James.galbraith

President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, claimed Thursday that Black Lives Matter is a “domestic terrorist group” led by “killers” who “hate white people” and “want to do away with a mother-father family.”

During an appearance on Fox & Friends, Giuliani claimed that if Democrat Joe Biden defeats Trump, America will become “a socialist country that Black Lives Matter wants.”

Rudy Giuliani calls Black Lives Matter "a domestic terrorist group" run by the Weather Underground: "These are killers, and these are people who hate white people. They're people who hate white men in particular. And they want to do away with a mother-father family." pic.twitter.com/GWd42ajVpT

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) August 6, 2020

“Biden has agreed with it and he’s too weak to oppose it,” Giuliani said. “They haven’t said a single word about the violence taking place by Antifa or Black Lives Matter, both of whom domestic terrorist groups without any doubt. …

“Stop the nonsense,” Giuliani continued. “These are killers, and these are people who hate white people. They’re people who hate white men in particular, and they want to do away with a mother-father family. They don’t think fathers are necessary.”

Watch the full segment below.

The post Rudy Giuliani: Black Lives Matter Activists ‘Hate White People’ and ‘Want to Do Away With a Mother-Father Family’ (WATCH) appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

President Donald Trump shakes hands in 2017 with then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, as Vice President Mike Pence beams. | Bill Clark-Pool/Getty Images

A new book tries to untangle the relationship between white identity politics and skyrocketing inequality.

Historically, conservative political parties face the problem Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt calls “the conservative dilemma.” How does a party that represents the interests of moneyed elites win elections in a democracy? The dilemma sharpens as inequality widens: The more the haves have, the more have-nots there are who will vote to tax them.

This is not mere ivory-tower theorizing. Conservative politicians know the bind they’re in. When Mitt Romney told a room of donors during the 2012 election that there were “47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what” because they “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it,” even though they “pay no income tax,” he was describing the conservative dilemma. “Our message of low taxes doesn’t connect,” he said, a bit sadly.

If anything, Romney understated the case. Sure, 47 percent of Americans, in 2011, didn’t pay federal income taxes — though they paid a variety of other taxes, ranging from federal payroll taxes to state sales taxes. But slicing the electorate by income tax burden only makes sense if you’re wealthy enough for income taxes to be your primary economic irritant. That’s not true for most people. Romney’s 53 percent versus 47 percent split was a gentle rendering of an economy where the rich were siphoning off startling quantities of wealth.

Occupy Wall Street’s rallying cry — “We are the 99%!” — framed the math behind the conservative dilemma more directly: How do you keep winning elections and cutting taxes for the rich in a (putative) democracy where the top 1 percent went from 11 percent of national income in 1980 to 20 percent in 2016, and the bottom 50 percent fell from 21 percent of national income in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016? How do you keep your party from being buried by the 99 percent banding together to vote that income share back into their own pockets?

In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer three possible answers. You can cease being a party built around tax cuts for the rich and try to develop an economic agenda that will appeal to the middle class. You can try to change the political topic, centering politics on racial, religious, and nationalist grievance. Or you can try to undermine democracy itself.

Despite endless calls for the GOP to choose door No. 1 — and poll after poll showing their voting base desperate for leaders who would represent their economic interests while reflecting their cultural grievances — Republican elites have refused. Take the 2018 tax cuts. Donald Trump might have run as a populist prepared to raise taxes on plutocrats like, well, him, but according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the bill he signed gave more than 20 percent of its benefits over the first 10 years, and more than 80 percent of the benefits that last beyond the first 10 years, to the top 1 percent. For that reason, it’s one of the most unpopular bills ever to be signed into law. It’s not the kind of accomplishment you can run for reelection on.

From Let Them Eat Tweets, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

That’s left Republicans reliant on the second and third strategies. Hacker and Pierson call the resulting ideology “plutocratic populism,” and their book is sharp and thoughtful on how the GOP got here and the dangers of the path they’ve chosen. Where it’s less convincing is in its description of where “here” is: Does Trump represent the culmination of the Republican coalition or the contradictions that will ultimately tear it apart?

The logic, and illogic, of plutocratic populism

Plutocratic populism presents as a contradiction — like shouted silence or carnivorous vegan. The key to Hacker and Pierson’s formulation is that, in the GOP, plutocracy and populism operate on different axes. The plutocrats control economic policy, and the populists win elections by deepening racial, religious, and nationalist grievances.

“To advance an unpopular plutocratic agenda, Republicans have escalated white backlash — and, increasingly, undermined democracy,” Hacker and Pierson write. “In the United States, then, plutocracy and right-wing populism have not been opposing forces. Instead, they have been locked in a doom loop of escalating extremism that must be disrupted.”

This is their synthesis of the great economic anxiety versus racial resentment debate. Republican elites weaponize racial resentment to win voters who would otherwise vote their economic self-interest. Hacker and Pierson are careful to sidestep the crude version that holds that ethnic and religious division are mere distractions. Voters see racial and religious dominance as political interests as compelling and legitimate as tax benefits, and the demand for politicians to reflect those underlying resentments and fears is real.

David McNew/Getty Images

This is a key point in Hacker and Pierson’s analysis: They focus on the decisions made by GOP elites, not the desires of conservative voters. Their fundamental claim is that if Republican elites had chosen a more politically sellable economic agenda, they would have — or at least could have — resisted the lure of white resentment and still won elections. But once they made tax cuts for the rich and opposition to universal health care the immovable lodestones of their governance, they had little political choice save to power their movement with the dirty, but abundant, energy offered by ethnonationalism.

The most compelling evidence Hacker and Pierson cite for this argument comes from a study conducted by political scientists Margit Tavits and Joshua Potter, which looked at party platforms from 450 parties in 41 countries between 1945 and 2010. Tavits and Potter find that as inequality rises, conservative parties ratchet up their emphasis on religious and racial grievances — particularly in countries with deep racial and religious fractures. The pivot only works, Tavits and Potter say, when there is high “social demand” for ethnonationalist conflict.

The question this raises, and which Hacker and Pierson don’t really answer, is what would happen to this demand in the absence of conservative politicians willing to meet it — particularly in an age of weakened political parties, demographic change, and identitarian social media? Trump’s rise, which Hacker and Pierson present as the culmination of plutocratic populism, can also be read as a symptom of its mounting internal contradictions, and of the way Republicans voters are increasingly capable of demanding the representation they want.

It may be that the uneasy coalition that married white identitarians to Davos Man is breaking apart. Indeed, reading Hacker and Pierson’s book, I found myself wondering whether inequality was, itself, the cause of the coalition’s collapse: Perhaps the plutocratic agenda is becoming too unpopular to even survive Republican presidential primaries. And if that’s so, is the future of the Republican Party more moderate on all fronts, or more purely ethnonationalist?

The Donald Trump question

If you survey the modern Republican Party, the figures most intent on turning it into a vehicle for ethnonationalist resentment are the least committed to the plutocratic agenda. Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Sen. Josh Hawley, and 2016 candidate Donald Trump are all examples of the trend: They are, or were, explicit in their desire to sever the ties that yoke angry nationalism and a desire for a whiter America to Paul Ryan’s budget.

Conversely, the Republican figures most committed to plutocracy — like Ryan or the Koch brothers or the Chamber of Commerce — tend to back immigration reform and recoil from ethnonationalist rhetoric, and in 2016, they opposed Trump in favor of Jeb Bush and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio. They just lost on all those fronts.

Hacker and Pierson emphasize the fact that once in office, Trump abandoned populist pretense and gave the Chamber of Commerce everything it had ever wanted and more. But, as with so much else with Trump, it can be hard to distinguish decision-making from disinterest. Trump outsourced the staffing of his White House to the Koch-soaked Mike Pence and his agenda to congressional Republicans. The question, then, is whether the dissonance of his administration represents an inevitability of Republican Party politics or simply a lag between Trump demonstrating the base’s prioritization of ethnonationalist resentment and a politician who will both win and govern on those terms.

This is the central unanswered question of Hacker and Pierson’s book: If you cut the plutocrats out of the party, either because bigotry drove them out or campaign finance reform neutered them or the Ayn Rand rapture ascended them, would their absence lead to a Republican Party that moderates on economics and eases off the ethnonationalism, or would it lead to a Republican Party that moderates on economics so it can more effectively pursue social division? Put differently, do you get 2000-era John McCain or 2020-era Tucker Carlson? I suspect the latter.

Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Politicon

Hacker and Pierson admit they are assessing the GOP as an elite-led institution, and quite often, that’s probably the right way to look at it. But they end up virtually ignoring the power that Republican voters actually hold and, when they are sufficiently offended, wield.

Bush and Rubio and Christie were humiliated in 2016. GOP-led efforts at immigration reform failed in 2007 and 2013. Majority Leader Eric Cantor was deposed by Rep. Dave Brat. The Republican autopsy, which recommended that the GOP become more racially and generationally inclusive, was ignored. At key moments, Fox News tried to support immigration reform and deflate Trump, and it lost those fights and remade itself in Trump’s image. There are lines even conservative media can’t cross.

Hacker and Pierson marshal data showing the very rich are more economically conservative than the median voter, but also more socially liberal. As the GOP becomes more crudely identitarian, there’s some evidence that it’s losing the economic elites who George W. Bush once called “my base”: Contributions from the Forbes 400 have been tipping toward the Democratic Party in recent decades, and there’s reason to believe that’s accelerated under Trump. Hillary Clinton won the country’s richest zip codes in 2016 — a change from past Democratic performance — while Trump’s Electoral College win relied on gains among lower-income whites.

Hacker and Pierson don’t assess the Democratic Party much in their book, but the future of plutocratic populism likely depends on the direction that coalition takes. Joe Biden’s Democratic Party is a tent restive billionaires might feel comfortable in. Yes, they’ll pay higher taxes, but they’ll also receive competent protection from pandemics and won’t have to explain away the white nationalists in their ranks. If Bernie Sanders’s vision is the future of the Democratic Party, billionaires will remain in the Republican Party, where they are at least seen as allies.

Minoritarian authoritarians

The most chilling argument in Hacker and Pierson’s book is that Trump’s rhetoric has focused us on the wrong authoritarian threat. The fear that he would entrench himself as an individual strongman has distracted from the reality that his party is insulating itself from democracy:

As their goals have become more extreme, Republicans and their organized allies have increasingly exploited long-standing but worsening vulnerabilities in our political system to lock in narrow priorities, even in the face of majority opposition. The specter we face is not just a strongman bending a party and our political institutions to his will; it is also a minority faction entrenching itself in power, beyond the ambitions and careers of any individual leader. Whether Trump can break through the barriers against autocracy, he and his party—with plutocratic and right-wing backing—are breaking majoritarian democracy.

A useful thought experiment in American politics is simply to imagine what would happen if the system worked the way we tend to tell our children it works: Whoever wins the most votes wins the election. In that case, George W. Bush would never have passed his tax cuts nor made his Supreme Court nominations, and neither would Donald Trump. The Republican Party would likely have had to moderate its approach on both economics and social and racial issues, as there’d be no viable path forward that combines an economic agenda that repels most voters and a social agenda that offends the rising demographic majority. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said in 2012, before becoming first Trump’s most slashing critic and then one of his most sycophantic defenders, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

As I argue in my book on polarization, which similarly ends with a call for democratization, if Trump had won exactly as many votes in 2016 but lost the election because of it, he and his followers would be blamed for blowing a clearly winnable contest and handing the Supreme Court to the Democrats for a generation. In that world, the toxic tendencies he represents would be weakened, and the Republican Party, having lost three presidential elections in a row, would have been far likelier to reform itself. Its ability to keep traveling the path of plutocratic populism stems entirely from the minoritarian possibilities embedded in America’s political institutions.

Andy Katz/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

As Hacker and Pierson show, this is a point of true convergence between the identitarians and the plutocrats: Both have lost confidence that they can win elections democratically, so they have sought to rewrite the rules in their favor. What hold on power they retain comes from the way American politics amplifies the power of whiter, more rural, more conservative areas — and that’s given the conservative coalition a closing window in which to rig the system such that they can retain control.

America does not exist in a steady state of tension between majoritarian and minoritarian institutions. Those institutions can be changed, and they are being changed. A party in power can rewrite the rules in its own favor, and the Republican Party, at every level, is trying to do just that — using power won through white identity politics and geographic advantage, but deploying strategies patiently funded by plutocrats. As Hacker and Pierson write:

Recent GOP moves in North Carolina show what’s possible in a closely balanced state. Republicans first took the statehouse in 2010. They quickly enlisted the leading Republican architect of extreme partisan gerrymanders, Thomas Hofeller. A mostly anonymous figure until his death in 2018, Hofeller liked to describe gerrymandering as “the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States.” He once told an audience of state legislators, “Redistricting is like an election in reverse. It’s a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters.” In 2018, North Carolina Republicans won their “election in reverse,” keeping hold of the statehouse even while losing the statewide popular vote. In North Carolina’s races for the US House, Republicans won half the statewide votes and 77 percent of the seats. A global elections watchdog ranked North Carolina’s “electoral integrity” alongside that of Cuba, Indonesia, and Sierra Leone.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought to reword the census so Hispanics fear filling it out, in the hope that the political representation they’d normally receive flows to white, Republican voters instead. So far, the White House has been too clumsily explicit about the aims of this strategy for courts to clear it, but that’s a mistake that can easily be remedied by savvier successors.

Hacker and Pierson argue that the conservative dilemma matters because conservative parties matter. History shows that democratic systems thrive amid responsible conservative parties — parties that make their peace with democracy and build agendas that can successfully compete for votes — and they collapse when conservative parties back themselves into defending constituencies and agendas so narrow that their only path to victory is to rig the system in their favor.

This is the cliff on which American democracy now teeters. The threat isn’t that Donald Trump will carve his face onto Mount Rushmore and engrave his name across the White House. It’s that the awkward coalition that nominated and sustains him will entrench itself, not their bumbling standard-bearer, by turning America into a government by the ethnonationalist minority, for the plutocratic minority.

Further listening

I spoke with Hacker and Pierson about their book, and the questions it raised for me, on my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. Listen here, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your pods.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

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President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on August 4, 2020, in Washington, DC.  | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

It’s Bush v. Gore all over again.

On Monday, Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) signed legislation intended to ensure that voters in his state can still cast a ballot during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Among other things, the new law (known as AB4) provides that registered Nevada voters will automatically receive a ballot in the mail, a common practice in Western states. It also requires the state to provide a minimum number of polling places for in-person voters, both on Election Day and for early voting.

President Trump’s response to this new law was apoplectic.

On Tuesday, one day after AB4 became law, Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit on behalf of Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party, seeking to block it.

Their legal complaint in Donald J. Trump for President v. Cegavske is not a model of careful legal argumentation. It claims, for example, that AB4 changed Nevada law to allow mailed-in ballots without postmarks to be counted so long as they arrive within three days of Election Day. In fact, Nevada law already allowed such ballots to be counted. An entire section of the complaint focuses on the fact that AB4 was enacted “on a weekend vote” — the state House approved the bill on a Friday, but the Senate passed it on a Sunday — without explaining how the day of the bill’s passage was relevant to its legality.

Though Trump for President v. Cegavske (the named defendant is Barbara Cegavske, Nevada’s secretary of state) targets several provisions of Nevada’s election law, its most significant attacks focus on two provisions — the provision allowing some late-arriving ballots to be counted, and a provision requiring the state’s two most populous counties to have a higher minimum number of polling places than less populous counties.

It’s not hard to guess why Trump wants late-arriving mail-in ballots to be tossed out. Multiple polls have shown that Biden voters prefer to vote by mail, while Trump voters are much more likely to vote in person.

Trump has spent the past several months attacking states that try to make it easier to vote by mail — though he recently claimed that mail-in ballots in Florida are fine because “Florida’s got a great Republican governor.”

In any event, Trump’s lawsuit suffers from several fundamental flaws. Some of its arguments rely on federal statutes that most likely cannot be enforced through a lawsuit brought by a private party. Others rest on speculation about how certain provisions of AB4 will be implemented. Important prongs of Trump’s legal arguments rest on the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore (2000), an opinion that explicitly states its decision is “limited to the present circumstances” and therefore should not be relied on by future courts.

And beyond that, at least some of Trump’s arguments would lead to sweeping progressive results that he probably would not like, if they were embraced by federal courts.

Trump would not like the implications of his own legal arguments

AB4 requires all Nevada counties to have at least one in-person early voting site in every county and at least one in-person polling place on Election Day. Only two Nevada counties have more than 60,000 residents, and those two counties are required to have additional polling sites. Washoe County (Reno), with nearly 500,000 residents, must have at least 15 early voting sites and 25 sites on the day of the election. Clark County (Las Vegas), with more than 2.2 million residents, must have at least 35 early sites and at least 100 on Election Day.

The Trump team claims this arrangement is unconstitutional and relies heavily on Bush v. Gore to make its case.

One of the ironies of Bush v. Gore is that if the Supreme Court actually took its own holding in that case seriously, Bush would have been one of the most progressive election law decisions in American history.

The specific issue in Bush, which effectively handed the presidency to George W. Bush, concerned a recount of the ballots cast in Florida’s extraordinarily close 2000 presidential contest between Bush and Democrat Al Gore. The majority in Bush faulted Florida election officials for failing to apply “uniform rules” to this recount — an unclearly marked ballot might be counted in one Florida county while a ballot with the same unclear marking might be rejected in another. This lack of one statewide standard, according to a majority of the justices, injected too much arbitrariness into the recount.

But Bush also contains sweeping language suggesting that any disparate treatment of voters within a state may be constitutionally suspect. “Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms,” the majority concluded in Bush, “the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”

One reason Bush was widely criticized by legal scholars is because this expansive approach to voter equality was hard to square with prior, more parsimonious voting rights decisions handed down by conservative justices who joined the Bush majority. As Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and a member of Gore’s legal team in Bush, wrote in 2003, “the ‘right’ ostensibly protected by the majority in Bush v. Gore seems characteristic of a class of entitlements that has received only reluctant federal protection from the Rehnquist Court.”

The conservative justices’ departure from their ordinary practices, their decision to restrict their holding to a single election, and the fact that Bush placed a Republican in the White House all gave a fairly clear impression that Bush v. Gore was an exercise of partisanship and not of legal reasoning.

Moreover, the Supreme Court has since been fairly clear that it doesn’t take Bush’s approach to voter equality seriously. In the nearly two decades since Bush was decided, only one Supreme Court opinion has so much as cited Bush v. Gore, according to the legal database Lexis Advance. And that single citation appears in a footnote to a dissenting opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that was joined by no other justice.

Nevertheless, Trump’s lawyers ask the courts to take Bush’s expansive approach to voter equality very seriously.

Relying on the strong language in Bush calling for all voters to be treated on “equal terms,” Trump’s lawyers argue that Nevada’s formula for setting the minimum number of polling places in each county is unconstitutional. “Several rural counties — where AB4 authorizes only 1 polling place each — have substantially higher numbers of registered voters per polling place” than the two most populous counties, they claim.

As a threshold matter, this claim is premature. As the Supreme Court held in Texas v. United States (1998), “a claim is not ripe for adjudication if it rests upon ‘contingent future events that may not occur as anticipated, or indeed may not occur at all.’” AB4 does not require Nevada’s smaller counties to have only one polling place — it provides that those counties must have at least one polling place. It’s possible that once AB4 is actually implemented, rural counties will have roughly the same number of registered voters per polling place as urban counties.

But if Trump is truly serious about implementing a voting rights standard that requires all voters to have equal access to polling sites, Democrats should agree to that deal with enthusiasm. After the Supreme Court struck down much of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, many states started closing polling places — and these closures disproportionately impact voters of color who tend to prefer Democrats over Republicans. As a result, voters in large Democratic cities within red states sometimes have to wait hours to cast a ballot.

It’s unlikely, however, that Trump really wants Democrats of color in urban centers to be able to vote with ease on Election Day. It’s more likely that he is looking for another decision like Bush v. Gore — a one-off opinion that lifts up a Republican presidential candidate without providing any benefits to future voters.

Trump wants to force Nevada to toss out many ballots

AB 4 provides that mall-in ballots will be counted so long as they are postmarked by the day of the election and received by the seventh day following the election. But not all mail is postmarked, and sometimes the date on a postmark is illegible. Thus, there is a risk that voters will be disenfranchised for completely arbitrary reasons — such as the postmark on their ballot getting smudged while the ballot was being delivered.

Nevada addresses this problem by creating a safe harbor for some ballots that arrive without postmarks. Under a provision of Nevada law that took effect last January, mailed ballots will be counted if they are “received not more than 3 days after the day of the election and the date of the postmark cannot be determined.” (AB4 actually makes this provision marginally stricter, by requiring such ballots to arrive by 5 pm on the third day after the election.)

Trump’s lawyers argue that this provision is illegal because it conflicts with a federal law providing that “the electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.” At least in theory, a ballot mailed after Election Day might arrive within three days of the election, and it might bear an illegible postmark. Thus, Trump’s lawyers claim, by accepting some late ballots, Nevada could wind up counting ballots mailed after the federally mandated Election Day has passed.

It’s a clever argument. And it is true that, at least before the Covid-19 pandemic, few states explicitly allowed ballots that arrived late and without postmarks to be counted. But there are a number of reasons to suspect that courts will reject this argument.

One problem with Trump’s argument is that it is difficult to square with the expansive theory of voter equality that Trump uses to challenge the state’s allocation of polling places. If it is unconstitutionally arbitrary for some counties to have more polling places per voter than others — or, for that matter, if it is unconstitutionally arbitrary for some Florida counties to use different standards to evaluate unclearly marked ballots than others — then surely it is also unconstitutional to toss out some ballots and accept others based on whether the post office smudged a postmark while the ballot was being delivered.

It’s also far from clear that Trump’s campaign — or, for that matter, any other private party — is allowed to sue because a state decides to count ballots that are cast after Election Day. Not all federal laws create a “private right of action,” meaning that private plaintiffs are allowed to bring a lawsuit challenging alleged violations of those laws.

As the Supreme Court explained in Gonzaga University v. Doe (2002), “for a statute to create such private rights, its text must be ‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited.’” Thus, for example, a statute that reads “eligible voters shall receive a ballot by mail” would create a private right of action because the text of this hypothetical statute centers “eligible voters” — the people who would benefit from that statute. A different statute that provides that “the state shall provide for a system of voting by mail” most likely could not be enforced in court because that statute does not even mention the people who would benefit from it.

In any event, the federal statute setting the date of presidential elections (“the electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November”) is not phrased in terms of the persons benefited — it conveys no rights that apply to individual voters, political candidates, or their campaigns. So it most likely cannot be enforced by private plaintiffs in federal court.

There’s also a third reason to doubt that Trump will prevail in his effort to toss out late-arriving Nevada ballots. Though Chief Justice John Roberts, frequently the median vote on the Supreme Court, is often hostile to voting rights claims, he’s also signaled that state officials struggling to control the pandemic should be given an unusual amount of deference by courts.

In South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2020), for example, Roberts sided against a church that challenged a state public health order that only allowed places of worship to reopen at limited capacity.

“The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement,” Roberts wrote in his South Bay opinion. He added that “our Constitution principally entrusts ‘[t]he safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States ‘to guard and protect.’”

The same logic that led Roberts to defer to state officials who want to prevent Covid-19 from spreading at churches in South Bay may also lead him to defer to Nevada officials who want to prevent Covid-19 from spreading at polling places.

That said, there is never any certainty in this kind of highly political litigation — especially when a Republican president seeks relief from courts dominated by Republicans. In the short term, the case is assigned to Judge James Mahan, a George W. Bush appointee. However Mahan rules, the losing party will likely appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which is closely divided between Democrats and Republicans. And the case may very well be heard by a very conservative Supreme Court.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook and Twitter have sanctioned President Donald Trump for spreading misinformation on Covid-19 on Wednesday, including blocking his campaign from tweeting until it removed an offending post.

Both social media giants acted in response to a video clip posted to both Trump's Facebook and campaign Twitter accounts where he claims children were "virtually immune" to Covid-19. Trump has been using the phrase recently as part of a drive to reopen schools. But both Facebook and Twitter considered the claim a breach of their guidelines on coronavirus misinformation.

“This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

The clip "is in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation. The account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again," a Twitter spokesperson told POLITICO in a statement.

The Twitter clip was initially posted by the Trump campaign's account, but Trump shared it on his personal account as well. By Wednesday evening, the video led to a dead link. Trump's personal account was not sanctioned for the video.

Though it was the first time Facebook took down a post on Trump’s account related to coronavirus, it was not the first time the social media company has removed content on his or related accounts more broadly. Facebook removed posts by Trump’s reelection campaign in June that featured a red inverted triangle — a symbol used by the Nazis for communists and some Jewish political prisoners during World War II. Facebook and Instagram have also taken down videos on the Trump campaign’s accounts over copyright complaints.

Twitter has also flagged content on Trump’s account, including a fake CNN clip that he tweeted in June. Twitter marked that video as “synthetic and manipulated media.”

The Trump campaign rejected Facebook’s characterization of the Wednesday post as misinformation.

“The President was stating a fact that children are less susceptible to the coronavirus,” a Trump campaign spokeswoman, Courtney Parella, said in a statement to POLITICO. “Another day, another display of Silicon Valley’s flagrant bias against this President, where the rules are only enforced in one direction. Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth.”

Trump has repeatedly asserted that children should be able to return to schools for in-person instruction, claiming that keeping them at home would be more detrimental to their health than going to school. During his daily White House coronavirus news briefings, Trump regularly says that children are “virtually immune” from the disease because of the lower death rates among younger people compared with older adults.

But opening schools leaves adult faculty and staff at risk of coming in contact with the virus, as well as parents and other family members at home. Trump’s push to open the schools has met fierce backlash, including from Republicans. Teachers unions, school administrators and the American Academy of Pediatrics have all rejected Trump’s calls to reopen schools for in-person learning.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday praised Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey’s handling of the pandemic — even as the virus tears through the state at an alarming rate.

“Arizona's record in reducing the spread of the virus while maintaining hospital capacity and allowing society to continue functioning and functioning very nicely, very successfully, is an example that shows how our path forward can work in other states,” Trump said at a White House briefing, calling Arizona “a state that is a model for applying a science-based approach to the decreasing cases and hospitalizations without implementing a punishing lockdown.”

Key context: Arizona’s coronavirus cases surged dramatically after the state relaxed restrictions on businesses and gatherings in May. While most states in the country have implemented mandatory mask-wearing rules, Arizona has not, though several individual counties did so.

The state has seen recent improvements, due in part to the move in late July to close down bars and some other businesses and reimpose restrictions on large gatherings.

By the numbers: Cases have decreased 24 percent in the last two weeks, according to the Covid Exit Strategy, but the numbers are still high. The state has the fifth-highest number of current hospitalizations in the country, the fifth-highest number of new cases in the last week, and the fifth-highest rate of tests that come back positive.

Arizona has a test positivity rate of about 18 percent — far higher than the 5 percent that the CDC says indicates sufficient testing and control of the virus. It’s an improvement, however, on the nearly 25 percent test positivity rate the state was reporting two weeks ago.

The state’s ICU beds are also more than 80 percent full.

“We’ve seen improvement week over week for four weeks,” Ducey told Trump when he visited the White House earlier Wednesday. “But we’re going to keep our guard up and stay vigilant.”

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio pushed out his health commissioner, Oxiris Barbot, after a series of private disagreements throughout the coronavirus pandemic, saying he needed an “atmosphere of unity.”

But the mayor offered another vote of confidence Wednesday in his police commissioner, Dermot Shea, who has publicly called a police reform law the mayor signed “insane,” labeled the budget de Blasio negotiated a “bow to mob rule,” and referred to city leaders as “cowards.”

When asked about the contrast, de Blasio said he required “communication” and “team work” from all of his agency heads, and does not believe Shea has violated those standards.

“There’s nothing he has said that I took personal offense to,” de Blasio said.

“We have talked constantly. When he has a concern, he raises it forthrightly. When it’s something that I understand he thinks is important to talk about publicly, he and I talk about it first,” he said. "And we come to an agreement on the right way to address things and handle things. So it’s been a very collegial dynamic. He has also, to his credit, really put a focus on working with other agencies.”

Critics have seen a double standard in de Blasio’s treatment of the white, male police commissioner and the Latina health commissioner.

“I am disappointed that women in leadership like Dr. Barbot are pushed out after speaking their mind, while people like NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea, who has publicly clashed with the Mayor, disagreed with him, and has completely failed in handling the City’s response to this summer’s protests, remains in his position without even the slightest bit of critique from his boss,” said City Council Member Carlina Rivera.

“Today’s decision will leave many aspiring women across New York City questioning whether they should pursue a career in New York City government under this administration," she added.

Council Member Brad Lander agreed. “When it was most urgent, NYC forfeited the leadership of its first-in-class public health dep't b/c BdB could not respect @NYCHealthCommr @DrOBarbot,” he said in a tweet. “Sexism & racism harm women & people-of-color most directly. But they also harm us all.”

De Blasio did not answer when asked Wednesday whether he has received implicit bias training, which is now required for all NYPD officers, to ferret out any of his own unconscious biases. He did say he has discussed the issue with his wife Chirlane McCray, who is Black.

The mayor said he had no regrets about how Barbot was treated in his administration. She issued an apology for saying she didn’t “give two rats’ asses” about NYPD cops during a heated argument in March after police attempted to commandeer 500,000 N95 masks, which had been designated for hospitals.

“I have a lot of respect for Dr. Barbot, and I appreciate what she did for this city. The bottom line is if someone, anyone says something that wasn’t the right thing to say, it’s important to just clear the air and move forward, and that’s what happened,” de Blasio said.

He said he believed he was doing the “gracious” thing by giving Barbot the chance to resign after settling on her successor, Dr. Dave Chokshi.

“Everyone’s mature adults. Some things just don’t work out. Sometimes it’s time for a change in leadership,” he said. “And that’s the point we got to this weekend. And I think, always the gracious thing to do is to ask someone if they would prefer to do something in term of a resignation.”

He declined to name anything she had done wrong. “I determined that it was important to have new leadership,” he said.

The Supreme Court has drawn the doctrine of qualified immunity so broadly that police officers can almost never be held accountable in civil court for their abuses on the job. Since what the Supreme Court says, goes, lower-court judges are forced to let violent or racist or violent and racist police off the hook time after time. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves is apparently sick of that, and made it very clear in a new decision—even as he granted qualified immunity to an officer who violated the Constitution.

The beginning of Reeves’ decision is one gut-punch after another. “Clarence Jamison wasn’t jaywalking. He wasn’t playing outside with a toy gun. He didn’t look like a ‘suspicious person.’ He wasn’t suspected of ‘selling loose, untaxed cigarettes.’ He wasn’t suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill.” Each of these lines is footnoted with the case of one or more Black men or boys killed by police under the named circumstances. “No,” Reeves concludes that section, “Clarence Jamison was a Black man driving a Mercedes convertible.” Outrage pours out of every line from the judge forced to make an unjust decision. “Let us not be fooled by legal jargon,” Reeves wrote. “Immunity is not exoneration. And the harm in this case to one man sheds light on the harm done to the nation by this manufactured doctrine.”

Officer Nick McClendon gets qualified immunity for pulling Clarence Jamison over and keeping him at the side of the road for 110 minutes of “an armed police officer badgering him, pressuring him, lying to him, and then searching his car top-to-bottom for drugs.” For no reason other than that Jamison was a Black man in a Mercedes. But “This Court is required to apply the law as stated by the Supreme Court.” And that means McClendon evades accountability and Jamison doesn’t get justice.

McClendon claimed he stopped Jamison because the temporary tag on Jamison’s car “was folded over to where [he] couldn’t see it.” Jamison provided full paperwork on himself and the car including a bill of sale. McClendon ran Jamison’s information through multiple databases. Jamison came up clear in the first. But instead of letting him go, and before hearing from the second check, McClendon pressured Jamison to allow him to search the car, including by lying about a non-existent phone call alleging there were 10 kilos of cocaine in the car. After McClendon repeatedly lied to and pressured Jamison, he finally—under duress—agreed to the search.

After McClendon personally searched Jamison’s car, and did not find “anything suspicious whatsoever,” he then pressured Jamison to allow a canine search. When Jamison finally was allowed to go, and got home, he discovered that McClendon had done $4,000 in damage to his recently purchased car, and he personally faced the trauma of being a Black man subjected to a racist abuse of power by a police officer in a place and time in which such traffic stops can lead to death.

Judge Reeves goes deep on the sordid history of qualified immunity, before taking the traffic stop at issue before him step by step and concluding both that it involved “an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment” involving involuntary, coerced consent—and that McClendon is protected by qualified immunity until the Supreme Court overturns it. His decision is a sustained plea to the court to do exactly that, concluding “I do not envy the task before the Supreme Court. Overturning qualified immunity will undoubtedly impact our society. Yet, the status quo is extraordinary and unsustainable. Just as the Supreme Court swept away the mistaken doctrine of ‘separate but equal,’ so too it should eliminate the doctrine of qualified immunity.”

A majority of voters want to end qualified immunity. Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Justin Amash have sponsored legislation to end it. But for now—until either Congress or the Supreme Court acts—it gives police the right to commit gross abuses against civilians, abuses that in many cases are obviously and outrageously racist. It must go.

News outlet OneZero crunched the numbers on just how inefficient wireless charging is -- and the results are pretty revealing. From the report: On paper, wireless charging sounds appealing. Just drop a phone down on a charger and it will start charging. There's no wear and tear on charging ports, and chargers can even be built into furniture. Not all of the energy that comes out of a wall outlet, however, ends up in a phone's battery. Some of it gets lost in the process as heat. While this is true of all forms of charging to a certain extent, wireless chargers lose a lot of energy compared to cables. They get even less efficient when the coils in the phone aren't aligned properly with the coils in the charging pad, a surprisingly common problem. [...] To get a sense of how much extra power is lost when using wireless charging versus wired charging in the real world, I tested a Pixel 4 using multiple wireless chargers, as well as the standard charging cable that comes with the phone. I used a high-precision power meter that sits between the charging block and the power outlet to measure power consumption. In my tests, I found that wireless charging used, on average, around 47% more power than a cable. Charging the phone from completely dead to 100% using a cable took an average of 14.26 watt-hours (Wh). Using a wireless charger took, on average, 21.01 Wh. That comes out to slightly more than 47% more energy for the convenience of not plugging in a cable. In other words, the phone had to work harder, generate more heat, and suck up more energy when wirelessly charging to fill the same size battery. [...] The first test with the Yootech pad -- before I figured out how to align the coils properly -- took a whopping 25.62 Wh to charge, or 80% more energy than an average cable charge. Hearing about the hypothetical inefficiencies online was one thing, but here I could see how I'd nearly doubled the amount of power it took to charge my phone by setting it down slightly wrong instead of just plugging in a cable.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A new report suggests a blueprint for what will be a monumental task.

In 2020, all politics is national.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For at least the last two months, a key Instagram feature, which algorithmically pushes users toward supposedly related content, has been treating hashtags associated with President Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in very different ways. Searches for Biden also return a variety of pro-Trump messages, while searches for Trump-related topics only returned the specific hashtags, like #MAGA or #Trump -- which means searches for Biden-related hashtags also return counter-messaging, while those for Trump do not. Earlier this week, a search on Instagram for #JoeBiden would have surfaced nearly 390,000 posts tagged with the former vice president's name along with related hashtags selected by the platform's algorithm. Users searching Instagram for #JoeBiden might also see results for #joebiden2020, as well as pro-Trump hashtags like #trump2020landslide and #democratsdestroyamerica. A similar search for #DonaldTrump on the platform, however, provided a totally different experience. Besides showing 7 million posts tagged with the president's name, Instagram did not present any related hashtags that would have pushed users toward different content or promoted alternative viewpoints. The difference between these two results, which an Instagram spokesperson told BuzzFeed News was a "bug," prevented hashtags including #Trump and #MAGA from being associated with potentially negative content. Meanwhile, Instagram hashtags associated with the Democratic presidential candidate -- #JoeBiden and #Biden, for example -- were presented alongside content that included overtly pro-Trump content and attacks on the former vice president.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I think I've noticed that if you listened to any country music, youtube makes some strong political assumptions.

Today's News:

Voters in another deep-red state approve Obamacare's expansion of Medicaid.

Tools used to shuttle digital information out of Europe are stuck in legal limbo. Now companies are considering the once-unthinkable: limiting the flow of data out of the bloc.

After the EU's top court last month struck down a second transatlantic data protection agreement, called Privacy Shield, in five years, businesses on both sides of the pond have been quick to call for a swift replacement, rallying around the concept of frictionless data that has undergirded the internet since its inception.

But the annulment of Privacy Shield suggests the tide may be turning on the idea of a truly borderless internet.

European regulators are increasingly speaking out in favor of keeping data stored inside the bloc. And while the Continent's landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has provided a template for privacy rules in other parts of the world, so too have Chinese-like restrictions on data flows — in India and Brazil, both GDPR-like laws and local data storage requirements are in the pipeline.

While it remains to be seen exactly how EU watchdogs will interpret the Privacy Shield ruling, a growing number of companies are not waiting to find out — and proactively taking the decision to keep their data in the bloc.

In 2018 cybersecurity firm Kaspersky began storing data from Europe and North America in Switzerland to ward off privacy concerns. Digital wallet provider Dashlane has stored user data in Europe since its launch in 2012 because founders believed that high data protection standards would appeal to its customers.

Peter Yared, whose firm InCountry helps companies comply with local data regulations, told POLITICO that data localization requirements are increasingly factored in by clients, especially those with a global footprint. "From our customer conversations, we think ... companies with a global mindset ... are setting themselves up for a future of tighter digital data regulations," he said.

Those companies may well become the precursors to a stampede. A lawyer who represents large tech companies — and who asked to speak on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters — said they now advise some clients to consider compartmentalizing data in different regions.

"We used to tell our clients not to worry about where to store their data because data export mechanisms allow for a lot of flexibility, but we've done a complete 180 and tell clients to consider storing data locally first. It's not because of the Schrems II ruling per se, but it seems that increasing restrictions on data flows is the way the world is going and this will help clients future proof their compliance program," the lawyer said, referring to the annulment of Privacy Shield earlier this month.

Germany leads charge

While the EU’s top court struck down the Privacy Shield over fears of U.S. snooping, it upheld the legality of instruments used to export personal data all over the world called Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs).

But an apparent endorsement of SCCs came with hidden barbs: The court stressed that it was up to companies and data protection regulators to check if transfers done using those instruments adhered to Europe’s high data protection standards.

In a sign of the legal headaches to come, Europe’s grouping of data protection authorities said an assessment of whether data exports using SCCs were legal would have to be done on a “case-by-case basis", raising the prospect of companies having to do a painstaking analysis of foreign surveillance regimes whenever they want to send data abroad.

Regulators in Germany went further, with Berlin’s data protection regulator calling for data stored in the U.S. to be relocated to Europe and the watchdog in the state of Baden-Württemberg telling POLITICO that SCCs as they stand are now largely unsuitable for exporting data out of Europe. A joint statement by all of the country’s privacy regulators later said that SCCs for U.S. data transfers without additional safeguards were “generally not sufficient.”

Calls for data localization — especially from privacy-conscious Germany — are not new, but this time could be different. Digital sovereignty has emerged as a top priority for Europe’s top policymakers, who have thrown their weight behind projects like Gaia-X, an initiative aimed at boosting the bloc’s ability to store data on the continent.

Local data storage requirements are also in vogue. China and Russia are high-profile adherents to the policy, but restrictions on data are popping up all over. India and Brazil, under strongmen leaders Narendra Modi and Jair Bolsonaro, are also leaning toward data localization requirements, while countries like Vietnam and Malaysia have similar rules. Western allies like Australia and some Canadian provinces have restrictions too.

For companies like Google and Facebook, whose global empires rest on their ability to extract value from personal data, a shift toward data localization spells bad news. Many of these companies ship big quantities of data back to the United States for processing, analysis, research and other purposes. Having to regionalize those functions would mean reorganizing corporate structures and becoming subject to greater regulatory scrutiny in other countries.

“When you think about operations of these big companies, relocating your data is not as simple as it may sound unless you’ve designed it like that from the start,” said Emmanuel Schalit, the co-founder and CEO of digital identity company Dashlane, which has stored data in Europe from its inception. “Who knows what complex web of agreements between suppliers and customers they have?”

While lawyers scramble to find ways of keeping data flowing overseas — and tech lobbies shout for another Privacy Shield to replace the dead one — some analysts warn that the time for legal tinkering may be over.

“Absent another Privacy Shield-like scheme, and assuming it's done right on the technical and organizational level, localizing data sounds like the simplest approach,” independent cybersecurity researcher and consultant Lukasz Olejnik told POLITICO via email. “I doubt that a pure legalistic response is sufficient … I am convinced that compliance will need actual technological … changes. In some cases this means rearchitecting systems," he said.

Echoing this line, Baden-Württemberg's privacy regulator Stefan Brink told POLITICO that legal changes alone would not be enough to keep data flowing.

Companies could store their data in Europe, or they could reach for a wildcard: encrypting everything that crosses the Atlantic.

"I generally agree that data exports to third countries may no longer be based on Standard Contractual Clauses. However, the ECJ shows the possibility of continuing such exports with additional guarantees. This could include an effective encryption of data stored in the U.S., which the U.S. service provider cannot break," Brink said.

The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump group led by Kellyanne Conway’s husband George, and other disillusioned Republicans, takes aim at Jared Kushner, “Trump’s Secretary of Failure,” in its latest sizzler noting that he may be more powerful inside the White House, but “like his father-in-law, he’s not up to the task.”

“This pampered princeling has never met a problem he couldn’t f**k up,” the ad continues.

The ad notes that Kushner was put in charge of the COVID response: “150,000 people dead. And an economy in ruins. his Task Force put Trump cronies first and of course Jared’s family cashed in on bailout money. No surprise from the son of a convicted felon and slumlord who served time in prison.”

The post Secretary of Failure: ‘The Lincoln Project’ Puts Jared Kushner on Blast — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Trump’s insane and delusional Axios interview with Jonathan Swan is being broadcast by the Biden campaign in a haunting ad using Trump’s cold assessment of Americans dying in the COVID-19 pandemic: “It is what it is.”

Thousands of Americans are dying every week. The President's response?

"It is what it is." pic.twitter.com/GT59hr14kb

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 4, 2020

CNN reports that the Biden campaign has reserved $280 million in TV and digital ads to batter Trump over his handling of the pandemic: “The presumptive Democratic nominee’s ads will often run 60 seconds rather than the more typical 30-second commercials, and will frequently feature Biden speaking directly into a camera, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a memo Wednesday. The ads will focus heavily on the pandemic, contrasting what Biden’s campaign sees as Trump’s failures with the former vice president’s experience and empathy. Biden’s ads are intended to allow voters to ‘hear directly from the vice president in his own voice, speaking to this moment that we’re in,’ O’Malley Dillon told reporters in a call detailing the strategy.”

The post ‘It Is What It Is’ — Biden Hits Trump on COVID Deaths in Blistering New Ad, Plans $280 Million Buy in 15 States appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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In the video, Juniper Simonis screams as they are pushed to the ground, struggling, by a group of men in military fatigues who wield large, black weapons. While Simonis is handcuffed and their service dog barks, the men surround them, a wall of camo, blocking the videographer from capturing the full extent of what’s happening. Simonis wears shorts and a tank top, but the men appear dressed for war. The officers’ uniforms bear a large patch that says “police,” but they aren’t police. They’re federal agents, but with no name tags or badges, they are, in the moment of Simonis’s arrest, impossible to identify.

Simonis is an American scientist — a computational ecologist who does data analysis for researchers and the government. Last month, Simonis was detained outside a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, by mysterious men now known to be agents of the Department of Homeland Security, a federal agency created to fight terrorism. By Simonis’s own estimation, the scientist spent around eight hours in the agents’ custody. For the first 45 minutes or so, they said, they were held in a parking garage without having been read their rights. Simonis was then transferred to a U.S. Marshals’ lockup. Their request to call a lawyer or a friend was refused. Eventually, Simonis was given a citation for vandalism related to chalking the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, and sent out the door in the middle of the night with no way home.

Simonis’s story is not how most Americans expect law enforcement to work. But over the last few weeks, it’s become part of a familiar pattern. DHS agents in Portland have tear-gassed protesters and pulled individuals into unmarked vans, and some of those people were banned from attending any more protests as a condition of being released from jail. The agency also collected information on journalists who published leaked documents.

Late last week, a deal was struck with Oregon’s governor to withdraw the troops. The governor said it was happening immediately, but DHS officials said it was a phased withdrawal and that they wouldn’t leave until “[W]e are assured that the courthouse and other federal facilities will no longer be attacked nightly.”

These events sit in a weird nexus. They are extraordinary enough to draw the attention of legal scholars and criticism from civil liberties groups. But politically, the response has been divided. House Democrats called for an investigation, while Sen. Rand Paul is the only congressional Republican to speak out against the DHS response. The media’s reaction has also fallen along well-worn lines, with outlets like the National Review telling readers that the events in Portland were justified and The Atlantic saying justification was impossible. That divided response makes some experts almost as concerned as the arrests. Partisanship is dangerous, they told us, particularly when it’s accompanied by a long series of warning signs that could signal serious danger for American democracy.

Portland is not the first place the federal government has stepped in with disproportionate force against the will of local authorities. In 1794, George Washington himself led a militia of 13,000 men into Pennsylvania to put down an anti-tax revolt. And while that is a very long time to reach back for precedent, experts say it’s important to understand the context of American history when it comes to violation of democratic norms. “Contrary to what a lot of people assume, American democracy has always been fragile and in real danger of backsliding,” said Suzanne Mettler, a professor of American politics at Cornell University and one of the authors of “Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy.”

She, and other experts, consider our current time period one in which authoritarianism poses a serious risk — but not because of what is happening with the DHS in Portland. Instead, it’s more likely that recent events are a symptom of something bigger, a risk that has steadily grown in the last several decades. Instead, they point to the political polarization evident in public opinion on Portland as indicative of the danger we’re in.

When it comes to Portland, specifically, the partisan divide is definitely real. In a survey fielded by Data for Progress on July 28, respondents were split about Trump’s decision to send DHS to Oregon, with 42 percent calling the deployment of federal police “essential” and 45 percent calling it an “overstep.” And that split was highly partisan. Broken down by party affiliation, nearly three-quarters of Republicans favored the decision while a similar proportion of Democrats opposed it. (Full disclosure: Shom Mazumder, one of the authors of this article, is a fellow at Data for Progress.)

That, by itself, isn’t much of a shock. We are, for better or for worse, used to all sorts of issues dividing public opinion. The terrifying thing is the way it links partisan politics and authoritarianism. According to a recent report by the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group, support for democracy is in no way universal. In fact, their findings show that 1 in 3 Americans have, at some point in the last three years, supported some kind of authoritarian view, and only about 80 percent said it was very important to live in a democracy.

And separate polling, commissioned by Mazumder before Portland, from YouGov Blue, an arm of YouGov that primarily serves Democratic and progressive clients, underscores this as well. Although it found that Republicans were less supportive overall of democracy — 1 out of 4 Republicans said that democracy is a “very bad” or “fairly bad” way to govern the country compared to just four percent of Democrats. There was also more support for a strong leader, defined in the survey as someone “who does not have to bother with Congress and elections” among Republicans. But it wasn’t just Republicans driving these anti-democratic views. A significant percentage of Democrats said they preferred to have “experts, not the government” make decisions on what they think is best for the country.

That isn’t necessarily all that surprising when you consider we’ve spent the last 30 years building up an increasingly apocalyptic view of our political opponents and their intentions. Since 1994, Pew Research Center has asked Americans about the amount of partisan animosity they held. In that time, the percentage of people who rate the opposing party as “very unfavorable” has climbed from about 20 percent to more than 50 percent. In fact, as of 2016, more than 40 percent of both Republicans and Democrats said they saw the other side as a threat to the nation.

That poses a real threat to our democracy, too. “If we view that if one party gets into power they’ll be a threat to my way of life or the nation as a whole, we’ll do whatever we can to keep them out or keep ourselves in,” said Jennifer McCoy, a professor of political science at Georgia State University. That, she added, is when people start to tolerate the violation of democratic norms. “The goal is to stay in power or get in power and it overrides the value of respecting democratic principles,” she said.

In fact, research from political scientists Matt Graham and Milan Svolik of Yale University found that survey measures might even overestimate the American public’s commitment to upholding democratic norms, especially when subverting norms might help get one side’s preferred candidate pushed through.

Looking at situations in American history and around the world, McCoy, Mettler and other experts have found that extreme polarization is one major red flag that shows a democracy is in trouble. That’s because people will condone all kinds of violence in the name of protecting themselves, said Christian Davenport, professor of political science at the University of Michigan. Violations of norms — even the law — become justifiable depending on who is doing the rule-breaking and who is being targeted.

Through that lens, it makes perfect sense why Americans are politically divided on Portland: It’s actually a divide over whether you see the protesters as a threat. And that should make us all very uncomfortable — no matter which side of the aisle we’re on. Because evidence points to the fact that many Americans, regardless of their party affiliation, are willing to condone violence and repression against their political opponents.

Back in March, McCoy and other researchers surveyed nearly 3,000 Americans about their support for various anti-democratic policies under different scenarios where one party, or the other, was in power. The results from this survey have not yet been published, but their preliminary analysis finds significantly higher support for such policies as prosecuting journalists, banning protests and disqualifying political opponents from elections in situations when a respondent’s preferred party was in power — and hoping to stay there. The effect was larger among Republicans hoping to consolidate Republican power. But it existed for Democrats, as well. For instance, while 23.6 percent of Democrats and 22.7 percent of Republicans said the president should do what the people want, even if it goes against existing laws, when their party was out of power, those numbers jumped to 29.6 percent and 35.1 percent, respectively, when the rule of law became inconvenient to keeping the other side at bay.

Not all experts who study democratic erosion think what’s going on in Portland is a threat to democracy, though. Robert Mickey, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, told us he’s more concerned with threats to voting rights and sees Portland as especially dangerous political theater.

But all of the experts we spoke to said our democracy is in a dangerous place, and that the partisan split we see over things like federal agents dragging a screaming woman into a courthouse is part of that. “We’re not immune to the rise of authoritarianism in the United States,” Mettler said. “And we can’t be cavalier in thinking we are.”

CORRECTION (August 5, 2020, 1:58 p.m.): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the percentage of Americans who said it was very important to live in a democracy. It was 80 percent, not 20 percent. It also said that survey measures might underestimate the American public’s commitment to upholding democratic norms, when in fact, they might overestimate them.

That guy is a real person from the real world, the dialogue in the first panel is verbatim what I heard him say in the supermarket checkout line. Those are the clothes he was wearing. That is his real hair.

Fox News will no doubt eventually be forced to boot Tucker Carlson off their airwaves, likely for the same reason they were forced to part with Glenn Beck: At some point the host's increasingly rabid proclamations and incitements will create more legal liability to the company than the dwindling advertising revenues can make up for. Until that moment, however, Tucker and his band of ragingly racist writers will continue to produce the Tucker Carlson White Nationalism Funtime Show, sponsored by That Pillow Guy.

Tucker's latest claim: Three Black women on Joe Biden's shortlist of potential vice presidents is "probably illegal." Yeah, he said that. It's Tucker. This is his nightly song-and-dance. It's what the pillow guy pays for, and why he's Trump's new best friend, and how Fox News mainstreams racist bullshit into things that the rest of the network's hosts can then coincidentally wedge into their own discussions.

As transcribed by The Daily Beast: “For what could very well be the most important job on Earth, Biden has decided to hire exclusively on the basis of qualities that are both immutable and completely irrelevant—race and gender. And that’s it. But wait a second, you ask, isn’t that insulting? Isn’t it wrong? Isn’t it probably illegal? Yes, it is all three of those things.”

Tucker had personal insults for each of the four Black women he was singling out, of course. Rep. Karen Bass is a "lunatic," Stacey Abrams is allegedly "delusional," former National Security Adviser Susan Rice was something-something-Benghazi, and as for Sen. Kamala Harris: "Pretty much no one who knows Kamala Harris likes her." (If this sounds almost exactly like the same insults Donald Trump himself hurls, it is no coincidence. It is well known that Tucker and Trump share a single brain, which they pass back and forth in a lunchbox. When Trump has one of his sleepier, medicated-seeming performances, it is because Tucker was late returning the lunchbox brain.)

Biden has been considering other Americans besides those four, of course. But it is those four whose presence Tucker considers "probably illegal." He does not mean it; this is just one of many hats Tucker Carlson has donned in his self-promotional career, but at the moment stirring up white nationalism of the Proud Boys, Klan, and bitter drunk uncles everywhere is the most lucrative path.

So sure, Biden being uncomfortable choosing yet another white man in this particular moment is "probably illegal," Tucker says in his nightly attempt to rile his racist audience, "but no one's pushing back against it." It is nonsense meant to make his racist audience angry, in a campaign to make them angry every night, without fail, relentlessly, forever. What happens after that is of no concern to Tucker; at least for now, That Pillow Guy is paying his bills.

It was never cute. It was gross, unbridled, and hostile bigotry, racism, sexism, and xenophobia in its purest form, and it managed to be just appealing enough to some white Americans in 2016 to swing the electoral college in Donald Trump's favor.

But now, as Republicans helplessly watch Trump drive their party into the ground, his politics of toxic white grievance don't seem quite as appealing as they once did.

“It’s like when a 25-year old gets drunk and shows up at a family engagement. That can be cute," a senior GOP congressional aide told Politico. "But if you’re a 50-year-old and you show up at the gathering drunk and embarrassing, that just hits a little differently. It’s not cute anymore.”

It's impossible to know for certain whether that GOP aide was a white male, but that observation—that Trump's cruelty was ever cute—feels impossibly white and male. Nonetheless, that congressional aide was among those particularly down on Trump as Republicans seem to be cycling through different stages of grieving their demise.

There's Rudy Giuliani, who's still in awe-inspiring denial and pushing Trump to attack Joe Biden's mental acuity. 

“I have a good friend who has early stage Alzheimer’s and they could be twins,” he said of Biden, asserting that “Nobody thinks Trump has a mental issue. ... There's no comparison between the two people in terms of being able to finish a sentence, being aware of where they are, and being able to go through five sentences that stick together. Trump is very sharp, actually."

Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. 

Then there's Newt Gingrich, who completely blew the party's leadership prospects back in the '90s but still serves as a fixture in the GOP's most hallowed literati. Gingrich thinks Trump can dig himself out of this electoral hole if he stops acting like the "law and order" Nixon of '68 and more like the '72 Nixon who ran on a great economy. Ponder that one following the economy's greatest second-quarter contraction in recorded history. 

Still other Republicans think it isn't about Trump at all, noting that Trump has been plummeting ever since incoming Chief of Staff Mark Meadows took over in February.

“I don’t think his newest team is serving him well,” said a White House official. “In fact it’s worse than ever. They came in thinking they know best, and they’ve not bothered to understand the president or West Wing.”

If only Trump had stuck with intellectual heavyweight Mick Mulvaney—he surely could have righted Trump’s COVID-19 ship. 

According to 15 Republicans interviewed by Politico, Trump is "troubled that his usual arsenal seems to be having no effect." He also surely believes the problem lies elsewhere. Thus, his shuffling of campaign managers and short-lived "pivot" to striking a somber tone on the coronavirus before going all-in on quack science, demon sperm doctors, and his completely unproven hydroxychloroqine "cure." (It’s nothing of the sort, as Dr. Anthony Fauci has repeatedly asserted.)

Some top Republicans are still hoping against hope that Trump might tune into the fact that he's in a nosedive. But they're clearly still in denial as Trump continues amassing a mountain of excuses for why he'll lose in November. 

And then, there's perhaps some acceptance from one prominent conservative who dared not speak his name.

“He’s weak, passive, and ruled by his insecurities,” he said of Trump. “We have all fallen for the oldest ruse in the book: the more insecure the person is, the more narcissistic he is.”

Speak for yourself, buddy. 

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On Tuesday, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds discussed how the state will handle school reopenings amid the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic. During a press conference, Gov. Reynolds said that if school districts hold classes online without approval, students will not receive instruction hour credits for that learning, and school administrators could face licensure penalties. As of now, it’s the governor’s requirement that school districts conduct at least 50% of learning in-person this academic year unless they get a waiver, which are given in two-week increments. 

"If schools move to primarily remote learning without approval, according again to the law, those days do not count toward instructional time,” she stated, as reported by The Des Moines Register. 

When a reporter asked Gov. Reynolds about people’s concerns with schools reopening, including students, as well as teachers, possibly getting sick or even dying as a result of the virus, she characterized the question as media “scare tactics” and said she’d also heard from parents, including single moms, about the importance of reopening schools.

Here’s that clip.

Right now, one school (Rolling Green) has received a waiver. On Monday, two school districts moved toward online learning; the Waukee school district gave a statement arguing that by state law, school districts can make decisions about potential health hazards (such as closing schools in dangerous weather), and thus they will not follow Reynolds’ order, as reported by local outlet KCCI. The Urbandale school board voted on Monday to continue virtual-only learning. The district did request to extend virtual learning at the school, but the state denied the district’s request, as reported by KCCI.

At the press conference today Reynolds addressed this matter, saying in part that “schools that choose not to return to school for at least 50% in-person instruction are not defying me, they are defying the law," as reported by local outlet KTIV.

Is any of this terribly surprising for Iowa’s pandemic response? No. Iowa is one of the last states without a statewide mask mandate, with the Republican governor instead encouraging people to rely on their personal responsibility amid the public health crisis. As Daily Kos previously covered, hundreds of physicians in Iowa recently signed an open letter pleading with Reynolds to issue a statewide mask mandate. 

Even outside of Iowa, schools reopening are seeing frightening results. One school in Indiana, for example, dealt with a positive COVID-19 case within hours of reopening. One county in Georgia was not even able to reopen to students before dealing with positive cases; 260 school district employees were out with either positive coronavirus tests or contact with a case. 

Of course, Betsy DeVos still hasn’t answered these questions about schools reopening, either. 

Retired Army Col. Douglas MacGregor has a history of grossly Islamophobic and anti-immigrant comments, with many focusing on Muslim migrants to Europe, and he has criticized Germany for offering assistance to “millions of unwanted Muslim invaders.” So of course Donald Trump has nominated him to be ambassador to Germany.

MacGregor’s comments were reported by CNN’s KFile as his nomination is pending and as Trump announced a plan to withdraw nearly 12,000 troops from Germany. That move is widely seen as benefiting Russia, and guess what: MacGregor went on Russian state-controlled TV network RT in 2014 as Russia was trying to annex Crimea from Ukraine and called Eastern Ukrainians “Russians.”

MacGregor’s comments specifically about Germany, as reported by CNN, include:

• “The Germans, like the Koreans and the Japanese, are tired of this American troop presence on their soil. And I think that if you want the Germans to step up and assert themselves as the great power that they are, one of the first steps in that direction is to change our relationship with Germany in terms of military power. Make it clear to them that we are not going to be the first responder.”
• ”The Germans, thanks to us, don't feel obligated to defend themselves. And the President has simply said, 'look, why should the American taxpayer defend you if you aren't willing to defend yourself?”
• ”These people [Muslim migrants] are not coming to assimilate and become part of Europe. They're coming to benefit to consume and to establish themselves inside other people's countries with the goal of eventually turning Europe into an Islamic state. That's a bad thing for the West. It's a bad thing for Europeans.”
• ”[Germany is] spending money, but they have practically no armed forces, their army, their air force, both are terribly demoralized. I know many, many men who were in those armed forces in Germany, and that's a function of this extremely bizarre government that seems more concerned about providing free services to millions of unwanted Muslim invaders, to be blunt, than it does about its own armed forces in the defense of its country.” (Gee, do you think we should maybe talk about the history of why it’s not seen as a great idea for Germany to have a large, powerful military?)

Of course, his offensive comments aren’t all about Muslim migrants in Europe. MacGregor has also had plenty of terrible things to say about immigrants coming to the U.S.-Mexico border, including comments like “the only solution is martial law on the border, putting the United States Army in charge of it and closing it off would take about 30, 40,000 troops. We're talking about the regular army. You need robust rules of engagement. That means that you can shoot people as required if your life is in danger.”

This guy is supposedly going to be a diplomat in a country he’s repeatedly insulted. It’s very typical of the Trump administration’s approach to relationships with world powers, but the Senate should absolutely not confirm MacGregor.

Divided government is the real culprit.

A virus has brought the world's most powerful country to its knees. From a report: A pandemic can be prevented in two ways: Stop an infection from ever arising, or stop an infection from becoming thousands more. The first way is likely impossible. There are simply too many viruses and too many animals that harbor them. Bats alone could host thousands of unknown coronaviruses; in some Chinese caves, one out of every 20 bats is infected. Many people live near these caves, shelter in them, or collect guano from them for fertilizer. Thousands of bats also fly over these people's villages and roost in their homes, creating opportunities for the bats' viral stowaways to spill over into human hosts. Based on antibody testing in rural parts of China, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that studies emerging diseases, estimates that such viruses infect a substantial number of people every year. "Most infected people don't know about it, and most of the viruses aren't transmissible," Daszak says. But it takes just one transmissible virus to start a pandemic. Sometime in late 2019, the wrong virus left a bat and ended up, perhaps via an intermediate host, in a human -- and another, and another. Eventually it found its way to the Huanan seafood market, and jumped into dozens of new hosts in an explosive super-spreading event. The COVID-19 pandemic had begun. [...] Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, "so that when something like this happens, you're moving quickly," Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. "By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken." Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, and urged Americans to avoid going there.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Florida’s major coronavirus outbreak has come very, very close to Gov. Ron DeSantis, and maybe to Donald Trump as well.

Last week, DeSantis attended a Florida Sheriffs Association meeting. As of Monday, five of the attendees of that meeting have tested positive for COVID-19, including Corrections Secretary Mark Inch and Department of Corrections Deputy Secretary Ricky Dixon. Two sheriffs have also tested positive, one of whom got his positive test just hours before he was slated to appear with Trump at an endorsement event. Fifteen sheriffs did do that Trump event, with none of the participants wearing masks.

DeSantis strongly implied but did not say outright that he had recently had a negative test. “I’m tested regularly, and I don’t have or have not had any symptoms,” he said. “The number of times I’ve been tested has been pretty significant, and I’ve had my temperature checked probably 100 times in the last few months.”

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and incoming state House Speaker Chris Sprowls also attended the sheriffs meeting. Organizers of the event said strict social distancing procedures were observed, and it’s not known whether the people who have since tested positive were infected there or elsewhere.

Florida’s new cases are trending down after several disastrous weeks, but the state still had 245 deaths reported Tuesday (though reports can come days or even weeks after the death occurred). The state’s positive test rate has been over 10% on all but two days over the past two weeks.