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Nature doesn't exactly want you dead, but it certainly doesn't want you alive.

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Covid Tracking Project

Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are up across the country. More deaths are likely to follow.

A new wave of Covid-19 cases is rising across the United States, a harbinger of difficult winter months ahead.

America is now averaging about 54,000 new confirmed cases every day, the highest numbers since early August, according to the New York Times. More than 37,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 in the US, up from about 30,000 a week ago. Roughy 700 new deaths are being reported on average every day, too — and while that is down from August, when there were often more than 1,000 deaths a day, deaths are going to start increasing if cases and hospitalizations continue to rise. It’s a pattern we have seen before.

Public health experts have been warning for months that fall and winter could lead to a spike in Covid-19 cases. Why? Because the best way to slow down the coronavirus’s spread is to keep your distance from other people and, if you are going to be around others, to be outside as much as possible — and both become harder when the weather gets cold.

We may now be seeing those predictions start to come true, even as much of the country still has warm weather. The US already has nearly 8 million confirmed cases and 217,000 confirmed deaths. Both numbers will continue to climb.

Eight months into the pandemic, America’s failures to contain Covid-19, and states’ eagerness to reopen even if they haven’t gotten their outbreaks under control, is once again leading to a surge in cases and hospitalizations.

Covid-19 cases are rising everywhere across the country

Earlier in the year, there was limited value to discussing “waves” because some states would have a decline in cases while other states were experiencing surges. What distinguishes this autumn wave is that it seems to be happening everywhere.

Case numbers are up across every region: the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, and the West.

Covid Tracking Project

What’s so worrisome is that no one state or region can be blamed for this new wave. Just two states have seen their number of new Covid-19 cases drop over the last two weeks, as of October 15, according to Covid Exit Strategy. Cases are up in all the others.

Raw case numbers can, of course, obscure important differences in population; 100 new cases means something different for California than it does for Wyoming. Experts will use another metric — new cases per million people — to gauge how saturated a given state is with Covid-19.

The goal would be to have fewer than 40 new cases per million people. But just two states — Maine and Vermont — meet that threshold. Meanwhile, North Dakota (800 cases per million), South Dakota (743), Montana (569), and Wisconsin (531) are some of the states seeing very high levels of new infections.

As Vox’s German Lopez reported this week, just one state — Maine — meets all of the benchmarks indicated by experts for a state to consider its Covid-19 outbreak contained. And yet, most states have reopened many of the businesses that were closed in the spring: 40 or so states have reopened restaurants, bars, gyms, movie theaters, and nonessential retail.

“Part of the problem is America never really suppressed its Covid-19 cases to begin with,” Lopez wrote, explaining why experts were anticipating a new surge in cases. “Think of a disease epidemic like a forest fire: It’s going to be really difficult to contain the virus when there are still flames raging in parts of the forest and small embers practically everywhere. The country always risks a full blaze with each step toward reopening and with each failure to take precautions seriously.”

Too many Covid-19 tests are coming back positive right now

Another closely watched indicator for renewed Covid-19 spread is the percentage of coronavirus tests that come back positive. The number of tests being conducted doesn’t actually tell you all that much; if a high percentage of them are positive, that suggests that many others aren’t being caught at all and the virus could continue to spread unchecked.

So while the US is now averaging about 1 million tests every day, that is not quite the triumph it might sound like (or that President Donald Trump would like to believe it is). The country’s positive test rate is around 5 percent, right at the threshold experts say would reflect adequate testing. Ideally, it would be even lower, 2 percent or less.

But even with that passable national positivity rate, most states are still not conducting nearly enough testing. Here are the 10 states with the highest positive test rates, according to Covid Exit Strategy. (Mississippi’s test positivity rate appears to be very high, but large recent swings in reported tests currently make the rate hard to determine.)

1. South Dakota (35.5 percent)
2. Wisconsin (22.9 percent)
3. Idaho (22.3 percent)
4. Iowa (20.2 percent)
5. Nevada (17.3 percent)
6. Kansas (17.1 percent)
7. Indiana (16.5 percent)
8. Utah (15.2 percent)
9. Nebraska (15.1 percent)
10. Alabama (14.6 percent)

It’s really only a handful of better-performing states — namely, New York, with more than 115,000 tests conducted per day and a 1.1 percent positivity rate — that’s keeping the US’s overall positive test rate from looking a lot worse.

America has never had a cohesive Covid-19 testing strategy. Since February, there have been regular supply shortages delaying test results. States have been fighting each other for precious testing resources. Contact tracing has not been a priority for the federal government, and most states have still not hired nearly enough people to perform that work.

Wealthy countries like Germany and South Korea have used effective test-trace-isolate programs to keep their Covid-19 outbreaks in check. The US, meanwhile, is still struggling to perform enough tests or scale up its contact tracing capabilities. Just a handful of states, plus the District of Columbia, could realistically expect to perform adequate contact tracing, according to Covid Exit Strategy, considering their positivity rate.

Without improvement in both of those areas, it will continue to be difficult for the US to contain the coronavirus before a vaccine becomes available.

More Americans are being hospitalized with Covid-19, too

Both case numbers and the positive test rate can be a little deceptive, depending on how many tests are being performed. They suggest what’s happening on the ground — in this case, Covid-19 is spreading — but they do have their limitations. There is some truth to the president’s claim that more tests will mean more cases, though that is not a reason to stop testing.

Hospitalizations, on the other hand, are more concrete. If more people are developing symptoms severe enough to warrant being hospitalized, that is a strong indicator that the real number of people being infected with Covid-19 is growing, regardless of whether they are getting tested.

And after a dip in September, the number of Americans currently in the hospital with Covid-19 is higher than it’s been in a month. That trend has been seen across the country.

Covid Tracking Project

The worry becomes that if hospitals take in too many patients, they’ll have to turn other people away, or that overwhelmed staff and facilities could lead to some patients receiving substandard care. According to Covid Exit Strategy, about 20 states currently have elevated ICU occupancy that puts them in a risk zone; and about 20 have an elevated occupancy rate of their regular hospital beds.

Wisconsin, where the number of hospitalized Covid-19 patients has risen over the last month from about 300 to more than 1,000 today, recently established a new field hospital on its state park fairgrounds over fears that the state’s hospitals wouldn’t have enough beds given the recent surge in cases.

Fortunately, hospitals have gotten much better at treating Covid-19. They have proven treatments, like remdesivir and dexamethasone, that reduce the length of hospital stays or reduce mortality in patients with severe symptoms. They have learned techniques like putting patients on their stomach to improve breathing. Hospitals that have endured spikes of Covid-19 cases report patients in the later waves are spending less time in the hospital and dying less frequently.

Nevertheless, more people developing severe symptoms, as we are starting to see, will inevitably lead to more deaths. Over the summer, people wondered why deaths were falling while cases and hospitalizations rose — until deaths did start to increase. There is a long lag between cases rising and deaths rising, because it can take a month or more between when a person first contracts Covid-19 and, if they die, when their death is reported.

That’s why these new Covid-19 trends in the US are so worrisome. Cases are rising, as are hospitalizations. It could be only a matter of time before deaths start to spike as well.

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A remarkable first-person story in today's Washington Post: I used to call it the "scamdemic." I thought it was an overblown media hoax. I made fun of people for wearing masks. I went all the way down the rabbit hole and fell hard on my own sword, so if you want to hate me or blame me, that's fine. I'm doing plenty of that myself. The party was my idea. That's what I can't get over. Well, I mean, it wasn't even a party — more like a get-together. There were just six of us, OK? My parents, my partner, and my partner's parents... Some people in my family didn't necessarily share all of my views, but I pushed it. I've always been out front with my opinions. I'm gay and I'm conservative, so either way I'm used to going against the grain... I told my family: "Come on. Enough already. Let's get together and enjoy life for once." They all came for the weekend. We agreed not to do any of the distancing or worry much about it... We cooked nice meals. We watched a few movies. I played a few songs on my baby grand piano. We drove to a lake about 60 miles outside of Dallas and talked and talked. It was nothing all that special. It was great. It was normal... I have no idea which one of us brought the virus into the house, but all six of us left with it. It kept spreading from there.... I was sweating profusely. I would wake up in a pool of sweat. I had this tingling feeling all over my body, this radiating kind of pain... Then one day I was walking up the stairs, and all of the sudden, I couldn't breathe. I screamed and fell flat on my face. I blacked out. I woke up a while later in the ER, and 10 doctors were standing around me in a circle. I was lying on the table after going through a CT scan. The doctors told me the virus had attacked my nervous system. They'd given me some medications that stopped me from having a massive stroke. They said I was minutes away. I stayed in the hospital for three days, trying to get my mind around it. It was guilt, embarrassment, shame. I thought: "OK. Maybe now I've paid for my mistake." But it kept getting worse. Six infections turned into nine. Nine went up to 14. It spread from one family member to the next, and it was like each person caught a different strain... My father is 78, and he went to get checked out at the hospital, but for whatever reasons, he seemed to recover really fast. My father-in-law nearly died in his living room and then ended up in the same hospital as me on the exact same day. His mother was in the room right next to him because she was having trouble breathing. They were lying there on both sides of the wall, fighting the same virus, and neither of them ever knew the other one was there. She died after a few weeks. On the day of her funeral, five more family members tested positive... They put my father-in-law on a ventilator, and he lay there on life support for six or seven weeks. There was never any goodbye. He was just gone. It's like the world swallowed him up. We could only have 10 people at the funeral, and I didn't make that list.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's not-for-profit College Board is a membership organization of 6,000 educational institutions that creates and administers tests used by college admissions offices. But it "operates as a near monopoly" with tests "which have a stranglehold on their student-customers...an organization under serious strain, run by an elitist, tone-deaf chief executive," according to a new article shared by long-term Slashdot reader theodp: The College Board's core product, the SAT, has set the standard for college admissions for more than five decades and fuels $1+ billion in annual revenue. In How The SAT Failed America, Forbes' Susan Adams takes a look at the College Board's billion-dollar testing monopoly and questions whether the great-granddaddy of standardized tests will survive... Adams notes that 2020 and fallout from the Board's inability to administer its tests safely and efficiently during the pandemic may be the undoing of the seemingly invincible cash machine. Since March, 500+ colleges — including every Ivy League school — have joined the growing 'test optional' movement. And on top of widely-reported technical problems with virtual AP exams in the spring, just-disclosed 2020 College Board AP data reveals that decreases in exam participation were seen in nearly every course. "They're going to learn how to do admissions without the tests," warns the head of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The article notes that "All told, more than 1,600 four-year schools will not require scores for admission in 2021, and a growing number are becoming 'test blind,' meaning they won't consider scores at all..." And there's also privacy concerns: College Board "leases" student data, including ethnicity, religion, gender and their parents' educational backgrounds, to colleges and other third parties. The practice initiates an onslaught of promotional mailings and brochures that students' families must endure in the years leading up to admission. (Late last year, a class action suit was filed in federal court in Illinois, claiming the College Board is violating the state's child privacy laws and using deceptive practices to enrich itself. College Board points out that a similar suit was dismissed several years ago.) The PSAT and SAT exams are loss leaders, in a sense, steering students to other opportunities on which College Board can cash in.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It's the end of a rocky journey..." writes the Verge. After six years of developing the free first-person shooter game Crucible, Amazon launched the game in May, yanked it into closed beta in July, and then 14 weeks later cancelled the game altogether. Ars Technica reports: This followed the game's formal delisting from Steam in July, which followed painfully low concurrent player counts (as low as 200) that made it difficult for players to successfully matchmake with each other. Though the game launched with considerable attention, including a promotional blitz on the Amazon-owned game-streaming platform Twitch, it only briefly maintained a player population exceeding 10,000 users. "...ultimately we didn't see a healthy, sustainable future ahead [for] Crucible," explains a blog post from Amazon's Crucible team. The Verge reports: The developers will be hosting a "a final playtest and community celebration" in the next few weeks, according to the blog. Once that's done, matchmaking will be disabled, but you'll be able to play custom games (which are expected to be available in the coming days) until 3PM ET on November 9th. The company also says that it will be offering a full refund for any purchases you might have made... Crucible developers will be moved to other Amazon Games titles, including New World, Amazon's upcoming massively multiplayer online game. That game, which is currently set to launch in spring 2021, has had its own set of challenges, including two delays. And we're also still waiting on the release of Pac-Man Live Studio, a version of Pac-Man that you can play directly on Twitch. Amazon said in May that the game would launch in June, but it's still not out, and the game's website only says that it's "coming soon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(843): Stop saving videos when you’re using my pornhub account!!! My girlfriend just tried to finger my butt because she thinks I’m into that.

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The so-called Surprise Test Paradox can be resolved by delivering it one second after midnight on the last day of the week.

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Throughout August, the British government subsidized diners up to £10 per person to encourage the public to patronize restaurants. | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Boris Johnson’s response is likely to blame for the country’s record-high case counts.

After a relatively quiet summer, the United Kingdom is now suffering a new onslaught of Covid-19. Where the seven-day rolling average for much of the summer was regularly below 1,000 cases a day, it began increasing in September, and by October 5, the new average had reached 15,505. The counts are complicated by test shortages and changes in the way cases are counted, but it’s clear the country is going through a serious second wave.

None of this was supposed to happen.

Last year, before Covid-19 hit, the Global Health Security Index judged the preparedness of countries around the world to prevent new infectious diseases from coming in, detect them if they did, and treat resulting infections. The UK looked great — it was the second-most prepared country in the world, behind only the US.

Since then, other countries, like Vietnam, Germany, and South Korea, have been able to hold their Covid-19 case numbers down. But the UK government — and several other wealthy countries in Europe — made a series of missteps and lost control.

Courtesy of Our World in Data

So how did such a seemingly well-prepared country blow it, not once but twice?

The missteps were primarily the responsibility of Parliament and its leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Unlike in the United States, where public health is primarily the responsibility of state and local governments, in the UK most public health directives for England come directly from the prime minister. (Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland get some leeway.)

There are currently no checks and balances in Parliament; Johnson’s Conservative Party has enough members in power to ensure that what the prime minister says, goes.

Matthew Horwood/Getty Images

David Cliff/NurPhoto/Getty Images

What stands out in the UK response is its unevenness, despite being led by someone who tested positive for the virus and wound up in an intensive care unit in London for several days in April, relatively early on in the pandemic.

Here are some of the missteps Johnson’s government has made leading to the second spike.

Boris Johnson’s plan to help the restaurant industry may have been a public health disaster

If you want to stop the spread of an infectious disease, you do your best to keep uninfected people away from infected people. On March 20, as the epidemic was just beginning, the UK government counted 1,254 positive coronavirus tests, and Johnson ordered all cafés, restaurants, and pubs in England closed. Good so far. (The other nations in the UK made their own rules.)

On July 4, with the daily new case count down to 403, Johnson reopened English pubs and restaurants with no face coverings needed, but with more hand-washing and ventilation required, and a limit of two households allowed to dine together. On July 15, to the delight of millions of Brits, Johnson took things a step further with a plan to pay people to eat out.

For the plan, dubbed “Eat Out to Help Out,” the government paid half of everyone’s restaurant bills up to 10 pounds (roughly $13) per meal every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in August — for all diners, in groups of any size, as often as people wanted, indoors or out. At the time, face masks were not required in most eating establishments. According to Johnson and UK Finance Minister Rishi Sunak, the point of the plan was to help save jobs in the restaurant industry.

The public was more than happy to eat on the government’s dime, and it did so 100 million times between August 3 and 31, to the tune of of £522 million (about $694 million), per Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the IRS of the UK.

Leon Neal/Getty Images

The public health community reacted to the plan with horror. “In a word, it’s nuts,” says Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Center on National and Global Health Law, professor of global health law at Georgetown University, and a research fellow at Oxford University. “In the midst of a pandemic, it’s actually directly opposite to what the public health evidence suggests.”

The move was made despite evidence available since early in the pandemic that eating indoors, close to others, is a high-risk activity for spreading the virus. For example, there was a well-known incident at a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, back in January, when a diner who’d just returned from Wuhan infected nine others in a restaurant, at his own table and two tables nearby. There’s also been growing concern about the ability of the virus to travel more than 6 feet from an infected individual. A report since published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that American adults who got Covid-19 were twice as likely to have dined out compared with members of a control group who hadn’t gotten the virus.

There are no currently published medical studies definitively linking the rise in UK cases beginning in early September to the increased visits to restaurants throughout August. But it’s hard to think otherwise.

Toby Phillips, head of research and policy at Oxford University’s Pathways for Prosperity Commission, looked at how many more people dined out and how many more cases there have been, and concluded that the increased number of cases in early September “is consistent with” the restaurant program.

“Looking at the English regions, there is a loose correlation between uptake of the scheme and new cases in the last weeks of August,” Phillips wrote in the Conversation. “Again, this isn’t to say that the scheme caused those cases. But it certainly didn’t discourage those people from going out.”

To Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Johnson was being business-friendly and actively playing to his base. “People loved it. And he was celebrated for it,” she says.

Three weeks after the “Eat Out to Help Out” program ended, Johnson limited restaurant and pub hours as Covid-19 infections took off. “Now these restaurants and the hospitality industry are being hit by curfews and restrictions,” says Sridhar. “So, it’s like one step forward, five steps backward.”

Even Johnson himself recently acknowledged that his plan might have played a role in fueling the new wave of cases across the country. At the same time, he took responsibility “for everything that has happened since the pandemic began.”

The government has fumbled on PPE, testing, and contact tracing

In October 2016, the UK government and local authorities gamed out a detailed disaster scenario called Cygnus, in which a hypothetical new and voracious influenza virus came in from Southeast Asia. Although the government has yet to publicly release the results, British newspapers reported that the Cygnus simulation showed a shortage of ventilators and critical care beds and a serious lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) for National Health Service (NHS) employees. The government reportedly scored poorly in its ability to communicate with the public. An unnamed former government official told the Telegraph that the simulation had results “too terrifying” to reveal.

Indeed, there was a severe shortage of PPE for NHS staff during the first Covid-19 spike in the spring, with health care workers appealing to the public for donations of masks and other equipment. The British media was quick to publish photos of health workers wearing garbage bags and homemade masks.

The toll of improper preparation hit the UK’s health care providers hard. Amnesty International reported that by September 3, near the start of the second peak, 649 health workers in the UK had died of Covid-19, putting it third in the world for coronavirus-related health care worker deaths, behind only Mexico and the US. That’s left a smaller — and rattled — workforce to deal with the second spike.

The government has promised that it’s now set with PPE, and this time around there seem to be fewer complaints. By contrast, both testing and contact tracing — thought by many epidemiologists to be key, along with face masks and isolation, to controlling the pandemic — remain fraught.

Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The National Health Service has been offering free testing to people with symptoms and for all NHS workers, as well as some others throughout the pandemic. Shortages were the norm early on, which became an issue for health care workers. One of Johnson’s top ministers announced March 31 that there was a shortage of chemical reagents needed for testing; the Chemical Industries Association told ITV News the same day that the problem was not at their end.

The government canceled an early initial contact tracing effort on March 12; some of Johnson’s science advisers thought there were too many cases to trace. Then the number of cases and deaths soared, and the government started a new program in April. It has not gone smoothly.

Work on a contact-tracing phone app, a strategy that has been credited with helping other countries, such as South Korea, keep the virus under control, was started in March. But that work stopped in June, before it was ever broadly rolled out, due to issues integrating it effectively with major phone operating systems. When the phone app was revived on September 24, it at first failed to pick up data on who was infected.

Much of the test-and-trace work has been farmed out in no-bid contracts to private companies, which has sparked accusations of profiteering. Sridhar points to the Conservative government for following a long history of privatizing government services. “They’re trying to get contracts for companies rather than improving public health,” she says.

In September, after the BMJ reported that the government had a secret £100 billion ($129 billion) plan called “Operation Moonshot” to do 10 million tests a day (some with tests not yet on the market) by early next year, critics immediately criticized the idea, saying it disregards the enormous current problems with testing. On September 10, when the health secretary announced the plan in the House of Commons, it was met with laughter by disbelieving members of Parliament. Operation Moonshot would extend testing to everyone — at the moment people are only supposed to ask for tests if they have symptoms or are asked to by a contact tracer. That in itself is problematic since asymptomatic or presymptomatic people with known exposures may be infected and can spread the virus without knowing it.

Then, in early October, Public Health England (PHE) admitted that because of an IT error, data from nearly 16,000 people who’d tested positive between September 25 and October 2 were left out of the UK’s daily count. This means their contacts were not immediately informed, so people who were exposed to virus-positive contacts did not know to self-isolate, and potentially infected people continued their normal lives for days. Once again, and in this time in the middle of a spike, the government missed a chance to stem the tide.

Is the UK learning from its mistakes?

Despite all of these failures, the UK government is still not setting itself up for future success. For example, it is axing Public Health England, which in addition to its involvement in testing, also conducts public health research and formulates recommendations on everything from smoking to obesity to poverty — all conditions that may leave people more vulnerable to Covid-19.

On August 18, the government announced PHE would be folded into a new agency called the National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP) by next spring. The NIHP is currently charged with focusing on the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving PHE’s other disease-prevention functions “to be discussed.”

“It is on one level inexplicable, at another level perfectly understandable,” says Martin McKee, professor of European health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The inexplicable part is gutting a public health agency in the middle of a pandemic — even one that has made mistakes — while the understandable part is that Johnson’s top political adviser, Dominic Cummings, has a history of abrupt changes. “He has this view of creative destruction,” says McKee. “The idea would be that you shake everything up and something good might come out of it.”

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

In the meantime, the UK is facing new daily case counts 15 times what they were this summer — and a potentially long and difficult winter ahead. Even Prime Minister Johnson is not optimistic. On the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show on October 5, Johnson predicted “it will continue to be bumpy through to Christmas and may even be bumpy beyond.”

Many blame the uneven reaction to the new coronavirus — and many of the UK’s more-than 42,500 Covid-19 deaths — on Johnson’s hot-again, cold-again belief in the seriousness of the pandemic, his interest in helping out businesses, and a system that gives him unquestioned power to guide the government response.

“You can have the best health system in the world,” Gostin says. “You can have the most expert scientists in the world as the UK has. But if you don’t have a leader that can effectively implement good policy and effectively communicate the importance of risk avoidance behaviors, you’re finished.”

Joanne Silberner is a freelance journalist who has been reporting on health policy and medicine since the early days of HIV.

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Packing the courts with right-wing judges, while pretending to be angry that politics might ever infect the judiciary.

TUCSON, Ariz. — Arizona’s Supreme Court had five judges for 56 years. But on December 19, 2016, thanks to a GOP-authored bill that was opposed by every Democrat in the state Legislature, Republican Governor Doug Ducey held a ceremony in the Old Capitol building to swear in a sixth justice, and then a seventh.

In all, Ducey has appointed five of the seven justices on the state court, taking a personal interest in vetting candidates with questions designed to ferret out a fidelity to textualism and an inclination to uphold, rather than overturn or tinker with, the law. His appointments, including the addition of the two new justices, have eliminated the court’s progressive caucus and swung it from a more moderate conservative tilt to one that emphasizes libertarianism, populism, and law and order, in line with Ducey’s own views. And the ages of its younger members mean the court likely will stay that way for years.

As Democrats in Washington debate expanding the nation’s Supreme Court beyond nine justices if they win the November election—and many political observers react with horror, either real or feigned, at such a violation of American norms—much less understood is that these changes are not uncommon at the state level. According to Duke University law professor Marin K. Levy, at least 10 states have attempted to change the size of their courts over the past decade, with Arizona and one other state—Georgia—succeeding. And most of these efforts were spearheaded by Republicans.

How has it gone? As the debate over court-packing grows more contentious in the presidential election, Arizona offers something of a window into how these expansions can happen and the long-term impact they can have.

The addition of two new state Supreme Court seats in Arizona, the result of a funding bargain struck between the Legislature and the courts, didn’t generate anywhere near the same political rancor as the U.S. Supreme Court-packing debate. For one thing, the state court didn’t tip from liberal to conservative—it just became marginally more conservative. For another, the idea had been floating around Arizona politics for years: When architects set out to design the current Supreme Court headquarters in 1989, they constructed it to accommodate seven justices, seemingly assuming that a day would come when lawmakers would add justices, as allowed under a state constitutional amendment.

GOP lawmakers pitched the idea of expanding the Arizona Supreme Court by arguing that businesses needed clarity on the law more quickly than five justices could provide, and that the growing state needed more voices on the bench to represent its diverse citizenry. While Ducey consistently has said he was not packing the court for political purposes, Republicans acknowledge they wouldn’t have proposed the change if it would have meant handing over two seats for a Democratic governor to fill.

“I admit it that if there were a different governor, I would have different feelings,” says J.D. Mesnard, the GOP state lawmaker who sponsored the 2016 expansion legislation.

In the aftermath, even some Democrats say the impact on the court’s rulings has been limited. But the expansion—an early priority for Ducey’s office—helped to cement a lasting legacy: Ducey holds the record for the most judicial appointments in Arizona history, having moved quickly since he took office in 2015 to fill seats at all levels of the judicial system. (His five conservative male Supreme Court appointments notwithstanding, Ducey has a record of appointing women and members of other political parties to lower courts.)

And in the long term, some observers have another worry: As demographic trends shift Arizona from a red state to purple, potentially even toward Democratic control, that won’t be reflected in its highest court. Thanks to the Republican-led expansion, the conservative makeup of Arizona’s Supreme Court likely will stay in place for more than a decade.

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Over the years, state lawmakers had occasionally kicked around the idea of expanding Arizona’s courts, including a 2015 proposal that the court system successfully beat back.

In 2016, a new opportunity arose. After years of recession-era budget cuts and fund sweeps, the court system was facing a financial crisis. Republican lawmakers—reeling from a series of state Supreme Court decisions rejecting their attempts to interfere with redistricting and cut education funds—set their gaze on the state courts’ budget, threatening to sweep an additional $6 million from juvenile probation, drug treatment and funds for jurors on lengthy trials. The courts resisted.

“If y’all need revenue, we understand that,” Amy Love, who lobbied on behalf of the court system, told lawmakers during a budget hearing. “We just don’t see anyone else getting swept, not like this.”

That same year, the legislation to expand the court reappeared. Mesnard, the bill’s sponsor and a self-described geeky student of government structure, pitched expansion as a way to decentralize power from five justices, offer more opportunity for diverging opinions and bring Arizona’s court into line with other states of similar size, many of which have seven or more justices on their supreme courts.

All five Supreme Court justices opposed the expansion plan, and the courts dispatched their lobbyist to again hammer the message that the idea was unnecessary, costly and political.

Republican lawmakers, however, saw an opening, and made the courts an offer: Back the court-packing plan and see a windfall of more than $10 million in desperately needed funding, including raises for judges and salaries for the two new justices, or oppose it and face further crippling budget cuts.

The proposal garnered a few headlines and some angry letters from judges, but it never caught the public’s attention as calls to expand the U.S. Supreme Court have. A local newspaper columnist compared the proposition to the court prostituting itself to the ruling political party, noting that once the courts had signaled they were for sale, Republican lawmakers immediately started haggling over the price. But Scott Bales, then the chief justice on the court and its only Democrat, wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republic saying that while the expansion plan was unnecessary, the money was crucial.

In the end, lawmakers offered the courts only about half of what they had originally bargained for. The Legislature still cut $5 million in funding from the court system, rather than the $6 million they had threatened, and offered judges on the trial, appeals and supreme courts a 3 percent raise over two years, rather than the 6 percent raise they had agreed on.

Republican lawmakers passed the court-packing bill on party lines. And, despite a letter from Bales revoking his previous support for the expansion and urging Ducey to veto the legislation and the budget cuts, the governor signed both into law.

Ducey, in a letter accompanying his signature on the court expansion bill, argued that he wasn’t packing the court because, unlike the president, he can’t nominate whomever he wants. Arizona’s merit selection system for judges requires applicants to be screened by an independent judicial nominating commission made up of lawyers and members of the public who are nominated by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. Each time a court vacancy occurs, the commission must send the governor candidates representing different political parties.

“Some, particularly national activists and media who aren’t familiar with our system here, have inaccurately described this as court packing,” Ducey wrote in his letter. “That’s just wrong.”

The reality is a bit more complicated.

Although an earlier state Supreme Court pick, independent Clint Bolick, had faced some pushback for his work at the conservative Goldwater Institute and for being seen as too cozy with Republican lawmakers, Ducey’s next two picks—the justices who would fill the expanded court—drew considerably less criticism. Republicans Andrew Gould, a court of appeals judge who had worked as a trial court judge and prosecutor, and John Lopez IV, a former solicitor general in the state and federal prosecutor who was the first Hispanic ever appointed to the court, were widely viewed as conservative, but not outwardly political. James Beene, whom Ducey chose in 2019 as fourth appointment, even received some praise from Democrats.

Yet, Ducey’s fifth Supreme Court appointee—Bill Montgomery, a controversial prosecutor and longtime ally of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—drew a firestorm of criticism from those who saw him as too political for the court. The American Civil Liberties Union described him as “the most unqualified candidate” on the governor’s list and said Montgomery’s office had “deep history of misconduct and corruption.” (Allies of Montgomery sent letters to the judicial nominating commission calling the ACLU’s attacks “false charges” that the organization was “cynically using in an effort to raise money.”) After the commission rejected his application for Ducey's fourth vacancy in 2019, Ducey simply replaced the three commissioners who had voted against Montgomery. Soon enough, his name made it to the governor’s desk, and he was seated on the court as Ducey's fifth and likely final appointee.

A body that had four conservatives and one liberal when Ducey took office now consisted of seven conservatives and zero liberals.

To some Arizonans, it was Ducey’s stacking of the commission to get Montgomery through that made clear that the expansion was a partisan effort. But Daniel Scarpinato, Ducey’s chief of staff, disagreed in a recent interview, noting that the expanded court hasn’t always ruled the way Republicans would like. He pointed a decision this year allowing an income tax hike initiative to remain on the ballot, and another allowing Phoenix’s airport to increase fees on Uber and Lyft rides.

Ducey knew the reaction that his choice of Montgomery would spark, and scheduled the announcement for a time when reporters were consumed with other news. The governor’s office also broke tradition by refusing to tell reporters when or where Montgomery’s swearing-in event was to be held. So the press staked out the governor’s tower to try to get in a few questions with the newest justice after his private swearing-in ceremony. Instead, Montgomery got in his car and hit the gas as he drove out of governor’s parking lot, tires squealing briefly as he sped away from the state capitol toward the Supreme Court building.

***

Mesnard, the lawmaker who sponsored the expansion bill, maintains that the effort was nothing like the “packing” that Democrats in Washington are considering now. Unlike national Democrats, he says, his motivation wasn’t to change the court’s ideological composition.

“I wasn’t trying to achieve a specific end,” he says. “It wasn’t like, ‘I don’t like the rulings coming out, so I want to add more to tilt it a certain way.’”

Still, he acknowledges that he wouldn’t have pushed the legislation if he were handing over two seats on the high court to a Democratic governor. “It’s impossible to separate the politics from that type of decision,” he said in a recent interview. “I wasn’t going to dance around it or pretend that there weren’t serious political implications.”

Scarpinato, Ducey’s chief of staff, also points to the fact that, unlike U.S. Supreme Court justices, Arizona’s judges can serve only until age 70 (though they frequently retire before they reach that limit). Justices also face retention elections two years after being appointed and again every six years thereafter. “It’s very different from the discussion that’s happening at the federal level, which is largely about changing the rules of regular order to affect policy outcomes,” Scarpinato adds.

Many Democrats, however, saw a nakedly partisan power grab. “The only reason why you would add justices to the court is to pack the court for political gain,” then-state Senator Steve Farley, a Democrat, said during debate about the legislation. “If you don’t like the decisions the Supreme Court is making, you don’t pack the court. Franklin Delano Roosevelt learned that in the 1930s.”

Much like Roosevelt, Ducey’s efforts to pack the court didn’t cost him politically: Both went on to win decisive reelections.

Patricia K. Norris, a retired appeals court judge in Arizona who urged lawmakers in 2016 not to expand the court, says that while the original five-member Supreme Court was largely conservative, the justices called balls and strikes, and sometimes their rulings went against the wishes of the ruling political party. “They tended to be, well, independent,” she says. “And I think this whole expansion—which was completely not justified for any good reason—was designed to change the philosophical leaning of the court by changing the structure”—the very definition of court-packing, she says.

The expansion scheme affected the outcome of at least one recent landmark case. A trial court ruled that when a calligraphy business had refused to make invitations for a gay wedding, it was violating Phoenix’s anti-discrimination ordinance, and an appeals court agreed. But the newly expanded state Supreme Court reversed the lower courts, writing a narrow opinion siding with the calligraphy business without giving business owners blanket protection to discriminate against gay couples. That 4-3 ruling would have come out differently without Ducey’s two additional justices, the Arizona Capitol Times found in an analysis of the decision.

Despite this ruling, Democratic state Senator Martin Quezada, a lawyer who led the fight against the bill in 2016, says Democrats’ fears about the political implications have proved to be “a little overblown,” at least in the short term. Quezada now thinks Republicans were engaged in more of a long-game strategy designed to keep Democrats from enacting progressive policies for another generation, as a bulwark against the voters who are electing Democrats in increasing numbers.

Ducey’s five Supreme Court appointments in his six years in office have cemented a conservative legacy that will long outlive his governorship and, likely, the Republican majorities that have dominated the state capitol for more than 50 years. Three of the five conservative men Ducey has appointed are younger than the 56-year-old governor.

“As we turn blue, I think there’s a belief that we will do radically leftist policies, and those will be challenged and that court will be the backstop,” Quezada says. “And I can’t say it’s a bad strategy on their part. The state is turning blue, and that is a good way to maintain a backstop through the judicial system.”

Calling the proceedings an “unseemly charade,” Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse used his time in the opening day of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing to point a forceful finger at a key reason for the Republican rush to get Barrett on the Supreme Court: They want her there to strike down the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Whitehouse tightly linked the push to confirm Barrett with the longtime Republican push to kill the ACA—and he named names. One name, anyway. Sen. John Cornyn tore off his mask and glared angrily at Whitehouse as Whitehouse rebutted Cornyn’s recent claim that Republicans aren’t rushing to get Barrett on the court by the Nov. 10 arguments in the latest attempt to strike down the ACA.

Let's beat John Cornyn. Can you give $3 to help MJ Hegar win in Texas?

“Trump has over and over said this is his reason, and now we’re in this mad rush to meet the November 10 argument deadline and colleagues pretend this isn’t about the ACA,” Whitehouse said, scoffing, “Ha, right.”

Then he moved on to connect Cornyn—despite his denial that the ACA is motivating Republicans here—with the exact case that threatens health care for millions.

“The district judge in Texas who struck down the ACA in the case now headed for the court is a former aide to the senator, who has become what the Texas Tribune calls the favorite for Texas Republicans seeking big judicial wins like torpedoing the ACA,” Whitehouse said. “The senior senator from Texas introduced in committee the circuit court judge who wrote the decision on appeal striking down the ACA.”

He continued, “Sen. Cornyn has filed brief after brief arguing for striking down the ACA. He led the failed Senate charge to repeal the ACA in 2017. He has said ‘I’ve introduced and cosponsored 27 bills to repeal or defund Obamacare and I’ve voted to do so at every opportunity.’” 

So, yeah, Cornyn is looking to Barrett to strike down the ACA ASAP. And he’s lying about it.

Just 44% of voters think the Senate should go ahead with hearings and a vote on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court before the elections, with 52% opposed. An even larger majority opposes one of the most likely outcomes of Barrett being seated on the court—the overturn of Roe v. Wade. But Senate Republicans are determined to get this thing done with what they clearly anticipate will be some of their last weeks in power, and Barrett’s confirmation hearing starts Monday.

Monday’s proceedings won't get to the questions at the heart of a confirmation hearing. Instead, Barrett and committee members will make opening statements. (Should be riveting viewing!) Barrett, chosen for her total fealty to the far right, will claim that “Americans of all backgrounds deserve an independent Supreme Court that interprets our Constitution and laws as they are written.”

Barrett will get questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, at least some of which should center on the fact that she conveniently omitted important parts of her record from her Senate questionnaire and document submissions. Important parts like signing an anti-abortion ad calling for “an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe vs. Wade,” and talks she gave to anti-abortion organizations.

Senate Republicans are determined to push ahead with the hearings despite the fact that two Republican members of the committee, Mike Lee and Thom Tillis, tested positive for coronavirus in the wake of the superspreader event at which Barrett’s nomination was officially announced, and subsequently attended a committee meeting. The committee chair, Lindsey Graham, refused to take a coronavirus test as a condition for debating late last week, leading to questions about whether he’s hiding something.

Sen. Kamala Harris will participate remotely. Harris drew national attention through her tough, focused questioning of Brett Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearing, so combining that with her current role as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, her questions are hotly anticipated.

The thing is, while Barrett is a truly abysmal candidate who is going to get up there and lie about her desire to overturn Roe v. Wade, she’s beside the point. The point is that Republicans are and have been packing the courts, and it needs to end.

While Alaska’s U.S. Senate race looked like just an afterthought for both parties as recently as a few months ago, major outside groups on each side are continuing to book millions here just weeks ahead of Election Day.

Politico’s James Arkin reports that a newly established Democratic group called North Star has launched a $4 million ad buy in support of Al Gross, an independent who is running as the Democratic nominee. The first ad stars a local breast cancer survivor, and she takes Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan to task for voting to let insurance companies deny coverage due to preexisting conditions. Arkin also reports that the conservative Senate Leadership Fund will spend $3.7 million here to protect Sullivan, which would bring the super PAC’s total planned spending for this race to $5.3 million.

While SLF’s investment gives Sullivan’s side more firepower, the incumbent is still being very badly outspent. OpenSecrets reports that Gross’ allies have already spent $6.6 million in this race, a figure that doesn’t yet account for North Star’s new offensive, while the only major pro-Sullivan spending was the aforementioned $1.5 million buy from SLF.

Gross also announced that he raised a massive $9 million during the third quarter of 2020—over $1 million more that Sullivan brought in during his entire 2014 campaign. Sullivan hasn’t announced his own haul, but Arkin writes that his campaign “has said they expect to be outraised and outspent by a staggering, five-to-one margin.”

All of this spending comes despite the fact that very few polls have been released here over the last month, though the few numbers we’ve seen have shown a close race. In late September, a Harstad Research poll for Al Gross’ allies at Independent Alaska showed Sullivan up just 46-45. Donald Trump also led only 47-46, which is not only a big drop from his 51-37 victory here in 2016, it would be the closest presidential contest ever in the Last Frontier state, narrowly topping Richard Nixon’s 51-49 win over John F. Kennedy in 1960.

The local firm Alaska Survey Research also released its own poll recently that showed Sullivan and Trump up 48-44 and 50-46, respectively.

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On Sept. 11, the New York Daily News reported that the Trump administration had been somewhat secretly siphoning off millions from the Fire Department of New York’s (FDNY) World Trade Center Health Program. The money taken by the Trump administration—shorting payments to the fund here and there over the past three-plus years—is a cruel attack in an alleged battle between the administration and New York health officials over Medicare. That money is earmarked for the men and women who have suffered and continue to suffer from serious medical issues due to their first responder work on Sept. 11, 2001.

Remember that? Well, there’s an update. The New York Daily News reports that while “top officials in the Trump administration” admit that withholding $4 million from the New York Fire Department’s 9/11 treatment program was “unacceptable,” the officials aren’t doing anything to get that money back to those heroes, who they enjoy wrapping themselves in when they’re running for reelection.

The Trump administration’s position is that the money is a “debt” New York owes for some unrelated Medicare issue. No one has been able to find out exactly what this issue is. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, best known for being a world-renowned bag of overly expensive dung beetle refuse, has the power to make this issue go away with a wave of his hand. He’s been mum.

Seema Verma has been in charge of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) under Trump. She has not been able, along with Mnuchin, to figure out a way to get that money back to the 9/11 Fireman’s fund, although she has reportedly been able to steer another $5 million in taxpayer money toward her buddies and the communications consultants brought in to “burnish her image.” 

On the one hand, Verma is a scapegoat at this point for the Trump administration, in no small part because she’s a woman of color and the optics are likely better for the white supremacists. But the fact of the matter is the entire Trump administration is corrupt, so virtually anyone can be easily scapegoated. Fish in a barrel. Corrupt, spoiled fish in a barrel.

Back on Oct. 3 when she was feeling some heat over the Daily News’ article, Verma tweeted: “@CMSGov has been made aware of recent reports regarding the unacceptable use of NYC’s 9/11 funds as a means to repay debt, and is taking swift action to correct this issue.” Once again, whether or not this “debt” is a real thing is a question. But either way, all that the Trump administration seems to be able to do, as Mnuchin sits on hundreds of billions of dollars to buy off big businesses, is blame New York for the Trump administration’s craven attack on our country’s first responders. 

A spokesperson for Verma and CMS was not able to say whether or not the agency had taken that immediate action. A spokesperson for the Treasury Department did not answer a request for comment.

FDNY officials have been fighting since the Trump administration came into office to stop this siphoning of funds. According to the Daily News, “21 jobs dealing with medical care and support for ill paramedics and firefighters remain unfilled while the program goes without its money.” 

MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson grilled White House Deputy Press Secretary Brian Morgenstern six times when Trump’s last negative COVID test was, and Morgenstern wouldn’t say.

“Did the president at least comply with the Cleveland Clinic debate requirements to be negative tested in the 72 hours prior to that debate [with Joe Biden]?” Jackson asked, finally.

I have concluded that the White House won't answer basic questions about when Trump's last negative test occurred because he likely recklessly exposed Joe Biden to a virus that could've killed him at the first presidential debate https://t.co/0q7IlonESp

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2020

The post Asked 6 Times When Trump’s Last Negative COVID Test Was, White House Spox Refuses to Answer: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

A comprehensive timeline of Trump encouraging hate groups and political violence.

On the very day that Congress counted the electoral votes that certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, Trump opened up the US Capitol to an insurrection.

He told a crowd rallying south of the White House to “walk down to the Capitol,” adding, “You will never take back our country with weakness.”

At Trump’s behest, throngs of his supporters descended on Washington, DC, to dispute the results of the presidential election, climbing the steps of the Capitol and busting through its doors and windows. Throughout the day, Trump continued to falsely claim that the election was stolen without any evidence to support this unreality, further riling up his followers to “take the country back.” By mid-afternoon, the Capitol building was breached and one member of the mob had been shot and fatally wounded. A police officer and three others reportedly died.

In a last-minute video message, Trump told the crowd to go home — then told them he loved them and believes they’re “very special.”

Trump’s messaging on January 6 is precisely in line with how he’s historically addressed violence on the part of hate groups and his supporters: He emboldens it.

As far back as 2015, Trump has been connected to documented acts of violence, with perpetrators claiming that he was even their inspiration. In fact, dozens of people enacted violence in Trump’s name in the years before the Capitol attack, according to a 2020 report from ABC News.

In 2016, a white man told officers “Donald Trump will fix them” while being arrested for threatening his Black neighbors with a knife. That same year, a Florida man threatened to burn down a house next to his because a Muslim family purchased it, claiming that Trump’s Muslim ban made it a reason for “concern.” Then there are the more widely known examples, like Cesar Sayoc, who mailed 16 inoperative pipe bombs to Democratic leaders and referred to Trump as a “surrogate father”; and the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 that left 23 dead, where the shooter’s manifesto parroted Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants.

In some cases, Trump denounces the violence, but he often walks back such statements, returning to a message of hate and harm. In August, he defended a teenage supporter who shot three people at a Black Lives Matter protest. And at the first presidential debate of the 2020 election, the president shocked many viewers when he was given an opportunity to condemn white supremacists, but declined.

In October, he equivocated on condemnation of the domestic terrorists who allegedly planned to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, after Trump had stoked outrage over the state’s pandemic safety measures. He criticized Whitmer when the kidnapping plot was revealed and fished for compliments.

Trump has continually refused to recognize what’s at the core of this violence: hate nurtured under a tense national climate that he has helped cultivate.

Trump’s campaign rallies have always been incubation grounds for violence, sites where Trump spewed hate speech that encouraged physical harm against dissenters. And as president, he has used his platform to encourage violence against American citizens, whether through the police and National Guard or militia groups — unless those citizens are his supporters.

Here is a timeline of Trump’s hateful rhetoric since 2015, and some of the moments when his supporters took heed.

2015: Trump announces his presidential bid and quickly suggests violence is the answer to opposition

Trump officially announced his candidacy for president of the United States in June 2015 and wasted little time inciting fear and hate in his first speech. That year, critics argued that his language led to attacks on bystanders, and in some cases, acts of violence were directly linked to Trump’s words.

June 16, 2015: When Trump announced his bid for president at Trump Tower in New York City, he made disparaging comments about Mexicans. His repeated insults have been said to incite violence and hate toward immigrants in the years that followed.

Trump’s message from the start: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Even though his statement was almost entirely false, in the months following, Trump would defend the criminal threat of immigrants. “What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.,” he said on July 6, 2015.

August 11, 2015: Trump indirectly took aim at Black Lives Matter protesters, calling Sen. Bernie Sanders “weak” after Sanders allowed protesters to seize the microphone at a campaign rally. “I thought that was disgusting. That showed such weakness — the way he was taken away by two young women. … They just took the whole place over.”

Trump added, “That will never happen with me. I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or if other people will. But that was a disgrace. … I felt badly for him, but it showed that he’s weak.”

August 19, 2015: Two Boston brothers invoked Trump when they were arrested for urinating on a homeless man and beating him with a metal pipe. While in custody, one of the brothers told the police, “Trump was right. All of these illegals need to be deported.” The 58-year-old Mexican American they assaulted was a permanent US resident.

In response to the news that the Boston assault was inspired by his rhetoric, Trump did not denounce the violence, instead calling his supporters “passionate.” “I think that would be a shame. I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that,” he told reporters the next day.

On August 21, Trump backtracked a bit, taking a both-sides approach. “Boston incident is terrible. We need energy and passion, but we must treat each other with respect. I would never condone violence,” he tweeted.

October 23, 2015: After repeatedly being interrupted by protesters at a campaign rally in Miami, Trump warned he’ll “be a little more violent” next time when addressing protesters. “See, the first group, I was nice. ‘Oh, take your time.’ The second group, I was pretty nice. The third group, I’ll be a little more violent. And the fourth group, I’ll say get the hell out of here!” he said. On video, the pro-immigration protesters could be seen being forcibly dragged out of the campaign event.

November 21, 2015: At a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Trump demanded the removal of Black activist Mercutio Southall Jr. after he yelled, “Black lives matter!” Onstage, Trump exclaimed, “Get him the hell out of here! Get him out of here! Throw him out!” In a video captured by CNN, Southall fell to the ground as Trump made his statements and white men appeared to kick and punch him.

As security guards removed Southall from the rally, the crowd chanted, “All lives matter,” according to the Washington Post. Trump told Fox News the next day, “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing. I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble.”

December 2015: The Trump campaign devised a strategy to address protesters who demonstrated at rallies. Instead of harming the protester, the campaign suggested they chant, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” until a security guard removed the protester. The campaign began playing an announcement of the plan at rallies in mid-December, which started with the line, “If a protester starts demonstrating in the area around you, please do not touch or harm the protester. This is a peaceful rally.” According to the Washington Post, attendees laughed when the announcement was played at a rally.

2016: At campaign rallies, Trump models the violence that he encourages by making a spectacle out of ejecting protesters

At his large campaign rallies, Trump would often yell “Get ’em out!” at protesters who demonstrated, whether they stood there silently, held up a sign, or chanted. Though Trump often alleged that the protesters were violent, reporters in 2016 found no evidence to suggest that protesters had attacked Trump supporters at one of his rallies.

In 2016, Trump sharpened his rhetoric against Muslims, suggesting that the country must scrutinize mosques and newly arrived Muslim migrants. 2016 also gave rise to the chant that advocated for violence against then-Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton: “Lock her up!”

January 8, 2016: Rose Hamid, a 56-year-old Muslim woman wearing a hijab, was escorted out of a Trump rally after standing up in silent protest over Trump’s speech, in which he said Syrian refugees fleeing war were affiliated with ISIS. Hamid attended the rally to show Trump supporters what Muslims are like (Trump had already called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” in December 2015), and told CNN’s Don Lemon that the people sitting around her were “very nice” and “sharing their popcorn.”

But once the crowd “got this hateful crowd mentality,” as she was being escorted out, “it was a vivid example of what happens when you start using this hateful rhetoric and how it can incite a crowd where moments ago were very kind to me.” Hamid said one man yelled to her, “Get out! Do you have a bomb? Do you have a bomb?”

January 23, 2016: At a campaign rally in Iowa, Trump, in describing the loyalty of his supporters, notoriously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

February 1, 2016: At a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump told the crowd that his security team informed him there may be somebody throwing tomatoes. “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. There won’t be so much of them because the courts agree with us,” he said.

February 23, 2016: At a campaign rally in Las Vegas, Trump said of a protester, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” As security guards escorted the protester out of the rally, Trump mocked him, saying, “He’s smiling. Having a good time.” He then reminisced about being able to get away with violence: “There’s a guy, totally disruptive, throwing punches. We’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.” Trump also called the protester “nasty as hell.” CNN reported that the man did not appear to fight with the security guards taking him outside.

At the same rally, Trump would reiterate his support for waterboarding, a banned interrogation method. “They said to me, ‘What do you think of waterboarding?’ I said I think it’s great, but we don’t go far enough. It’s true. We don’t go far enough. We don’t go far enough.” At a February 6 Republican debate in New Hampshire, Trump said he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” if he were elected president.

February 27, 2016: Trump advocated for police state violence, lamenting how officers are afraid to do their jobs because America is “becoming a frightened country.” “You see, in the good old days, law enforcement acted a lot quicker than this. A lot quicker. In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast — but today, everybody’s politically correct,” Trump said. “Our country’s going to hell with being politically correct. Going to hell.”

March 1, 2016: At a campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky, Trump repeatedly yelled, “Get out of here! Get ’em out of here! Get him the hell out!” to a group of protesters, galvanizing the crowd to chant, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and physically shove the group of Black protesters. Trump continued: “Don’t hurt him! If I say, ‘Go get him,’ I get in trouble with the press, the most dishonest human beings in the world. If I say, ‘Don’t hurt him,’ the press will say, ‘Well, Trump isn’t as tough as he used to be!’ ... So you can’t win.”

March 9, 2016: A 78-year-old white male Trump supporter punched a Black male protester being escorted out of a Trump campaign rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Trump supporter was recorded on video saying he enjoyed “knocking the hell out of that big mouth” and “Yes, he deserved it. The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.” He was arrested and charged with assault a day later, though he attacked the protester directly in front of law enforcement officials.

Instead, at the time, law enforcement officials tackled the protester to the ground after he had been punched in the face.

Two days after the assault, Trump said such attacks on protesters were “very, very appropriate” and the kind of action “we need a little bit more of.” Trump called the protesters “very violent,” though multiple news outlets at the time reported that there were no documented cases of protesters inciting violence against Trump supporters.

March 10, 2016: At a Miami Republican debate, Trump denied that his tone incited violence at his rallies and insinuated that the anger toward protesters was justified. “I will say this,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “We have 25 [thousand], 30,000 people. You’ve seen it yourself. People come with tremendous passion and love for the country, and when they see protest — in some cases — you know, you’re mentioning one case, which I haven’t seen, I heard about it, which I don’t like. But when they see what’s going on in this country, they have anger that’s unbelievable. They have anger.”

He added: “We have some protesters who are bad dudes, they have done bad things. They are swinging, they are really dangerous … And if they’ve got to be taken out, to be honest, I mean, we have to run something.”

March 11, 2016: Trump abandoned a planned Chicago campaign rally after fights broke out between his supporters and protesters. Five people were arrested and two police officers were injured, according to the Chicago police. In a tweet, Trump blamed “thugs” for the chaos.

March 31, 2016: Three people who say they were assaulted at a March 1, 2016, Trump campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky, sued the then-candidate, alleging that he riled up his followers and encouraged violence when he repeatedly yelled, “Get ‘em out of here!” The group sued Trump for incitement to riot, and in April 2017, federal Judge David Hale ruled that their claim was valid since there was sufficient evidence proving their injuries were a “direct and proximate result” of Trump’s comments. “It is plausible that Trump’s direction to ‘get ‘em out of here’ advocated the use of force,” Hale wrote. “It was an order, an instruction, a command.”

Trump appealed the case, and in September 2018, a federal appeals court dismissed the protesters’ claims, saying that Trump’s words were protected under the First Amendment and did not “specifically advocate imminent lawless violence.” An attorney for the plaintiffs called the ruling “unprecedented” and “dangerous,” and a “free pass” for a candidate for public office.

July 2016: By July, the infamous “Lock her up!” chant in response to any mention of Hillary Clinton became a facet of Trump’s rallies and even the GOP convention. On July 19, at the Republican National Convention, the crowd chanted, “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” as Chris Christie delivered a speech. At a rally in Colorado Springs on July 29, Trump, after resisting joining in on the chant at rallies, told the audience, “I’ve been saying let’s just beat her on November 8th. But you know what, I’m starting to agree with you.”

Trump’s comments came after Clinton criticized him in her Democratic National Convention address. “You know it’s interesting. Every time I mention her, everyone screams, ‘Lock her up, lock her up.’ They keep screaming. And you know what I do? I’ve been nice,” Trump said. “But after watching that performance last night — such lies — I don’t have to be so nice anymore. I’m taking the gloves off.”

But crowds and commentators didn’t stop at “Lock her up!” As the Atlantic reported, some called for Clinton to be “hung on the Mall in Washington, DC” or “put in a firing line and shot for treason.”

December 2016: After Trump bullied then-Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly for months, Kelly said that Trump’s social media director was responsible for inciting the many death threats she was receiving. “The vast majority of Donald Trump supporters are not at all this way,” Kelly said, according to the Guardian. “It’s that far corner of the internet that really enjoys nastiness and threats and unfortunately there is a man who works for Donald Trump whose job it is to stir these people up and that man needs to stop doing that. His name is Dan Scavino.”

2017: With Trump in office, white supremacists organize and are emboldened to march in public; Trump also amplifies his attacks on the press

In 2017, Trump sharply criticized the press, calling it the “enemy of the American people,” fueling hostility toward journalists that many say led to violence. He also failed to condemn white supremacist and white nationalist groups that organized in Charlottesville, Virginia. The “Unite the Right” rally became a turning point for the nation, prompting many people to finally stop and question the impact of Trump’s rhetoric.

January 27, 2017: On the day the Trump administration instituted a ban against travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries, a Muslim Delta employee wearing a hijab was physically and verbally attacked at JFK International Airport in New York. The perpetrator told the victim “[Expletive] Islam. [Expletive] ISIS. Trump is here now. He will get rid of all of you,” according to ABC. On the campaign trail, Trump said he was open to the idea of closing mosques and creating a database of all Muslims in the US, consistently saying that Muslims were a “problem” and a “sickness.”

February 17, 2017: In what the New York Times called a “striking escalation in his attacks,” Trump tweeted that the news media is “the enemy of the American People.”

Trump had long blamed news organizations for misrepresenting his agenda and performance, but in February he more explicitly positioned the media as a key opponent. At a press conference on February 16, Trump strategically called the media “dishonest” and labeled reporting from outlets like CNN “fake news.”

Onlookers argued that Trump’s rhetoric toward the press led to violent attacks on reporters. As Jeff Guo reported in 2017, “Anti-media rhetoric has abounded since the election,” pointing to examples of physical hostility toward journalists at the time:

In West Virginia last month, Dan Heyman of Public News Service was handcuffed and arrested at the state capitol building for posing questions to Tom Price, the secretary of Health and Human Services. And in Washington last week, a reporter from CQ Roll Call was pushed against a wall by security guards for asking an FCC commissioner questions in the lobby of a public building.

July 28, 2017: During a speech to law enforcement officials in Long Island, New York, Trump encouraged police to be more violent when handling suspects and potential offenders:

Now, we’re getting them [criminals] out anyway, but we’d like to get them out a lot faster, and when you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, please don’t be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. Don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?

In the 35-minute speech, Trump discussed his plan to fight MS-13 gang violence, calling the gang’s members “animals” who had “transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into blood-stained killing fields.”

August 12, 2017: One of the clearest moments in which Trump refused to denounce violence, and thereby encouraged it, was when he equated the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, as part of a “Unite the Right” rally with the leftist protesters who demonstrated against them. During the rally, a Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd of anti-racism counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The evening before, on August 11, the neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups marched at the University of Virginia, carrying lit tiki torches and chanting anti-Semitic slogans, in response to the impending removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

As Tara Golshan reported for Vox, Trump’s very first response to the events in Charlottesville was to condemn violence on the part of many players, while initially refusing to even mention the presence of white supremacist groups. In a short statement issued that day, Trump said from his golf club in New Jersey, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides. It has been going on for a long time in our country — not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. It has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America.”

That same night, he tweeted condolences to Heyer’s family but made no mention of who was responsible for the violence. Trump called for there to be “a study” to understand what happened in Charlottesville.

On the Tuesday following the weekend rally, Trump infamously said, “You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides.”

The president also attempted to identify the “good people” in the sea of white nationalists that weekend: “You had people and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists. They should be condemned totally. ... You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”

September 22, 2017: At a rally in Alabama, Trump took aim at football players like Colin Kaepernick, who kneeled during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and systemic racism. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’” he said.

In the following days, Trump underscored his disdain for the anthem protests.

Trump turned the NFL player’s silent protest about police violence into a debate about nationalism. This became emblematic of a larger push: Trump continues to spin issues of racial injustice as an affront to American life, riling up his base (many supporters set fire to NFL team merchandise).

2018: Trump still fails to condemn white supremacists as hate crimes are on the rise

Multiple studies released between 2017 and 2019 showed how hate crimes reached a high during the first two years of Trump’s presidency. A report from the FBI found that hate crimes, especially against Muslims, increased by 5 percent in 2016 and were up 17 percent in 2017; in 2018, hate crimes reached a 16-year high, with a significant rise in violence against Latinos.

According to a 2019 report, counties that hosted a rally with Trump as a headliner experienced a 226 percent increase in hate crimes. The report’s authors noted: “Trump’s rhetoric may encourage hate crimes.” At the middle point of his term, when confronted with opportunities to condemn white supremacy and attempt to unify the country, Trump declined to do so.

June 24, 2018: Amid his administration’s family separation crisis, Trump fanned the flames of anti-immigration sentiment. He tweeted rhetoric that justified his administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which featured ICE raids and migrant detention facilities. Between October 1, 2017, and May 31, 2018, at least 2,700 children were split from their families at the border. “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents ...” he wrote.

August 11, 2018: A year after the inaugural “Unite the Right” rally, organizers planned a second “Unite the Right” event, yet Trump still failed to condemn the hate groups by name. Ahead of the rally, he tweeted a rather vague statement against hate and did not acknowledge and condemn the people perpetrating the violence.

October 18, 2018: At a rally in Montana, Trump celebrated Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte, who body-slammed a reporter in May 2017, telling the crowd, “Any guy who can do a body-slam ... he’s my guy.”

Gianforte assaulted journalist Ben Jacobs after Jacobs asked him a question about the GOP health care bill, on the day before Gianforte won election. He ultimately apologized (after his spokesperson first denied the assault) and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault. Gianforte was sentenced with 40 hours of community service, 20 hours of anger management, and a $300 fine along with an $85 court fee, in addition to a deferred 180-day jail sentence.

As Jeff Guo reported for Vox in 2017, the assault revealed how the Republican Party, at Trump’s behest, has grown comfortable with verbal and physical violence against the press.

October 22-November 1, 2018: Cesar Sayoc, a Florida Trump supporter, mailed 16 inoperative pipe bombs to Democratic leaders, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, who had been critical of Trump’s presidency. Sayoc had been living in a van that was covered in photos of Trump and “decals attacking the media,” according to NBC News. Sayoc’s lawyers argued that Trump’s rhetoric fueled his actions and that Sayoc viewed Trump as a “surrogate father.” On August 4, 2019, Sayoc was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Trump first condemned Sayoc’s actions, but then walked back his condemnation. “In these times we have to unify,” Trump said. “We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.”

As Vox’s Alex Ward reported, Trump had opportunities to unite the country after Sayoc was detained, but instead blamed the media and Democrats for the anger that his supporters were acting out.

October 27, 2018: An anti-Semitic terrorist murdered 11 worshippers and injured seven others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Though the shooter criticized Trump for being a “globalist” who was controlled by Jews, many critics linked Trump’s rhetoric to the mass shooting. Jewish leaders in Pittsburgh wrote an open letter to Trump demanding that he “fully denounce white nationalism” before visiting a city in mourning. “For the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement,” the letter said. “You yourself called the murderer evil, but yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence.”

Trump first lamented the shooting but then suggested that the victims should have protected themselves by having an armed guard inside the synagogue, and distanced himself from the National Rifle Association when asked about his ties to the organization.

2019: Mass shootings and hate crimes linked to Trump’s rhetoric continued, while he lashed out at a group of newly elected congresswomen

Instead of denouncing the white supremacy and hate fueling many mass shootings, Trump pointed to mental illness as a key factor behind domestic terrorism. As Trump returned the campaign trail in an attempt to gain a second term, he targeted a new group at his campaign events — a group of young congresswomen of color, known as “the Squad.”

May 8, 2019: At a Florida rally, Trump turned the idea of shooting migrants and asylum seekers into a punchline. In his remarks, he asked, “How do you stop these people?” A woman at the rally reportedly yelled “shoot them” in response. Trump then joked, “That’s only in the Panhandle, you can get away with that statement.”

Trump’s statement came a day after reports that a border militia member said of migrants, “Why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them. ... We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber.”

July 14, 2019: Trump attacked the group of congresswomen known as “the Squad,” saying on Twitter that they should “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” Trump didn’t initially name the lawmakers he was attacking, but it was clear he was directing his ire at first-term members Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The women, who advocate for progressive policies, became the target of backlash and scrutiny.

Three days later at a Trump 2020 campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina, the crowd repeatedly chanted “Send her back! Send her back!” directed at Rep. Omar, whom Trump began to single out from the Squad, which he described that night as a group of “hate-filled extremists.”

Trump’s rhetoric toward Omar and the rest of the Squad led to death threats and increased security for the women. In April, just hours after a man was charged for threatening to assault and murder Omar, Trump again told harmful lies about her at an event. The man told officials that “he loves the president” and “hates radical Muslims in our government.” In June, Tlaib read out a death threat she received that said, “The only good Muslim is a dead one.”

August 3, 2019: In one of the larger calamities of Trump’s presidency, a 21-year-old white man opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 23 people and injuring 22 others. As Alexia Fernández Campbell reported for Vox, the shooter drove more than 10 hours to the store to target Mexicans. Officials believe that the gunman was the author of a racist, xenophobic online manifesto that warned of a “Hispanic invasion” of Texas and echoed the president’s language, according to the New York Times. Trump responded to the shooting in a brief speech but “said nothing about widespread criticism of his own anti-immigrant rhetoric, which some say inspired the El Paso attacks,” Fernández Campbell reported.

August 5, 2019: A 39-year-old Montana man was charged with felony assault for choking, slamming, and fracturing the skull of a 13-year-old boy who didn’t take his hat off for the national anthem. The man’s attorney told the local newspaper that Trump’s “rhetoric” led to the violent act. “His commander in chief is telling people that if they kneel, they should be fired, or if they burn a flag, they should be punished,” the lawyer said, referencing Trump’s harsh words against athletes like Colin Kaepernick who protested for social justice.

October 1, 2019: A New York Times report stated that Trump, as part of his border security plan in early 2019, reportedly wanted to shoot migrants in the legs and keep them away from the southern border with a trench filled with water, alligators, and snakes. Trump also reportedly asked for a cost estimate for an electrified wall with spikes that could “pierce human flesh.”

November 1, 2019: A 61-year-old Milwaukee man was arrested and charged with a felony hate crime after allegedly throwing acid at a Peruvian American who was walking to a Mexican restaurant. The perpetrator accused the victim of being in the country illegally, asking him, “Why you invade my country?” and “Why don’t you respect my laws?” before attacking him. When police searched the perpetrator’s home, they found three letters addressed to Donald Trump. The victim suffered second-degree burns.

2020: Trump is explicit about the kinds of violence he is willing to use against Black Lives Matter protesters

As Black Lives Matter protests swept the country this summer following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a key thread running through Trump’s response was to call for and send in law enforcement officials — the National Guard, Secret Service police, local police, US Park Police, and state troopers — who dressed in riot gear and used a variety of weapons, from tear gas to rubber bullets. While he said violence was out of hand in cities, the protests were mostly peaceful, outside of escalation by police.

In fact, after Homeland Security agents were deployed in Portland in the summer, violent demonstrations increased from under 17 percent to over 42 percent, according to a report. Amid the unrest, Trump also repeatedly failed to identify and call out white supremacist agitators and counterprotesters who traveled to cities and towns and incited violence.

And throughout the country, Asian Americans faced violence due to fears about the coronavirus. Trump has repeatedly used a racist name for the virus, calling it the “Chinese flu” or the “Chinese virus.” It’s one of many ways he has downplayed Covid-19 and cast blame elsewhere for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of whom are people of color.

March 14, 2020: 19-year-old Jose L. Gomez stabbed three members of an Asian American family, including a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old, at a Sam’s Club in Texas. According to the FBI’s report obtained by ABC News, Gomez said he attacked them because “he thought the family was Chinese and infecting people with the coronavirus.” Gomez was charged with three counts of attempted capital murder and one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

In a report released in late March, the FBI warned that hate crimes against Asian Americans would surge (and were already surging) due to rhetoric that associated the disease with China and Asian American populations. Trump began calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” early in the pandemic and defended his use of the phrase against frequent criticism, saying, “It did come from China. It is a very accurate term.”

Catherine Kim reported for Vox that the phrase fits into Trump’s “pattern of xenophobia” and “pattern of deflecting blame.” After a week of anti-Asian rhetoric, Trump tweeted, “It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community” (but othered Asian Americans — “they” and “us” — in his next tweet).

On October 8, a few days after being released from Walter Reed Medical Center, where he was treated for the virus, Trump released a video in which he again blamed China. “China’s going to pay a big price for what they’ve done to this country,” Trump said.

May 29, 2020: Following the first weekend of social justice protests after George Floyd’s killing, Trump threatened to shoot looters in Minneapolis. His tweet thread showed the tone that would dominate his reaction to the unrest in the following months: He called protesters “thugs” and said, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter flagged Trump’s tweet for “glorifying violence.”

As Katelyn Burns reported for Vox, a day later, “Trump tried to walk back the phrase on Twitter by claiming he meant that when looting starts, people end up getting shot.”

June 1, 2020: Police officers in Washington, DC, attacked hundreds of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square with tear gas to make way for Trump, who traveled from the White House to St. John’s Church for a photo op. Before visiting the church, Trump said in a speech, “If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” The remarks fit into Trump’s repeated call for “law and order.”

August 29, 2020: At an emergency operations briefing in Texas, Trump expressed interest in sending the National Guard to Portland to meet protesters with force.

“We sent in 1,000 National Guard, and that’s not even a big force. We could clean out — as an example, Portland: We could fix Portland in, I would say, 45 minutes.”

August 31, 2020: After Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot seven times by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, protests broke out across the country. The next day, a group of armed men including 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse from Illinois showed up in Kenosha, saying they were there to protect property. Rittenhouse, a law enforcement enthusiast and a Trump supporter, shot and killed two people and injured another; he was later charged with murder.

Trump later appeared to justify Rittenhouse’s actions by saying he was acting in self-defense. At a press briefing, Trump told reporters, “I guess it looks like he fell and then they very violently attacked him and it was something we’re looking at right now and it’s under investigation. I guess he was in very big trouble. He probably would have been killed. But it’s under investigation.”

September 1, 2020: Before traveling to Kenosha, Trump said he was going to the city to show support for law enforcement. He did not visit Blake’s family or mention Blake by name. Instead, he said the officer who shot him must have “choked.”

Trump also said that law enforcement was ready to stop protests “very powerfully.” “As soon as they came in, boom, the flame was gone. Now maybe it will start up again, in which case they will put it out very powerfully,” he said.

Blake’s family and Wisconsin leaders feared that Trump’s visit would lead to more violence and destruction.

September 17, 2020: In August 2020, an antifa supporter was accused of shooting and killing a pro-Trump activist during Portland, Oregon protests. The suspect, Michael Reinoehl, was killed by law enforcement officers in early September. In an interview with Jeanine Pirro on the 17th, Trump praised law enforcement for killing Reinoehl. Vox’s Aaron Rupar wrote, “It’s bad enough that the president is more or less endorsing extrajudicial killings before all the relevant facts are known, and despite an eyewitness saying it was unjustified. But it’s even worse viewed in light of how Trump is politicizing street violence.”

September 29, 2020: At the first presidential debate for the general election, when given the opportunity to denounce white supremacy, Trump spoke directly to a hate group, the Proud Boys, instructing them to “stand back” and “stand by.” In response, the Proud Boys instantly expressed gratitude and joy at being recognized by the president.

Days later, after receiving bipartisan criticism, Trump told Fox News that he condemns far-right hate groups. “Let me be clear again: I condemn the KKK. I condemn all white supremacists,” he said. “I condemn the Proud Boys. I don’t know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing, but I condemn that.”

However, as EJ Dickson argued in Rolling Stone, there are reasons to believe that Trump knows who the Proud Boys are, from his connection to Roger Stone — who has close ties to the Proud Boys — to the fact that Proud Boys regularly attend Trump rallies, with a Proud Boy co-chair sitting directly behind Trump at a Miami rally in 2019.

October 8, 2020: Six men face conspiracy charges in a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop reported, “the conspirators were in contact with a militia group based in Michigan — training in tactics and weapons with the group, and attempting to build an explosive device with a militia group member.” The men were reportedly angry about Whitmer’s coronavirus shutdown policies.

In August, Trump had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” after the state instituted a stay-at-home order to combat the pandemic. In response to the FBI’s investigation of the kidnapping plot, Trump demanded that Whitmer thank him. And he chastised Whitmer for the very thing that the conspirators targeted her for — taking action against the spread of a deadly virus that Trump has waved off as a threat.

In a livestream address, Whitmer said that Trump gives “comfort” to those who “spread fear and hatred and division.” She pointed to Trump’s comments at the presidential debate and called him “complicit”:

Just last week, the president of the United States stood before the American people and refused to condemn white supremacists and hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups. ... Hate groups heard the president’s words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry, as a call to action. When our leaders speak, their words matter. They carry weight. When our leaders meet with, encourage, or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions and they are complicit. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit.

2021: After losing the presidential election to Joe Biden, Trump continued a dangerous effort to overturn Biden’s victory

January 6, 2021: On the day that Congress moved to certify the 2020 presidential election results confirming Biden as the winner, Trump encouraged thousands of his supporters to dispute vote counts. At an outdoor rally in Washington, DC, Trump turned on Republicans who refused to support his efforts to overturn the election results, calling them weak, and urged Vice President Mike Pence to reject the Electoral College results.

Trump told listeners, “You will never take back our country with weakness.” (Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani also delivered a speech in which he encouraged “trial by combat.”) He encouraged them to head to the Capitol to support objections to certification of the vote.

Hours of violence followed the speech when supporters stormed the US Capitol, as well as state capitols across the country. Capitol Police fatally shot Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter, as she and others tried to breach the halls of the Senate. Four others died, including a police officer. Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser imposed a city-wide curfew beginning at 6 pm, and few people were arrested, though many rioters violated the restriction.

That evening, Trump again equivocated in messages to supporters, making little attempt to try to stop the violence. He later denounced the violence, but refused to clearly state he lost the election. According to the New York Times, he soon expressed regret to White House aides about committing to a peaceful transfer of power and condemning the Capitol attack.

[#WhatsApp #SCOTUS]

–8/26/20–

@Clerk: SG filed application for stay in abortion case. District Court entered nationwide injunction to make it easier to obtain mifepristone during the pandemic.

–9/10/20–

@Clerk: Briefing completed in abortion case.

@Chief: I vote to deny the stay. We are too close to the election to rule on abortion. What do you all think?

@RBG: Steve, Sonia, Elena, and I will join you. That makes five.

@Chief: Okay, Sam and Clarence, I assume you want to dissent?

@PhilliesFan: I can't believe I have to do this again.

@BigRed: We should vote to overrule Roe already.

@Chief: Okay, Neil and Brett, what do you think?

@RobesNotCapes: Uh, I won't say anything. Still smarting from Bostock.

@BeachWeek: I'll find some technical jurisdictional way to avoid ruling on abortion again.

@Chief: Fine. Sam, can you please finish your dissent in about a week or so.

–9/18/20–

@PhilliesFan: Hey Chief, now you have four votes.

@TheRealChief: I have an idea. What if we deny the stay without denying the stay.

@Chief: What do you mean Elena?

@TheRealChief: What if we remand to the District Court, and give it another opportunity to reconsider whether its nationwide injunction was proper. Then we don't have to do anything, but the Trump Administration loses. It's a #WinWin.

@BigRed: How is that a Win-Win? The government loses.

@BreyerPager: And perhaps the District Court can consider whether the COVID situation is still severe enough to warrant this restriction. Perhaps the situation is different. Perhaps the facts balance out differently. I like it.

@PhilliesFan: You've got to be kidding me. Do you really think the public is that stupid? You are denying the stay.

@Chief: Well, we can say that we are not indicating the Court's views on the merits. I like it. What do you think Neil?

@RobesNotCapes: Yeah, we really shouldn't be talking about abortion. Amy's confirmation hearing is in a few days. Let's keep things smooth for her. Remember when you jerks reversed one of my opinions during my hearing? Total d*ck move.

@BeachWeek: I have an idea. Let's cite some obscure opinion from five decades ago so it is really clear we aren't talking about abortion. Maybe Justice Harlan. And maybe we can dismiss the ACA as improvidently granted. Really make things easier for the Glorious ACB.

@MyBelovedWorld: Now, don't you start.

@TheRealChief: #TooSoon

@BeachWeek: Whatever. I am going to be the swing vote soon.

@MyBelovedWorld: You will be the swing vote until we welcome Justices Brown Jackson and Kruger. 6-5 will be the new 5-4.

@BreyerPager: And I will be the swing vote. Now they will have to answer my questions!

@TheRealChief: And I will be the Real Chief.

@Chief: What about me?

@TheRealChief: You can write the ERISA cases.

@PhiliesFan: Okay, I've circulated my dissent. Does anyone want to even bother replying? I called you all hypocrites. Anyone? <InsertFerrisBueller.gif>

–@GoIrish Joins Group–

@GoIrish: Hi everyone. Is it too soon for me to join?

@Chief: Welcome Amy. You were nominated. That's close enough.

–@MerrickGizzle Joins Group–

@Chief: Let me clarify. You were nominated, and have a hearing scheduled.

–@MerrickGizzle Leaves Group–

@GoIrish: Thanks Chief. I will need a bigger parking spot to fit my minivan.

@BigRed: I can move my RV a bit.

@Chief: Okay, we done here? It's getting late. I am going to call it quits.

@TheRealChief: Somewhere Josh just wrote another blog post about you retiring.

@Chief: Whatever, I've blocked him on Twitter.

@PhilliesFan: #BlueJune.

@Chief: Stop it! That stopped being funny three months ago. I can't believe he wrote an entire stupid article about the term. He really isn't funny. I doubt anyone even bothers reading his stuff till the end.

@DeputyMarshall: Okay, I am going to gavel this chat to a close. Conference tomorrow morning. Night tweeps.

How are they going to protect people with preexisting conditions while trying to destroy the law that does just that? You'll never guess.

The brilliant strategist thinks he'll turn things around by doing exactly what put him in this hole to begin with.

Trump increasingly appears unwilling to discourage the potential for political violence on his behalf.

It’s Wednesday, Nov. 4, and the vote count is too close to call. Neither President Trump nor former Vice President Joe Biden is conceding defeat, recounts are being conducted, disputes over recounts are being lodged, and a court case will soon be making its way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Trump has voiced his belief that there is widespread ballot fraud and as a result there’s already some degree of civil unrest.

This is the nightmare scenario for 2020, one in which a disputed election drives the country further apart. It’s also one that’s vaguely familiar. In 2000, there was no clear winner in the contest between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush. That triggered a recount and a controversial Supreme Court decision that ultimately determined the presidency for Bush. Yet even in the direct aftermath of Bush v. Gore, Americans still kept the faith in democratic institutions and the process. I went looking for lessons from that period of disruption. But all I found were the first cancer cells that have metastasized in our political system over the past 20 years.

It’s not that Americans didn’t think something had gone wrong in 2000 — in a CBS News poll conducted after the Supreme Court’s decision in mid-December, 60 percent of people said there had not been a fair and accurate count of votes. Still, 59 percent of people in an ABC News/Washington Post poll from the same time said their opinion of the court remained unchanged. The same poll asked what people would think if there were an unofficial recount and Gore were declared the winner. Would they consider Bush legitimately elected? Eighty-four percent answered, “Yes.”

It’s difficult to imagine similar sentiments in December 2020 if the Supreme Court intervened. Already, Americans say they are worried about something going wrong. In a late September Monmouth University poll, 39 percent of people said they were “not too confident” or “not at all confident” that the 2020 election would be conducted “fairly and accurately.” A FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll from about the same time found that while 60 percent of people surveyed said the election would be fair, 39 percent said it wouldn’t be. The open seat on the Supreme Court has only complicated matters.

Journalists’ recitation of engrained partisanship is now somewhat rote, but the scale of our almost-religious alienation from one another is sort of breathtaking; we were not this divided a nation in 2000. Pew Research tracked partisanship trends in America from 1994 to 2017 by measuring responses to the same questions about things like views on gay marriage and immigration. In 1999, there was a 15-point difference between Democrats and Republicans on these questions. In 2017, the difference was 36 points.

But man, did we think we had it bad back in the 15-point difference world.

The history of the 2000 election recount generally tells about the partisan spin that polluted the airwaves during the counting of the ballots. (If you are too young to know what a “hanging chad” is, please Google; it was important in American life for a few weeks, but I just don’t have the strength to get into it here.) Gore’s team wanted officials to recount ballots by hand in four heavily Democratic counties where the vote was quite close, while Bush’s team wanted to stop the recount entirely.

James Baker was Bush’s point-man in Florida, having served as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, and was quick to realize that the campaign would need to wage a war for public opinion. “We’re getting killed on ‘count all the votes.’ Who the hell could be against that?” Jeffrey Toobin quoted Baker as saying in his book about the recount, “Too Close to Call.” Gore’s team thought it had the “moral authority to make his case,” according to a New York Times report from two days after Election Day. It allowed “Democrats to suggest that the Republicans are trying to subvert the will of the people.”

As the drama unfolded, many Americans thought more votes needed to be tallied, but they also thought Gore should concede defeat. In a Fox News survey from late November, the plurality of people, 47 percent, thought that not all the votes in Florida had been counted. But the same survey also found that 56 percent of people thought Gore should concede.

This psychology is fascinating when seen through 2020’s rearview mirror. It speaks to a certain satisfaction some people had with the general political state of things: Either Bush or Gore would do just fine. It’s the sort of laissez-faire attitude toward election outcomes that 15-point partisan differences buy you. In the 36-point era, we’re discussing all-out civil war if things are too close to call on election night.

We have accelerated the formation of our separate partisan worlds over the past four years. These worlds accept different realities. Democrats generally accept fact-based conclusions (alongside their partisan, subjective beliefs), and Republicans — or at least the Republican Party — generally eschew the conclusions of experts on things like climate change and COVID-19 (alongside their partisan, subjective beliefs). Given all this, doesn’t it necessarily follow that we would continue down this garden path of separate realities when it comes to an initially indeterminate election outcome? One version of reality accepts a President Biden while the other accepts a President Trump, each with baroque arguments — about the eligibility of certain ballots or the legitimacy of the Electoral College — nicely retrofitted to match a predetermined conclusion.

In a piece in the 2010 collection “The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment,” David Greenberg, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, traced this inability to accept a common reality to the 2000 election and the postmodern brilliance of Baker and company: “The Bush team didn’t just contend that a recount would fail to identify the true winner more accurately; more radically, they argued that any accurate tally was unattainable — that the truth was unknowable.”

Greenberg points to a famous quote given to the New York Times Magazine by a Bush aide for further proof of the roots of this kind of thinking:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Professionally, I’m a member of the reality-based community. I try to think empirically about America, her culture, people and oh-so-screwy politics. That’s been a challenge as Trump and the Republican Party have perfected the creation of one’s own reality and the belittling of the reality-based community. During the first debate, the president waffled on whether he would concede defeat, falling back on his go-to line about the fraudulent — and unfounded — dangers of mail voting. If he actually does this post-Election Day, media organizations will be forced to grapple with reporting on the news of the day — the president’s words — and battling misinformation and mistrust. It’s more than the press had to contend with in 2000, and it’s an unwinnable scenario. But it’s the reality of our 36-point world.

NBC News reports that federal prosecutors who piloted the family separation policy at the border in 2017 apparently developed a “litmus test” to determine at what age it would be permissible to rip a child from their parent, as if that’s fine at a certain age. According to a memo in an unpublished report from the Department of Justice inspector general, agents were to see if the child could give their address, among other details. If the child could answer affirmatively, agents could presumably continue with separation.

“But the memo, prepared for John Bash, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, was never sent to Justice Department officials in Washington, according to a draft report from the department's inspector general obtained by NBC News,” the report said. When the Trump administration began widespread kidnapping under the official policy the next year, babies as young as four months old were taken. But far from showing a smidge of concern for children, the memo instead continued to confirm the administration’s callous cruelty.

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“The Jan. 7, 2018, memo from El Paso also indicates that neither the pilot program nor the zero-tolerance policy enacted across the southern border later that year was created with a plan to reunite families; instead, it expected that children would see their parents again when both were deported to their home countries,” Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff continue in the report. Further watchdog reports would later confirm officials failed to track families they ripped apart, adding to the chaos officials had already created.

Nor was this “age test” established as any sort of preventative measure: the test was created because officials had already separated a number of extremely young children during the pilot, including 11 children under 1. One. “By mid-August 2017, the memo said, prosecutors realized that some children were too young to be separated and established a litmus test to determine which children were too young.” But the memo never made it to top Justice Department leaders, the inspector general said.

In fact, further findings from the inspector general’s report as reported by The New York Times revealed former attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and his deputy Rod Rosenstein, were “a driving force” behind family separation—and intended to show no mercy.

The unpublished draft report said that when U.S. attorneys sought clarification on Sessions’ spring 2018 policy ordering the prosecution of parents who unlawfully crossed the border, both the attorney general and his deputy were ruthless. "We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly said. Rosenstein ”went even further in a second call about a week later,” The Times report continued, “telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were.”

Reacting to The Times report, Nevada U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen said in a statement received by Daily Kos that this was a plot to institute one of the cruelest government policies in modern American history. “In its quest to send a message to immigrant families fleeing violence, the administration implemented a cruel immigration agenda with no plan for reuniting families or ensuring children were safe while in the government’s care,” she said.

Government officials were repeatedly warned about the psychological horrors that would be inflicted on a child separated from his or her parent. The calls were clear and urgent, and they did it anyway. They took thousands of children. “The DOJ knew of the dangers and trauma family separation would create. They just chose to look away,” tweeted Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES). “The more we learn about the atrocities committed under this administration the harder it is to stomach it. They knew what they were doing.”

Nose-to-the-grindstone Donald Trump is getting back to his mission: personally spreading the coronavirus to as many Americans as humanly possible.  

So even as Trump aides continue to dodge all questions concerning Trump's COVID-19 status, Trump is planning an event Saturday (yes, Oct. 10!) on the White House South Lawn with hundreds of people for “his first in-person event since he announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus," reports The New York Times.

Enticing! Who exactly will show nobody knows, since most of Trump's besties are still sidelined following his last coronavirus bash two weeks ago. But Trump will reportedly reprise his triumphant "Covita" return from Walter Reed Medical Center earlier this week. 

The president was expected to make remarks from one of the balconies at the White House to the crowd, which was expected to include people attending an event elsewhere in Washington staged by a Trump supporter, Candace Owens, one of the people familiar with the plans said.

One person who clearly won't be there is GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who told reporters Thursday he had deliberately steered clear of the White House since August since it was clearly a COVID-19 hot zone in the making based on its lax protocols. 

Nonetheless, Trump deftly sidestepped McConnell on the way to infecting several members of the Senate Republican caucus, hobbling the U.S. military's top brass and turning the White House into one of the "most dangerous places in the country," as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it. Tragically, Trump's superspreader event for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett may have also sent the virus back to Barrett's community, where one teacher and two students recently tested positive at the small private school in South Bend, Indiana, which is attended by some of Barrett's children.

Anyway, things could change. As of yesterday, Trump was also planning a campaign stop in Pennsylvania. As of today, he wasn't. And after calling off coronavirus relief negotiations a couple days ago, Trump is now demanding the biggest, bestest deal ever.

So, yeah, Trump's not well. Things could change.  

Since Sen. Lindsey Graham was at the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting attended last week by Sens. Mike Lee and Thom Tillis, both of whom were unmasked and subsequently tested positive for COVID-19, you’d think he’d want to know his own status. But nope. Graham very much does not want to be tested—at least not with the results becoming public.

Graham’s opponent, Jaime Harrison, is pushing for testing for everyone involved in the debate scheduled for Oct. 9. “We need real leadership in this pandemic,” Harrison tweeted Thursday afternoon. “The debate moderators and I have agreed to take a COVID test prior to debating. I've scheduled my test, and I am calling on Sen. Graham to do the same.” Graham was not on board, all but calling Harrison “uppity” in response.

“Mr. Harrison is demanding special treatment,” Graham responded in a statement. “South Carolinians do not appreciate Harrison putting himself above others.” 

“Putting himself above others,” in this context, means “calling on someone known to have been in a room with multiple people who tested positive for COVID-19 to be tested before spending an extended period on a stage with him.” The subtext, of course, is that Harrison is doing that while Black.

Graham claimed to be following his doctor’s advice in not being tested, and said he’d be at the debate.

Harrison’s response was brief and to the point:

It’s easy enough to be tested if you’re a United States senator. For some reason, Graham won’t do it, won’t set an example for South Carolinians to be tested when they’ve had contact with coronavirus-positive people, won’t set an example for South Carolinians to be tested if they’ll be sharing space with others for a sustained, maskless period of time. For some reason.

Hmmm. It’s not hard to think of a few possibilities why that might be. It’s up to Graham to prove otherwise.

Covid-19 contact-tracing apps that rely on an API developed by Apple and Google and bluetooth technology cannot accurately measure the distance between users on public transport, a recently released study from Trinity College Dublin has found. From a report: The researchers of the study first tested the API on a group of volunteers who switched seats every fifteen minutes in a Dublin tram. They then ran the collected data through the detection rules of the Swiss, German, and Italian contact-tracing apps to see how often they correctly identified contact between users. Based on this, they found that the chance of an accurate detection was "similar to that of triggering notifications by randomly selecting from the participants in our experiments, regardless of proximity." So, no better than random. This finding is the latest example of mounting skepticism among experts regarding the effectiveness of the technology underlying the apps which have been widely released -- but less widely used -- by governments across Europe and more recently the United States. Most contact-tracing apps in Europe and the United States use Apple and Google's exposure notification API, which in turn relies on in-built wireless Bluetooth technology to estimate the distance between two users and whether they've been in contact. What actually constitutes 'contact' is set by the developers of whichever app calls the API, but it's usually defined as being within 2 meters (~6.5 feet) of another user for at least 15 minutes. Once a user uploads a positive test result to a contact-tracing app, it notifies all contacted users and lets them know that they've been at risk of infection.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

San Francisco-based "co-living platform" HubHaus has collapsed, saying it has no funds, leaving people using its platform to rent rooms in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Washington DC, in limbo. From a report: HubHaus' business model seemed simple enough: lease large, single-family units and then cut them up into as many rooms as possible in order to sublet each room. Upon closer examination, however, there seem to have been numerous red flags. In interviews with tenants, the San Francisco Chronicle found that they were still being charged for services (e.g. housekeeping) that were no longer provided and some were charged double their rent after setting up auto-pay. Landlords told the Chronicle that HubHaus stopped paying for utilities and slashed its leasing payments to them. One former employee also reported that the company consistently paid him less than he earned or would pay him late, causing financial hardship that led him to quit. In a September 30 letter sent to homeowners and tenants, and obtained by the Chronicle, HubHaus owner Diablo Management Group said "HubHaus is completing a liquidation and closure of the company." As part of that process, an analysis by Diablo found there were "no funds available to pay the claims of unsecured creditors (e.g., claims by landlords, tenants, trade creditors, or contractors)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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