiracy since the actual Civil War, all in service to an incompetent blowhard and gasbag, under the apparent impression that what the nation really needs these days is to just nix elections outright and put tax-dodging rapists in charge.

Did he support the nullification of an election because his kids and their friends were bored and wanted to play insurrection, or was that one on him? If any of us could still stomach even hearing this mulletfaced Gulf treasonfish bubble at us any longer it might make for a fascinating story, but if Texas voters still have a drop of dignity left maybe they'll run Ted out of town—the roads are slick, so a pair of skates and a little push is probably all it would take—and appoint a particularly irritable rat snake to fill out his term.

The 1990s Christian radio ecosystem played a crucial role in enabling Limbaugh and conservative talk radio.

The late Rush Limbaugh’s far-reaching and toxic impact on conservative America and the Republican party is well-known and well-documented. Still, there’s one aspect of his legacy, specifically his cultural dominance in the 1990s, that’s difficult to convey in the post-internet era: Limbaugh’s pivotal role in the ascension of conservative talk radio and the pivotal role that conservative radio played in emboldening modern conservative populism.

For many years throughout the Clinton era, Limbaugh’s daily radio program, The Rush Limbaugh Show, was synonymous with conservative political media and part of a larger burgeoning conservative radio ecosystem. The show, which aired for three hours each afternoon across America, began syndicating nationally in 1988 — incidentally the same year that famed evangelist minister Billy Graham delivered the benediction for both the Republican and Democratic national conventions. If you can’t imagine that happening today, it’s due in large part to the political polarization Limbaugh himself helped engender. In fact, Graham’s brand of evangelical Christianity spread across many of the same airwaves that also aired Limbaugh’s brand of toxic conservative bigotry.

Rush Limbaugh didn’t emerge from a vacuum. He was part of a Christian-based radio ecosystem that allowed his message to thrive.

The key detail that frequently gets lost when discussing Rush Limbaugh and his influence is that Limbaugh didn’t come out of nowhere. At the time he rose to prominence, he was part of a conservative radio ecosystem priming its listeners for exactly the kind of content he provided. In particular, the late 1980s and early ’90s saw the rise of Christian evangelism as a major media force. The popularity of televangelists and megachurches throughout that period fueled the idea of modern Christians as an identifiable audience that could be targeted as a group, which paved the way for the phenomenon that was Christian radio.

Picture the typical radio diet for the average conservative Christian in the 1990s: The typical middle-American Protestant would probably have their dial tuned to a radio station that was either owned by, or partnering with, one of the many Christian radio networks that established a foothold over the decade — like Salem Media, founded in 1986 and now one of the largest radio networks in the US. Or the American Family Radio network, which was founded in 1991 and rapidly grew to encompass more than 200 radio stations across the country. Part of the American Family Association, the network frequently aired anti-gay propaganda and helped popularize the notion of “the homosexual agenda.”

That same listener might, on any given day, hear one of Dr. James Dobson’s daily advice spots on his Focus on the Family network, which broadcast daily guides to Christian life, as well as promoting staunchly pro-life, creationist, and anti-gay political stances. (Network founder Dobson was also then the head of the bigoted Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has since classified as an anti-LGBTQ extremist group.)

At its peak, Dobson’s flagship Focus on the Family spots were broadcast to 220 million people daily on 7,000 radio stations globally. These short segments were often paired with Focus on the Family’s Adventures in Odyssey, the network’s Christian children’s radio drama which began in 1987 and became a big part of the era’s Christian fantasy boom. The Christian fantasy boom itself was bolstered by Satanic Panic and the pervasive evangelical theme of the period that not only were angels and demons real, but Christianity itself was a process of daily “spiritual warfare,” which often involved putting on the “spiritual armor of God” and figuratively doing battle with outside forces.

This was a theme reinforced by many songs that played throughout the late ’80s and ’90s on contemporary Christian radio stations, which were also enjoying a simultaneous massive rise in popularity. Contemporary Christian music artists, or “CCM” artists, like Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Jars of Clay, and DC Talk frequently received airplay on mainstream contemporary radio alongside secular music.

As a genre, CCM often wedded all of these elements — the evangelism, the adrenalin-fueled “spiritual warfare” mentality, and the politicization of contemporary Christianity — into one irresistible package. Take, for example, the biggest successes of the CCM artist Carman, who peaked in the ’90s with a popular tour that doubled as a musical concert and an evangelical revival conference. His best-known hit, “The Champion,” featured an extravagant music video that depicted Jesus and Satan in a boxing match, from which Jesus emerged victorious. (Carman died this week at the age of 65.)

It was within this pervasive atmosphere of pumped-up, aggressively combative evangelism and overtly polarizing political messages that Rush Limbaugh gained popularity. His show was another piece of the rapidly coalescing image of America’s new conservative — one in which Limbaugh’s lack of Christian empathy somehow became a feature, not a bug, of the modern conservative movement.

Limbaugh’s radio show emboldened a new era of conservative populism

While each of these radio networks was ostensibly Christian-focused at their outset, they each played a major role in bringing conservative talk radio to the forefront of America’s cultural conversation. All of them increasingly added the format to their lineups, interspersed between their other programming; they aired conservative talk radio shows alongside other content, cross-promoted conservative talk radio stations on their sibling CCM radio stations, and sometimes converted mixed-content Christian radio stations fully over to political talk radio. (This fate befell my own hometown radio station multiple times over the decades, as it flipped back and forth between CCM and talk radio.) Salem Media then went on to expand into dozens of conservative talk stations, and Dobson eventually left Focus on the Family to found his own even more overtly political radio network, Family Talk, which emphasizes talk radio.

By promoting talk radio’s partisan political discussions alongside their Christian “family-focused” messaging, all of these networks merged the Christian idea of being at war with spiritual “outsiders” with a conservative political theme that’s still dominant today: painting left-of-center democratic politics as immoral.

This framing was often explicit. When evangelicals of the ’90s urged their fellow Christians to engage in spiritual warfare, they often meant that they should all be working against Democrats and Democratic policies. For example, in the Christian fantasy bestseller of the era, Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness series, a variety of left-leaning concepts and policies, from globalization to the welfare system, were presented as being part of an overarching Satanic influence. The books depicted demons as being physically attached to leftist political enemies of the church, while occultist New Age conspirators controlled democratic politicians. (Sound familiar?)

In other words, Clinton-era Democrats weren’t just Christian conservatives’ political enemies. They were The Enemy.

So when Rush Limbaugh — with his braggadocio, mockery of his political opposites, and confident assertion of his own righteous authority over any subject put before him — hit the airwaves and began broadcasting for three hours every day, five days a week, conservative Americans responded to him very similarly to how they would respond to Donald Trump decades later: They lauded him as a much-needed, truth-speaking foil to godless liberals.

A built-in assumption of Limbaugh’s righteousness allowed him to go unchallenged for years in spouting bigotry, including outright racism and homophobia. He constantly asserted the moral vacuity of Democrats while couching his own arguments in populist appeals, played for laughs, such that they could be more easily overlooked as jokes. Like Trump, it didn’t matter that he himself wasn’t particularly moral or spiritual or good — what mattered to his audience was that he held the ostensibly immoral and unholy up to a lens for public scrutiny and collective ridicule.

For a case study of this approach in action, look to one of Bill Clinton’s cabinet appointees, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the nation’s first Black Surgeon General. At the time of Elders’s appointment, Americans really weren’t outraged by her, and Republican senators had no real reason to block her nomination. But then Limbaugh viciously and relentlessly attacked Elders throughout the ’90s and beyond, labeling her “the condom queen” and using a thick, racist accent to mock her pro-abortion-rights and pro-sex-education stances. Limbaugh’s radio show arguably played a major role in fomenting negative public opinion against Elders, until Clinton ultimately fired her in 1994. “Goodbye to the Condom Queen,” a Newsweek headline crowed at the time.

I couldn’t find any widely available audio from the period in which Limbaugh mocked Elders, but I remember it vividly: As a teen who spent years listening to Limbaugh with family members, I remember his crude mockery of her — like her entirely reasonable suggestion, “I would like to make every child born in America a planned and wanted child.” In Limbaugh’s racist, exaggerated accent, this became a catchphrase he repeated over and over — “ever’ chil’ a planned and wanted chil’” — until Elders became one of his go-to examples of liberal insanity.

Limbaugh’s audience tolerated his bigotry not because it wasn’t abhorrent — I remember it so clearly because of how much it disturbed me at the time — but because they saw liberalism as even worse. Aspects of his “comedy” that appear horrific to modern-day listeners were frequently seen as acceptable because he framed the liberal lifestyle as being so immoral that displaying empathy toward it was laughable. This includes his now-infamous “AIDS updates,” a recurring segment in which he mocked dying gay AIDS patients. Limbaugh did eventually express regret over the segment and ended it by 1990 — but by then the damage was done, and his pattern of greeting liberal excess with savage mockery was both well-established and welcomed by his fans.

Writing in 1994, the well-known conservative columnist Joseph Sobran argued that there was no liberal equivalent to Limbaugh because liberalism’s “shrill ridicule of the normal is essentially humorless”:

The key to Limbaugh’s humor is his robust sense of the normal. Humor might almost be defined as the revenge of the normal on the official. Liberalism, having been official for lo these many years, has tried to outlaw many traditional sources of humor with epithets like “bigoted” and (heaven help us) “homophobic.”

Sobran’s mocking attitude reveals how Limbaugh’s humor typically came off to listeners at the time. And Limbaugh’s “normal,” casually bigoted view of the world aligned with conservative Christianity’s view of the tenets of liberal democracy as sinful. That these worldviews were being promoted alongside each other on the same radio stations, by the same radio networks, made them increasingly difficult to extricate from one another.

All the while, as Limbaugh was rarely chastised for his bigotry due to the conservative feeling that liberalism was worse, many in his audience were being encouraged and emboldened. His followers called themselves “Dittoheads” as a way of emphasizing that Limbaugh’s view of America was one that every properly minded listener agreed with — and that view inevitably included Limbaugh’s prejudices. As the Orlando Sentinel noted with unwittingly chilling foresight in 1993, “Some laugh off Limbaugh’s extreme remarks — his ‘femi-Nazi’ tirades, for instance — while others take him very, very seriously.”

Again, there are clear parallels between support for Limbaugh and the justifications that many Trump voters found for their support of Trump in 2016, despite his outspoken and ongoing racism and bigotry. Trump attracted voters with a high level of racial resentment, even as other supporters and many in the media tried to frame Trump voters’ main concerns as being primarily economic.

Like Trump, Limbaugh managed to cull an extreme level of patriotic, populist zeal from his listeners. As a teen growing up in a conservative Christian household, when my family tuned in to Limbaugh and his daily floods of enthusiastic callers across the country, politics felt like a fun national sport that my team was winning. And I was primed to view the stakes in terms of winning and losing because contemporary Christian culture had me viewing everything in terms of epic spiritual warfare, of battles won and lost for the “good” team.

When Newt Gingrich unveiled his “Contract With America” in 1994, a litany of proposed GOP initiatives for the coming midterm elections, Limbaugh talked it up constantly on his show — by then the most popular radio show in the country by far, with weekly estimated audiences of between 14 million and 20 million. Though pundits have since downplayed its political importance, the “Contract” felt to me at the time like a major historical movement: an actual, concrete victory campaign, with Limbaugh helming the cavalry charge. When the Contract subsequently helped deliver the House to Republicans in 1994 for the first time in four decades, incoming Republican Congress members thanked Limbaugh explicitly for helping them win.

“Talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide, Rush, and we know that,“ Rep. Barbara Cubin (R–WY) told Limbaugh at the time. “You were the voice that everyone else could follow.”

Speaking to Fox News’ The Story after Limbaugh’s death on Wednesday, Gingrich was effusive on this subject: “Without Rush, I doubt if we would have won control of the House in 1994 ... his impact was more than the 20 million listeners a week, it was all of the people they would go talk to. My guess is that the ripple effect of Rush was 80 to 90 million people every single week because people would go out and say, ‘Did you hear what Rush said today?’”

Gingrich’s assessment is accurate: The Limbaugh Show did have a water cooler effect — at least in my own family, where we discussed what Rush said and thought about the issues of the day alongside the news itself. Before social media bubbles, Limbaugh’s fandom was a self-contained bubble of its own. And the sense of collectivity and community it engendered allowed a specific strain of unchecked, inexpert, self-cultivated conservative talk radio to flourish, thus paving the way for today’s polarized and highly partisan landscape of politicized commentary, spanning everything from Joe Rogan to Infowars.

In the 25 years since Limbaugh’s peak, the subsequent massive rise of conservative talk radio has helped further divide an already divided country. Though Fox News and its links to Donald Trump have been in the spotlight much more frequently of late, the effect of conservative radio on America’s political discourse cannot be dismissed. Long before the 2016 election, the format played a huge role in shifting the views of once-centrist Republicans — a shift I witnessed in my own family — toward the far right.

Many of us haven’t listened to Rush Limbaugh in decades, but we’re all still feeling his influence daily, like it or not.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Paul Taylor)

House Republicans have unveiled their plan for "boosting" broadband connectivity and competition, and one of the key planks is prohibiting states and cities from building their own networks. The proposal to ban new public networks was included in the "Boosting Broadband Connectivity Agenda" announced Tuesday by Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Bob Latta (R-Ohio), the top Republicans on the House Commerce Committee and Subcommittee for Communications and Technology, respectively.

Republicans call it the CONNECT Act, for "Communities Overregulating Networks Need Economic Competition Today." The bill "would promote competition by limiting government-run broadband networks throughout the country and encouraging private investment," the Commerce Committee Republicans said in their announcement, without explaining how limiting the number of broadband networks would increase competition. Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) is the lead sponsor.

The bill itself says that "a State or political subdivision thereof may not provide or offer for sale to the public, a telecommunications provider, or to a commercial provider of broadband Internet access service, retail or wholesale broadband Internet access service."

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Texans who have been without power for days in the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri are now also facing food and water crises as frigid temperatures and ongoing blackouts disrupt supply chains and wreak havoc on the state’s infrastructure—compounding emergencies that have spurred intensifying backlash against GOP leaders.

At his first press conference since the devastating winter storm slammed the state, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott—facing growing calls to resign—said Wednesday that he didn’t know when the nearly three million households still without power will see their electricity restored.

“That is information that has not been provided to me,” said Abbott, who has shifted blame onto state energy officials and erroneously claimed the state’s wind and solar power sources are responsible for blackouts.

In a statement following Abbott’s press briefing, Texas Democratic Party chair Gilberto Hinojosa said the Republican governor’s “lack of foresight and inability to manage this crisis is part of a repeated pattern.”

“Crisis after crisis, Greg Abbott has failed and passed off blame to somebody else,” said Hinojosa. “Texas is in dire straits. Texans are dying. Homes are being destroyed, people are cold and hungry, and we have no idea when things will begin to return to normal because our state government continues to fail. Millions of Texans are without power in freezing temperatures, many of them for the last 60 hours. At least 21 Texans have died. Their blood is on Abbott’s hands.”

As of late Wednesday, an estimated seven million Texans were under a boil water notice, guidance that households without electricity will not be able to follow. That, and widespread water shortages, is what forced some residents of Houston—the fourth largest city in the United States—to bring empty jugs and buckets to a local public park, where water was being distributed through a spigot.

The Houston Chronicle reported Wednesday that “a large chunk of Houston households had already lost water pressure altogether or had seen their pipes freeze, preventing access to the city’s water system.”

“The crisis extended to key facilities, depriving hospitals and the Harris County Jail of running water. Houston Methodist canceled most non-urgent surgeries and procedures due to the water shortage and may do so again Thursday,” the local outlet noted. “The plummeting water pressure was the result of bursting pipes across the city and equipment failures at water distribution facilities due to frigid weather conditions.”

Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, tweeted Wednesday that the growing water crisis “is a public policy catastrophe.”

Castro delivered a similar message in an appearance on MSNBC late Wednesday, declaring, “This is becoming the worst state-level policy disaster since the Flint water crisis.”

“We have state leadership—Governor Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick—that want to point fingers at everything except the problem. For the last few decades, they have been the problem,” said Castro. “This is not the breakdown of a system, this is a system that is broken down by design.”

On top of the ongoing power outages and water disruptions, many Texans are beginning to run out of food as grocery stores with increasingly empty shelves have been forced to shut their doors to customers due to continued blackouts.

As The Texas Tribune reported Wednesday:

Across the state, people are using up supplies they had stockpiled and losing more as items start to spoil in dark refrigerators. Some are storing their remaining rations in coolers outside…

Meanwhile, fruit and vegetable crops in the Rio Grande Valley have frozen over in what The Produce News described as a ‘Valentine’s Day produce massacre.’ School districts from Fort Worth to Houston have halted meal distributions to students for the next several days, and Texas Department of Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said dairy farmers around the state are pouring $8 million worth of milk down the drain every day because they can’t get it to dairies.

Celia Cole, the CEO of hunger-relief organization Feeding Texas, said that so far, eight food banks have asked the state for extra help feeding their communities. Several food banks affiliated with Feeding Texas have also started providing food supplies to emergency warming shelters in the state’s major cities. Wednesday afternoon, the Central Food Bank of Texas canceled its deliveries scheduled for Thursday in Austin and Rockdale.

Hinojosa said Wednesday that blame for the intertwined emergencies facing the people of Texas ultimately lies at the feet of Abbott, whose “lack of care has put lives and communities in danger.”

“He didn’t take action when Texans were displaced during Hurricane Harvey, he refused to plan appropriately for the coronavirus crisis, his handling of vaccine distribution has been abysmal, and now, in Texas’ time of greatest need during this winter storm, his incompetence is once again on full display,” said Hinojosa. “This isn’t partisan politics. This is a question of his basic ability to do the job he was elected to do. We’ve given Abbott chance after chance to prove that he can manage our state government and he’s failed to answer the call every single damn time.”

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) was allegedly photographed on a flight to Cancun, Mexico, fleeing a natural disaster of his state’s own making as Texans endured an ongoing extreme weather-triggered power outage that has already taken the lives of more than 30 people.

Cruz has not commented on the reports, which went viral overnight.

KSAT reports: “The reports of Cruz’s alleged vacation spread quickly on social media, catapulted by Texans‘ frozen frustration. That after a failure of the state’s electric grid forced millions in the state to go days without sustained power in sub-freezing temperatures. If true, the trip would add even more insult to injury for a battered state dealing with a historic disaster.”

“It seems pretty clear that a reckless reliance on windmills is the cause of this disaster” in Texas, Tucker Carlson lied.

As nearly 3 million Texans languished without electricity Wednesday afternoon amid the ongoing fallout from Winter Storm Uri, Republicans and Fox News have teamed up to turn the disaster into a culture-war wedge issue.

As Vox’s Umair Irfan explained, the blackouts happened when the winter storm created a sudden spike in energy demand and hamstrung production of natural gas, coal, nuclear, and wind energy. The root problems (climate change aside) involve the state’s failure to winterize energy facilities and infrastructure in a region not accustomed to sustained freezing weather.

It’s a somewhat complicated story — unless you get your information from Fox News. Since Monday, various Fox News hosts, including Tucker Carlson and Harris Faulkner, have pushed the narrative that the power outages in Texas are actually the result of Green New Deal-style energy policies that aren’t even in place there.

“It seems pretty clear that a reckless reliance on windmills is the cause of this disaster,” Carlson claimed Monday, establishing a talking point that Fox News continued to hammer into the brains of viewers across numerous shows on Tuesday, with Carlson returning to the theme that evening.

Then, in an episode illustrative of the symbiotic relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) took a break from responding to the disaster to join Sean Hannity’s Fox News show later Tuesday evening. As Hannity agreed with him, Abbott said that “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.”

“Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis,” he continued. “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure that we’ll be able to heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime.”

It’s not just Abbott — other Texas Republicans, including fellow Fox News regular Rep. Dan Crenshaw and Sen. John Cornyn — are also using Uri and the ensuing humanitarian crisis as a pretext to bash renewable energy.

It is true that some wind turbines and other renewable energy facilities froze amid the historic cold snap and had to cease production. But the bigger problem the Abbotts and Hannitys of the world refuse to acknowledge is that the winter storm shut down an even greater proportion of the thermal sources favored by opponents of renewable energy.

As Katie Shepherd detailed for the Washington Post, data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the nonprofit that runs Texas’s electrical grid, refutes the Abbott/Fox News spin:

Although renewable energy sources did partially fail, they only contributed to 13 percent of the power outages, while providing about a quarter of the state’s energy in winter. Thermal sources, including coal, gas and nuclear, lost almost twice as many gigawatts of power because of the cold, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s electric grid operator. Critics have also noted that wind turbines can operate in climates as cold as Greenland if they’re properly prepared for the weather.

Against that backdrop, singling out wind turbines for the ongoing outages in Texas is obviously a fundamental misreading of what’s really going on. But instead of subjecting Abbott’s claims to critical scrutiny, Fox News’s “news side” hosts amplified them on Wednesday by covering them as news.

Fox News’ treatment of Uri illustrates how, for a large segment of the Republican Party, everything is now a culture war. On Fox, the coronavirus pandemic is recast around the struggle of aggrieved business owners and parents to overcome purportedly unnecessary public health regulations imposed by Democratic public officials; the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol becomes about Nancy Pelosi’s alleged failures; President Joe Biden’s efforts to prevent conflicts of interest in and around the White House is covered, while the egregious conflicts of interest in the Trump White House were defended.

And a historic winter storm in Texas made worse by failures to take proper precautions — officials ignored a 2011 federal report recommending that ERCOT take steps to weatherize facilities against cold weather, for instance, and when Abbott isn’t on Fox News, he’s been trying to pin blame for the power outages on the nonprofit — ends up being twisted into a pretext for misleading attacks on renewable energy.

“Republicans and right-wing media, they want to take every policy issue and turn it into some painful culture war idiocy,” said MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Tuesday in a monologue critiquing coverage of what’s going on in Texas. “And there’s an interest to do it. The fossil fuel companies want this too. They want it to turn into a culture war, like ‘the libs don’t want you to have power.’”

Ted Cruz was already treading on rough political terrain this week — then he boarded a flight to Cancun during a natural disaster.

The Texas Republican senator, condemned by opponents for objecting to November’s presidential election results even after rioters besieged the Capitol, fled his frozen home state for the sunny Mexican resort city on Wednesday while Texans reeled from winter storms that have left millions without electricity and running water. Cruz, who’s no stranger to controversies surrounding extreme weather events, took hours to acknowledge his trip as critics accused him of political malpractice at best and all-out negligence at worst — prompting him to return to Texas on Thursday.

“I have to admit, I started having second thoughts almost the moment I sat down on the plane,” Cruz said after landing back in Houston. “Frankly, leaving when so many Texans were hurting didn’t feel right, and so I changed my return flight and flew back on the first available flight I could take.”

When he finally addressed the furor earlier Thursday, Cruz said he flew to Cancun to accompany his daughters at their request and was flying back to the U.S. the next day. He initially did not clarify whether he had always intended the trip to last less than 24 hours, saying only that he “wanted to be a good dad” and “drop off” his daughters in Cancun. He later acknowledged that his trip was booked through the weekend.

His explanation quickly became its own social media punch line, with one House Democrat tweeting wryly that he needed to take his daughters to Cancun “so I can be a good father.” For a 2016 White House contender widely viewed as a potential 2024 hopeful, the mostly tight-lipped response from Cruz’s fellow Republicans underscored his long-standing status as one of the more polarizing figures in the Senate GOP.

The flap began Wednesday night, when photos surfaced on social media of Cruz waiting in line to board a flight from his home airport in Houston with his wife, Heidi, and their daughters. He left Texas as his constituents were dealing with unprecedented power outages and sub-freezing temperatures stemming from a series of devastating and ongoing winter storms, and Cruz decided to return home early after the backlash materialized.

He told the local ABC station in Houston that he made a “mistake,” and later told Sean Hannity on Fox News that he ultimately came to the conclusion that “you need to be here on the ground.” He said his intention was to “work remotely” from Cancun through the weekend.

Text messages shared with POLITICO showed Heidi Cruz bemoaning the “FREEZING” temperatures after their house lost power earlier in the week. She asked neighbors and friends in a group text conversation whether they were interested in joining them on their trip.

“Anyone can or want to leave for the week?” Heidi Cruz asked, noting that hotels had openings and sharing the family’s flight itinerary.

Cruz’s counterpart in the Senate, John Cornyn, has been directing Texans to resources including shelters and food banks — and even re-tweeted a user who wrote a subtle contrast to Cruz: “Meanwhile, @JohnCornyn’s Twitter feed is full of helpful news and resources for Texas.”

Although nobody disputed that Cruz’s travels were politically risky, some Cruz allies, like Donald Trump Jr., defended him by suggesting that senators have little power when it comes to “localized disasters.”

But lawmakers are typically eager to show their faces when their constituents are dealing with natural disasters or other tragedies — not only to show their commitment to voters, but to help lead response and recovery efforts. Senators in particular play critical roles, helping to coordinate work between the federal government and state and local municipalities while mobilizing their powerful constituent services arms.

Cruz, however, has stumbled before during weather-related emergencies. When Hurricane Sandy battered the northeast in 2012, he vocally opposed a relief package to help those states rebuild, blasting it as a “Christmas tree” filled with unnecessary spending. But when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in 2017, Cruz led the charge for an emergency spending bill to help his state and faced questions from fellow lawmakers — as well as then-GOP Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — about the apparent double standard.

Texas in particular has been starving for resources from the federal government in the aftermath of the storms, which have caused severe damage to the state’s infrastructure and electric grids.

In an earlier statement, Cruz said he and his staff “are in constant communication with state and local leaders to get to the bottom of what happened in Texas.”

Cruz’s office was apparently planning for the trip ahead of time. A spokesperson for the Houston Police Department confirmed that a member of Cruz’s staff contacted the department Wednesday afternoon and requested law enforcement “assistance upon Sen. Cruz’s arrival” at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

The Senate is on a scheduled recess this week, with many senators returning to work in their home states. Meanwhile, winter storms have pummeled cities across Texas all week, leaving millions of residents unable to heat their homes or buy food. Cruz urged Texans during a Monday radio interview to “just stay home” as the winter weather was bearing down on the state.

His political opponents hustled to use the Cancun flight against him.

“Cruz is emblematic of what the Texas Republican Party and its leaders have become: weak, corrupt, inept, and self-serving politicians who don’t give a damn about the people they were elected to represent,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement. “They were elected by the people but have no interest or intent of doing their jobs.”

One liberal group began fundraising to send an electronic billboard to Cruz’s house that read, “Texans Froze. Ted Fled.”

Cruz is already facing a Senate Ethics Committee investigation, requested by Democrats, over his efforts to object to the Electoral College certification on Jan. 6, when a violent mob stormed the Capitol to prevent lawmakers from certifying Biden’s victory.

Even after the insurrection, Cruz maintained his objections to the certification even as some of his fellow Republicans backed away. Top Republicans including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell harangued the effort as a dangerous attempt to overturn the will of the voters.

While Cruz described his Cancun trip as a request from his children, at least one other parent at their school raised concerns about the getaway and inquired about whether Cruz’s family would have to quarantine after returning to the U.S., according to a person familiar with the matter.

“As with any other school family, they must QUARANTINE APPROPRIATELY upon their return, correct?” one parent wrote on Facebook.

Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat Cruz defeated in 2018’s Texas Senate race, tweeted that he spent Wednesday night on a phone-banking effort to check in on senior citizens. O’Rourke also has been using his Twitter account to direct Texans toward shelters and food banks.

Texas grid operators said Thursday morning they have begun to restore power to most customers, but for nearly a week as many as 4 million residents of the Lone Star state lived without electric light or, in many cases electric heat, amid near-zero temperatures.

Pictures soon surfaced on social media of frost in living rooms and food on porches to keep it from spoiling while refrigerators had no power as residents struggled to stay warm amid the days-long power failure. By Wednesday night 7 million Texans were under boil water orders as water utilities working with reduced electricity supply struggled to keep up with demand.

Eric Wolff and Natasha Korecki contributed to this report.

Perched on a cream-colored armchair, Johnny Enlow, a 61-year-old, California-based Pentecostal pastor with short-cropped gray hair, a trim beard and Tom Selleck-style mustache, looked into the camera and prophesied that Donald Trump would become president again.

Not in 2024. In 2021.

“The January 20 inauguration date doesn’t really mean anything,” Enlow said in the January 29 video, which has gotten north of 100,000 views on YouTube. According to Enlow, more than 100 other “credible” Christian prophets around the world had likewise declared that Trump, somehow, would be restored to power soon.

Indeed, Enlow was not alone out on that limb. Greg Locke, a Nashville pastor with a massive social media following, said after Trump’s loss that he would “100 percent remain president of the United States for another term.” Kat Kerr, a pink-haired preacher from Jacksonville, Florida, declared repeatedly last month that Trump had won the election “by a landslide” and that God had told her he would serve for eight years. In his video, Enlow went further. “There’s not going to be just Trump coming back,” he said. “There’s going to be at least two more Trumps that will be in office in some way.” Donald Trump, he proclaimed elsewhere, was “the primary government leader on Planet Earth.”

Enlow, Locke and Kerr are among dozens of Christian prophets in America—religious leaders with followings among Pentecostal and charismatic Christians who claim the ability to predict the future based on dreams, visions and other supernatural phenomena. Some prophets are church leaders, while others operate independently. There are no official requirements for prophet status, though followers generally expect prophets to get at least a few prophecies right.

But, lately, that standard has come under duress—particularly when it comes to Donald Trump.

In 2015, spurred by the lengthy prophecy of a 27-year-old wunderkind named Jeremiah Johnson, many Pentecostals and charismatics embraced the idea that God had chosen Trump to restore America’s Christian moorings. Trump’s surprise win in 2016 offered a dramatic validation, and in 2020 dozens of prophets declared that he would win election again. This time, they were wrong. Yet, in the wake of Joe Biden’s victory, instead of apologizing or backtracking, a number of prophets continue to assert that it is God’s will for Trump to be in the White House and that a miraculous reversal is nigh. Enlow, who did not respond to a request for comment for this article, has said Trump’s victory will be made clear by March.

With only two-thirds of voters—and one-third of Republicans—expressing confidence that Biden won a free and fair election, many observers worry that these prophets are sowing more confusion, blurring the line between misinformation and religious proclamation. They are spreading their message to wide audiences—some preachers who amplify these prophecies have followings in the millions—that increasingly exist in an echo chamber of like-minded religious YouTube channels, Instagram feeds and websites such as ElijahList, host of the YouTube channel ElijahStreams, where Enlow’s video aired.

It’s well known that Trump received strong support from white evangelicals in the 2020 election; estimates hover around 80 percent. But the role that prophecy plays in that support might be underexplored. In a survey conducted last year, two political scientists found that nearly half of America’s church-attending white Protestants believed Trump was anointed by God to be president—a portion of the population that other scholars have dubbed “prophecy voters.” The share is likely higher among charismatic Christians, who skew more politically and theologically conservative than evangelicals as a whole. And although this population is only a subset of American Christianity, it’s a large one: Some estimates hold that as many as 65 million Americans could be counted as Pentecostals or charismatics.

Not all prophets have doubled down on their Trump prophecies since the election, however. And as some have backed away from Trump, a schism has emerged. At least six recognized prophets who initially predicted a Trump reelection have acknowledged those prophecies were wrong. They now say they are deeply troubled by their peers’ refusal to acknowledge the same—and worry that allegiance to Trump could threaten the prophetic tradition itself.

In a December 15 article, Michael Brown, a longtime charismatic revivalist and scholar in Charlotte, North Carolina, had sharp words, warning co-religionists: “There is no reality in which Trump actually did win but in fact didn’t win. … To entertain possibilities like this is to mock the integrity of prophecy and to make us charismatics look like total fools.” After apologizing on January 7 for his own prophecy that Trump would be reelected, Jeremiah Johnson called parts of the prophetic movement “deeply sick.” In early February, he released a new YouTube series called “I Was Wrong: Donald Trump and the Prophetic Controversy.”

“I believe that this election cycle has revealed how desperately we need reformation in the prophetic movement,” Johnson said in a February 8 video. “I have serious concerns for the charismatic-prophetic world that if we do not wake up, if we do not humble ourselves, there is greater judgment to come.”

The emerging rift mirrors the one in the GOP, with one faction trying to move on from Trump in the name of democratic principles, and the other redoubling their commitment to him, spurred by the grassroots and in defiance of facts. Johnson and other prophets in his camp have received fervent pushback from their followers. But Brown and his ilk believe a reckoning is in order—that false prophets must be held accountable and that reforms are needed if the prophecy movement is to retain any spiritual integrity. He has begun convening monthly Zoom calls with prophetic leaders to discuss a way forward.

“This has opened the door to outright delusion,” Brown said in an interview. “As a full-blooded charismatic, I’ll say we’ve earned the world’s mockery for our foolishness.”

Although common in biblical times, Christian prophecy largely fell into disuse for almost two millennia. It has a scriptural tradition: In his first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul describes prophecy as one of the Holy Spirit’s gifts for believers. The contemporary version was revived, along with the better-known gifts of healing and speaking in tongues, at a Pentecostal prayer meeting in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901. Over time, the Pentecostal movement—joined in the 1960s by like-minded followers in mainline Protestant and Catholic circles known as “charismatics”—has become the world’s fastest-growing form of Christianity, with an estimated half a billion believers around the globe.

Pentecostal worship tends to be more decentralized than the more formal mainline denominations, and many charismatic churches are completely independent. In the late 1980s, when the “Kansas City prophets,” a group of Pentecostal-charismatic leaders based in the Missouri suburbs, came out with controversial claims of supernatural visions and prophecies of future events—like a billion people becoming Christian almost overnight and hospitals being emptied of their sick patients—there was no governing body to rein them in. Concerns about accountability led to the formation in 1999 of the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders, a group of about 32 people tasked with quality control.

But many of the prophetic voices that emerged after the creation of the ACPE formed their own ministries and networks, and the council gradually lost influence. “The entire prophetic and prayer movement expanded with the digital age,” James Goll, a Nashville-based prophet who was part of the Kansas City group, said in an interview. “So, one might ask, is there accountability on these new platforms?”

Political prophecies are a relatively recent phenomenon. Televangelist Pat Robertson, who ran for president as a Republican in 1988, occasionally prophesied everything from wars to Earth-destroying asteroids, but it was Trump who gave the movement a political focal point. Trump is seen by some charismatic Christians as chosen by God in spite of his faults. Prophets have said as far back as 2007 that the then-real estate mogul would eventually land in the White House. In 2011, a retired Orlando firefighter-turned-prophet named Mark Taylor predicted Trump would be elected in 2012. (After Trump decided not to run, a few prophets predicted, incorrectly as it turned out, that Mitt Romney would win.)

Once Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, more prophets, led by Johnson, predicted his win. Published in Charisma magazine, Johnson’s July 2015, prophecy—that Trump would be a latter-day Cyrus, modeled after the 6th-century B.C. Persian king who allowed Babylonian Jews to return to their homeland—was heavily criticized by some evangelical leaders, who pointed out that Trump had never been known to be a serious Christian, and had a personal history of divorces and extramarital affairs. (Johnson himself wrote that Trump was “like a bull in a china shop” who would disturb some people’s “sense of peace and tranquility.”) Many evangelicals still preferred other Republican candidates. Yet Trump’s prophetic fan club did not budge. Taylor not only updated his original prophecy to say Trump would win in 2016, but also said Trump would appoint three Supreme Court justices, an outcome that seemed only a distant possibility back then.

After Trump’s unexpected victory against Hillary Clinton, the new president welcomed Christian leaders who had been early supporters into the halls of power. Kerr led a six-minute blessing over Trump during his inaugural prayer breakfast in 2017. (She later prophesied that not only would Trump have two consecutive terms—so would former Vice President Mike Pence.) Most notable was Paula White-Cain, Trump’s spiritual adviser for more than a decade who recruited several Pentecostal leaders for his evangelical advisory board.

Trump’s wooing of evangelicals and charismatics made for “a veritable flood” of favorable prophecies during his presidency, in Brown’s words. They ranged from Australian prophet Lana Vawser’s May 2017 vision of Jesus clothing Trump with a purple robe and crown, to Enlow’s February 2020 assertion that the victory by the Kansas City Chiefs over the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl that year had prophetic significance for, among other things, the fact that “Trump is God-sent” and is advancing “a Kingdom agenda.” (Enlow is one of several prophets who believe God speaks through major sports events.)

In a 2020 book, James Beverley, a research professor at Tyndale University in Toronto, tracked more than 500 prophecies about Trump by more than 100 prophets over a 15-year period, and found a low batting average for accuracy. “My research,” Beverley told me, “shows that the prophecies are usually vague, sometimes totally wrong, and, with rare exception, have failed to be properly critical of Trump.”

Nonetheless, Trump rewarded his Pentecostal supporters with photo ops in the Oval Office and visits to their churches, including one this past October in Las Vegas, where leaders prophesied, to a cheering crowd, that Trump would win a second term. “The Lord spoke to me and said, ‘I am going to give your president a second wind,’” senior associate pastor Denise Goulet said as Trump, standing in the crowd, beamed and spread out his arms in an I-told-you-so gesture.

Some observers argue the prophecies at times were an attempt to curry favor with a powerful political figure and movement. “What were they getting in return?” asks Chris Rosebrough, a theologian and Lutheran pastor on the Minnesota-North Dakota state line who monitors prophets on his Pirate Christian Radio broadcasts. “They had direct access to him and ability to influence decisions Trump was making. The real story was in the power, influence and access.”

On November 7, the day Biden was declared the president-elect, one prophet, Kris Vallotton, of the mega-congregation Bethel Church in Redding, California, notably apologized. “I take full responsibility for being wrong,” he said on Instagram. “There was no excuse for it. I think it doesn’t make me a false prophet, but it does actually create a credibility gap.”

But dozens of Pentecostal prophets dug in, insisting, even after the Electoral College vote certifying Biden’s win, that Trump would still be inaugurated.

In addition to Kerr, Enlow and Locke, there was South Carolina prophet Dutch Sheets, who announced a seven-state “prayer tour” to sites where the votes were being contested. “We believe we can win this battle,” he said. Jeff Jansen, a Murfreesboro, Tennessee, prophet, appeared on ElijahStreams to echo Enlow’s prophecy of a Trump dynasty. “The last Trump will be Barron,” Jansen said. “He is going to be one of the greatest presidents of the United States.”

According to local media reports and social media feeds, a handful of prophets traveled to Washington for Trump’s speech on January 6. They included North Carolina evangelist Charlie Shamp, who tweeted a photo of himself just below the steps where crowds were storming the Capitol and produced a video about the experience. “Don’t let the media lie to you,” Shamp later wrote, from a Twitter account that has since been deleted. (He has moved to Parler.) “We peacefully assembled outside the building to voice our protest against this fraudulent election and pray for America!”

Within a day of the Capitol insurrection, a few other prophets who had prophesied a Trump win apologized: Johnson, as well as California pastor Shawn Bolz and Denver pastor Loren Sandford. Johnson published a long explanation, saying he had “misinterpreted” dreams and wished to “repent and ask your forgiveness.”

“I do not blame God’s people for insufficient prayer that resulted in Donald Trump’s losing the election, nor do I blame any kind of election fraud,” he wrote. “I am simply convinced God Himself removed him and there was nothing that any human being could have done about it.”

Blowback was swift. A few days later, Johnson wrote on Facebook that he had received “multiple death threats and thousands upon thousands of emails from Christians saying the nastiest and most vulgar things I have ever heard toward my family and ministry.” He also said he was losing financial support “every hour and counting.” (Johnson declined an interview request made through Brown, a mentor.)

“He lost a lot of monthly support,” Brown told me. “He said people were unsubscribing from his email list at such a high rate, it crashed his server.”

A few more apologies followed. Vallotton, who had retracted his apology after hearing from “thousands” of angry followers, reinstated it on January 8. Talk show host Sid Roth, as well as Jennifer LeClaire, the former editor of Charisma magazine (whose publisher, Stephen Strang, predicted that Trump would top 400 electors), also apologized, with LeClaire writing: “I believe some prophets who prophesied a Trump win never heard God at all. They merely tapped into the popular prophetic opinion because it was what so many in the church wanted to hear.”

Comments like these have prompted discussions around the charismatic world on podcasts, email threads, Twitter and Facebook. The overriding emotion in reading them is anger at the prophets—in some cases, for making false declarations and, in other cases, for apologizing for those declarations. Brown told me pastors have reached out to him asking how to handle the fallout in their congregations. Goll used words like “toxic,” “mudslinging,” “disappointment” and “disillusion” to describe the flood of invective from Christians who feel duped by false prophecies. But a sizable share of believers, at least those active online, seem to be holding out for a Trump resurrection sometime this spring.

That has left prophets like Johnson and LeClaire calling on Pentecostal and charismatic Christians to rethink what prophecy should and should not be in the 21st century. So far, they and other movement leaders have opted to address false prophets privately. “Some people are spoken to and don’t respond. Some people respond quickly,” Goll says.

That’s not enough for Rosebrough, who doesn’t see the movement reforming itself unless it can call out false prophets by name. “There are never any efforts to validate any of the claims made,” he says. “The more outrageous the claims, the truer it has to be. And if you are critical of these things, God will curse you as opposing his prophets.” (On February 11, Enlow hit back, slamming the would-be reformers with a statement titled “An Apostolic Rebuke and Entreaty for Those Blaming the Prophets.”)

Beverley, the Tyndale University professor, worries the widespread fidelity to Trump prophecies is part of a broader embrace of conspiratorial thinking in America. In a new book, he links the prophetic movement to the far-right QAnon conspiracy: Leaders of both, he says, have said all along that Trump would win and continue to push the idea that this will happen in March. Beverly, however, believes the charismatic prophets are likely to move on if nothing happens at that point.

But Brown is not counting on it. On February 8, he and Brooklyn pastor Joseph Mattera began organizing secret monthly meetings over Zoom with a new confederation of 20 prophetic leaders, representing various streams of the movement across ethnic, racial and denominational lines. Their aim is to set up guidelines for public prophecies and requirements for accountability. One idea: The group could demand that anyone who wants its imprimatur needs to sign on to certain rules. Those who don’t “will be left out of our circles,” as Brown puts it.

Yet even Brown admits these measures will go only so far, given the extent to which the evangelical church has become entwined with Trump’s strain of politics. “How did we become so politicized?” he wonders. “How did so many of us end up with an almost a cultlike devotion to a leader, compromise our ethics for a seat at the table and drape the Gospel in an American flag?”

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has fled to Mexico. As Texans face blackouts, harsh and unusually cold weather, flooding concerns, lack of heat, and general chaos in trying to get everything from groceries to running water, photos of the Republican senator flying to Cancun, Mexico, have gone viral. Cruz’s office has not released an official comment, and Cruz’s social media does not mention the trip. Mind you, this is international travel during a literal global pandemic.

That said, Fox journalist Chad Pergram tweeted that fellow Fox News reporter Paul Steinhauser confirmed Cruz did indeed travel to Mexico. The source reportedly said “the photos speak for themselves.” As my colleague Mark Sumner points out, as ever with the GOP, there’s always the possibility they’ll keep things vague and confusing with the hope of saying, “Hey, that’s fake news!” later on. Let’s dive into what social media has to say about the situation below.

First, the tweet from Pergram confirms the story.

As some background, photos of Cruz traveling to Mexico gained traction on Wednesday night. 

Note the same face mask.

People are, of course, livid. And how does social media deal with frustration, anger, and disappointment? Jokes!

Who will Cruz try to blame? Progressives, probably.

Or God!

In addition to jokes, people are also comparing Cruz’s response to the crisis to that of former Rep. Beto O’Rourke. 

O’Rourke himself also mentioned Cruz’s alleged trip during an interview on Thursday morning. “Unless we hold those responsible accountable for what they did,” O’Rourke stated. “Yes, that means Donald Trump, but it also means the junior senator from the state of Texas, who I understand is vacationing in Cancun right now when people are literally freezing to death in the state he was elected to represent and serve.”

And though social media isn’t talking about them quite as much as O’Rourke, both Julián and Rep. Joaquin Castro have been working seriously hard to take care of Texans in need during this crisis.

And last but not least, some are speculating that Cruz not only slunk off to Mexico but that he’s already on his way back. This speculation is based on the upgrade list for a United flight below, with the assumption that “CRU R” is him.

Meanwhile, people are still battling COVID-19, unemployment, and, in Texas, once-in-a-lifetime weather disasters. 

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Approximately one-third of troops have declined to take the coronavirus vaccine so far, Pentagon officials told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.

Maj. Gen. Jeff Taliaferro, the vice director of operations for the Joint Staff, said the military has a two-thirds acceptance rate for the vaccine, meaning as much as a third isn't taking it. The vaccine is not yet mandatory for service members.

"Our initial look — and this is of course very early data — is acceptance rates are somewhere in the two-thirds territory," Taliaferro told the panel's top Republican, Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama. "And of course it varies by different groups."

Top leaders were testifying on the Pentagon's role in the federal pandemic response.

Maj. Gen. Steven Nordhaus, the director of operations for the National Guard Bureau, added later that the Guard has a similar acceptance rate of "two-thirds to 70 percent."

The Pentagon has not previously specified how many troops are declining the vaccine. Spokesperson John Kirby told reporters later on Wednesday that the department doesn't have a system in place to track that information and pushed back on the notion that officials are hiding information.

Officials at the House hearing were referring to broad data showing that the military's acceptance rates "mirror" those of American society as a whole, Kirby said, noting that they went on to say that the department is not specifically tracking that data right now.

"Nobody is hiding data," Kirby said. "We don't have a system in place across the services to specifically track data with respect to those individuals who for whatever reason are declining."

Early in the hearing, lawmakers from both parties voiced concerns about the pace of vaccinations, the number of troops who may be declining the vaccine and the impact of refusals on military readiness.

"It's critical for our national security that every service member, as well as DoD civilian personnel and contractors, receive vaccines as soon as possible," Rogers said in his opening statement. "I am interested to hear from our witnesses what percentage of our service members have been vaccinated, what the refusal rate has been, and what steps they are taking to get more shots into arms."

Pentagon officials have said the vaccine will initially be voluntary because it does not have full FDA approval yet, though leaders have encouraged personnel to get vaccinated.

"We believe that, of course, the vaccine is the right thing to do. It's clearly safe for service members," Taliaferro said. "And we need to continue to educate our force and help them understand the benefits."

By the numbers: Taliaferro told the committee that 916,575 doses of the vaccine have been administered to Defense Department personnel so far.

Pentagon official Robert Salesses added that 359,000 troops have been given initial doses, and 147,000 troops have been fully vaccinated.

Vaccination timeline: Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) pressed officials on how long it will take the Defense Department to vaccinate its full military, civilian and contractor workforce. Salesses told lawmakers the Pentagon will likely achieve that milestone this summer.

"It'll probably be sometime in late July, August timeframe," Salesses said.

Lara Seligman contributed to this report.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that on the day when everyone can say something good about Rush Limbaugh, Republicans are again working hard to push a big lie. As has been seen so many times in  Donald Trump era of Republicanism, the big lie is best deployed in an attempt to mask abject defeat with a false patina of victory. And, as has been the rule since the time of Joseph Goebbels, one of the most important features of selling that lie is repetition.

With Texas in a deep freeze—a deep freeze that lacks power and water—Republicans who lead the state desperately need an excuse for why they’ve failed their citizens to the extent that millions are cold and many of their lives are in genuine peril. The explanation the Republicans have created is exactly as truthful as the idea that the assault on the nation’s Capitol was directed by antifa.

And they’re doing it for exactly the same reason: The failure of the Texas power grid is a prime example of a massive failure not just on the part of Republican leadership in Texas, but of the whole conservative philosophy. This is a system that was milk-fed on their conception of free market capitalism and raised to generate maximum profits for a few at the expense of the many. In the face of 40+ years of refining that system down to the raw ragged edge where any pressure could not help but generate failure, they’re not just lying about the cause, they’re trying to weaponize their own failure in order to make things worse.

In case there’s still some confusion that the issue of power failures in Texas has to do with windmills: It’s not. It’s really, really not. The cause for the Texas blackout comes from decades of a system that was meant to optimize profits by encouraging providers not to plan for emergencies or provide any more power than is needed under usual circumstances. That system depends on tight spots in the market to generate spikes in pricing. It’s supposed to operate by generating “inconvenience.” 

Here’s The New York Times providing some insight on the thinking of those involved. 

That design relies on basic economics: When electricity demand increases, so too does the price for power. The higher prices force consumers to reduce energy use to prevent cascading failures of power plants that could leave the entire state in the dark, while encouraging power plants to generate more electricity.

“It’s not convenient,” Professor Hogan said. “It’s not nice. It’s necessary.”

It’s “necessary” not because that provides the best service to the most customers, or because that ensures the greatest level of safety in the case of emergency. It’s necessary because that’s the best way to generate maximum profits from the system at a cost of “inconvenience” to those left in the dark.

But while a professor of global energy policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School can afford to be honest about how the Texas system is working exactly as designed, the Republican politicians who put this system in place—along with conservatives nationwide who would like to use this as a model for every system everywhere—don’t want the public looking too closely at how this sausage is being not made. That’s why they’ve launched a national “Look, over there!” campaign to point the finger at wind energy. Even though that energy is the one component of the system that’s actually working better than expected. Solar power is running slightly below projections, but only by a small amount.

The big windy lie campaign began on Monday morning, with Fox Business journalist Steve Moore touting oil stocks and introducing the framing that other Republicans would take up for the remainder of the week. 

The other thing that’s going on … is that wind and solar are almost completely useless when you have a polar vortex, when you have these frigid temperatures. The wind turbines freeze, they don’t twist anymore, and the solar panels get snow and get ice on them so they’re no good either.

Moore then goes on to claim that America is using coal “at record levels across the country.” Which, unless he means at record low levels, is a whopper of lie. America has not used so little coal since 1979. It also ignores the fact that a larger percentage of the outage in Texas comes from coal plants that are offline than comes from wind turbines out of service. Far from turning to coal in this crisis, the crisis has again demonstrated that coal is less reliable than renewable sources. Not only that, it’s far more costly. Which is why no one is even talking about building a new coal plant. 

But the lie that wind turbines were freezing was quickly picked up and repeated across the spectrum of Fox News programs. This would certainly be news to the people who run the largest wind farm in Antarctica, or in fact to every other state where wind farms operate. Iowa is genuinely the nation’s leader when it comes to the percentage of power that it gets from wind. Iowa is also regularly subject to the kind of weather that caused Texas’ power grid to buckle this week. Iowa’s wind power is just fine.

After a hundred more repetitions, and once the meme was solidly established on Facebook and other social media, Tucker Carlson was the logical person to turn the big lie big dial up to 11 when he put the blame for the continuing Texas’ blackout solidly on … the Green New Deal, a piece of legislation yet to move out of the House and Senate. That, in turn, led to a full day of right-wing talkers popping up to call the Green New Deal “deadly” and to point to Texas as “proof” that renewable power doesn’t work.

With this solid bench of two days worth of lies to rest on, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott then appeared with Sean Hannity to reinforce every false claim made so far.

This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. … Our wind and our solar got shut down, and collectively they were more than 10% of our power grid. … As a result, it just shows, that fossil fuels is necessary for the state of Texas, as well as the other states.

Meanwhile in the real world, the actual production of wind power was actually producing 2 gigawatts more than the most optimistic forecast, while natural gas prices were soaring to record highs, specifically because gas pipelines in Texas were freezing up and natural gas suppliers were unable to meet demand. Gas prices went from $4/MMBtu at the beginning of last week to $9 at the end of the week. On Tuesday, they hit $1,000. On Wednesday, $1,200. That’s a major part of why electricity in Texas is currently pegged at the ERCOT maximum of $9,000 megawatts an hour across the entire state.

In fact, the only thing in the nation currently thrilling coal mining companies is the instability in the gas market introduced not by Texas’ dependence on wind, but by its failure to require that gas pipelines be buried or insulated to guard against freezing. (Side note: Methane does not freeze above -161 degrees C. While it’s cold in Texas, it’s not that cold. What’s freezing in the pipelines is actually “drilling fluids” resulting from the use of fracking to expand gas production in Texas’ Permian Basin.) What could make companies think twice about closing their money-losing coal plants? A gas market more unstable than at any time in the last two decades.

As Bloomberg reports, out of service wind turbines are the least contributing factor to the Texas outages. Even if all the wind turbines currently offline, including those down for regular maintenance, are added together, their capacity comes to just 3.6 to 4.5 gigawatts, or about 12% of the total 35-gigawatt shortfall in Texas. And that’s even if those wind turbines were producing at their maximum level, not the level they’re actually rated to in current conditions. The truth is wind turbine outages are well below 10% of the total outage. 

Wind shutdowns accounted for 3.6 to 4.5 gigawatts — or less than 13% — of the 30 to 35 gigawatts of total outages, according to Woodfin. That’s in part because wind only comprises 25% of the state’s energy mix this time of year.

Texas has failed because it has built a system that’s designed to always run at the edge of failure. That system offers absolutely no incentive to increase reliability or provide protections in the case of an emergency situation. It’s a system where the providers get maximum money when the system includes periods of failure and excess demand, creating a perverse incentive to not expand so that the system has any buffer between capacity and demand.

What Abbott and every Fox News talking head is trying to do is make Texas more dependent on the part of the system that has failed the hardest and is most responsible for spiking prices. Only … they’re not really. Because neither Fox nor Abbott is actually proposing anything at all. They’re just repeating the latest Big Lie over and over, with full knowledge that it is a lie and that it makes absolutely no sense.

But it does allow them to point the finger of blame away from their core beliefs in a maximized profit market and deregulation of ways to fleece the public. 

Tim Boyd, the mayor of Colorado City, Texas, resigned after posting a message to Facebook amid massive power outages caused by the polar plunge and winter storm wreaking havoc on the state.

Wrote Boyd on Facebook after receiving complaints about lack of electricity and heat from constituents: “No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local governments responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn hand out! If you don’t have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe. If you have no water you deal with out and think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family. If you were sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! Only the strong will survive and the week will perish.”

“Folks, God Has given us the tools to support ourselves in times like this,” Boyd continued. “This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW work and others will become dependent for handouts. Am I sorry that you have been dealing without electricity and water; yes! But I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves! We have lost sight of those in need and those that take advantage of the system and mesh them into one group!! Bottom line, quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family! Bottom line – DON’T BE A PART OF A PROBLEM, BE A PART OF THE SOLUTION!”

Following outrage over the post, Boyd resigned.

In a second Facebook post, Boyd wrote: “All, I have set back and watched all this escalating and have tried to keep my mouth shut! I won’t deny for one minute what I said in my post this morning. Believe me when I say that many of the things I said were taken out of context and some of which were said without putting much thought in to it. I would never want to hurt the elderly or anyone that is in true need of help to be left to fend for themselves. I was only making the statement that those folks that are too lazy to get up and fend for themselves but are capable should not be dealt a handout. I apologize for the wording and some of the phrases that were used! I had already turned in my resignation and had not signed up to run for mayor again on the deadline that was February 12th! I spoke some of this out of the anger that the city and county was catching for situations which were out of their control. Please understand if I had it to do over again I would have just kept my words to myself and if I did say them I would have used better wording and been more descriptive.”

“The anger and harassment you have caused my wife and family is so undeserved….my wife was laid off of her job based off the association people gave to her and the business she worked for,” Boyd added. “She’s a very good person and was only defending me! But her to have to get fired from her job over things I said out of context is so horrible. I admit, there are things that are said all the time that I don’t agree with; but I would never harass you or your family to the point that they would lose there livelihood such as a form of income. I ask that you each understand I never meant to speak for the city of Colorado City or Mitchell county! I was speaking as a citizen as I am NOT THE MAYOR anymore. I apologize for the wording and ask that you please not harass myself or my family anymore!”

Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) told the Washington Blade that he won’t support the Equality Act, which would update existing civil rights laws to protect LGBTQ Americans, unless there were religious exemptions.

Said Arielle Mueller, a Romney spokesperson, via email to the Blade: Sen. Romney believes that strong religious liberty protections are essential to any legislation on this issue, and since those provisions are absent from this particular bill, he is not able to support it.”

Biden has promised to make passing the legislation a priority in his first 100 days in office, but needs 60 votes in the Senate for it to pass. But doing so means ending the filibuster, and, as Michelangelo Signorile explained in a story posted to his substack yesterday, certain senators, like Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, are in the way.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced in a letter to colleagues that a vote on the Equality Act, which the House already passed once in 2019 (it never received a Senate vote), would take place next week.

More than 50 years after passage of the Fair Housing Act, it’s time to sue the suburbs.

This is the fourth time Kennetha has been homeless.

She and her husband have five kids, the youngest of whom is just 8. They’ve been threatened with truancy for keeping their cameras off during remote learning — a grace they hoped would spare themselves some privacy over their living situation. At 37, Kennetha is haunted by an unfinished bachelor’s degree that has left her nothing but debt. Digging herself out of a financial hole has felt like a full-time job. Being without a stable home doesn’t help.

“It feels like we’re an expendable family — hopeless and voiceless,” she told me.

Kennetha tells me she grew up near Bordeaux, in the northwest part of Nashville, Tennessee. Her address puts her in the Haynes area, where researchers say the expected household earnings for a low-income child is just $20,000 a year. She would prefer to live in a suburb like Franklin. In parts of Franklin, a child who grows up in a low-income family would go on to have a household income of $53,000 a year.

But that feels impossible. The population of Franklin is only 6.6 percent Black, even though the city of Nashville is nearly 28 percent Black.

“They don’t want us in that neighborhood,” Kennetha said. “It’s just a longstanding, unspoken thing. Franklin is meant for the rich, white people.”

Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

Neighborhoods matter. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews reported, researchers Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz found in 2016 that moving to a wealthier neighborhood not only increased the likelihood that kids would go to college, but also increased earnings by roughly 31 percent by the time they’d reached their mid-20s.

Part of what has kept Kennetha out of living in Franklin is exclusionary zoning. Single-family zoning, which means it’s illegal to build anything other than single-family homes, is prevalent in the suburb. Single-family homes are more expensive than apartments, townhomes, or duplexes, and that makes rent costly, too. Houses in Franklin go for an average price of $550,000, far above the average in Nashville of $335,000.

In some parts of Franklin, it is illegal to have a property smaller than 2 acres. And even in its “mixed residential district” — which allows for duplexes and multiplexes — the town has ordained minimum lot sizes that force builders to make units larger than they otherwise might have. And the bigger the apartment, the more expensive it is.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

Exclusionary zoning laws essentially trap many Black families into low-income neighborhoods by pricing them out of richer ones.

Ending residential segregation would allow Americans to move from poor neighborhoods or cities to richer ones and allow lower-skilled workers to find better-paying jobs. To put a number on it, exclusionary zoning has artificially inflated the price of housing so much that one paper estimated that from 1964 to 2009, it lowered the aggregate growth by more than 50 percent.

This problem may feel like a tragedy of local governments and NIMBY-ism run amuck. But there’s actually a lot President Joe Biden’s administration can do about it right now. Biden can tie public concern over racial justice to tangible changes people can make at the local level. He can also tie federal dollars to mandates to reduce exclusionary zoning. And if all else fails, his administration can sue the jurisdictions that are knowingly perpetuating segregation.

Kennetha doesn’t have to be stuck in a high-poverty neighborhood, and lots of other Americans don’t either. Eliminating exclusionary zoning means Kennetha’s kids can grow up with the same opportunities as white children in Franklin.

A (very) abbreviated history of exclusionary zoning

More than 100 years ago, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, had a zoning ordinance that prohibited a white man from selling his property to a Black one if the neighborhood was already majority-white.

In 1917, the Supreme Court ruled in Buchanan v. Warley that this was unconstitutional, recognizing that the city might have a legitimate interest in the “promotion of the public health, safety, and welfare,” but that did not justify the “direct violation of the fundamental law enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution preventing state interference with property rights except by due process of law.”

In what would become an enduring American tradition, white homeowners found other ways to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Corbis/Getty Images

Alex Wong/Getty Images

According to a report by the Century Foundation, homeowners banded together and adopted covenants, or neighborhood contracts, that would prohibit their neighbors from selling homes to Black Americans: “in city after city, courts and sheriffs successfully evicted African Americans from homes that they had rightly purchased in order to enforce racially restrictive covenants,” write Richard Kahlenberg and Kimberly Quick. It wasn’t until 1948 that the Supreme Court deemed this practice unconstitutional.

Extralegal action (a nice way of saying racist mobs) still enforced segregation, though. As Richard Rothstein documented in his book The Color of Law, authorities from Richmond, California, to Levittown, Pennsylvania, allowed violent intimidation of Black families who attempted to move into segregated communities. “From 1917 to 1921, when the Chicago ghetto was first being rigidly defined,” Rothstein writes, “there were fifty-eight firebombings of homes in white border areas to which African Americans had moved, with no arrests or prosecutions — despite the deaths of two African American residents.”

This isn’t to say local governments gave up on segregation by design. As Buchanan was being argued in the nation’s capital, there were only eight American cities with zoning ordinances — 20 years later there were 1,246, according to economist William Fischel. While previous attempts at zoning had to do with safety concerns like fires or light-and-air regulations, Fischel writes that zoning from the 1910s onward “represented an important break with the past. The new features were the comprehensiveness of its map and the law’s presumption that single-family residences were to get the most protection.”

Comprehensive federal protections from housing discrimination wouldn’t come about until 1968. Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Congress passed the Fair Housing Act — an extraordinary piece of civil rights legislation that not only clarified that it was in fact illegal to discriminate due to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability, but also that the government had the obligation to “affirmatively further fair housing.”

Despite this mandate, zoning laws proliferated that have entrenched de facto discrimination. Instead of explicitly barring people due to their race, these laws have taken the form of regulations like minimum sizes for new homes, which effectively ban more affordable dwellings. Localities have also weaponized seemingly neutral regulations that make the cost of development so exorbitant that the only profitable type of homes to build are large or luxury units.

There’s some disagreement about where the worst offenders of exclusionary zoning are today: In one index created and managed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, New England and the mid-Atlantic region have the most stringent zoning regulations. The West Coast and Hawaii come second, and Southern and Midwestern states are considered to be the least regulated.

However, Thomas Silverstein, a lawyer at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Fair Housing and Community Development Project, says, “Many suburban areas in the Midwest outside of major urban centers — whether it’s Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee — suburb after suburb, you’ll find plenty of places where much less percentage of land is zoned for multifamily housing” than in coastal cities.

Arthur Siegel/Anthony Potter Collection/Getty Images

Housing rules are pretty bad everywhere — from the Northeastern states of Massachusetts and Connecticut to the West Coast supercities of San Francisco and Seattle as well as places like Cleveland and Phoenix. This is an American problem.

Convince who you can

Zoning has long been the domain of local government. But that doesn’t mean the Biden administration doesn’t have the ability to influence those decisions.

Many of the suburbs Biden won in the 2020 election count themselves as socially liberal or even progressive. For example, the hippie-esque town of Takoma Park, Maryland, in the DC suburbs votes overwhelmingly Democratic. It’s also almost exclusively zoned for single-family homes despite bordering the nation’s capital.

I grew up in Maryland, in a town not far from Takoma Park, and I can promise you that it’s one of the most outwardly progressive places I’ve ever been. Many of these suburbanites haven’t made the connection between their personal views on racial, social, and economic justice and the zoning policies that dictate who can and cannot live in their neighborhoods.

This is why one of the most important aspects to ending exclusionary zoning is making people aware of its effects. As president, Biden could help draw the racial justice connection for these communities by alleviating their concerns about property values, pointing to the environmental impact of sprawl, and making it clear that banning multi-family homes is in direct opposition to progressive goals around equal opportunity.

But this goes beyond appealing to suburbanites on progressive grounds. The overarching argument that needs to be made — not only to voters but to Democratic leaders in cities, counties, and states — is an economic one. Residential segregation shrinks the pot, and increasingly even more affluent, white college graduates are feeling the squeeze as they struggle to find housing in high-opportunity cities.

Darrell Owens, a housing activist and policy analyst at the pro-housing group California YIMBY, said that while discussing race is necessary, couching it in personal terms is most effective — like pointing out to a couple who want to build a small addition to their property that the same single-family zoning that keeps out Black Americans would preclude them from doing that as well.

Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images

“Calling my neighbors who are all wealthy, white homeowners racist is not helpful because as soon as you call a white person racist they kind of shut down and don’t really engage anymore,” he said. It will also “generally incite a quiet backlash at the ballot box,” which harms the effort to eradicate exclusionary zoning.

Put your money where your mouth is

While shifting public opinion is a vital step to sparking real change, it has to be coupled with policy.

Both fair housing lawyers and policy wonks say the Biden administration should work with jurisdictions to provide technical and planning assistance in its aims to rid itself of exclusionary zoning practices. To this end, Biden has endorsed providing $300 million in local housing policy grants, which would “give states and localities the technical assistance and planning support they need to eliminate exclusionary zoning policies.”

“Exclusionary zoning is a product of state law, and if we can get states to address that through funding incentives, I think that that could lead to some real change at the local level,” Phil Tegeler, executive director of the civil rights group Poverty and Race Research Action Council, told Vox. “Local governments have no inherent authority that’s not granted to them by state government.”

States care a lot about the general economic outlook and growth of their metro regions, whereas local officials are sometimes captured by the interests of local homeowners to the detriment of the broader region. Creating incentives and showing states how they are allowing localities to inhibit growth could spark a lot of change through state legislatures.

The administration should (as they have signaled they will do) reinstate the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. In 2015, the Obama administration passed the rule, which required cities, counties, states, and public housing agencies receiving money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to come up with a plan to take “meaningful actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination.”

The Trump administration rescinded this rule under then-HUD Secretary Ben Carson. But on January 26, Biden issued an executive order directing HUD to examine the effects that repealing the AFFH rule had on “HUD’s statutory duty to affirmatively further fair housing.”

Emily Hamilton, a senior research fellow at the think tank Mercatus Center, is skeptical that the AFFH rule “was ever going to be a very effective tool” since it didn’t require grantees to actually prove that they were increasing the number of low-income and minority households living in high-opportunity neighborhoods. Instead of just asking localities to come up with a “strategy” or a “plan” for how they’re going to improve, she suggested tying funding streams directly to outcomes, which would force them to show real progress before receiving money.

This change would need to be passed by Congress, where there’s already bipartisan support for tying funding from the popular Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) — a program that provides resources to large cities and counties to invest in housing, expanding economic opportunities for lower- and moderate-income families, and other broad urban development goals like infrastructure — to reporting on how grantees are reducing exclusionary zoning practices.

However, while this type of reform is likely to spur action from some jurisdictions, there’s a reason it won’t work when it comes to the worst offenders: Many of them don’t need the money.

For those localities that cannot be convinced, cajoled, or financially incentivized, more punitive action is necessary.

It’s time to sue the suburbs.

When all else fails, sue

We’ve talked about the carrots, now here’s the stick: The Biden administration must open up the floodgates for civil rights organizations, developers, and its own Justice Department to begin suing the worst offenders of exclusionary zoning.

Sara Pratt, the former deputy assistant secretary for fair housing enforcement and programs and senior adviser to the assistant secretary at HUD during the Obama administration, told Vox: “There’s a group who ... embrace segregation and inequity, and they don’t want to spend a dime in the Black community and they would rather have their Latino population move out of town. For those people, that’s where enforcement becomes relevant — and good, strong enforcement.”

The disparate impact standard, the legal doctrine underlying the Fair Housing Act, ensures that plaintiffs don’t have to prove a policy was necessarily designed with the intent to discriminate; they can instead show that it had a discriminatory effect against a protected class. If the government claims an on-the-surface neutral reason for implementing the policy, the plaintiff must also show there was another way to achieve those goals that does not lead to the same discriminatory effect.

For example, in 1981, under the Fair Housing Act, the local branch of the NAACP sued the town of Huntington, New York, over its refusal to allow multi-family housing to be built in a section of town that was 98 percent white and zoned for single-family homes. The NAACP won, proving that the defendant not only implemented a policy with a racially discriminatory effect that would have “significantly perpetuated segregation” but also that the alleged reasons for doing so — traffic, parking, and fire problems, and inadequate play areas, among others — were “weak justifications.”

The Trump administration was overtly hostile to this form of analysis, and last year finalized a rule that created a much higher bar for plaintiffs in these types of lawsuits to clear. Under the new rule, the plaintiffs have to essentially “prove your discrimination case when you file it,” Lisa Rice, president and chief executive of the National Fair Housing Alliance, told the Washington Post in 2019. “They have elevated the bar so high that it is virtually insurmountable.”

While Biden has already taken the first step to repeal this rule, it’s not enough to ensure that cases are actually brought against unjust housing rules.

Pratt told Vox that staffing is a huge piece of this puzzle: “I think a well-staffed civil rights office can have a major influence over a period of time in changing the country’s patterns of segregation. I actually have no doubt of it.”

However, she said, the current staffing at HUD and its Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is “lacking the kind of expertise that will be needed to in order to dig into civil rights enforcement and compliance and will need to hire economists and planners and other experts [like sociologists] in addition to good, seasoned investigators.”

A HUD official told Vox that the department “will be working diligently in the coming months to rebuild the department. We are focused on strengthening HUD’s capacity by rebuilding the career workforce.”

In order for the department to staff up, lawmakers will need to appropriate more money, Silverstein told Vox. Lucky for Biden and Secretary-designate Marcia Fudge, Democrats now control both houses of Congress.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Once HUD builds up its staff, these experts can review jurisdictions where there are multiple and particularly egregious fair housing complaints, and provide detailed statistical analysis that can show how specific zoning decisions perpetuate racial discrimination.

A recent lawsuit against the town of Coxsackie, New York, seems like the type of case HUD could take up. A developer wanted to build 300 units of moderately priced housing, and the town fought back, making offensive remarks like comparing would-be residents to people on the TV show Cops. Plaintiffs are alleging discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, and familial status after the defendant “bowed to discriminatory opposition” and “adopted ... a highly restrictive zoning ordinance,” which would block the development of these more affordable units, according to the complaint.

Suing is essentially a last resort: Communities immune to racial justice appeals, economic logic, and the financial incentives to allow more affordable housing need to be presented with a real threat if they are to remedy their worst policies.

Silverstein told Vox that the DOJ “institutionally has tended not to litigate at the cutting edge of these issues,” adding that the department is sensitive to potentially losing and has frequently avoided cases that might push the case law forward.

But if Biden’s DOJ gets serious about taking up lawsuits, it can set a precedent and deter other localities against exclusionary zoning practices and encourage them to work with HUD to develop a plan that fits their localities’ needs. These types of lawsuits are extremely expensive for localities to defend against, not to mention the bad press that comes with being sued for discrimination.

Being serious about eliminating exclusionary zoning means doing everything, all at once. It’s convincing whoever can be convinced. It’s throwing financial incentives at localities. And it’s taking punitive action against those places immune to all other methods of persuasion.

Fixing this problem requires a commitment not only to enforcing the letter of the Fair Housing Law, but also to changing the way people think about what a good neighborhood looks like and emphasizing that a thriving country means one that embraces change, diversity, and growth.

Kennetha, who is now building a nonprofit to help people like herself get back on their feet, told Vox that the lack of help from her elected officials is disheartening: “It feels like your voice is just noise, especially as a Black woman speaking,” she said.

If all her local officials are hearing is noise, it’s time for the Biden administration to turn up the volume.

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

President Joe Biden on day one terminated the so-called “national emergency” his predecessor declared as an excuse to build his border wall, ordering a halt to construction “as soon as possible but in no case later than seven days” while his administration reassessed the legality of the project. Biden last week then informed Congress of the termination, telling leaders that he had “determined that the declaration of a national emergency at our southern border was unwarranted.”

But weeks after Biden ordered that pause to wall construction at the southern border, environmental advocates have discovered what appears to be bulldozers continuing to level through a mountain and critical wildlife habitat in Arizona, “in an apparent violation of President Biden’s proclamation halting border wall construction,” Center for Biological Diversity said. “The footage was reportedly shot on Wednesday, Feb. 10, by members of the Tucson Samaritans, who shared it with the Center.”

“ALERT: Contractors are still hard at work building Trump's #BorderWall,” tweeted Laiken Jordahl, a borderlands campaigner with the center. In the one minute and eighteen second clip he shared on Twitter, at least two bulldozers and an excavator can be seen tearing into the Pajarito Mountains in Arizona. “They're leveling mountains & destroying jaguar habitat in an apparent violation of Biden's order to halt construction,” he said. “@POTUS must investigate & stop this madness for good. Footage shot by Tucson Samaritans.”

Advocates said that it appears that not only are construction crews continuing with building in violation of the president’s order, they are continuing to tear into the habitat at detriment to precious wildlife in the region.

“This section of wall, west of Nogales, is a part of a larger 74-mile stretch being built through remote, mountainous terrain that includes the last remaining corridors jaguars use to move back and forth between the United States and Mexico,” the Center for Biological Diversity said. “Many other animals use these remote areas to migrate across the landscape. A 2017 Center report identified 93 threatened and endangered species along the 2,000-mile border that would be harmed by Trump’s wall.”

“The president’s Jan. 20 executive order directed that work ‘on each construction project on the southern border wall’ be paused ‘as soon as possible, but in no case later than seven days’ from the date of the order,” the Center for Biological Diversity continued. “It shall be the policy of my administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall,” Biden’s proclamation said. “I am also directing a careful review of all resources appropriated or redirected to construct a southern border wall.”

Yet construction crews continue harming the land, according to what’s seen in the video. “A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson did not confirm or deny the report, but said the agency remains fully committed to implementing President Biden’s immigration and border security-related executive actions,” Arizona Public Media reported. Considering the previous president corruptly pushed for favored companies to get border wall contracts, it would not come as a shock if contractors were knowingly violating Biden’s order out of their loyalties. 

One favored contractor, Fisher Sand and Gravel admitted to tax fraud in 2009, 60 Minutes reported in September. “They've racked up thousands of environmental and safety violations in six states, and almost $2 million in fines.” Advocates say that President Biden must not only ensure that all construction ends now, but that the federal government use its authority and cancel the contracts as soon as possible.

“These alarming videos seem to show construction crews destroying every acre of pristine wildlands they can lay their hands on, in what appears to be blatant disregard of Biden’s order halting construction,” said Laiken Jordahl, borderlands campaigner at the Center. “The Biden administration should investigate this immediately and stop any construction that’s still occurring. Pausing work on the wall isn’t enough. The new administration must cancel these contracts for good and work with border communities and tribal nations to repair all that Trump destroyed.”

[[UPDATE: Great comment thread; Cal Cetin wins with, "Who's a pretty little kitty? Does kitty want an injunction?”]]

IMPORTANT ZOOM TIP: If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off. This kitten just made a formal announcement on a case in the 394th (sound on). #lawtwitter #OhNo @zoom_ushttps://t.co/I0zaj0wu6K

— Judge Roy Ferguson (@JudgeFergusonTX) February 9, 2021

UPDATE: Whoops, just saw that Josh beat me to it. But now there's a comment, our bot has Tweeted both, and the posts are short, so we'll just leave them both up.