The state of Florida continues to act as a test case for the Republican notion of ignoring a worldwide pandemic into submission. Under the control of Donald Trump devotee and "mayor from Jaws" Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state has seen steadily rising COVID-19 cases after a period of largely ignoring social distancing recommendations urged by infectious disease experts. It took some time for the new cases to translate into a rise in deaths; that, too, has been recently changing.
Another recent change: the state's numbers of COVID-19 cases in children are now soaring, as they have throughout the nation. Nearly 100,000 new COVID-19 cases were confirmed in children nationwide in the last two weeks of July—the period just before most of America begins a new school year. In Florida, the number of cases in children during the last month soared a staggering 137%.
There are now nearly 40,000 children in Florida who have tested positive for the virus, reports CNN, a more than doubling from the less than 17,000 positive cases in early July. Hospitalizations of Florida children almost exactly doubled, as well. While Donald Trump and other, like-minded politicians have dismissed soaring pandemic numbers as the result of more testing, hospitalization rates are more difficult to ignore; children are not ending up hospitalized with COVID-19 infections as a result of "more tests."
Deaths, which lag behind hospitalizations as hospitalizations lag behind positive test rates, also roughly doubled during the same period for Florida's children—from 4 to 7.
None of this, in Florida or elsewhere, seems as of yet to have forced Trump-loyal governors to rethink their plans of ignoring COVID-19 into submission in their states' school systems just as they did in prior rounds of thoughts-and-prayers pandemic management.
We know exactly how that will turn out, because science: crowded indoor environments where social distancing is impossible will result in rapid virus spread, resulting in individual school re-closures only after students have gotten sick and exposed many others, resulting in increased hospitalizations and deaths.
As COVID-19 cases continue to increase throughout the country, President Donald Trump is apparently off prioritizing racist dog whistles. He could be heard in an interview Tuesday morning on Fox Sports Radio’s “Outkick the Coverage with Clay Travis,” describing what he deemed “nastiness” in the NBA while praising ice hockey players for respecting “the mores.”
The president’s words followed a renewed interest in supporting athletes taking a stand against racism and police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death May 25. Floyd, a Black man, died in police custody after an officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes. Since then, the NBA has held true to its promise to print "Black Lives Matter" on the game court used since the professional sport reopened in a restricted “bubble” in Orlando. Players, supported by NBA personnel, were also allowed to kneel during the national anthem and to have a phrase of their choosing printed on the back of their jerseys. The actions in support of the Black Lives Matter movement obviously didn’t sit well with the commander in chief.
“And there was a nastiness about the NBA the way it was done too. So I think that the NBA’s in trouble,” Trump said. “I think it’s in big trouble, bigger trouble than they understand, and frankly ice hockey, which is doing very well, they didn’t do that. They respected the mores. They respected what they’re supposed to be doing, and they’re actually doing very well as I understand it.”
Changing gears to answer a question about the likelihood that the NFL reopens Sept. 10 as planned, Trump said the league wants to "open badly" and has been working with the government. "I would say this, if they don't stand for the national anthem, I hope they don't open, but other than that I’d love to see them open,” he said. “And we’re doing everything possible for getting them open. They can protest in other ways. They shouldn't protest our flag or our country.”
Following nationwide protests regarding Floyd’s death, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell vowed to allow players to peacefully protest even though years earlier free-agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick was all but banned from the league for kneeling during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. “We were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest," Goodell has since said, earning condemnation from the president.
Trump doubled down on criticism of Black Lives Matter support during his recent Fox Sports Radio interview. “I think it’s been horrible for basketball. Look at the basketball ratings. They’re down, they’re down to very low numbers, very very low numbers,” the president said. “People are angry about it. They don’t realize. They don’t want. They have enough politics with guys like me. They don’t need more as they’re driving down, going up for the shot. You know they don’t need it.”
That analysis, of course, is based on nothing substantive. TNT’s coverage of the NBA Restart attracted an average of 3.4 million viewers, more than twice that of the network's average viewership during a regular-season game, according to an NBA release. That’s compared to the NHL, which restarted with an average of 1.3 million viewers on NBC Sports August 1, CNBC reported.
For months now, the Trump administration has used a Stephen Miller-led public health order to unlawfully kick out thousands of unaccompanied migrant kids, claiming that allowing them into the U.S. is a COVID-19 risk. Under the CDC order, officials have bypassed immigration judges entirely to expel children including infants, and because kids aren’t even assigned identifying information after they’re taken initially taken into custody, advocates have said many are now “virtually impossible” to find. Remember—all of this is happening because officials claim it’s a matter of public health.
But new reporting from Dara Lind and Lomi Kriel in ProPublica lays the administration’s false claim to waste. Not only is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) testing nearly all of these children for COVID-19, it’s still expelling them even after they test negative. “ICE’s comprehensive testing appears to undermine the rationale for the mass expulsion policy: that it is necessary to ‘prevent the introduction’ of COVID-19 into the United States,” they write.
“The CDC’s original order banning the ‘introduction’ of migrants, from March, assumed that it would be impossible to test migrants for COVID-19,” Lind and Kriel report. “That was key to its rationale for barring their entry.” But it’s testing nearly all children, court documents and congressional hearings reveal, apparently as part of agreements with the countries where children are expelled back to. “Asked specifically about its claim to Congress that all countries agreeing to accept children required testing, and whether that was at odds with the stated rationale for the expulsion policy, ICE declined to clarify, citing ‘pending litigation,’” the report continued.
How convenient. Trump administration officials are also likely to not want to comment on how difficult it has been to locate these children after they’ve been sent back to whatever dangers they were escaping from in the first place. In her report earlier this month, Kriel reported that of these expelled children, only about three dozen have been located by advocacy groups. “Nobody can find them,” Kids in Need of Defense vice president for policy Jennifer Podkul told her.
In a recent letter led by Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Kamala Harris of California, more than two dozen senators demanded officials respect the rights of children and fully adhere to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, further noting that acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan made “misleading” statements to them under oath. He had claimed that all children are screened for trafficking and protection concerns.
Due to a recent lawsuit, a small number of adults and children who had been held at a Texas hotel will be allowed to remain in the U.S. to pursue their claims. But in the meantime, a racist twerp continues to head an unlawful effort to quickly kick out thousands of other children who have fled for their lives to the U.S., and quickly expelling them based on a racist lie that they pose a danger to the nation. Nope—it’s Stephen Miller and coopting of federal agencies like DHS that pose the actual danger. As Jean Guerrero recently noted in The Nation, “Acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf is regurgitating Miller’s apocalyptic talking points.”
“The Trump administration’s claim that they need to summarily expel children because of COVID was always a pretext,” Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union told ProPublica. “If they are now actually testing and know the children do not have COVID, then the policy is that much more unjustified.”
As some countries like New Zealand celebrate being free of the novel coronavirus, health officials in the U.S. continue to urge individuals to wear masks and avoid large gatherings in efforts to decrease the spread of the virus. Yet some Americans just won’t listen. Not only do some U.S. residents refuse to wear masks in public despite laws mandating they do so, but many others continue to gather in large groups.
While wearing masks is not required in all states, recent research has shown that wearing a mask can significantly prevent the contraction of COVID-19. But this information doesn’t seem to matter to the thousands of bikers who attended the world’s biggest annual motorcycle rally this weekend. With more than 250,000 estimated attendees, maskless bikers crowded Sturgis, South Dakota for the city’s 80th annual motorcycle rally—some even with shirts that said: “Screw COVID. I went to Sturgis.”
South Dakota’s Republican Gov. Kristi L. Noem welcomed bikers from all over the country into the state in a tweet on Friday. Despite worries by health professionals that the state’s numbers would increase with large events, Noem happily first hosted Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration and plans to host more large events. “We hope people come,” Noem said when she spoke of the motorcycle rally, according to The Washington Post. “Our economy benefits when people come and visit us.”
#Sturgis2020 kicks off today. Welcome to South Dakota! Our state had the Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration. We had the first national indoor sporting event with fans thanks to @PBR. We've been "Back to Normal" for over 3 months, and South Dakota is in a good spot.
According to the Argus Leader, more than $1 million in city and state tax revenue was brought in by the event hosted in Sturgis last year. During the rallies, Sturgis is described as “alive,” hosting “the largest community in the state,” a letter by the town Mayor Mark Carstensen said. Carstensen told CNN Monday that while “[w]e cannot stop people from coming,” the town can emphasize the importance of “personal responsibility.” He noted that sanitation stations and masks are available to be given out, but not required to be worn.
The state does not have any mandates requiring facial coverings. Noem has repeatedly supported the Trump administration’s downplaying of the severity of the virus and even resisted stay-at-home orders at the start of the pandemic. “We've been ‘Back to Normal’ for over 3 months, and South Dakota is in a good spot,” Noem said on Twitter. The numbers, however, seem to disagree. According to The Washington Post, while the average daily cases reported in the state remain under 100, they have risen in recent weeks. Without requiring masks or social distancing protocols, a surge in cases is likely to be seen.
"Those super spreader events are real," Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Lifespan Health System and associate professor at Brown University, told CNN. "We have reports from across the country of one person infecting 90 or 100 (people) or even more. And so if you have a few of those infections that start at Sturgis, people go back home and even have the potential to spread in their own communities." Ranney added that not all symptoms are visible and apparent. "This has the potential to seed new hotspots literally across the country," she said.
While Noem showed no concern over the risk of COVID-19 spread, not everyone in the town was happy to host the event. A survey was sent to all residents asking if they agreed to have the rally proceed on its scheduled date. While 60% of the fewer than 7,000 city residents voted against holding the event starting Friday, the city council approved it anyway. According to CNN, on its 75th anniversary, the event had close to 1 million people in attendance.
While this year’s event did not gather as many attendees as previous years, Kevin Lunsmann, a motorcyclist who has previously attended the rally, told the Associated Press that outside of a few people wearing masks, the event remained the same, with bars and nightclubs still full. According to the Argus Leader, the number of arrests and citations even increased. In addition to a fear of COVID-19 spread, residents experienced crashes and fears of drunk drivers on the road. During a 24-hour period from Saturday to Sunday, the Department of Public Safety reported 84 arrests for driving under the influence or drug-related offenses.
“We have to be here after they leave, and we’re not sure what they’re leaving,” a 65-year-old resident of Hill City, another small town flooded with bikers, told The Washington Post. She requested to remain anonymous for fear of backlash. “No masks, no social distancing,” she said. “I just wish other people would respect the locals a little bit more.” Regulations and confirmations on whether or not bikers from coronavirus-ridden states self-quarantined prior to attending the event or would be required to afterward were nonexistent.
Most attendees were not at all concerned about the virus, with some expressing more concern about driving etiquette, The New York Times reported. “My biggest concern is drivers — they just don’t pay attention to bikes. But I don’t know one person in a six-state radius who has had Covid. I think it is all just political,” Michael Brown, an attendee of the rally, told The Times. The event had both new and old bikers in attendance. “We got married here three years ago, so we come out here every year for our anniversary. Now we have a reason to come here every year,” Monica Hartman told The New York Times. “We have no concerns — if we are going to get sick, then we’ll get sick.”
Local town residents weren’t the only ones concerned with a potential outbreak of the novel coronavirus. Prior to the start of the event, authorities from the Cheyenne River Reservation announced they would deny access through the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation to prevent the potential spread of the pandemic, The Hill reported. While commercial energy and essential vehicles were allowed, tourists were not allowed to pass through the territory’s checkpoints. Since the start of the pandemic, Indigenous communities have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, with previous healthcare obstacles present including limited access to water and an underfunded healthcare system.
Photos and videos of the weekend-long crowded gathering are being shared across social media platforms. In most videos, out of the hundreds of people shown, only one can be seen wearing a mask.
As of Aug. 9, at least 128 new cases of COVID-19 were reported in South Dakota. Having seen an increase in the last two weeks, the state now has an average of 93 cases per day, according to The New York Times database. While South Dakota has seen less than 10,000 cases of coronavirus statewide, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is likely to change this.
Nationwide more than 4.8 million people in the U.S. have been infected by the novel coronavirus. Until residents across the country observe safety measures, including wearing a mask and social distancing, the number of cases and deaths as a result of COVID-19 will continue to rise.
I have blogged many times, and written a few law review articles, about how the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination applies to compelled decryption. The New Jersey Supreme Court handed down a new decision today,State v. Andrews, that basically leaves me unable to say what the law is. Instead of trying to describe the law, I think I'll explain it through the following imagined dialogue.
Student: Hi, Professor! I have a really simple question: Can the government make you unlock your phone if you plead the Fifth?
Teacher: That's a great question. Let me ask you to be more specific. When you say, "make you unlock your phone," what do you mean? Are you asking if they can make you enter in the password to unlock the phone without disclosing the password to the government?
Student: Sure, I guess that's one way to do it. What's the answer?
Teacher: It's not clear. It depends what state you're in. If you're in Massachusetts, the state supreme court has ruled that they can make you unlock the phone if it's your phone or there's some other reason to think you know the password. If you're in Indiana, though, the state supreme court says the law is different. In Indiana, the government can't make you unlock your phone unless the investigators already know the incriminating evidence on the phone.
Student: That's confusing! Is the law clearer if the government has another way to have you unlock your phone? Like, what if they order you to disclose the password rather than enter it?
Teacher: Again, it depends what state you're in.
Student: It's Massachusetts versus Indiana again, right?
Teacher: No, this time it's Pennsylvania versus New Jersey. If you're in Pennsylvania, the state supreme court says you can't be ordered to disclose your password. But if you're in New Jersey, the state supreme court says you can be ordered to disclose the password as long as there's evidence you know or have it.
Student: Wow, it sounds like the courts are confused. But at least we know what states to look to depending on whether the government's order is to enter the password versus to disclose it. There's uncertainty, but at least there's two distinct lines of cases.
Teacher: Not so fast. Some courts have treated them as distinct lines of cases. And that makes sense: Under traditional Fifth Amendment caselaw, there's a different constitutional standard for compelling statements and compelling acts. But several of these court decisions, like the New Jersey case, don't distinguish between password entry and password disclosure. They treat them as basically the same thing. So maybe it's two 1-1 splits, or maybe there's just one 2-2 split. It's hard to say.
Student: I guess it's up to the U.S. Supreme Court to figure all this out. They can decide how to reconcile the existing Supreme Court cases and come up with a uniform rule.
Teacher: Yes, although that's complicated, too. The Supreme Court's caselaw on how the privilege against self-incrimination applies to compelled acts mostly dates to the 1970s. Two Justices, Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch, have already announced that they may not follow it and that they may be interested instead in applying the original public meaning of the Fifth Amendment compelled decryption.
Student: That sounds impossible!
Teacher: Well maybe not, in light of the 1807 Burr case. But it certainly adds a complication. You may have some Justices looking to update the Fifth Amendment for the digital era, some Justices trying to apply existing doctrine, and some Justices poring over ancient texts to see what the answer should be. It's not clear where the majorities may be.
Student: This sounds messy. But at least we have certainty on one scenario, compelled biometrics. When the government wants to make someone put a thumb on a keypad or look into a scanner, there's obviously no Fifth Amendment privilege for that. After all, that's the body, not the mind. It's obviously not forcing the person to implicitly speak anything.
Teacher: That certainly seems right. And it's what a bunch of courts have said, including the state supreme court in Minnesota. But the lower courts aren't uniform on that, either. A bunch of federal magistrate judges have disagreed, on the thinking that biometric access effectively proves ownership and use of the phone. There isn't disagreement on this among state supreme courts or federal courts of appeals, but even that is somewhat uncertain right now.
Sen. Susan Collins is concerned. While her colleague from Maine, the independent Sen. Angus King, calls Donald Trump's executive actions out for what they are—“unconstitutional executive orders [that] would accelerate the erosion of Congress’s fundamental powers and lead us further down the path to the undermining of the American experiment in self-governance,” leading the country toward an “elected monarchy“—Collins couldn't bring herself to condemn Trump's move, but does recognize it for what it is. Sort of.
“There are constitutional limits on what the President can do to help through executive orders,” she said, even though she didn't comment on whether Trump violated those limits. The Press Herald reports that they tried to find out, but Collins' "spokespeople said she was not available to answer questions about the constitutionality of the president’s actions." But she was perfectly willing to adopt the Republican line that it's all the Democrats' fault. “I hope the President’s actions will prompt Democratic leaders to negotiate seriously to reach a much-needed agreement to help struggling families, seniors, schools, businesses, municipalities & the USPS with this persistent pandemic,” her released statement said.
“Three times,“ she wrote, “Senate Democratic leaders blocked extending extra unemployment benefits to prevent their expiration during the negotiations.” Which is technically true, but utterly false in reality because when Democrats repeatedly attempted to bring up measures that would continue the $600/week universal income bump last week, Republicans blocked them. What Republicans were trying to pass was a $200/week boost, which not only would be totally inadequate, it would never pass the House. A House which, by the way—and which Collins seems to be conveniently ignoring this—passed a bill 11 weeks ago to continue the payments and do much, much more to try to save the country.
Collins' boss, Sen. Mitch McConnell, said at the time the House passed that bill (the HEROES Act) that there was "no urgency" to act. He then waited to act until all of the key CARES Act provisions protecting people financially were set to expire, and then wasted two more weeks negotiating with his own senators to come up with something that the House would never pass, setting up this massive collapse. In the meantime, Collins did absolutely nothing to push McConnell to act.
Something which Democratic challenger to Collins Sara Gideon pointed out. “For months, Susan Collins and Senate Republicans have refused to do what’s right for the American people during a pandemic. Donald Trump’s political theater does nothing to provide relief to states and municipalities, help schools, or expand testing—instead, it puts Medicare and Social Security at risk.” That is a very good point in Maine, which demographically speaking is the oldest state in the nation. Collins didn't say a word against Trump's effort to cut off payroll taxes, the revenue stream for Social Security and Medicare.
Last month, when it was clear that Congress wasn't going to approve Trump's obsession, i.e., the payroll tax cut, Collins was brave enough to oppose it. Now that Trump is trying to do it unilaterally, not a peep out of her about it. Collins' failure to stand up for Maine's seniors is something they're probably going to be hearing a lot about over the next few months.
It’s the latest major tech company to announce it will keep its offices closed much longer than anticipated.
Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook employees that the company would be extending its policy for corporate employees to work from home until July 2021. The social media company has around 48,000 employees worldwide.
The Facebook CEO announced the move in a weekly Q&A virtual meeting with employees. Previously, Facebook said employees would start returning to its offices in January 2021. But as coronavirus infection rates continue to spike across the US, Facebook is following Google and Uber to become the latest tech company to extend its timeline for office closures. The move reflects a broader sense among tech companies that office life will not be back to normal until much later than initially anticipated at the onset of the pandemic.
“Based on guidance from health and government experts, as well as decisions drawn from our internal discussions about these matters, we are allowing employees to continue voluntarily working from home until July 2021,” said Pamela Austin, a spokesperson for Facebook in a statement to Recode. The company will also be giving employees an additional $1,000 for home office needs.
On Facebook’s earnings call last week, Zuckerberg said he saw “no end in sight” for when his staff would be able to return to the company’s offices. But his latest comments represent the first time he’s given a hard date for how long Facebook’s offices will remain largely closed. Facebook had also previously stated it was canceling all large corporate events until June 2021.
The extended timeline may prompt many Facebook employees to move. In a recent company poll, about 75 percent of Facebook’s corporate employees said they were highly confident they would move to a different city if they could work remotely. However, Facebook has said it will adjust employees’ salaries if they leave the regions in which they were hired, like the San Francisco Bay Area, for comparatively cheaper areas. The poll was seemingly taken before employees were aware their salaries may be docked if they did choose to move.
While many of Facebook’s corporate engineers, designers, and business managers can mostly perform their jobs from home, it’s unclear what will happen to the thousands of service workers who normally keep Facebook’s physical offices running. Facebook uses third-party contractors to staff positions such as janitors, cafeteria workers, and shuttle bus drivers who take corporate employees to work and home. In March, Facebook, Google, Apple, and other major tech companies promised to continue to pay their support staff their pre-pandemic wages even during temporary office closures. But it’s unclear if these companies will maintain that promise as offices are staying closed for longer than expected.
“We have continued to work closely with our vendor partners and pay our CWs [contract workers] while working from home even if they are not able to perform their roles,” a Facebook spokesperson told Recode. “We’ll continue to assess what we can do as COVID-19 evolves.”
The spokesperson did not directly respond to Recode’s question about whether the company will continue to pay contracted service employees until July 2021 at pre-pandemic levels, or if the company is planning cuts to these positions.
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Video has begun to spread around the internets purportedly showing LA County, California law enforcement training their guns (including what appears to be an assault rifle) on three Black teenagers while bystanders plead with police, telling them that they are threatening the wrong people. In the video, which takes place in Santa Clarita, about 30 miles outside of Los Angeles, a law enforcement officer can be seen telling the crowd gathered to back up while he holds his rifle trained on teens standing at a bus stop. The teens have their hands up, and one teen has been moved to his knees in front of the police car.
Most striking is that more than a handful of onlookers plead with law enforcement to put down their guns, telling them they have the whole thing mixed up. TMZ reports that a mother of one of the teens told the outlet that the kids were sitting at a bus stop when an unhoused individual came up to them asking for drugs and then getting very aggressive, pulling off his shirt and attacking them with a knife. The kids reportedly fended their attacker off with their skateboards. The LA County Sheriff's Dept. told TMZ that the reason the police were treating the teens this way was because they were responding to a call of “2 adult males hitting another man with a skateboard.” The deadly weapon that the police were training multiple guns on the kids for was their skateboard.
To be clear, the LA County Sheriff’s Department statement only satisfies the explanation of why they were initially treating the teens as suspects and not victims. It does not explain why Rambo and team decided to load up the threat of obliteration.
An unarmed Breonna Taylor was shot eight times and killed by police on March 13, in her own home, after she was awoken by law enforcement crashing through her front door. Not a single charge has been filed against any of the officers involved.
Anticipation has been growing for weeks that Joe Biden will make history by choosing the first Black woman as a running mate on a major party’s presidential ticket.
But after news broke over the weekend that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a white woman, had flown to meet with Biden to discuss the vice presidency, frustration and disappointment boiled over among Black female Democrats — including some in her own state.
“He better pick a black woman. If he picks Gretchen, he’ll lose Michigan,” said Virgie Rollins, chair of the Democratic National Committee Black Caucus, who hosted Biden at her home before his Michigan primary win this spring.
“There are a lot of Black people mad at her [Whitmer] in this state,” Rollins told POLITICO, citing her record on Flint’s lead water crisis and education policy, particularly in Detroit.
As Biden prepares to announce his choice this week, Black women activists and operatives have launched an eleventh-hour campaign to pressure him. In a pair of open letters Monday and last week, they made the case that he needs strong African American turnout in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to win.
In all those states, a drop-off of Black voter turnout in 2016 compared to the 2012 and 2008 elections, when Barack Obama was on the ticket, helped Donald Trump become president. Dislike of Trump, they say, is probably not enough to motivate the large turnout needed to beat him.
A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment and a Whitmer spokesperson defended her record in Michigan, where polls show her with approval ratings in the low 60s. Biden is expected to unveil his running mate in advance of the Democratic National Convention, which starts Aug. 17.
It’s not just Whitmer’s record that’s led activists and political leaders to speak out. They said they’re also chagrined by the positive press coverage of Whitmer compared to Black women on Biden’s shortlist: California Sen. Kamala Harris, Florida Rep. Val Demings, former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, California Rep. Karen Bass and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.
“I don’t want to bash Whitmer, but I could not stand by quietly while we were putting these women, these Black women, out there to take all these hits,” Pamela Pugh, the elected vice president of the Michigan State Board of Education, told POLITICO.
The sentiment was echoed by Flint’s former mayor, Karen Weaver.
“They let Black women out there get beaten up in the media but they protected her. Nobody’s talking about what was promised in Flint that hasn’t happened,” Weaver said.
In the wake of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests and Biden’s repeated stumbles over race, many activists thought a Black woman was a lock to be his running mate until the Whitmer news broke, said Latosha Brown, a co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter.
Brown said she was flummoxed by the late consideration of Whitmer because a Black woman would do a better job turning out African American voters, even in Michigan.
“If he picks the governor of Michigan, she might not be able to move the Black vote for him because a lot of people are upset with her,” Brown said.
“At the end of the day, if Joe Biden can’t get the white Midwestern vote, then we’re all up the creek,” she said. “The whole point of Black folks voting for him is he’s supposed to deliver the white people. If he can’t deliver the white Midwestern vote, like what the heck did we vote for you for?”
But Valerie Jarrett, an adviser to former President Obama and a top Biden surrogate, indicated she wasn’t concerned because she trusts “Biden to select the right person for the job. He is uniquely suited to know what the job entails since he had it for eight years.”
“I think that we will see a large uptick in turnout for Vice President Biden, no matter who he selects as his running mate,” she added. “I do think that, certainly, there will be an element of enthusiasm if it is a historic pick by choosing a Black woman. But also, from what I see, there's an awful lot of enthusiasm for [Biden] and his presidency.”
In a written statement, the state’s Democratic Party chair, Lavora Barnes, stood by Whitmer and praised her leadership.
"Nobody knows the job of Vice President better than Joe Biden and I believe he should pick the woman that he feels best suited for the role,” Barnes, who is African-American, said. “I'm confident that whoever that may be, she will be a strong partner in government and on the campaign trail that will help us beat Donald Trump, elect Democrats up and down the ballot in Michigan, and lead our country through the global health and economic crises that Trump's failed leadership helped create."
Jotaka Eaddy, who helped pen the Aug. 5 letter calling on Biden to pick a Black woman, said that an African American running mate would also help with progressive whites and young and millennial voters.
“This will energize the base that will bring out a widespread demographic,” Eaddy said. “It’s not about Black voters sitting at home. It’s about the intensity and energy needed to secure the White House.”
Glynda Carr, co-founder Higher Heights, an advocacy group for Black women, said Biden could ruin the otherwise positive coverage of a running mate by not picking a woman of color. Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham are the only other women on Biden’s list who identify as neither Black nor white.
“If he doesn’t pick a Black woman, it’s going to be an awkward day for" the VP nominee, Carr said. "There’s going to be a lot of tension, people asking, 'Why not?'”
Karen Finney, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s White House and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, said Biden will pay a steep price if he opts for Whitmer. It’s nothing personal against the Michigan governor, she said, but Black women have worked too hard and long for the Democratic Party to get passed over. African American female voters powered Biden’s victory in the South Carolina primary, a win that revived his campaign and put him on the path to the nomination.
“The Whitmer news reminded people that we need to keep being vocal, not just to push back on the attacks but to make it clear that the backlash, if he doesn’t pick a Black woman, is going to be severe,” Finney said.
Angela Rye, the former general counsel for the Congressional Black Caucus and a prominent advocate for Black women, said the agitation is building.
“I’m at a fever pitch, a boiling point over this,” Rye said.
Rye cited a Sunday editorial by Pugh in the online publication Black Star News that laid out two major criticisms of Whitmer, concerning water policy in Flint and education policy affecting Detroit.
First, Pugh and others say, Whitmer under-delivered on promises to clean up the lead-poisoned water of the majority-Black city of Flint. And Whitmer initially fought a lawsuit that was especially important to Black people in Detroit “seeking a basic right to literacy, classrooms with books and teachers and school buildings with no heat in winter or air conditioning in summer,” Pugh wrote.
“There’s not enough ‘there’ there, first of all, when you compare Whitmer to these qualified women, which we unfortunately have to do,” Pugh told POLITICO.
A spokesperson for Whitmer responded to Pugh’s criticisms by noting that the city of Flint is in charge of pipe replacement, that its water quality is “well within federal testing requirements” and that “bottled water is available and is currently being provided to city residents by Nestle.”
But Rye said the governor’s explanation doesn’t cut it.
“Gretchen Whitmer, I don’t know her,” Rye added. “But here’s what I do know: Flint still doesn’t have clean water, and it was a campaign promise of hers,” Rye said. “In a climate where we experienced George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor and Elijah McLean and everyone else who has never even had a hashtag, how do you justify that pick?”
Biden’s defenders, who don’t want to publicly push back against the coalition of Black women advocates, point out that he has committed to nominate the first Black woman for the U.S. Supreme Court. They also note that if Whitmer is picked, Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II would be the first African American governor of the state.
But that’s little consolation for those who want a Black woman for VP, an issue that has taken on added importance in Biden’s selection process because of his advanced age, 77.
Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of the BlackPAC political group, said the concerns about Whitmer are “completely justified.” But she indicated she thinks a Whitmer pick is unlikely because it would be such a bad idea.
“I think the Whitmer leak was a red herring,” Shropshire said via text message. “It’s hard to imagine that with 4 top-tier Black women leaders, who are all not only uniquely qualified to be vice president but president, the Biden campaign would come out of this process saying ‘yeah, none of the Black women met our criteria.’ They’d have a lot of explaining to do and very little time to do it."
President Donald Trump and several Republican members of Congress are pushing universities to save the college football season as the coronavirus dampens hopes for the sport this fall.
"The student-athletes have been working too hard for their season to be cancelled," Trump also tweeted, hours after prominent athletes began a social media campaign calling for universal health and safety protocols, as well as the creation of a college football players association to respond to the pandemic.
Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Marco Rubio of Florida and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia — as well as Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan — also pressed for the show to go on, while a growing number of conferences, schools and two of the NCAA’s three divisions have already upended their seasons or canceled competitions.
“This is a moment for leadership,” Sasse wrote in a letter to the Big Ten Conference, one of college sports’ five wealthiest and most powerful institutions, as the the Detroit Free Press reported that conference officials were expected to vote to cancel this year's contests. “These young men need a season. Please don’t cancel college football.”
Politicians diving into the sports shutdown debate marked a day of fresh tumult for the campus athletics business and will surely escalate fan frustration smoldering on message boards, social media and sports talk radio into a broader political concern.
Spokespeople for several Big Ten schools declined comment Monday, or said no official conference decision on the season had been reached. Some conference coaches, however, took their concerns about a canceled season to the public.
“People need to understand the carnage and aftermath of what college athletics looks like if we don't play,” Nebraska football coach Scott Frost said at a press conference. “This isn't as simple as canceling a Little League game and picking up and playing the next Saturday. There's a lot of effects to our states, to our communities, to our universities, to our athletic departments, to other sports, to people's employment and jobs. This is a huge decision.”
Reports of a Big Ten cancellation arrived days after the conference held back on authorizing full-contact football practices for the season and the Mid-American Conference postponed its fall competitions until at least the spring. The Mountain West Conference indefinitely postponed its fall season, and Virginia’s Old Dominion University announced the cancellation of fall sports on Monday.
"We concluded that the season — including travel and competition — posed too great a risk for our student-athletes," Old Dominion University President John Broderick said.
Already, athletes at hundreds of colleges and universities won't participate in fall sports championships this year, after the NCAA's second- and third-tier divisions canceled postseason competitions last week.
The NCAA’s governing board said athletes must be allowed to opt out of playing if they are worried about getting sick while keeping their scholarships if they have them, and it barred member schools from forcing athletes to waive their legal rights if they want to play. Each NCAA division must also set out rules requiring schools to cover an athlete's medical costs and determine how to accommodate player eligibility standards if they opt out of competing or see their seasons cut short.
Trump and other federal lawmakers are making clear they want the games to go on.
Loeffler wrote in a separate post that colleges and athletic conferences "need to put politics aside and come together to find a way to safely play college football this season.
Rubio, meanwhile, used his own Twitter feed to repost messages from players and coaches who support proceeding with the football season.
“The risks of going back to school & sports are significant,” Rubio tweeted. “But so too are the risks of not going back … We need to at least try to get to the safest YES possible by identifying what it would take to lower the risk to students, teachers & high risk family & then put that in place.”
“Life is about tradeoffs,” Sasse wrote on Monday. “There are no guarantees that college football will be completely safe — that’s absolutely true; it’s always true. But the structure and discipline of football programs is very likely safer than what the lived experience of 18- to 22-year-olds will be if there isn’t a season.”
It starts with a reporter, usually a female reporter, asking President Donald Trump hard, tenacious questions at a news conference. Trump's jaw seizes up, rattled and dumbfounded by the questions that he can’t or won’t answer, he abruptly ends the presser by saying, “Thank you, very much” and stalking out of the room.
Trump threw such a fit on Saturday when CBS News reporter Paula Reid launched a volley of questions about why he once again took credit for passing a veterans program that the Obama administration pushed through in 2014. In late July, the same fight-or-flight response turned to flight again when CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins chased Trump with pointed, persistent questions about his retweets of a fringe doctor’s theories that masks were useless and hydroxychloroquine cured Covid-19. “OK, thank you very much everybody,” Trump said as he backed off, truncating the news conference. In May, it was CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang and Collins again whose questions prompted Trump to crumble and skedaddle. And in April, when Playboy White House correspondent Brian Karem barraged the president with Covid-19 questions, a flustered Trump threatened a walk-off. “If you keep talking, I’m going to leave and you can have it out with them”—meaning the other reporters—Trump said.
Trump toughed it out that time, winding down the briefing down without yanking the ejection lever. But his increasingly skittish manner with the press marks a turning point in his presidency, a new moment where his usually reliable mouth almighty seems incapable of articulating a put-down or a blow-off response. Our two-fisted brawler of a president, always ready to smash the interlocutors from the press with a virtual folding chair, has replaced moxie with pouts. In the old days, he would have had a ready answer for the much-expected question from Reid, Collins and Jiang. But now he’s like the former alpha leader of the troop. He makes a show of maintaining his dominance by beating his breast, but when challenged by somebody superior, he takes his beating then slinks off to a dark, safe place to lick his wounds.
What’s causing Trump to back down from the press after so many months of fighting them? There could be a method to his madness. As my colleagues Nancy Cook and Gabby Orr reported this summer, his aides have urged him to avoid the marathon sessions of his earlier coronavirus briefings, “straying off message and generating negative headlines.” He’s playing it safe by keeping it short. Another way to view his dust-ups with female reporters is as an act of conflict avoidance. With his support among suburban women dropping in the polls, the Trump camp thinks that dodging unnecessary clashes with women in the briefing room might help win additional votes in November. Essentially, don’t make a bad situation worse.
But that’s only a partial explanation. Trump’s problems with female reporters have become a defining quality of his presidency. NBC News’ Katy Tur says Trump turned her into a “target“ during the campaign, and he feuded with Megyn Kelly while she was at Fox. In late March, when PBS NewsHour reporter Yamiche Alcindor pursued Trump with legitimate questions about Covid-19, he cut her off, ridiculed her, and said, “Don’t be threatening. Be nice.” Two weeks earlier, Trump had accused Alcindor of asking a “nasty“ question when her query about shrinking the White House national security staff was entirely above board.
Of course, Trump has given male reporters similar thumpings. CNN’s Jim Acosta has made his career by burrowing under Trump’s skin like a chigger, and Trump has set the tone for his pressers by lashing back at Acosta. In 2018, you recall, Trump ordered Acosta to surrender the mic at a news conference, and when Acosta didn’t, Trump made a brief move to leave the podium. But he stayed and then opened fire on NBC’s Peter Alexander. The moral of the story is clear. Male reporters who contest his views make him mad. But female reporters who do the same make him melt down.
Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and the recipient of Trump abuse—”You’re a third-rate reporter,” he told Karl in an April briefing—tells me that the trigger for Trump’s walk-offs appears to questions in which a reporter fact-checks him. That’s abundantly true in the Reid, Collins and Jiang instances. For somebody who has told at least 20,000 lies in the course of his presidency, Trump seems to flinch hardest when confronted with his own mendacity. There may be something about being contradicted in a group setting like the briefing that sets him off. As we saw in his recent one-on-one interviews with Chris Wallace and Jonathan Swan, he’s able to contest their exacting fact-checks without completely losing it. Group settings must make him more vulnerable to humiliation, hence his expectation that the world receive his words as the uncontested law, no matter how batty those words are.
Trumpies might think that avoiding direct and extended conflicts with detail-minded reporters during the pandemic lends his administration an edge. They might even think shutting down the pressers on no notice make him look like a bad-ass with his base. But I doubt these tongue-tied tantrums have such an effect. And so does Karl. “The walk-off is a surprising display of weakness—he allows the reporter to have the last word, ending the press conference by asking a question the president appears unable to handle,” he says.
Whether by design or by chance, Trump minimized Saturday’s embarrassment by staging his presser at his Bedminster, N.J., country club, where a “Greek chorus” of members stood in observance of the session and cheered the insults that he dumped on the journos. Regaining his composure backstage as he mentally replayed their ovations, Trump might even have thought he won the showdown—and so might his supporters who watched on TV. If so, we can expect additional walk-offs as the campaign and his presidency continue.
A California judge ruled that Uber and Lyft must classify their drivers as employees in a stunning preliminary injunction issued Monday afternoon. The Verge reports: The injunction is stayed for 10 days, however, giving Uber and Lyft an opportunity to appeal the decision. Uber said it planned to file an immediate emergency appeal to block the ruling from going into effect. [...] Drivers' groups hailed the ruling as forward progress in their fight to upend Uber and Lyft. "Today's ruling affirms what California drivers have long known to be true: workers like me have rights and Uber and Lyft must respect those rights," Mike Robinson, a Lyft driver and member of the Mobile Workers Alliance, a group of Southern California drivers, said in a statement.
But Uber maintains this ruling will result in fewer jobs during a global pandemic that is putting strain on the state's economic conditions. "The vast majority of drivers want to work independently, and we've already made significant changes to our app to ensure that remains the case under California law," an Uber spokesperson said. "When over 3 million Californians are without a job, our elected leaders should be focused on creating work, not trying to shut down an entire industry during an economic depression." A Lyft spokesperson agreed. "Drivers do not want to be employees, full stop," the spokesperson said. "We'll immediately appeal this ruling and continue to fight for their independence. Ultimately, we believe this issue will be decided by California voters and that they will side with drivers." Earlier today in an op-ed via The New York Times, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said lawmakers should require gig economy companies to create benefits funds, which would "give workers cash that they can use for the benefits they want, like health insurance or paid time off."
As Republicans face worsening poll numbers, there is much they could do to rebuild their standing with American voters. They could pretend to take an ongoing nationwide pandemic that has killed 160,000 people seriously. They could rally around an actual plan for testing, tracing, and isolating the virus. They could pass legislation giving robust enough aid to the unemployed and the about-to-be-homeless to keep the American economy away from all-out collapse. They could put a hold on their efforts to kill off American health insurance reforms during a crisis reliant on our healthcare systems. They could come up with a plan to reopen schools and universities that does not rely on "what if we just let the kids get it, what's the worst that could happen?"
All of those things would be ragingly popular. But those are hard, so instead Donald Trump, his corruption-enmeshed toadies, and Republican lawmakers are going to just go with racism, again. It's Black Americans, say Republicans. The real problem here is that Black Americans are demanding police reform and if we do that then communism will run rampant, police won't be able to kill anyone, and America Is Doomed.
Politico reports that two "lines of attack" are emerging. Trump and likeminded Republicans are going the full Fox News Tucker Carlson Frothing Doomspeech route, declaring that Black Lives Matter is a "Marxist" movement, radical plan to "destroy" the police, "destroy" the American family, a conspiracy, an anti-fascist plot, et cetera and so on. Republicans in more swing districts are ... well, saying the same things, but just leaving the phrase "Black Lives Matter" out of it.
The problem, you see, is that Black Lives Matter is now a very popular movement among nearly every subsection of the electorate not consisting of racist conservatives. Americans are in general agreement with the premise that militarized police departments should not be killing unarmed Black men and boys during routine traffic stops or over an alleged counterfeit bill.
So swing-district Republicans are attempting to avoid the movement's broad popularity by not mentioning the "Black Lives Matter" phrase, but instead focusing on the alleged chaos that would result from "defunding" the police. Yes, America could redirect more resources to social services and community-oriented response teams rather than having armed police officers respond to every minor non-criminal incident, but if we did that we would all be doomed, our cities would be desolate and lawless wastelands, and some say the living would envy the dead. The usual stuff.
The core of the American approach to social problems is that maintaining order requires a frequently paramilitary response. It has been baked into the system since slavery, and the reasons for its perpetuation are not much different now. It's not, for example, brazenly corrupt bank executives being dragged into unmarked vans by assault rifle-wielding anonymous agents. It's people who want social change. The Americans being killed by aggressive, militarized law "enforcement" are, disproportionately, Black. It's not an accident, and has in the United States literally never been otherwise, to the point where even suggesting it be changed is declared to be a radical, anti-American conspiracy.
Because Republicanism is devoid of any backing policy other than racism—and you can flip through the last two decades of spinning, contrary positions on anything from deficits to "big government" to "local control" to executive orders for evidence of that—it was a given that the closing argument in these elections would be racism. Even during a once-per-century pandemic that is continuing to kill Americans, it would be racism. During multiple trade wars, multiple constitutional crises, a collapsed economy, it would still be racism. There is one hammer and one nail; the party and its base cannot tolerate more nuance than that.
There is always, just before each Republican runs for reelection, a new existential crisis caused by non-whites that threatens to destroy America if said Republican is not returned to power. Last time it was "caravans" of non-whites seeking asylum in this nation that was Marxism, or "globalist"-inspired, and poised to destroy American suburbia by spreading "disease" and bilingualism.
It was ISIS. It was ISIS plus ebola. It was too-lenient treatment of children who were brought to America through no fault of their own. If you believed the National Rifle Association and their kept pets, it was "urban" people who would be rampaging through your neighborhoods to loot and pillage after something-something destroyed society, leaving you defenseless unless you were prepared to murder dozens or hundreds in the apocalyptic remains.
Every election just happens to coincide with a new existential crisis of predominately not-white human beings doing something that would destroy America, we are told by bulging-eyed shouting white conservative candidates and media figures, if even the most bungling of Republicans is rejected by voters. Every time.
It doesn't seem like it's going to work this time around. Not because the racism is any less motivational to the Republican base, mind you, but because the world is literally in absolute batshit crisis right now and in order to even find time to be racist, even the Republican base has to weave through and over multiple more urgent priorities. It's harder to sell a notion of "the world will go to hell if my opponent wins" when the world is objectively hell-plus-three right now.
That doesn't mean it won't be tried. For starters, Donald Trump simply lacks the capacity to do anything else; he is a racist conspiracy freak by nature, and nobody among his rotating cast of aides and advisers has been able to bend his behavior in the slightest. The rest of the Republican Party has willingly chained themselves to Trump at the ankle, and not just will but must parrot whatever carnival phrases come out of his mouth or face his retaliation.
There's a pandemic still raging out of control, of course. It's expected to get worse when the weather turns colder. But the party and its anti-science, Foxified babbling has proven utterly incompetent at dealing with that, so racism it is.
Because right now really screams "normal". WTF is wrong with these ghouls?
While most of the supply chain issues for food that arose at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis have been resolved, food costs for consumers are still higher than they were back in January, in some places significantly so. High food costs and high unemployment means that from April through June, one in three families with children reported food insecurity, not enough food for every family member to have adequate nutrition every day.
Back in May, Feeding America reported "record levels" of food insecurity, projecting 54 million Americans, including 1 in 4 children, would not have enough to eat throughout the duration of the crisis. That was May, but it's going to get worse because the Trump administration is ending the flexibility states were given back in March to provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or food stamps to more people. The Department of Agriculture is now telling states they have to return to "normal operations," and put limits on food assistance. Normal. Operations. In a still-raging pandemic. In which tens of millions of people just lost the lifeline of extra unemployment benefits.
The Families First Act, passed back on March 18, gave states the flexibility to change SNAP eligibility and procedures to maximize assistance. And SNAP responded, adding more than 6 million people, about a 17% increase nationally, by May. The March law did two things. It allowed states to waive the requirement that currently participating households continue to prove their eligibility or risk losing the assistance. Almost every state did waive the requirements or extended the deadline, to give people—and states—more time to provide information and process cases. It also allowed states to simplify the application process to make sure that all the newly unemployed could get help right away.
Now the USDA is telling states they have to return to "normal" by next month. That's despite the fact that the SNAP caseloads have mushroomed since March and returning to "normal" means much more work. The demand that states start rigorously proving that people getting the benefits are eligible means that states could be cutting needy households just because the overloaded states can't fulfill the paperwork and interview requirements in the mandated timeline. The need is only going to increase now, with the end of the $600/week unemployment insurance bump. Many receiving the enhanced UI weren't eligible for food stamps, but with the loss of that income will be, just in time to have their access to assistance shut down.
Some states haven't even been able to get virtual application and eligibility processing established by now. Requiring new applicants to apply in-person for assistance is a burden on both staff and the applicants, one that could be dangerous in a COVID-19 hotspot. It's a burden that will stretch states. It's an arbitrary decision that will make more people go hungry.
Fox really stepped on it with this one. Couldn't have asked for better footage to compare the two for stamina and faculties. Trump thinks we should praise him for identifying an elephant, and Biden is an actual adult that can ride a bike. The GOP must be so proud.
Former Vice President Joe Biden's viral bike ride exchange with a Fox News reporter this weekend not only destroyed a Donald Trump talking point, it destroyed it specifically on Trump’s favorite network.
Trump, who feebly inched his way down a ramp following a speech in June, has been trying to cast his Democratic rival as a "sleepy" old guy in physical and mental decline. But on Saturday, Fox News treated its viewers to video of Biden having a jovial exchange with a Fox reporter about his vice presidential pick as he swept past the cameras on his mountain bike.
“Mr. Vice President, have you picked a running mate yet?” Fox's Peter Doocy shouted at Biden, who was riding through the streets of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
"Yeah, I have," said a mask-clad Biden, to which Doocy quickly responded: “You have? Who is it?”
"You!" Biden answered, joking with Doocy.
The Fox video was an instant hit among journalists and political pundits on Twitter, who marveled at Biden's athletic cameo on Fox's airwaves.
"The real news in this video is that @JoeBiden is riding a bicycle. Can you picture @realDonaldTrump riding a bicycle?" quipped filmmaker Andy Ostroy.
No, we can't. And clearly no one else could either.
"Biden can ride a bike and make a joke, all while wearing a mask," noted Matthew Hall, editorial and opinion director at the San Diego Union-Tribune.
There were plenty more where that came from—a legit viral moment courtesy of Fox News, where primetime hosts have been laboring for months to paint a picture of Biden as a demented recluse locked away in his basement.
But while everyone was remarking on Biden's athleticism and jocularity, let's remember the simple things too: He was actually able to speak. That alone sets him apart from the current occupant of the Oval Office, who just this past week gave a shout to "Yo-Semite" national park and renamed the country popularly known as Thailand, "Thighland."
Imagine having a president who can speak the English language.
To be clear, the guy on the left is campaigning on the guy on the right allegedly being in decline pic.twitter.com/MWduos00nX
(303): Pretty sure he proposed because my house is awesome. His ass is a ten and he's offering to pay more than half the bills... How expensive is a divorce really? I mean I could probably put up with him for three or four years but a lifetime is a big ask.
As ways to prove that Trump was yet again wrong go, 97,000 kids with coronavirus is really not the best. What was happening in the last two weeks of July? In some places, camps were opening for an abbreviated summer. In other places, schools were starting to reopen. The spike in coronavirus cases in many states was continuing, but so was the move back to something approaching “normal” life. And the result was that one in four diagnoses of children since the pandemic hit the U.S. back in March was crammed into one two-week period.
The report, from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, has data from 49 states, New York City, Washington, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Most defined children as younger than 19, but some defined the category as young as 14 or as old as 24.
The new pediatric cases were clustered in the South and West, with seven out of 10 in those regions. But how much of that is because southern and western states go back to school earlier than in the Northeast, where there are still relatively few cases among children (for now)?
The good news is that children remain less likely than adults to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19, but, continuing the racial disparities seen among adults, Black and Latino children are more likely to be hospitalized than white ones.
In many places, school districts are scrambling to figure out reopening plans as surging coronavirus rates make in-person schooling a very bad idea—even the hybrid plans many districts had spent the summer working out. Of course, there are exceptions, places where schools have already opened in person. At this point, we call those cautionary tales. It’s time for school districts to admit that 97,000 kids with a potentially deadly virus in the space of two weeks is reason enough to put the brakes on and take school reopening seriously as a public health issue.
Said Earhardt (via Media Matters): “We’re all worried about sending our kids back to school. What is that going to look like for our country, and for our elderly grandparents and things like that? 97,000 kids have tested positive. We all… that was such a shock to me, because I had heard kids really don’t get it, if they do they’re all going to be OK. Do you know any details about that, those — that percentage of kids that did get it? Are they all doing OK, do you have any deaths?”
Replied Kathuria: “I don’t know about the mortality and morbidity right now in that group. You know, that was just in two weeks, so about 100,000 new cases in pediatric kids just in two weeks. And I can guarantee you that number is actually much higher. We don’t really test kids that often. They’re usually asymptomatic, they have very mild symptoms, but they’re still shedding this virus. So that is going to artificially be low, no matter how good we are about testing right now. So, you know, that’s what we’re worried about right now, is sending these kids to schools and sending them home. And it’s not the kids so much we’re concerned about. Obviously, we are, but it’s their grandparents, their parents, when their parents then go to work, who they’re spreading this to.”
This is what happens when you get all your coronavirus information from Fox docs and Trump
F&F Host Ainsley Earhardt: "97,000 kids tested positive? That was such a shock to me because we heard kids really don't get it." pic.twitter.com/T8K1spUUtQ
The Daily Beast adds: “Of course, Earhardt, who could be considered some sort of journalist, was apparently unaware of these basic facts. Instead, she chose to believe misinformation from President Donald Trump, who said on her show last week, ‘If you look at children, children are almost—and I would almost say definitely—but almost immune from this disease.’ He added, ‘They don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem.’ It was that specific false claim from the president that prompted Facebook to finally take down one of his campaign’s posts, which featured the video clip from Fox. Twitter similarly blocked the Team Trump account from posting until they removed a tweet with that piece of misinformation.”
In a recent post, I mentioned that I tentatively support UC's new requirement that all students, faculty, and staff get vaccinated against the flu. (I say tentatively because it's possible that the medical benefits aren't great enough.) My reasoning there specifically focused on the government's propriety role there: I think it's generally legitimate for institutions (government or otherwise) to protect their clients (including students) and employees from the risk of harm—including inadvertent harm—inflicted by other clients and employees.
But I also think that it would be morally permissible for the government to require various vaccines for everybody, and not just for its employees or students. Again, it might be that the costs of some particular vaccine mandate would exceed the benefits; and we should count cost to liberty in some measure in this analysis. But I don't think that vaccinations are categorically precluded on libertarian grounds, or in particular the Millian "free to do what I please so long as I don't harm others" principle. Let me quickly lay out my thinking.
It is a sad fact of biology that we can spread communicable diseases without any conscious decision on our parts, even without knowing that we are infected. Any time we do this, we are causing physical harm to someone else, and indirectly causing physical harm to many others; and we do that without choosing to cause such harm.
An analogy might be guns. Libertarians generally frown on gun bans, and instead seek to ban misuse of guns. People who use guns properly, the theory goes, should be free to keep doing that; only those who choose to misuse them (to kill or to shoot recklessly or the like) should be punished. Likewise with alcohol and the like.
But say that you had a gun that had a 1% chance of just randomly shooting someone—or perhaps a 1% chance of leaking a deadly poison into the air around you—even when that wasn't at all your desire; and there was a procedure that could be performed on your gun that would pretty safely eliminate or at least sharply reduce that chance. It seems to me that it would be reasonable to require you to have your gun treated with that procedure, to prevent you from inadvertently inflicting such physical harm to others. Likewise when the dangerous weapon (or the poison-leaking device) is your body.
Some libertarians respond that the right approach is to allow people to choose whether to be vaccinated, but to allow others to exclude the non-vaccinated from spaces that those others control. That might cut in favor of private universities or even public ones mandating vaccination, but might still forbid the government from imposing such mandates. And perhaps such an approach might work in a libertarian society where all property was private, and policed effectively for who is coming on the property and who isn't.
But in our society, for better or worse, people routinely go onto shared government-controlled property, and are generally allowed to go on much private property (such as businesses open to the public) without any effective screening of such visitors. We need a second-best libertarian analysis that works for this society, and I think it makes sense to allow compulsory vaccinations, by counting exposure (even inadvertent) to communicable disease as an unconsented-to harm that people can be prevented from inflicting on others.
More concretely, let's consider a topic that was in the news some years ago (when I first blogged a version of this post): immunizations against sexually transmitted diseases, such as HPV. I'll start with that, and turn to flu immunizations at the end of the post.
Say Alan has sex with Betty, who then has sex with Carl, who then has sex with Denise; say Alan is infected with HPV, and each sexual act would (absent immunization) spread HPV; and say Betty isn't immunized against HPV. Betty's failure to get immunized would lead to her unwittingly spreading the virus, which ends up hurting Denise. Betty hasn't intentionally harmed Denise, but she has harmed her—you might categorize the harm as negligent (in that it flows from negligent failure to get immunized) or not, but it is indeed the infliction of harm.
Now it's true that the harm also flowed from Denise's voluntary decision to have sex with Carl. But it's hard to see why this should excuse the harm caused by Betty, any more than Denise's voluntary decision to get on the road excuses the harm that someone imposes on Denise by crashing into her with a car (or, if you prefer, that Betty imposes on Denise by crashing into Carl's car, which then crashes into Denise's).
Even if you think that some people's having many sexual partners should affect the analysis, remember that HPV can be spread even among people who are about as sexually constrained as can be expected. The Alan-Betty-Carl-Denise connection can happen even if Betty was a virgin when she married Alan; if she then didn't have sex with Carl until she married him (assume Alan had died, or had left Betty); and if Denise was a virgin when she married Carl (again, assume Betty had died, or had left Carl).
This specific scenario might be rare—but lots of other scenarios in which people had led fairly safe lives, but find themselves getting HPV, are also quite plausible. And more broadly, even if people are leading somewhat riskier lives than this, participating in infecting them with a disease may still be quite rightly seen as harming them, despite their own role in choosing risky behavior.
Of course, if HPV immunization were 100% reliable, and 100% available, then this analysis wouldn't apply with quite the same strength: Presumably any person who remains at risk of HPV infection would be at risk because of her own refusal to get the vaccine. Yet some people don't get the vaccine, possibly because they can't afford it; some can't get it because they're in the small but significant group of people for whom the vaccine would be unsafe; for some classes of people, the vaccine hasn't been tested (for instance, for people in their age group); and for at least some vaccines, the vaccine may be far from 100% effective for any individual recipient.
So I think that a libertarian may reasonably conclude, I think, that refusing to get immunized is wrongful behavior. Such refusal may lead to one's becoming a vehicle for transmitting a dangerous and sometimes deadly disease to third parties, and thus harming those third parties (in a way that an "assumption of risk" argument would not excuse). And while a vaccine will step in before the harm is inflicted, rather than as punishment for inflicting harm, it doesn't make sense to take a punishment model: Again, the harm of spreading communicable disease generally isn't inflicted through deliberate choice to do something unusually dangerous (other than the deliberate choice not to get vaccinated).
And that's for sexually transmitted diseases. When a disease can be spread through casual contact—sneezing, coughing, perhaps even breathing—the disease is even harder for people to reliably avoid spreading, or to reliably avoid acquiring. The case for forbidding people from inflicting this disease on others, by requiring them to take reasonably safe and effective steps to keep their bodies from being deadly, is thus even stronger.
So a brief summary: There may well be practical problems with truly mandatory immunization, and it may well be that herd immunity would mean that 90% immunization is good enough to reduce the risk to a level that doesn't merit regulation. There may of course also be practical objections to immunization if the immunization seems unduly risky.
But as a moral matter of individual liberty, it seems to me that there's little support for a claimed freedom from getting immunized—and especially a claimed freedom from getting your underage children immunized. A requirement that people not allow their bodies to be media for unwitting transmission of deadly diseases strikes me as quite compatible with a generally libertarian perspective on the world.
A 911 emergency dispatch center in Centennial, Colorado, on February 5. Arapahoe County is the second county in Colorado to classify telecommunicators as first responders. | RJ Sangosti/Denver Post/Getty Images
“911 call takers are gatekeepers for the entire criminal justice system. We need to start treating them that way.”
Tamir Rice,a 12-year-old Black child, was playing with a toy pellet gun in a Cleveland park when a police car arrived on the scene. Within moments of exiting his squad car, officer Timothy Loehmann shot and killed Rice. The surveillance video of the November 2014shooting garnered worldwide attention, and Rice remains a symbol for the Black Lives Matter movement.
As is the case with many high-profile police killings, most after-the-fact reports focused on the incident itself and the officer’s record: Why didn’t Loehmann give any warning before shooting? Would he have done the same to a white child? Why was the officerhired in the first place, given he had been deemed unfit for duty by a different police department?
These are legitimate questions. But it’s possible the most important factor in Rice’s killing was what happened in the moments before the police officer arrived on the scene.
Like the majority of police killings of unarmed civilians, this incident began with a 911 call. The civilian who called 911 on Rice initially reported a Black male with a gun in a park, but then clarified the initial description, saying that Tamir is “probably a juvenile” and that the weapon is “probably fake.” However, according to police records,that clarifying information did not get passed on to responding officers. All the information Loehmann and his partner heard from their dispatcher was, “We have a Code 1” — the department’s highest level of urgency.
That error may have been the difference between life and death for a child.
When Paul Taylor, a former police officer, use-of-force training instructor, and now a criminologist at the University of Colorado Denver, found out that the 911dispatch information about Rice had been wrong, he decided to run an experiment.
Taylor put 300 police officers representing 18 agencies in two states through an interactive firearms training simulator. All the officers were told about a “possible trespass in progress.” Then some were told that the “subject appears to be holding a gun” and others that the “subject appears to be talking on a cellphone.”
When the officers arrived at the scene, they sawa man matching the description of the suspect with his hands in his jacket pockets. For half the volunteers, the man quickly pulled a cellphone out of his pocket to film the officers; for the other half, the man pulled out a handgun and pointed it at them. The officers had to make a split-second decision to shoot or not shoot, with their virtual lives at stake.
The results were dramatic. Six percent of officers who had been advised that the subject appeared to be talking on a cellphone ended up shooting the man who attempted to film them with his phone. But 62 percent of the officers who were told the suspect had a gun did the same. In other words, officers who were told the man had a cellphone were 10 times less likely to shoot an unarmed suspect than those with incorrect information. (In the scenario where the suspect drew a gun, 100 percent of the officers shot the suspect, regardless of what dispatch told them.)
“What blew me away is that these results held for all officers no matter what,” Taylor told me. “It didn’t matter how much experience you had. It didn’t matter if you were on a SWAT team. Getting the wrong information universally increased the risk of making an error.”
Findings like this one do not excuse police officers of wrongdoing. Nor do they suggest that anti-Black racial bias doesn’t play a huge role in police shootings — itmostcertainlydoes. What studies like this (and others) demonstrate is that when it comes to police violence and aggression, the officer-civilian interaction itself is only part of the story.
Of the 50 million Americans who came into contact with the police in 2015, about half were the result of citizen-requested police services, usually through an emergency call number. And 83 of the 153 police killings of unarmed civilians that year began with a 911 call. Research on the 911 system is scarce and imperfect (that’s putting it lightly), so we don’t know for certain how many of these calls contained incorrect information. But the experts I spoke to mentioned data points — like the proportion of calls downgraded by officers once they arrive on the scene — and examples like the killings of Rice, Francisco Serna, and Fridoon Rawshan Nehad and the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. as evidence of the severity of the problem.
“We will never know what would have happened to Tamir Rice if the officer had been given a different image of what was happening,” says Rebecca Neusteter, the executive director of the Health Lab at the University of Chicago’s Urban Labs. “But I would like to believe he would have approached that situation very differently if he was aware this could just be a kid playing in the park.”
Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Protesters took to the streets of downtown Cleveland, Ohio, in 2016, after a local grand jury decided not to indict the officers who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice.
The emergency call taker who relayed the incorrect information in the Rice case was temporarily suspended by Cleveland’s police chief for “violating protocol.” But for Neusteter and others who have studied the role of 911 call takers and police dispatchers within the American criminal justice system, the Rice killing isn’t a one-off example of a bad call taker gone rogue — it is the product of systemic flaws in how call takers are trained that amplify the risk officers perceive when they enter a given situation. Addressing those flaws will be essential to the success of any police reform agenda.
Emergency call takers also decide whether police should be sent into a given situation in the first place. Thus, as communities develop alternatives to traditional police response — as many cities are already doing — their role may evolve into that of a public safety quarterback who will be tasked with the all-important role of sending the correct first responders.
Yet call takers are undertrained, underpaid, and underresourced. They are treated as though their role is no different from that of an administrative assistant. And they are ignored in most conversations about policing and criminal justice reform. That’s a shame given the essential role they play in our public safety system.
“911 call takers are gatekeepers not only for police but the entire criminal justice system,” says Neusteter. “We need to start treating them that way. We can’t solve any of our public safety problems without taking care of call takers.”
How the call-taking system canamplify the risk of a dangerous police encounter
To understand an error at the center of Tamir Rice’s killing, you first have to know how the 911 system works.
When you call 911 to summon police, the person you are talking to is generally neither a police officer nor a dispatcher directly in charge of sending police to a scene. Instead, you are talking to a call taker who’s in charge of collecting the relevant information about the incident and the suspect and then classifying the incident according to a list of predefined categories like “suspicious person,” “breaking and entering,” or “active shooter.” That incident type, along with some descriptive information about the suspect, is forwarded to a police dispatcher, who then relays it to responding officers.
This sounds like a fairly innocuous system. But according to Jessica Gillooly, a former call taker and research fellow at the Policing Project at New York University Law School who studies the role of call taking in the criminal justice system, it has a glaring flaw. Call takers are trained and incentivized to think of minimizing potential safety risk to police officers as their highest priority. That means if a caller is uncertain or ambiguous — for instance, simultaneously speculating that the event unfolding could be either a man at a park with a gun (a potential violent threat) or a kid playing with a toy gun (a clearly innocuous act) — call takers are more likely toclassify the incident as more serious to ensure officers are prepared for the worst-case scenario.
“There’s a huge training emphasis that essentially tells call takers, ‘You’re safer and better off by sending a police over-response,’” Gillooly tells me. “The big fear is that you don’t send a big enough or serious enough response and something bad happens. There’s no mention of the idea that maybe sending an over-response could also produce a really bad outcome.”
This emphasisproduces systemic police over-response. Scholarlyresearchhas found that between 20 and 40 percent of all crime calls that 911 call takers enter are downgraded by officers once at the scene. In other words, officers routinely arrive on the scene primed for a far more dangerous, serious encounter than actually exists.
In some cases, this means officers end up killing unarmed civilians like Rice, Serna, and Nehad, each of whom they were led to believe had weapons. More commonly, the result is the sort of humiliation, fear, and aggression that can occur when officers believe they are entering a situation far more serious than it actually is.
“I think about the current state of call taking and dispatching as a game of Telephone,” says Neusteter. “Often, the end result is very different than the original message. And that’s a huge problem. Public safety is too important to leave to a game of Telephone.”
The gatekeepers of our criminal justice system
911 call takers don’t just impact incidents between police officers and civilians; they also determine whether police are sent out in the first place.
Some240 million calls are made to 911 every year. Tens of millions — possibly hundreds of millions — more are made to non-emergency and alarm lines. In each case, acall taker’s first job is to play the role of gatekeeper: either assign the call to the appropriate first responders or try to resolve the situation on the spot if it does not require immediate assistance.
In the real world, however, this gatekeeper function tends to devolve into a just-send-the-police function. Most jurisdictions have only three types of first responders: fire, medical, and police. And typically there are narrow, predefined criteria for sending in firefighters or EMTs. If those criteria haven’t been met and the situation can’t be easily resolved over the phone, the call taker only has two options: send the police or send no one.
Faced with this choice, call takers will usually opt to send the police for a simple reason: They face severe punishment and liability if they don’t and something bad happens.
“There are situations where if it’s not a clear-cut need for fire or ambulance service, sending law enforcement is the only legitimate response,” says April Heinze, a former call taker and call center director, and current 911 operations director for the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). “That’s not because the call taker wants to send police — they are constrained by local protocol.”
Gillooly, the former 911 call taker and researcher, says she rarely denied police services no matter how benign the situation seemed. She describes a call from someone who found it suspicious that an older Asian man was walking on the side of the road; another about a dispute over a pet peacock defecating on a neighbor’s front lawn; and one from a man who felt uncomfortable at the bus station because a Black teenager’s jeans were hanging too low.
“In most of these cases, sending the police is the only option you really have,” Gillooly tells me. “The informal motto among most call takers is, ‘When in doubt, send them out.’”
Sending police to situations like these can have devastating consequences. That’s why a central plank of the “defund the police” campaign is to reimagine public safety such that police are no longer the default response to all of society’s ills. Instead, activists point to a variety of potential non-police first responders, from trained mediators to crisis specialists to community patrols, that would be better suited to address problems like homelessness, mental illness, and traffic accidents.
In the wake of recent protests against police violence, cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Denver, Minneapolis, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles are developing their own civilian first responder programs. And Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) recently introduced the CAHOOTS Act — named after the much-applauded initiative in Eugene, Oregon, that sends unarmed crisis specialists instead of police to address noncriminal 911 calls — that would provide federal government support for such programs.
But even if these alternative programs are successful politically, they will only succeed logistically if 911 call takers can clearly distinguish between incidents that require sending in police and those that don’t.
“We expect our call takers to make really important judgment calls,” says Steve Zeedyk, a call center supervisor in Eugene who works closely with Cahoots. “There are many jurisdictions where if someone calls and wants an officer, they get an officer. Our call takers screen at a much higher level to determine whether police really are the right response. That’s why we’re able to make good decisions deploying the resources we have.”
My conversations with Zeedyk and others made clear that 911 call takers will be crucial to the success of any non-police response efforts. “The 911 system needs to be part of the conversation as cities think about how to set up alternate public safety initiatives,” says Ayesha Delany-Brumsey, director of the Behavioral Health Division at the Council of State Governments Justice Center. “Call takers are going to make consequential decisions about what responders get called in where.”
How to fix our 911 system
A few modest changes and investments could go a long way toward addressing the 911 system’s tendencies to default to police and amplify the risk of police over-response.
As Gillooly points out in a recent paper on the subject, the technology that call takers use to transfer call information could be redesigned toinclude fields that capture a situation’s level of ambiguity and uncertainty, signaling quickly to the dispatcher and police that the information they’ve been given may be wrong. Training for call takers could be more comprehensive and include a greater emphasis on asking clarifying questions — like “are you sure that the gun is real?” — before classifying an incident. And incentives for call takers more broadly could be changed to incorporate the social costs of sending a police over-response.
A more sweeping solution would be to invest in significantly upgrading the technology that 911 call takers use. Imagine how many problems with the current 911 system would be mitigated if call takers could receive pictures or videos of a given situation as it is happening and then forward them directly to theresponding officer — or use them to determine that police aren’t needed for the situation at all. That’s part of the vision behind “Next Generation 911,” an initiative spearheaded by the US Department of Transportation’s National 911 Program to upgrade the emergency call system nationwide.
According to experts at NENA, the biggest obstacle to Next Gen 911 deployment is inadequate funding. Before Covid-19, about half of jurisdictions in the US were slated to have Next Gen core services by the end of 2020 and 85 percent by 2025; however, the pandemic’s impacts on state and local government budgets may create a shortfall of funding and thus delay deployment.
A modest federal investment could change that. According to the National 911 program, the cost of national deployment of Next Gen 911 comes out to about $12 billion over five to 10 years, a relatively small drop in the bucket of the federal budget.
“It’s about time to move 911 technology into the 21st century,” says Brian Fontes, CEO of NENA. “With so many 911 calls originating from smartphones, there is so much potential information we could gather that is essential to responding to an emergency.”
Call centers could also implement “criteria-based dispatching,” a script-based set of questions that guide the call-taking process. This would mean that both the level of police response and whether police are sent in at all would be left up to predefined criteria instead of the subjective discretion of the call taker, which could be subject to all kinds of momentary biases. The criteria-based dispatching model is often used in medical and firefighting dispatching centers and has been credited with curbing over-response. The approachis being piloted for policing in a handful of cities including Seattle, Tucson, Houston, and Washington, DC.
With criteria-based dispatching, the important consideration is to draw the criteria boundaries such that police forces aren’t the default response. For instance, in Seattle, part of the dispatch criteria makes a strict distinction between “suspicious activities” and “suspicious persons”; if the caller can’t definitively name a specific suspect behavior that a given person is engaging in, the call taker does not dispatch police.
Some places have gone a step further. Houston 911 call-taking scripts involve mandatory questions to assess whether the given incident involves someone experiencing a mental health crisis. If a case does involve a mental health component, it is flagged for dispatchers. And for those cases, the city employs a handful of mental health clinicians to sit with dispatchers and help them determine the appropriate first response: a civilian clinician team, a co-response team of police and clinicians, or a police team.
The result is that of the 40,000-plus calls that were flagged by call takers as having a mental health component in 2019, only 0.5 percent ended in an arrest, according to Wendy Baimbridge, assistant chief of the Houston police’s mental health division. That’s partly because Houston sometimes sends non-police first responders, but it’s also because when police officers do enter such situations, they are fully aware that what they are dealing with is probably a mental health crisis.
“Call takers can’t possibly train for everything,” says Baimbridge. “And they certainly don’t have the time to do a full mental health assessment. That’s why we need mental health clinicians on the floor to play that role.”
Of course, without the availability of non-police first responders, reforms like these will only go so far. For the many situations that require some kind of trained response, call takers can’t do much except call the police unless they have alternatives available.
In addition to these specific reforms, the experts I spoke with called for a cultural shift in how we as a society view, compensate, and treat emergency call takers and dispatchers. Only 20 states have even minimum training requirements for call takers and dispatchers, and even fewer provide funding for that training. In most states, call takers make less than $50,000 per year with scant benefits. And they routinely experience burnout, high stress levels, and PTSD from their work.
“The 911 system has been completely undervalued, underfunded, and underresourced for 50 years,” says Neusteter. “The technology is terrible. The training, benefits, and occupational standards are subpar. Call takers have not been set up for success institutionally.”
That’s a shame because call takers are the first point of contact, the most common reference point, and the gatekeeper for our entire criminal justice system.As cities and communities across the country wrestle with how to change policing, it’s more important than ever they invest in 911 call centers that are better equipped, better trained, and better suited to handle the range of responsibilities they will be tasked with.
“Over the years, 911 has been treated as a stepchild of the public safety community,” says Fontes. “That needs to change.”
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On the heels of a “Friday Night Massacre” at the U.S. Postal Service that deeply alarmed lawmakers, activists, and ordinary citizens nationwide, two House Democrats are demanding the immediate removal of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over his sweeping operational changes to the beloved government service that have slowed the delivery of essential packages and jeopardized mail-in voting.
In a statement over the weekend, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) accused DeJoy—a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump with millions invested in USPS competitors—of doing the president’s bidding by sabotaging mail delivery with the November election less than 90 days away.
“DeJoy’s baseless operational changes have already crippled a beloved and essential agency, delaying mail, critical prescription drug shipments for veterans, and seniors and other essential goods,” said DeFazio.
The Oregon Democrat warned that the latest change imposed by DeJoy—the ouster of two top officials and reshuffling of nearly two dozen others—lay bare his “mission to centralize power, dismantle the agency, and degrade service in order to thwart vote-by-mail across the nation to aid Trump’s reelection efforts.”
“This November, an historic number of citizens will vote by mail in order to protect their health and safety during the Covid-19 pandemic,” said DeFazio. “DeJoy’s nefarious collective efforts will suppress millions of mail-in ballots and threaten the voting rights of millions of Americans, setting the stage for breach of our Constitution. It is imperative that we remove him from his post and immediately replace him with an experienced leader who is committed to sustaining a critical service for all Americans.”
DeJoy, a former North Carolina logistics executive, was appointed to lead USPS by the agency’s Board of Governors in May despite his complete lack of experience at the Postal Service and his potential conflicts of interest, which have drawn scrutiny from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other lawmakers. After taking charge in mid-June, the new Postmaster General wasted little time rolling out changes to USPS that postal workers said undermine the agency’s core mission and potentially set the stage for privatization.
During an open session last week with the Board of Governors, DeJoy rebuked lawmakers for “sensationalizing” major mail backlogs reported in states across the nation and downplayed the resulting delays as “isolated, operational incidents.” Postal workers, for their part, have warned that the delays appear to be a direct consequence of DeJoy’s policies barring overtime and prohibiting the sorting of mail ahead of morning deliveries.
As the American Prospect‘s David Dayen noted, the Postal Service under DeJoy’s leadership has also “informed states that they’ll need to pay first-class 55-cent postage to mail ballots to voters, rather than the normal 20-cent bulk rate.”
“That nearly triples the per-ballot cost at a time when tens of millions more will be delivered,” Dayen noted. “The rate change would have to go through the Postal Regulatory Commission and, undoubtedly, litigation. But the time frame for that is incredibly short, as ballots go out very soon. A side benefit of this money grab is that states and cities may decide they don’t have the money to mail absentee ballots, and will make them harder to get. Which is exactly the worst-case scenario everyone fears.”
This is the clearest example yet of Trump and his puppet Postmaster General's attempts to sabotage the USPS before November's election.
This kind of behavior is why we're demanding an investigation into Trump’s USPS—the Inspector General should add this to their list. https://t.co/2aXcLeZsF9
Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.) said in a statement issued alongside DeFazio’s that DeJoy is guilty of “unconstitutional sabotage of our Postal Service with complete disregard for the institution’s promise of the ‘safe and speedy transit of the mail’ and the ‘prompt delivery of its contents.'”
“My friend Maya Angelou used to say, ‘when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,'” Adams added. “The Postmaster General has shown us on multiple occasions he is working to dismantle a fundamental institution of our democracy. He needs to resign or be removed, now.”
Idiots. At this point, removing a generation of toxic masculine meatheads is not the worst outcome in the world.
Sardar Ismail, an Iraqi Kurdish bodybuilding world champion, trains at a gym in a mask! Be more like Sardar! | Safin Hamed/AFP via Getty Images
American men are failing the pandemic.
Fellas, is it gay to not die of a virus that turns your lungs into soggy shells of their former selves, drowning you from the inside out? Is wearing a mask to avoid death part of the feminization of America? Is it too emasculating to wear a mask to protect the others around you? Does staying alive make you feel weak?
According to many American men, yeah.
Poll after poll, most recently a Gallup poll from July 13, has found American men are more likely to not wear masks compared to women. Specifically, the survey found that 34 percent of men compared to 54 percent of women responded they “always” wore a mask when outside their home and that 20 percent of men said they “never” wore a mask outside their home (compared to just 8 percent of women).
What’s startling about these numbers is that it’s now been months since the US first began measures, including statewide lockdowns, against the virus.
Since late April, health experts and medical professionals have stressed the importance of wearing masks, as more and more research has found that the virus spreads through face-to-face close contact like talking, sneezing, and coughing. US cases and deaths continue to rise; at the same time, scientists are finding that men are more likely to die from Covid-19 and do not know why.
With the deaths and rising cases, it seems unclear what would convince more men to wear masks. According to bias, behavior, and health experts, the reason is maddeningly simple: Masks aren’t manly.
Still, some see masks as weakness, and men, regardless of politics or race or sexuality, don’t like being seen as weak. This virus can’t do pushups or race cars, so the usual displays of dominance are meaningless. Instead, it can best be battled by, of all things, putting on little cloth accessories.
The coronavirus has issued an undeniable taunt to American men on their home turf, and some have chosen to prove their virility through risk with no foreseeable reward. It’s a narrow vision of manhood that ignores other tropes like self-sacrifice and being a protector; performative masculinity for an audience of one that puts many more people at risk. And the solution would be so easy, if it weren’t left in the hands of the manliest men in the country.
Masks are caught in the eternal battle of men versus their own masculinity
Carolyn Kaster-Pool/Getty Images
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) removes his mask.
Americans can tell you how the coronavirus has completely changed their lives. From buying habits to social gatherings to commuting (or not) to the way we work out, the pandemic has altered our day-to-day existence. But not everyone’s behaviors have changed the same way.
The personal difference, as experts told me in July, comes down to how we respond to threats and stress. In crises, humans go into fight-or-flight mode, and we rely on our instincts. Those instincts tell us whom to listen to, which messages are important, and whose behavior to emulate. That notion about being sensitive to important messages and signals is central to why certain men are more likely to go against health directives and not wear a mask.
“The notion is masculinity is a status that you constantly have to prove,” Peter Glick, a Lawrence University professor and senior scientist at the Neuroleadership Institute, told me. Glick specializes in overcoming biases and stereotyping. “Any sort of stumble is perceived [as you losing your masculinity]. So if you do have a stumble, then you have to reestablish it. And if you perceive a mask as ‘Oh, I’m scared of this little virus’ — that’s weakness.”
The term for this phenomenon is called “precarious manhood,” coined by Joseph A. Vandello and Jennifer K. Bosson, researchers from the University of South Florida. In their research, they found that past studies show men experience anxiety when it comes to their manhood and masculinity, or masculine gender identity. Vandello and Bossun posit that this is because masculinity, or what society thinks is “manly,” is something that’s hard to achieve and easily lost. And when masculinity is slighted, men compensate by acting out in risky ways.
“[M]en experience more anxiety over their gender status than women do, particularly when gender status is uncertain or challenged,” they wrote in their 2012 research paper. “This can motivate a variety of risky and maladaptive behaviors, as well as the avoidance of behaviors that might otherwise prove adaptive and beneficial.”
In the US specifically, American culture has a history of framing disease as an individual battle or competition in which there are victors and losers, triumph and defeat. More recently, right-wing pundits and Republican lawmakers turned masks into a political issue, often framing masks as a slight on manliness. Gestures like Vice President Mike Pence’s mask-less visit to the Mayo Clinic in April and actions like President Donald Trump calling Dr. Anthony Fauci’s credibility into question strengthen the mask-is-weakness connection. Especially among men who see Trump as a leader they want to emulate.
“In those situations where your masculinity is called into question, the question is embarrassing”
“Trump even kind of made fun of people who are wearing masks, right?” Glick said, referring to Trump’s mockery of Joe Biden wearing a mask in May. “In those situations where your masculinity is called into question, the question is embarrassing. And ostracism is extremely powerful. Embarrassment, ostracism — that’s what keeps us in line with social bonds.”
Glick’s analysis lines up with research that people with sexist attitudes are less likely to take precautions against the virus. Tyler Reny, a postdoctoral research fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, found this by combing through data from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, a public opinion survey that’s been interviewing more than 6,000 Americans about the virus per week since March 19.
“Those who had more sexist attitudes were far less likely to report feeling concerned about the pandemic, less likely to support state and local coronavirus policies, less likely to take precautions like washing their hands or wearing masks, and more likely to get sick than those with less sexist attitudes,” Reny told me. “What I found is that sexist attitudes are very predictive of all four sets of [aforementioned] outcomes, even after accounting for differences in partisanship, ideology, age, education, and population density.”
There’s no set-in-stone rule that face masks are a sign of weakness. Masks and masculinity existed separately long before the pandemic. Health officials have also consistently said shame doesn’t work to get people to change their behavior for the better. Yet the triggers of shame and slighted masculinity are so effective in getting people to abandon advice that could save their lives. So why, then, does shame work to deter men from wearing masks?
It could be that men are more invested in their own masculinity than in their community.
Shaming people who don’t wear masks “doesn’t have the same power,” Glick said. “Are those people really experiencing shame? I don’t think they’re ashamed about their behavior. Shame is something you have to buy into.”
How we get men to wear masks
Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images
LeBron James wears a mask! YAY!
There exists an entire industry to masculinize inanimate objects to make them worthy of man usage. War Paint is makeup specifically branded for men. So were Kleenex’s “Man-Size” boxes and “Brogurt,” a yogurt for bros, before being rebranded after public mockery. And the Dude Wiper 1000, according to its semi-ironic, tongue-in-cheek website, “is not some ordinary bidet attachment,” as it has “blasters” to clean even the manliest of buttholes.
Going by capitalism’s penchant for man-plifying objects and knowing about men’s fragile relationship to their masculinity, it would seem that the obvious way to get more men to wear masks would be to make the manliest version of a mask possible. Maybe put guns on it, or a football team, or make a mask that makes men feel like a super-soldier spliced from both Rambo and Captain America.
You can see the effect in sports and athletic wear, where companies like Nike and Under Armour are making masks that superheroes might don. They’re sleeker, curved like shark fins. In June, Under Armour launched its Sportsmask, which it promised would “reinvent” the face mask for athletes. The Nike Strike Snood, which kind of makes the wearer look like Bane or a ninja, is sold out. GQ’s pick for masks includes one that makes you look like “you’re in Mortal Kombat.”
Make a mask that makes men feel like a super-soldier spliced from both Rambo and Captain America
For men concerned with masculinity, the appeal here is that these masks not only look cool but allow you to do masculine things like run faster, lift heavier, and be stronger. At the same time, in Asia, designers are incorporating new tech and fashion into their masks. But according to health officials, appealing to consumerist impulses isn’t the best way to change men’s, or anyone’s, behavior.
Glick and Reny echoed a sentiment that health experts I spoke to in July said: To get people to change behavior, masks have to become a socially accepted norm. Once people start accepting masks as normal behavior, like they do wearing seat belts and not smoking indoors, the number of people going against the norm decreases.
Getting to that tipping point is a lot easier said than done.
Laws and mandates that the government used in the past in regards to seat belts and smoking took time for everyone to adjust to — time we don’t have due to how fast coronavirus is surging in the US. And while experts say people are likely to emulate behavior they see from leaders, Republicans like Trump and Pence haven’t consistently modeled good mask behavior or messaged how important they are to our health.
“So a good start would be to have stronger repeated signals from elites (particularly Trump) on the importance of mask-wearing as an easy and cheap way to slow the pandemic,” Reny said. “Having publicly ‘tough’ men (actors, athletes, some musicians) and other Republican elites also join in and wear masks would help.”
There’s evidence of this working. In late June, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter posted a picture of him wearing a mask with the hashtag #RealMenWearMasks. And Trump wore a mask in public for the first time in July at a visit to Walter Reed medical center. He called himself “patriotic.” His supporters hailed him for looking “intensely masculine” and putting #AmericaFirst, and lauded how heroic he looked in a mask.
In May, Trump and conservatives had mocked Biden for wearing a mask, some saying it was a sign of weakness. The abrupt turn is, of course, politically driven. But it’s worth noting that the praise Trump received is about his manliness and heroism — the type of motivators that Glick and Reny mentioned.
If Trump wearing a mask gets more people, men specifically, to wear masks, that’s a positive for health officials.
The problem therein, though, is that there’s not enough consistent messaging or consistent visibility to really effect change — Trump and Pence need to wear masks consistently and visibly for it to make a difference. That’s what makes Glick a little more skeptical.
“It’s an uphill battle at this point,” he said. “It’s going to be hard as long as our leaders are undermining the message.”
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