New Atlas reports on ag-tech company Vertical Field's efforts to produce soil-based indoor vertical farms grown at the very location where food is consumed. From the report: The Vertical Field setup retains many of the advantages of hydroponic vertical farms, but instead of the plants growing in a nutrient-packed liquid medium, the container-based pods treat their crops to real soil, supplemented by a proprietary mix of minerals and nutrients. The company says that it opted for geoponic production "because we found that it has far richer flavor, color, and quality."
The recycled and repurposed 20- or 40-ft (6/12-ft) shipping containers used to host the farms can be installed within reach of consumers, such as in the parking lot of a restaurant or out back at the grocery store. Growers can also scale up operations to more than one pod per site if needed, and the external surfaces could be covered in a living wall of decorative plants to make them more appealing. The vertical urban farms are claimed capable of supporting the production of a wide range of fruits and veggies -- from leafy greens and herbs to strawberries and mushrooms, and more. And it's reported to use up to 90 percent less water than a traditional farming setup.
Unlike some high-tech farming solutions, staff won't need special training to work with the vertical farm as the automated growing process monitors, irrigates, and fertilizes the crops as they grow thanks to arrays of sensors that continually feed data on climate, soil condition, LED lighting and so on to management software. Each vertical farm unit has its own Wi-Fi comms technology installed to enable operators to tap into the system via a mobile app. The company told us that, by way of example, one container pilot farm offered a growing space of 400 sq ft (37 sq m) and yielded around 200 lb (90 kg) of produce per month, harvested daily. Lighting remained on for 16 hours per day. We assume that the pods are completely powered from the grid at their respective locations, though the company says that it is looking at ways to make use of solar panels as well as making more efficient use of water.
TSMC is to start making Intel's Core i3 on its 5nm process in 2H21 says TrendForce. From a report: Market analyst Trendforce reports that foundry TSMC is to start making Intel's Core i3 process later in the year on a 5nm process. This follows Intel's well documented problems with its leading edge process technology at 10nm and 7nm. The Core i3 move to a 5nm process is set to be followed by mid-range and high-end CPUs being produced for Intel by TSMC on a 3nm process in 2H22. TrendForce did not give a source for the information, simply referencing "investigations." Intel has long outsourced production significant amounts of its non-CPU chips to TSMC and UMC -- about 15 to 20 percent of its output, according to TrendForce. This is partly because it has often acquired fabless startups that had brought products to market using foundry. It was usually not worthwhile to re-engineer such products to Intel processes. It is also because Intel has wanted to focus on leading-edge specialist processes, although with less success in recent years. That 15 to 20 percent outsource was likely worth $10.5 billion to $14 billion in 2020, given Intel's annual revenue of $70bn.
As Barack Obama's inauguration kicked off on Jan. 20, 2009, LGBTQ Americans across the country watched with mixed emotions while evangelical pastor Rick Warren delivered the invocation. Though the vast majority of them had voted for Obama, Warren had urged members of his California-based megachurch to vote in favor of a ballot measure stripping marriage rights from same-sex couples; indeed, Proposition 8 narrowly passed on the same night Obama was elevated to the highest office in the land. Election Night had been a double-edged sword for gay and transgender individuals, and Warren's presence made the inauguration bittersweet as well.
But Obama's pick of Warren symbolized what ultimately emerged as a stumbling block to his ability to accomplish many of the priorities liberals had voted for in 2008 and which were also broadly popular—action on immigration, climate change, and, at least initially, queer rights. Obama was an incrementalist at heart, and he was still approaching Republicans as rational players in America's democratic experiment. Including an anti-gay evangelical pastor in his inauguration was one of several olive branches Obama extended to conservatives in the early days of his administration in what would prove to be a fruitless effort to win their cooperation. A dozen years later, however, Obama's former No. 2—a man who was viewed in the 2020 Democratic primary as far less progressive than Obama was seen in the 2008 contest—is quickly advancing a far more unapologetically progressive agenda from Day One of his administration.
In fact, President Joe Biden has quickly dispensed of many of the old Obama-era battles that flummoxed liberals and eventually drew them to the streets to protest the administration's inaction. Biden has already sent Congress a bold immigration bill that unequivocally includes a pathway to citizenship, expanded green card access, and fortifies the DACA program for Dreamers established by Obama in 2012. Biden also immediately yanked the Keystone XL pipeline permit—an action Obama didn't take until 2015, after years of pushing by climate activists. And building on the many hard-fought Obama-era wins on LGBTQ equality, Biden quickly signed an order pushing the most aggressive interpretation of Title VII protections for transgender and gay Americans in employment, housing, and education.
Sure, these are old battles. And to some extent, Biden has benefited from a natural evolution of the issues over a decade. That is particularly true on policies concerning the LGBTQ movement, which emerged from Obama's presidency lightyears ahead of where it began. But it is also a measure of how far the progressive movement has come over the past decade that we aren't immediately having to go to battle with a Democratic administration that seems less intent on advancing liberal causes than using them as bargaining chips on the way to accomplishing other goals. So far, that vestige of 90s-era Clintonian politics seems to have finally been laid to rest in the Biden White House.
The departure is clearly throwing some Washington journalists for a loop after decades of watching Democrats kowtow to Republicans.
During Thursday's White House press briefing, TheNew York Times' Michael Shear fixated on why President Biden wasn't extending more olive branches to Republicans, like Obama had in early 2009. Biden, for instance, doesn't have any GOP Cabinet members such as Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates—a holdover from the Bush administration. Shear also marveled that Biden's first directives were "largely designed at erasing as much of the Trump legacy as you can with executive orders"—the inference being that such an aggressive rejection of Trump policies would turn off Republicans, thereby crushing all comity. Gee, what ever happened to "elections have consequences"?
Part of what has gotten lost in translation for journalists is the word "unity," which Biden peppered throughout his inaugural address in some form or another no less than 11 times. Washington journalists view the word almost exclusively as a measure of bipartisan compromise. And to be fair, Biden's emphasis during the Democratic primaries on working with Republicans worried many liberals too. But whatever Biden meant by his compromise talk during the campaign, his definition of unity now appears to be centered around coming together to save America's democratic experiment. This political moment is simply that “dire,” as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki put it, that fraught. In Biden’s view, no true American patriot needs to sacrifice their values or core beliefs in order to mobilize against white supremacy and the corrosive scourge of disinformation.
In his inaugural address, Biden decried "lies told for power and for profit" and named the truth as one of the "common objects we love" as Americans. Lawmakers, he said, "who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation," bear a special responsibility to "defend the truth and to defeat the lies."
Biden also declared war on white supremacy, imploring Americans to unite in battling the nation's "common foes" of "extremism, lawlessness, violence."
In response, many Republicans are already reverting to their old tricks. They are calling Trump's impeachment divisive—as if siccing a murderous mob on the Capitol to overturn an election was a great unifier. They say they are uncomfortable with holding a trial for a president who is no longer in office—as if watching the nation's chief executive unleash an attack on the homeland wasn't uncomfortable for the vast majority of Americans.
As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters this week: "The fact is, the president of the United States committed an act of incitement of insurrection. I don’t think it’s very unifying to say, ‘oh, let’s just forget it and move on.’ That’s not how you unify."
And the very same Republicans who saddled taxpayers with some $2 trillion in debt to pass a giant tax giveaway to the rich and corporate-y, are now lining up against Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package to help struggling Americans and shore up the economy.
“The one thing that concerns me that nobody seems to be talking about anymore is the massive amount of debt that we continue to rack up as a nation,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, who voiced no such hesitation before casting his 2017 vote for the GOP's tax bonanza for the nation's wealthiest.
The White House has consistently said Biden believes there is bipartisan appeal for the relief package priorities, such as funding for unemployment insurance, vaccinations, and opening schools. “What are you going to cut?" Psaki posited at her first press briefing on Wednesday.
Psaki said Biden plans to be personally involved in rallying support for the package. But she also didn't rule out using the budget reconciliation process as a way to pass relief with a simple majority vote in the Senate, rather than the 60 needed to bypass a GOP filibuster. Biden has been here before, in 2009, as the country was staring down the Great Recession and negotiations with Republicans yielded a modest stimulus of $787 billion that ultimately hamstrung a quick recovery as many economists had warned. How much patience Biden has for haggling with Republicans in this moment of need remains to be seen.
But what jumps out from his first days in office is both Biden's resolve and his aggressive use of the tools at his disposal to take decisive action. He seems uniquely clear about the perils of this political era and what is required to meet them—a distinct break from the centrist dogma that has hung over Democrats for the better part of 30 years. And congressional Democrats across the liberal-to-moderate spectrum seem entirely bought into Biden's vision.
Republicans, for their part, are playing very small ball. The best any of the saner ones can manage is clinging to the same tired Reagan-era talking points that left the party open to hijack by a vulgar populist demagogue. It seems safe to say that it's going to require a lot more inspiration and creativity than what we are currently witnessing for the Republican Party to build an electorally viable coalition of voters over the next several years.
If President Biden continues to rise to the moment, the unity he engenders may ultimately be less about winning GOP votes for his policies than it is about unifying some 65% of Americans against a factionalized but dangerous party of seditionists.
Even as the votes continued to be counted in the early hours of Nov. 4, one thing became obvious before dawn: Joe Biden was going to be the next president of the United States. Though networks were extremely slow to acknowledge Biden’s wins across Rust Belt states, every model showed that Biden was going to win decisively in Minnesota and Michigan. Though Donald Trump had a large early lead among votes counted in Pennsylvania, it was easy to see from the make up of those votes that this was going to change. The closest of these swing states, Wisconsin, had already been called by the Associated Press. While it would take all the way until Saturday before networks made the final call, really the only thing in doubt by that point was the exact size of Biden’s victory.
But well before the final calls were made, at 2 A.M. on Nov. 4, Donald Trump had already made it clear where he was going. Trump appeared before the nation and said, “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment for our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election.”
Since Trump is constitutionally incapable of admitting a mistake, but only responds to errors by doubling down, everything that happened after that might have been predicted. Even so, the catalog of actions Trump took in an effort to subvert democracy is astounding.
Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results can be broken down into five broad categories:
🔵 Legal challenges on both state and federal level
🟢 Recounts, signature challenges, etc.
🟡 Efforts to suborn perjury from state officials or coerce state legislators
🟠 Reverse coup using government to defy election results
🔴 Overt calls to violence
In this timeline, the legal challenges are given very light treatment. Most of the 62 lawsuits filed by Trump’s legal team—teams, actually—were aimed at overturning the vote in one of six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The only lawsuit that Trump’s team won out of this whole collection was a ruling on how long voters had to “cure” mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania … which ultimately had no effect on the results in that state. So only a few “highlights” of these challenges are provided in this far-from-complete timeline.
🟡 Nov. 06—Trump campaign seeks volunteers to engage in election fraud in Pennsylvania by submitting late ballots.
🔵 Nov. 06—Trump lawsuit count in Pennsylvania alone reaches 16, as “garbage” suits proliferate in Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia.
🔴 Nov. 06—Armed QAnon fanatics are arrested outside Philadelphia election center as part of Trump-organized “Stop the Steal” rally.
🟠 Nov. 09—Trump replaces Secretary of Defense Mark Esper for failing to support Trump’s efforts to bring active duty military into Washington, D.C. during Black Lives Matter protests.
🟠 Nov. 10—Trump shuffles leadership at Pentagon, bringing loyalists to critical positions.
🟠 Nov. 10—William Barr authorizes U.S. attorneys to pursue false claims of election fraud, triggering resignation of DOJ’s Election Crimes Branch, Richard Pilger.
🟠 Nov. 12—Trump continues shuffling chairs at Pentagon, moving former Devin Nunes aide Kash Patel into the position of chief of staff, and Michael Flynn protégé Ezra Cohen-Watnick into the role of undersecretary for intelligence.
🔴 Nov. 14—Trump stages “Million MAGA March” in Washington D.C., including a “Stop the Steal” rally and thousands of white supremacist extremists descend upon the capital city in a preview of the Jan. 6 insurgency. Violence erupts among MAGA marchers, as groups including Proud Boys, American Guard, and Oath Keepers instigate assaults … as Trump sent statements of encouragement.
🔵 Nov. 25—Trump and Pennsylvania GOP leaders stage a “Gettysburg conference,” as Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis promote list of conspiracy theories to be incorporated into new lawsuit.
🟢 Nov. 30—Wisconsin conducts a recount in only the two most heavily Democratic counties (the only counties where Trump would pay for it). Biden picks up 87 votes.
🟡 Nov. 30—Rudy Giuliani appears before the Arizona legislature, urging them to throw out election results and name a slate of Trump electors.
🟠 Dec. 02—Recently pardoned Michael Flynn takes out a full-page ad in The Washington Post calling on Trump to overturn civilian government and institute “limited martial law.”
🟠 Dec. 08—Republican leaders in Congress cooperate with Trump to block Joe Biden from access to information and funds needed for transition.
🔵 Dec. 09—Michigan Supreme Court rejects a request for a “special master” to take control of ballots and order a third-party recount in Detroit in narrow 4-3 decision.
🔵 Dec. 11—The Supreme Court rejects a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, that attempts to overturn vote in four other states. That lawsuit was supported by other Republican attorneys general, and by 126 Republican members of the House.
🔴 Dec. 12—Texas Republicans respond to failure of seditious suit with calls for secession.
🟡 Dec. 13—Trump once again claims that he won the election “overwhelmingly,” and says there was “massive fraud.” He claims that Democrats voted two, three, or four times, and declares that he will “never give up.”
🟡 Dec. 23—Trump calls Georgia’s lead elections investigator and insists that he “find the fraud” in a lengthy conversation where he complained about other officials. Trump declares that the investigator would be a “national hero” if he overturns Georgia’s vote.
🟡 Dec. 29—Raffensperger announces that the investigator has found no sign of fraud.
🟠 Jan. 01—DOJ officials warn B.J. Pak, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, that Trump is “obsessing” about his office and may take actions to replace him.
🟠 Jan. 02—DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark meets with Trump. The two develop a plan in which Trump will replace acting AG Rosen with Clark, and Clark will then move forward to inform Georgia legislators that the DOJ is investigating serious election fraud in the state; simultaneously, Clark will file suit in effort to prevent Congress from counting electoral votes on Jan 6.
🟡 Jan. 02—Trump calls Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asks him to “find” votes. He also warns that U.S. attorney B.J. Pak is a “never-Trumper” who won’t support him. The recording surfaces the next day, after a member of the secretary of state’s office releases recording due to Trump’s continued complaints about Raffensperger following the call.
🟠 Jan. 03—The recording drops just hours before Rosen and Clark meet with Trump and White House attorney Pat Cipollone. With the tape causing problems, Cippollone convinces Trump not to execute Clark’s plan.
President Joe Biden’s 100-day moratorium on most deportations, which went into effect today, is a huge step in both protecting families and beginning the process of holding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accountable. But this pause came too late for as many as half a dozen Mauritanian asylum-seekers, who the out-of-control agency rushed to deport on Tuesday ahead of Biden’s inauguration.
ICE also rushed to deport immigrants from Haiti and Latin America, but Mother Jones reports the deportation of Black immigrants to Mauritania “have inspired particular outrage because of the country’s abysmal human rights record,” including continued slavery despite it being criminalized over a decade ago. Mother Jones said the previous administration in fact condemned this horrific human rights abuse, and yet rushed to deport asylum-seekers there anyway .
“Past administrations generally avoided deporting people to Mauritania, but the Trump administration upended that status quo by targeting Mauritanians who’d been allowed to live and work in the US for decades, even when they had deportation orders,” Mother Jones continued. “ICE deported 25 people to Mauritania last fiscal year, down from 98 two years before. There is usually no way for the people ICE deports, including Mauritanians, to return to the United States in the near future.”
One man who was also set to be deported that Tuesday was Paul Pierrilus, a New Yorker born in the Caribbean island Saint Martin and who ICE was going to send to Haiti even though he’d never stepped foot there before in his life. His family said he’d been swept up during what he thought was a routine immigration appointment. “My brother has never even been to Haiti,” sister Neomie told The Guardian. “He has the bare minimum of the language, he doesn’t know the culture, he doesn’t know anyone there. So my brother cannot go there.”
Mother Jones reports that ICE halted Pierrilus’ deportation “[f]ollowing pressure from advocates and newly-elected Rep. Mondaire Jones.” While apparently now protected from deportation by that pressure and Biden’s moratorium, he’s still languishing in ICE’s custody. Stopping these unjust and cruel deportations is one major step, but getting people out of abusive immigration detention conditions—especially if you’re a Black immigrant—must be another.
Recall that just this past fall, a civil rights complaint from leading advocacy groups said ICE agents and private prison officers tortured a number of Black immigrants to coerce them into signing their own deportation orders. ”The complaint describes the coercive tactics, including threats of violence and direct physical abuse to obtain submission, forced taking of fingerprints while individuals are in restraint, and the use of pepper spray against those who decline to sign their deportation papers,” the groups said in the complaint. ICE subsequently attempted to deport some of those men.
National Immigrant Justice Center Director of Policy Heidi Altman said in a statement received by Daily Kos that the organization “is eager to work with the Biden administration to ensure that the promise offered by the deportation moratorium is realized.”
“In order for that to happen,” she continued, “DHS must quickly and dramatically reduce the number of people in ICE detention and immediately begin developing a process to end the use of detention entirely and terminate ICE contracts with county jails and private prisons, starting with the facilities with the worst track records of abuse and corruption. Nearly 15,000 people's lives are now in the administration's hands, in dangerous ICE detention centers and at risk during a pandemic.” We must do better, and that time starts right now.
Another Trump supporter who violently invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6 was arrested this week only to be released shortly after. But in this case not only is Riley June Williams facing charges for storming the Capitol building, but also for helping to steal Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop, NBC News reported.
The 22-year-old Pennsylvania woman was arrested Monday and charged with intentionally entering into a restricted building without lawful authority in addition to disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. Williams was also accused of stealing a laptop belonging to Pelosi with the intention of selling it to Russian intelligence. Charges related to theft were added Tuesday. Despite these severe offenses, a federal judge released Williams from jail into the custody of her mother Thursday.
The “gravity of these offenses is great, it cannot be overstated,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Martin Carlson said. While a federal prosecutor argued earlier this week that Williams should not be released on bail pending trial, claiming she might flee, Carlson noted Williams had no prior criminal record. Given the fact that Williams did try to flee prior to her arrest Monday and this was confirmed by her mother, her white privilege clearly allowed her to be released.
Across the country, Americans of color are arrested daily, yet their lack of prior criminal history does not influence the circumstances or charges they face. In one incident, Daily Kos reported a teenage Black girl was arrested and put into juvenile detention for not finishing her homework. In similar incidents, police officials arrested children for throwing tantrums.
Others, including protestors and advocates across the country, have faced jail time for peacefully protesting and demonstrating. Williams not only incited violence but was caught on camera trespassing and stealing. Daily Kos reported that footage from ITV News depicted Williams in a green T-shirt and brown trench coat repeatedly directing rioters to go “up the stairs'' toward Pelosi’s office during the Jan. 6 attack.
According to an FBI court filing, Williams was also recorded on closed-circuit cameras in the Capitol building not only going in and out of Pelosi’s office but allegedly taking “a laptop computer or hard drive.” The FBI was alerted to Williams’ actions and video footage when a former partner of Williams tipped them off, alleging that Williams had planned to sell the computer to Russian intelligence.
According to the Associated Press, Williams’ defense lawyer, Lori Ulrich, told the federal judge the former boyfriend who had alerted the FBI was abusive to Williams and that “his accusations are overstated.”
Additionally, Ulrich blamed Trump for Williams’ actions. “It is regrettable that Ms. Williams took the president’s bait and went inside the Capitol,” Ulrich said.
While Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, Drew Hammill, confirmed on Jan. 8 that a laptop went missing from the conference room, the location of it is still unknown and was not discussed in court on Thursday, the AP reported.
Like others who were released after their involvement in the Capitol riots, the only restrictions Williams faces relate to travel. She is set to appear in court on Monday to continue her case.
Remember those widely-ridiculed agreements that anti-immigrant goofball Ken Cuccinelli, an unlawfully appointed former official with the previous administration, signed into place purporting that any future immigration changes by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would first have to be run by certain localities before the federal government could act?
Paxton “says Biden administration is violating the agreement TX signed w/ Trump’s DHS, which said the agency would check in with Texas before making changes,” BuzzFeed News’ Hamed Aleazis tweeted. Paxton’s threat demands DHS immediately rescind the memo, as well as “an immediate response or we will seek relief to enjoin your order, as contemplated by the Agreement.”
To put it plainly, Ken Paxton can eat shit. Legal experts like Santa Clara University School of Law professor Pratheepan Gulasekaram have criticized the agreements, calling them “completely unmoored from legal, constitutional ways of implementing policy,” BuzzFeed News previously reported. “The agreements, as Ken Paxton well knows, are blatantly illegal,” tweeted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. “Of course, that's never stopped him before. The Biden administration seems likely to take the correct step here; tell him to pound sand. The federal government can't contract away its right to make policy changes.”
Not to mention that Cuccinelli was unlawfully installed at DHS!A federal court had already previously ruled that the truly very strange Cuccinelli had also been unlawfully appointed to head U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Reichlin-Melnick noted at the time that the previous administration had since dropped its appeal of that ruling, yet was still “letting him go to work every day.” Perhaps because they knew he’d be willing to put his signature to ridiculous policies like the one now trying to tie up the new administration.
Needless to say, this entire agreement is laughably illegal for all kinds of reasons: - Signed by a DHS official unlawfully appointed - Fails the basic requirement of contract law - Delegates authority without Congressional permission. - Enforcing it would violate federalism.
The Texas Tribune reports that Paxton was also among the handful of state attorneys general to not sign a letter from state leaders condemning the Trump-incited seditionist attack on the U.S. Capitol this month. When those handful of Republican attorneys general then released their own letter, Ken didn’t that sign that one either. “After inciting the violence we saw last week and wasting Texas taxpayer dollars on baseless lawsuits that never see any results, Paxton is an embarrassment to this state and a traitor to this country,” Texas Democratic Party spokesperson Abhi Rahman said in the report. And his stupid lawsuits keep coming.
With every day that passes in which Minority Leader Mitch McConnell filibusters the organizing resolution for the Senate to pass unless Democrats promise him he can filibuster President Biden's agenda in the coming years, he further cements his legacy. Not as a Senate mastermind, but as a white supremacist extortionist. Mind you, he's been that for most of his career, but didn't really come into full realization of it until the nation elected a Black man, President Barack Obama. He did it in large part by using the filibuster, a "Jim Crow relic" in Obama's own words.
Obama called for eliminating the filibuster in his eulogy for Rep. John Lewis to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, "making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, […] adding polling places, and expanding early voting, and making Election Day a national holiday, […] guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C. and in Puerto Rico, […] ending some of the partisan gerrymandering—so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around." Not to put too fine a point on it, the filibuster is far from being an institution created by the Framers of the Constitution to preserve the rights of the minority.
In fact, as Senate procedural expert Adam Jentleson writes, the Framers "wanted the Senate to be a place where debate was thorough and thoughtful, but limited, and where bills passed or failed on majority votes when it became clear to reasonable minds that debate was exhausted." Thomas Jefferson wrote an early manual for the Senate establishing "procedures for silencing senators who debated 'superfluous, or tediously.'" They had experienced the need for supermajorities in the Articles of Confederation, and explicitly abandoned them in the Constitution. In Federalist 22, Alexander Hamilton wrote about supermajority requirements, "What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison." Requiring "more than a majority," he wrote, would be "to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices" of a minority to the "regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority." As Jentleson said in Daily Kos's "The Brief" last week, the Framers foresaw a Mitch McConnell, and also defined him: "pertinacious."
The filibuster quite literally came about in the 19th century to fight the abolition of slaves. "South Carolinian John C. Calhoun," Jentleson writes, "envisioned a Senate where this powerful pro-slavery minority would have not just the voice Madison intended but a veto—or as he put it, 'a negative on the others.'" His talking filibuster morphed over the decades into the 1917 Jim Crow-era Rule 22, which required a supermajority to (now 60 senators) to overcome a legislative filibuster. "Southerners inflated the minority’s right to unlimited debate with soaring oratory backed by intimidation from their monopoly of the Senate’s all-powerful committees," Jentleson explains, "which controlled the prospects for legislation as well as senators' careers." For the next 50 or so years, the filibuster "killed only civil rights bills."
Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer elaborates on the Jim Crow roots of the practice. "In 1951, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights ranked filibuster reform alongside criminalizing lynching and ending segregation," he writes. "Civil rights activists knew that the filibuster was one of the most potent weapons used by southern reactionaries to prevent racial justice."
And here we are again, with President Biden and a Democratic Senate majority that is making explicit their intent to address racial injustice, to tackle the racial disparities in the COVID-19 crisis, to rebalance federal courts, to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers. Up steps white supremacist, extortionist Mitch McConnell, taking that entire agenda hostage. Again.
Barack Obama is exactly right. The filibuster is a "Jim Crow relic" that stands in the way of progress. It's up to us to finish John Lewis's fight. To finally remove every last remnant of Jim Crow and build a democracy that works for everyone. pic.twitter.com/GT5FTlGki7
— Indivisible Guide (@IndivisibleTeam) July 30, 2020
When Joe Biden issued an executive order this week requiring mask-wearing on federal properties, it was framed as the least controversial provision he would issue early in his presidency.
“It’s not a political statement,” he said, “it’s a patriotic act.”
But shortly after the newly elected president uttered that plea, some Republicans made clear that even this ask wouldn’t go over well with them.
“The Biden administration is already headed in the wrong direction,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) said on Friday. “Continued federal overreach won’t end the Covid-19 pandemic or put food on the table.”
And within days, it became clearer that opponents wouldn’t just complain about the mask mandate, but actively fight it, too.
“Definitely expect lawsuits from our state, private lawsuits,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a Texas-based GOP strategist and former campaign manager to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
The pushback against Biden’s mask mandate is the earliest, most visceral sign to date that consensus will be nearly impossible to form in a still very-much-divided D.C. And it raises questions about how far the new administration is willing to go to crush what remains of a lethal pandemic, with expectation of 100,000 more deaths in the next month and widespread vaccination still months away.
Under the executive order, Biden is directing departments and agencies under his jurisdiction “to immediately take action to require people in federal buildings or on federal lands, on-duty or on-site federal employees, and on-site federal contractors to wear a mask and maintain physical distance,” according to the White House.
But the order also requires masks on various modes of public transportation, including trains, airplanes and intercity buses. And it’s that provision, attorneys who have challenged mask mandates in the past say, that could be the most vulnerable to a legal challenge.
While Republicans are warning about the potential for overreach, it does not appear that the White House will take a direct role in penalizing those who flout the mask mandate. A White House official said that agencies will be tasked with enforcing the order as they see fit. National parks also must abide by the mask order, but the White House says it is allowing for officials overseeing the parks to create their own guidelines for indoor and outdoor spaces on their properties.
At least one attorney who has headed a court case opposing mask mandates, said the language in Biden’s order appeared tightly written, perhaps in anticipation of legal challenges.
“In the summary I reviewed, I see evidence of careful thought and planning to anticipate challenges,” said Seldon Childers, a Florida attorney who has a pending case challenging mask mandates. ”I think they will probably prevail on having authority regulations.”
Scientists and epidemiologists say mask wearing is a critical means to slow the spread of Covid. And it wasn’t a surprise that Biden made the mandate one of his first acts in office. Throughout the campaign, he had pledged to take the action on the first day of his presidency.
But the pushback has, nevertheless, been visceral. A month ago, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) was chiding Biden’s mask mandate idea on Twitter. “On day one,” he said, “I will tell you to kiss my ass.”
And, after the formal introduction of the mandate, Republicans went after BIden, calling him a hypocrite for not wearing a mask at the Lincoln Memorial hours after he had signed the mandate.
“Typical Democrat - rules for thee, not for me,” former Trump campaign official Marc Lotter tweeted.
Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to George W. Bush, tweeted a New York Post story entitled “President Biden ditches mask at Lincoln Memorial hours after mandate.”
In a press briefing on Thursday, a Fox News reporter pressed White House press secretary Jen Psaki on whether Biden was practicing what he preached.
“We take a number of Covid precautions, as you know here, in terms of testing, social distancing, mask wearing ourselves, as we do every single day,” Psaki said.
Pushing against scientific consensus, Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, who has filed more than a dozen local lawsuits to battle mask mandates in counties across the state, challenged the notion that masks actually reduce the spread of the virus. He pointed to California, where compliance is high even as cases of Covid-19 have soared. He also insisted that there was no practical point to it, since, he argued, most federal properties are already requiring masks and cast Biden’s move as political.
“I think he's the guy that it's all about optics it's not really about results,” Sabatini said. “He wants to get his message across that he cares. He cares more about looking like he’s doing something.”
Biden advisers don’t necessarily dispute the idea that the point of the order is not the mandate itself but the optics and message it sends. They say Biden felt it was important for Americans to hear a clear message on the benefits of mask-wearing — with one White House official saying there was “no unifying standard” under Donald Trump. But the edict is also part of what they described as an all-hands-on-deck effort to contain the spread of the virus at a time that Biden has repeatedly warned would be a “dark winter.” And the more compliance with mask wearing, Biden advisers say, the more the country has an opportunity to drive down the spread of the virus.
Mark Scott and Tina Nguyen contributed to this report.
They get so jumpy because they're admitting they're white supremacists. Seems about right.
Republicans are telling on themselves. After President Joe Biden said, in his inaugural address, “a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat. To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity,” Republicans are outraged. Because, see, he was obviously talking about them.
Pro tip: If someone says “white supremacy and domestic terrorism are bad” and you’re like “you’re being mean and unfair to me,” you’re saying you identify yourself with white supremacists and domestic terrorists.
With that in mind, Sen. Rand Paul: “If you read his speech and listen to it carefully, much of it is thinly veiled innuendo, calling us white supremacists, calling us racists, calling us every name in the book.”
Dude, he didn’t call you a white supremacist. He said white supremacists exist in this nation. You chose to identify yourself with that.
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson: “What is it, exactly? Now that we’re waging war on white supremacists. Can somebody tell us in very clear language what a white supremacist is?”
He wants a definition? We could start with the dictionary: “a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.” But it’s safe to conclude that Biden was not talking about “waging war” on people who merely believe these things. His issue is going to be people who act on it, by, say, attacking the U.S. Capitol. Or burning Black Lives Matter banners at historic Black churches. There are concrete actions here—crimes, no less—and Biden is not somehow leaping over them to wage some kind of nebulous fight against stuff people think in the privacy of their homes without carrying it out in their public actions.
Carlson’s concern there was that Biden “has now declared war. So we should know specifically and precisely who exactly he has declared war on. We have a right to know that innocent people could be hurt in this war. They usually are.”
Oh noes! Innocent people could be hurt by … the fight against white supremacy? How about we start talking about that when those numbers approach the number of people hurt by white supremacy itself in, let’s say, the last month. That should buy us at least a decade before we have to worry about people who insist that they are not white supremacists, but merely white supremacy-adjacent.
Similarly, Jennifer Carnahan, the chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, wants the chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party to apologize for saying: “You're either on the side of Nazis, white supremacists & far-right groups, or you're on the side of democracy, liberty, freedom and our Constitution.” Because, Carnahan said, “Language like this does nothing but create division and flame tensions.” Ooookay, so that’s a vote for Nazis, white supremacists, and far-right groups over democracy, liberty, freedom, and the Constitution. Maybe she’d like to peel the “far-right groups” off of that, but this is a case where the shoe fits and she’s just going to have to wear it. If that’s who she wants to be defending, anyway.
Here’s everything else Biden had to say about racism in his speech, beyond that one mention of white supremacy:
”A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.”
”We can deliver racial justice.”
”Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart.”
”The sting of systemic racism.”
Not exactly “all of my Republican opponents are white supremacists and must be strung up,” is it? But when Republicans see themselves under attack by this language, they’re telling us a lot. They’re telling us that they want the dream of justice for all deferred still longer; that they don’t want racial justice delivered; that they want racism, nativism, fear, and demonization to continue to tear us apart. And, yes, that they look at the white supremacists who have attacked Black churches, attacked the Capitol, attacked U.S. democracy, and they see themselves.
Among President Joe Biden's first priorities on Wednesday was reaffirming the White House and the federal government as an outright ally of LGBTQ Americans. Biden immediately issued the most sweeping executive order to date aimed at providing protections on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, and education.
“All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation,” the White House said in a statement.
The order builds on last year's historic Supreme Court ruling finding that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides workplace protections to gay and transgender Americans based on its prohibition of "sex" discrimination. But the order extends those protections to the areas of housing and education, signaling that federal agencies stand ready to enforce the anti-discrimination protections in all areas of life for LGBTQ Americans.
The Trump administration had taken every anti-LGBTQ stance known to man, including arguing at the Supreme Court that Title VII doesn't protect queer Americans from discrimination. That was a total departure from a series of federal court rulings over the last decade that found exactly the opposite. As the HuffPost writes:
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the Justice Department’s civil rights division had recently issued a memo stating that the Bostock ruling, as it’s known, should not be applied to education and housing. The memo also argued that employers may still be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ workers by citing religious beliefs.
In other abrupt departures with the previous administration, the White House announced plans "in the coming days and weeks" to reverse Trump's policy of blocking transgender Americans from serving openly in the military.
The Obama administration had ended the ban on transgender military service, a policy that Trump reversed course on early in his tenure. Biden's reversion back to the Obama policy has been temporarily held up by the fact that his choice of secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, still hasn't been confirmed due to Mitch McConnell's obstruction of Senate proceedings.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has rebuffed Republican leader Mitch McConnell's obstructionist demand that the Democrats commit to keeping the filibuster on legislation. Schumer has precedent on his side; the organizing resolution from the last time the Senate was divided 50-50 didn't delve into floor procedure on the filibuster. Schumer also has his Democratic conference behind him.
That support ranges from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who said, "McConnell was fine with getting rid of the filibuster to a United States Supreme Court nominee for a lifetime appointment but he’s not ok getting rid of the filibuster for unemployment relief for families that are out of work because of COVID-19," to Sen. Jon Tester from Montana, who said, "Chuck Schumer is the majority leader and he should be treated like majority leader. We can get shit done around here and we ought to be focused on getting stuff done. […] If we don’t, the inmates are going to be running this ship." Sen. Dick Durbin, Schumer's deputy, adds: "Unfortunately we’re not going to give him what he wishes. If you did that then there would be just unbridled use of it." That's all extremely true, and having Democrats say it out loud and reporters repeating it is enough to make you think that maybe we really are in a new year.
It seems like "getting shit done" is the takeaway for Democrats. Giving in to McConnell and taking away the potentially necessary tool to get that shit done "would be exactly the wrong way to begin,” said Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal. "We need to have the kind of position of strength that will enable us to get stuff done." But that still leaves the Senate at an impasse in moving forward with organizing. For example, the three brand new Democratic senators sworn in Wednesday can't be assigned to committees until there's an organizing resolution in place. Not having it is slowing down committee hearings conducting the process of approving Biden's Cabinet.
McConnell doesn't want Biden to succeed. He doesn't want Democrats to get shit done because he's looking ahead—as always—to the next election and regaining his majority. To that end, he's preventing Biden from forming his government. He's using the same tool white supremacist senators used generations ago to first fight abolition and then civil rights legislation. How little things change.
If it comes down to it, Democrats can advance the cause of getting rid of the filibuster right now, on this organizing resolution McConnell has been delaying. If it comes to it, they can use what's been dubbed the Reid Precedent, when then Majority Leader Harry Reid used a simple majority to overturn a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian to end the filibuster on President Barack Obama's lower court nominees. They could, if McConnell forces them to, organize with a simple majority vote, with Vice President Harris' help.
Forums of the conspiracy theory known as QAnon went berserk Wednesday as their delusional dreams dissolved into dust while the completely obvious took place: Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States.
Here's what QAnon-ers expected to happen, according to NBC News reporter Ben Collins: Trump would use the Emergency Broadcasting System to announce the The Storm had arrived; Democrats would be rounded up and arrested; and Trump would be declared president. Q supporters had apparently bought CB radios for the blackout.
Well, rats! Instead, Biden is now president, and America's legal system is getting ready to rain down comeuppance on Donald Trump. But the meltdown that ensued in QAnon forums was epic.
"I don't think this is supposed to happen?" wrote one follower. "How long does it take the fed to run up the stairs and arrest him?" Apparently, a very very long time—otherwise known as never.
No emergency announcement from Trump. No mass arrests. Just the continuation of American democracy as regularly scheduled every four years at 12:01 PM on Jan. 20.
"I'm about to puke," wrote another conspirator. Okay, finally getting to where the rest of us here in reality have been for the past four years.
And beyond the nausea, a whole lot of disorienting bafflement poured out. "There is no plan," noted one person. "It's over and nothing makes sense... absolutely nothing..." wrote another.
Many followers cycled through the classic stages of grief (documented here): denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Some rather infamous purveyors of the QAnon nonsense even suggested they might have reached the end of the line with the conspiracy theory. "We gave it our all," wrote Ron Watkins, the former 8kun administrator, under the handle CodeMonkeyZ. "Now we need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able."
At the end of the day, a conspiracy theory that was so certain of its ability to predict the future, left its followers deeply disillusioned.
"It's like being a kid and seeing the big gift under the tree thinking it is exactly what you want only to open it and realize it was a lump of coal," observed one.
Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, has begun the process of crying about being persecuted for his beliefs in overthrowing the democratically elected president. According to NBC News, Lindell says he has been dropped from Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl’s. Newsweek says that H-E-B and Wayfair have also dropped Lindell’s special brand of bullshit.
Is this because Lindell has not stopped promoting the blatantly false story that the election was stolen from Donald Trump by magic? Is this because Lindell, last week, was photographed with notes from a meeting with the soon-to-be-ex president of the United States that seemed to bullet point sedition and martial law and the end of a peaceful transfer of power? Probably. There are numerous reasons to cut ties with Mike Lindell, but the voter fraud stuff is likely going to be litigated, and Mr. Pillowbrains is going to need to use some of his money for lawyers when that happens.
For example, Dominion Voting Systems, the company maligned by right-wing misinformation, has reportedly sent a letter to Lindell threatening a lawsuit for promoting the misinformation that their systems were used to perpetuate a historic fraud on the American public. Lindell, like a good charlatan, is going full-on overthrow of the government, doubling down and telling CBS news that “I want them to sue me. Please. Because I have all the evidence, 100%. I want all the American people and the world to see the horrific things that these [Dominion voting] machines are capable of and what they did to our country and what—they’re allowing other countries to steal our election and just to hijack our election.”
Two smiles that mean zilch
NBC News asked Mr. Lindell about the imminent lawsuit from Dominion and Mikey Pillow’s “evidence.” NBC reports that Lindell sent them an email with what MyPillow man claimed would be “one page of the proof.”
The email did not include an attachment. When asked if he had mistakenly omitted it, Lindell sent another email with an empty attachment and a third with screenshots of illegible text.
Lindell has been supporting the lies of Fox News for a long long time. The fact that he has stepped forward to become so actively seditious in his pursuits to help overthrow our government is not surprising. Over the past year, Lindell has really begun to come back out of his fraud’s shell, hocking snake oil COVID-19 therapeutics, and any other drivel the Trump administration’s cabal of hucksters were promoting to profit off the pain and death they’ve fostered.
Forbes reports that one of the groups leading the charge to have Lindell’s fraud punished in the marketplace is Sleeping Giants, who “have also lobbied Walmart, Amazon and Lowe’s to stop stocking MyPillow products.”
Enjoy Seth Meyers making fun of what might otherwise make you weep.
In 2016, Donald Trump infamously said that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue without losing the support of his fanatical followers. That still appears to be pretty much true as, after refusing to acknowledge the results of a free election, splitting his own party, presiding over the loss of the Senate, and instigating a deadly, violent assault on the Capitol in a bid to interfere with counting electoral votes, the latest CIVIQS results still show Trump holding onto 43% support.
In fact, if anyone has suffered from Trump’s actions it’s every other Republican official. It doesn’t even seem to matter to what degree they supported Trump in his efforts to topple the elected government. Kevin McCarthy? Way down. Mitch McConnell? Down to a hilarious 11% favorable rating. But the biggest loser may be Mike Pence, who has seen his support among Republicans plummet, putting him at a 33% favorable rating.
All of this can be explained simply enough: Republicans no longer think of themselves as Republicans. By a two to one margin, those who voted for Trump say they consider themselves “a Trump supporter,” not “a Republican.”
The way that these voters attach to Trump rather than anyone else can be seen in another value in the poll. When asked if they believed the election was “stolen,” a jaw-dropping 40% of Americans still said yes, over a week after the assault on the Capitol. But when asked if Republicans who voted against certifying the vote were “protecting democracy,” only 37% agreed. Even when Republicans were doing exactly what Trump asked them to do, they still got lower marks than Trump himself.
There was an interesting split on views of the actual insurgency. Asked if the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol represented “a coup attempt,” 53% of Americans agreed—within a point of those in the poll who said they did not vote for Trump. However, when asked if the attack was “an act of terrorism,” the number rose to 60%. That number indicates that even some of those who voted for Trump were upset over the the sight of a mob prowling the halls of Congress. That number was apparently confirmed by the 62% who agreed that everyone who broke into the Capitol building should be arrested. And still, the guy who instigated the attack is polling far higher than other Republicans.
Finally, a plurality of voters want to see both Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley kicked out of the Senate. In Hawley’s case, that includes at least some voters who went for Trump.
Everything in the poll seems to indicate that Trump voters remain Trump voters, not Republican voters. If there remains a core of non-Trump Republicans, they are vanishingly small. As the GOP tries to separate itself from the angry guy leaving the room, it’s completely unclear how many of those Trump voters are ready to come back into their ranks without Big Orange at the lead. With a 11% favorable rating for McConnell, and a 20% rating for McCarthy … just who is the leader of the Republican Party going into 2021?
One possible side effect of this deep schism in the Republican Party is that it may make it easier for McConnell and other Republicans to support Trump’s impeachment. To coin a phrase: What do you have to lose?
I’ve been thinking about Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, A Distant Mirror, over the past couple of weeks. The book is a masterful work of anti-romance, a cold-eyed look at how generations of aristocrats and royalty waged one of the longest wars in recorded history, all while claiming the mantle of a benevolent God. The disabusing begins early. In the introduction, Tuchman examines the ideal of chivalry and finds, beneath the poetry and codes of honor, little more than myth and delusion.
Knights “were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed,” Tuchman writes. “In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century, the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.”
The chasm between professed ideal and actual practice is not surprising. No one wants to believe themselves to be the villain of history, and when you have enough power, you can hold reality at bay. Raw power transfigured an age of serfdom and warmongering into one of piety and courtly love.
This is not merely a problem of history. Twice now, Rudy Giuliani has incited a mob of authoritarians. In the interim, “America’s Mayor” was lauded locally for crime drops that manifested nationally. No matter. The image of Giuliani as a pioneering crime fighter gave cover to his more lamentable habits—arresting whistleblowers, defaming dead altar boys, and raiding homeless shelters in the dead of night. Giuliani was, by Jimmy Breslin’s lights, “blind, mean, and duplicitous,” a man prone to displays “of great nervousness if more than one black at a time entered City Hall.” And yet much chin-stroking has been dedicated to understanding how Giuliani, once the standard-bearer for moderate Republicanism, a man who was literally knighted, was reduced to inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol. The answer is that Giuliani wasn’t reduced at all. The inability to see what was right before us—that Giuliani was always, in Breslin’s words, “a small man in search of a balcony”—is less about Giuliani and more about what people would rather not see.
And what is true of Giuliani is particularly true of his master. It was popular, at the time of Donald Trump’s ascension, to stand on the thinnest of reeds in order to avoid stating the obvious. It was said that the Trump presidency was the fruit of “economic anxiety,” of trigger warnings and the push for trans rights. We were told that it was wrong to call Trump a white supremacist, because he had merely “drawn upon their themes.”
One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to invalidate the will of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to go back where they came from; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “a refugee camp”; of his constant invocations of “the Chinese virus,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are—or should be—on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened—that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.
The temptation to look away is strong. This summer I watched as whole barrels of ink were emptied to champion free speech and denounce “cancel culture.” Meanwhile, from the most powerful office in the world, Trump issued executive orders targeting a journalistic institution and promoted “patriotic education.” The indifference to his incredible acts was telling. So much for chivalry.
The mix of blindness and pedantry did not plague merely writers, but also policy makers and executives. “The FBI does not talk in terms of terrorism committed by white people,” the journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote in the days after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “Attempting to appear politically ecumenical, a recent bureaucratic overhaul during an accelerated period of domestic terrorism created the category of ‘racially motivated violent extremism.’” But only so ecumenical. “For all its hesitation over white terror,” Ackerman continued, “the FBI until at least 2018 maintained an investigative category about a nebulous and exponentially less deadly thing it called ‘Black Identity Extremism.’”
“When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide,” Tuchman writes, “the system breaks down.” One hopes that this moment for America has arrived, that it can at last see that the sight of cops and a Confederate flag among the mob on January 6, the mockery of George Floyd and the politesse on display among some of the Capitol Police, are not a matter of chance.
More, that Trumpism did not begin with Trump; that the same Republican Party some now recall in wistful and nostalgic tones planted seeds of insurrection with specious claims of voter fraud; that the decision to storm the Capitol follows directly, and logically, from respectable Republicans who claim that Democrats steal elections and defraud this country’s citizens out of their right to self-government.
This, of course, is not my first time contemplating the import of such things. “The First White President” was the culmination of the years I’d spent watching the pieces fall into place. Pieces that, once assembled, finally gave us Trump. I’m sorry to report that I think the article holds up well. This would be a much better world if it didn’t. But in this world, an army has been marshaled and barbed wire installed, and the FBI is on guard against an inside job. Whatever this is—whatever we decide to call this—it is not peaceful, and it is not, in many ways, a transition. It is something darker. Are we now, at last, prepared to ask why?
The following is an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s October 2017 cover story, “The First White President.” You can find the full essay here.
It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.
Once upon a time, hard-right conservatives got very very mad about “The 1619 Project,” a New York Times Magazine attempt to "reframe" American history to better tell the story of slavery and ongoing suppression, and because when the running-for-reelection Donald Trump saw his allies melting down on Fox News over the injustice of it all, he promised that he would commission a better report, one with blackjack and hookers and owning the libs on every page.
The result of that conservative rebuttal to history itself, unimaginatively called “The 1776 Report” because all modern conservative thought consists of rebuttals to specific non-conservative things they didn't like, was released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, because of course it was. It consists of a thin 20-page book report compiled by an assembly of whoever Trump's team could round up, none of whom are historians, and is mostly a collection of the usual conservative grievances stapled together in the usual way and leavened with the usual dishonesties. It's not even worth reading for mockery purposes, so save the 15 minutes and do something else.
There has been significant hullabaloo on the internet over portions of it being plagiarized: This is not quite true, however. It contains bucketloads of uncited quotes, and one of the report's authors simply lifts an entire bit complaining about the nation's colleges from one of his prior works.
Here's a summary: According to the assembled best minds of the Team Trump era, "Progressivism" stands as a "challenge to America's principles" alongside slavery and fascism, and is "based on" a "false understanding of rights." Racism and "identity politics" are seen as equal dangers; certainly, racism was bad but in its place we have "moved toward a system of explicit group privilege" seeking "social justice," which is also bad.
Along the way we learn that the United States was a leader in defeating slavery, because our slaveholding founders did enshrine slaveholding into our national documents but truly felt bad about it the whole time, and that the infamous defender of slavery John C. Calhoun was Actually an inventor of "identity politics."
The section denouncing fascism is short, which is to be expected because the rest of the document teases at the edges of explicitly fascist principles. There is an entire section devoted to "national renewal," along with the robust use of religion to declare the inherent rightness of take-your-pick, and the condemnation of academia and of colleges that "peddle resentment and contempt" for our homeland rather than proper "reverence" for it.
That there are appendices devoted to each of these attacks in succession, tacking on a full 10 pages of grievances on top of the 20 pages of actual "report," shows where the authors' personal obsessions lie. Celebrating our history is one thing, but the most pressing national need is to root out the godless, the equality-demanders, and the elitists who cast doubts on our national greatness. Only then will we achieve the renewed America our forefathers intended for us.
So, then. Twenty pages of grievance filled with contextless quotes, half-truths, revisionism, and papering-over, all revolving around a history that historians are specifically disinvited from weighing in on because they are mean. That is the response to the 1619 Project that could be mustered after months of conservative teeth-gnashing over the indignity of it all. That sounds about right.
More than anything else, this document is again a testament to the complete hollowing-out of the conservative movement, a transformation that has in recent months purged from its ranks anyone with intellectual heft above a Dinesh D'Souza in favor of broad pamphleteering and demands for absolute loyalty regardless of facts or consequence. The reason no genuine historians were included is because genuine historians would immediately point out the false statements and flawed assumptions involved, as they do every time the same conservative arguments have been made in the past, and indeed historians near-immediately (it's a quick read, after all) weighed in with mockery and disgust at the shoddy effort.
After decades of throwing out anyone in conservatism who would value rigor over ideology, this is what you are left with. A slapdash report assembled in the last days of a fading, incompetent administration, one with roughly as many supposed authors as it has pages and which primarily concerns itself with the dangers posed by liberals, by academia, by "identity politics," and by whichever other whistles might sound good during a Tucker Carlson or Father Coughlin faux-populist diatribe. One with the entire Declaration of Independence stapled on to help boost the page count.
Whatever. The real shame is that it did not take longer to produce. It at least kept a collection of insincere faux thinkers off the streets and busy for a week or two, which is better than just letting them wander college campuses shouting about oppression or whatever it is they do when left unsupervised.
Get it done. This is hugely important legislation.
Elections have consequences. So does the Republican enabling of the worst, most corrupt chief executive in the nation’s history. Hence, the first piece of legislation to be introduced in the new Democratic Senate will be S. 1, The for the People Act of 2021. The bill from Incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota is a companion to H.R. 1 in the House, a bill with the same title and largely similar provisions to restore and protect voting rights, tackle dark money in politics, and make ethics reforms for public servants.
This could be the legislation that breaks the filibuster, and that will be a challenge for some Republicans to oppose. The House passed a version of the bill soon after retaking the majority in the last Congress, but no Republican in the Senate had to face a vote on it because Mitch McConnell just refused to bring the bill to the floor. Upping the stakes is Project Lincoln, the never-Trumper Republicans who made a big splash against Trump and his enablers in the GOP. The Washington Post's Greg Sargent has the scoop that Project Lincoln supports it. "If Republicans want to move past Trump and repudiate Trumpism in all its forms, they need to pass foundational reforms to democracy," Reed Galen, co-founder of the group told Sargent. "Senate Republicans must make a choice: Do they stand for democracy or are they the new Jim Crow caucus?"
Here's some of what they have to decide on: universal registration of eligible voters and simple voter registration maintenance available to all voters online, Election Day voter registration, limiting voter purges by states and requiring early voting, as well as restricting hurdles states can impose on voting and vote by mail; restoration of the protections in the Voting Rights Act overturned by the Supreme Court and blocked by McConnell; and independent redistricting commission in the states to end gerrymandering. On the dark money front, it would impose new disclosure requirements both on donations and on lobbying, and require presidents and vice presidents to release their tax returns.
"From a violent insurrection at the Capitol to the countless attempts to silence the vote of millions of Americans, attacks on our democracy have come in many forms," Schumer said in a press release announcing the bill. "This legislation will bring about long-needed democracy reforms that will ensure that government is finally able to respond to the pressing needs of the American people." Merkley added "A violent assault on the Capitol is not the only way to attack democracy. Everyone who believes in our Constitutional vision should support reforms that make sure the American people are able to vote and that their government reflects their preferences and works for them." Klobuchar, incoming chair of the Rules Committee which has jurisdiction over federal elections, added that her "number one priority will be to make voting easier and more secure and to halt the flood of special interest and dark money that is drowning out the voices of the American people."
Support for a Senate conviction of Donald Trump among Republican voters has grown since last week, though it's still not particularly high. But as more information emerges about the Trump-inspired violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, GOP support for convicting Trump has ticked up a half dozen points from 14% on Jan. 8-11 to 20% on Jan. 15-17, according to new Politico/Morning Consult polling released Tuesday.
It's still wildly low by any reasonable measure, but given that Trump commanded roughly 90% support among the GOP base throughout his term, it's a notable break from someone who conservative voters never held to account for anything he did. About 86% of Democrats also "strongly" or "somewhat" support Senate conviction, as do some 50% of independents.
Last week, FiveThirtyEight.com also found that overall support for Trump's impeachment in an average of polls was up a handful of points from where it stood during the Ukraine scandal, 52% now versus about 47%-48% then.
No matter what, Trump is leaving office with a wildly diminished profile because, well, he sucks and he actually launched a deadly attack on U.S. soil, the nation's duly elected Congress, and the government he was supposedly charged with leading. In the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, 60% of respondents said he would be remembered as a below-average president, with 47% saying he qualified as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history.
In Gallup’s final polling, Trump's job approval stood at 34%—his lowest to date in the poll. He averaged 41% approval throughout his tenure, hitting an all-time high of 49% early last year around the time of his Senate acquittal and the early days of the pandemic. "Trump is the only president not to register a 50% job approval rating at any point in his presidency since Gallup began measuring presidential job approval in 1938," writes the outlet.
National Guard members assist with processing Covid-19 deaths at the medical examiner coroner’s office in Los Angeles, California on January 18. | Los Angeles County Coroner via AP
The coronavirus has officially killed more Americans than World War II.
The number of confirmed Covid-19 deaths in the United States has now surpassed 400,000, and that devastating toll is set to grow in the coming weeks with the US still averaging more than 3,300 deaths every single day.
In just the 11 months since the country’s first confirmed death from Covid-19, the disease has killed as many Americans as US soldiers who died during four years of World War II.
That figure is also almost surely an undercount. The number of excess deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic (the number of deaths that have occurred in excess of what would ordinarily be expected based on long-running trends) is closer to 500,000, according to some recent estimates. Some of the additional 100,000 deaths may not be from the coronavirus — they could, instead, be people who couldn’t get adequate medical care because health systems have been strained by the pandemic — but experts think a substantial portion probably are uncounted Covid-19 deaths.
Regardless, the loss of human life over the past year has been extraordinary. The US has by far the most confirmed Covid-19 deaths in the world and nearly doubles the toll in Brazil, the second-hardest-hit country. Even when adjusting for population, America ranks 11th in the world in Covid-19 deaths per million people.
And even now, nearly a year into the pandemic, deaths are piling up faster and faster, rather than slowing down. It took about three months from the first confirmed Covid-19 death in the US in late February for the country to hit 100,000 deaths. Another four months elapsed before the country reached 200,000 deaths in late September. But then things picked up speed during the winter surge: The US added 100,000 more deaths in less than two months, and from there, it took a little more than a month to go from 300,000 to 400,000 deaths.
What went so wrong? Vox’s German Lopez explained at the beginning of this month:
The primary answer lies in President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress, who have collectively abdicated the federal government’s role in addressing the outbreak or even acknowledging its severity. From Trump’s borderline denialist messaging on Covid-19 to Congress’s inability to pass broader economic relief, the country has been left in a place where states, local governments, and the public have to fend for themselves — and none of them have the resources to deal with the coronavirus on their own.
Trump and his allies have also actively worked to sideline the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, crippling the agency’s ability to provide guidance to states and others that have now been left out on their own.
At the same time, there are serious structural issues that hindered states’ and the public’s ability to act. Experts have long argued that the US’s public health infrastructure is underresourced and ill prepared for a serious crisis, and the pandemic has exposed this many times over: Nearly a year into the pandemic, no state has capacities for testing and contact tracing that most experts would consider adequate.
After looking at the innards of Apple's new over-the-ear headphones, the AirPods Max, tech site iFixit concluded that the intricate engineering made the lofty $550 price seem almost reasonable. iFixit cracked open the headphones and in summation said, that after looking at competitors, "internally, the AirPods Max's obsessive craftsmanship makes those other extremely capable devices look like toys by comparison."
Enlarge / DUNKIRK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - 10/09/2016: A NRG-owned coal-fired energy facility that plans to convert to a natural gas facility. (credit: John Greim / Getty Images)
Today, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia vacated the Trump administration's attempt to take a minimalist approach to the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions. The ruling was a lopsided victory for the long list of groups opposing the Trump EPA's approach, with the entire rule being vacated. Thus, the Biden administration will start unencumbered by its predecessors' attempts to gut carbon dioxide regulations.
Here we go again
Some of the legal issues here date back to the Clinton administration, when states sued to force the EPA to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. That issue was ultimately clarified by the Supreme Court, which, during the George W. Bush administration, ruled that carbon dioxide could be regulated as a pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act. Early in the Obama administration, the EPA issued an endangerment finding for greenhouse gasses that provided the scientific rationale for regulations. Those regulations came in the form of the Clean Power Plan, issued during Obama's second term.
While the Clean Power Plan completed the federal rule-making process, it was held up by lawsuits when President Obama left office. Trump issued an executive order that directed the EPA to replace the Clean Power Plan. The EPA's eventual replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy rule (ACE), went well beyond simply ending or limiting the Clean Power Plan. Instead, the ACE attempted to narrow the regulation allowed under the Clean Air Act by having states regulate each individual source of emissions rather than regulating the state's total emissions. As an added bonus, it also stretched out the timeline for states to bring their emissions into compliance.
According to new research from Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (NS), almost a third of recovered COVID-19 patients will end up back in the hospital within five months and one in eight will die. Yahoo News reports via The Telegraph: Out of 47,780 people who were discharged from hospital in the first wave, 29.4 per cent were readmitted to hospital within 140 days, and 12.3 per cent of the total died. The current cut-off point for recording Covid deaths is 28 days after a positive test, so it may mean thousands more people should be included in the coronavirus death statistics. Researchers have called for urgent monitoring of people who have been discharged from hospital.
Study author Kamlesh Khunti, professor of primary care diabetes and vascular medicine at Leicester University, said: "This is the largest study of people discharged from hospital after being admitted with Covid. People seem to be going home, getting long-term effects, coming back in and dying. We see nearly 30 per cent have been readmitted, and that's a lot of people. The numbers are so large. The message here is we really need to prepare for long Covid. It's a mammoth task to follow up with these patients and the NHS is really pushed at the moment, but some sort of monitoring needs to be arranged."
The study found that Covid survivors were nearly three and a half times more likely to be readmitted to hospital, and die, in the 140 days timeframe than other hospital outpatients. Prof Khunti said the team had been surprised to find that many people were going back in with a new diagnosis, and many had developed heart, kidney and liver problems, as well as diabetes. "We don't know if it's because Covid destroyed the beta cells which make insulin and you get Type 1 diabetes, or whether it causes insulin resistance, and you develop Type 2, but we are seeing these surprising new diagnoses of diabetes,â he added. "We've seen studies where survivors have had MRS scans and they've cardiac problems and liver problems. These people urgently require follow up and the need to be on things like aspirin and statins."
