Jesus fucking christ. Now they just ignore decisions they don't like.
The Trump administration is openly and defiantly ignoring what are now multiple court orders on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Despite the Supreme Court’s historic ruling last month and then a federal judge’s ruling last Friday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) claimed the administration was “reviewing the court decision,” like the order was somehow a choice. But in the eyes of an authoritarian white supremacist administration displeased with the court outcomes, that’s what it believes it really is.
The administration’s open defiance of court orders to fully reopen the program to hundreds of thousands of new applicants (and much-needed fees that USCIS desperately needs) “may put immigration officials at risk of court penalties,” Law360 said. “The agency's failure to comply could leave administration officials facing a contempt order, or at least the threat of one, from a federal judge, according to Leon Rodriguez, who served as USCIS director for three years during the Obama administration.”
It’s hard to keep up with the administration’s lawlessness lately, especially at the hands of unconfirmed Department of Homeland Security officials Chad Wolf (who last year lied to Congress about his role in the family separation policy) and anti-immigrant loudmouth Ken Cuccinelli (who was unlawfully appointed to USCIS, a federal judge ruled this year). But just openly refusing to accept the court’s orders—I’m just astounded. I know I shouldn’t be three and half years into this horror show, but I am.
The lawlessness and authoritarian defiance is happening as experts say there’s no wiggle room because the orders are clear. The Supreme Court’s June decision finding the administration unlawfully ended the program was certified over a week ago, meaning the administration had “an unambiguous obligation to fully reinstate DACA,” experts with the Center for American Progress (CAP) wrote. But the administration still refused to budge.
Then on Friday, another court made another clear ruling requiring the administration “to restore DACA to the way it operated before the administration tried to terminate it in the fall of 2017,” CBS News reported. That includes reopening to brand new applicants and reinstating advance parole, which allowed some DACA recipients to be able to travel internationally for specific reasons and return home to the U.S. But the administration has continued to refuse to budge.
The same rogue agency snatching people off the street is currently defying court orders to open up new DACA applications despite losing TWICE as if we don�t have 3 branches of govt.
This is the point where if nobodies like us (and who aren’t friends with the president) defied a court order, our asses would get it. And it’s not just that the authoritarian Trump administration is saying that the court can go fuck itself because it didn’t like the outcome of the rulings, it’s that it’s also blocking hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from their chance to apply for relief, including work permits and protection from deportation.
So what happens now? Well, we keep screaming about this because we have no other choice. The courts could sanction, and they should. Chad and Ken certainly come to mind. “You have a court that's basically said they need to immediately begin authorizing new DACA cases and continue with DACA renewals,” Rodriguez continued to Law360. "That's an order that needs to be executed immediately." CAP’s Phil Wolgin told The American Prospect: “I think they could be legitimately sued, and will be sued for contempt of court.”
”Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, policy manager at United We Dream, said that she had heard from folks who applied for DACA as soon as the Supreme Court’s decision came out, and at least one was rejected on July 1,” the report continued. “But as of July 13, when the Court’s judgement was certified, applications have good standing to be accepted—and if they’re denied, to sue the government for noncompliance with a court order. ‘Our thinking is that they’re going to delay this as much as possible.’”
So no one should broadcast the obvious campaign rally
The White House announced on Monday that Donald Trump will be resuming his coronavirus briefings on Tuesday afternoon. That announcement seemed to catch members of Trump’s coronavirus task force by surprise, with Dr. Anthony Fauci learning about it in the middle of an interview and saying that he “expected” to be part of such briefings … though admitting he knew nothing about it.
As it turns out, Dr. Fauci need not concern himself. CDC Director Robert Redfield can also stay home, as can the disturbingly fawning Dr. Deborah Birx. Even Mike Pence can apparently grab a chair and watch. Because Trump is doing this briefing solo. Meaning that America can expect to get a briefing on the most critical items of the deadly crisis: The need to defend racist statutes, why polls are all fake news, and just where is Hunter anyway?
The last time America joined Donald Trump for a multi-hour rally substitute, it was to ponder the deep questions of whether injecting bleach, or putting sunlight inside people, could take care of COVID-19. The biggest difference between that event and what the nation can expect on Tuesday is that there will be no one for Trump to turn to and ask if his sudden inspirations just happen to be deadly ignorance.
According to CNN, not everyone at the White House is exactly thrilled at the idea of Trump stepping back in front of the camera for the kind of low energy, disjointed ramble he displayed day after day in his original briefings. The more Americans saw of Trump, the lower his handling of the crisis went, and White House aides spent weeks talking Trump off that ledge to get his appearances cancelled in the first place.
Now, with Trump falling ever further behind Biden in the polls and his attempts to restart his rallies ended in embarrassment—and outbreaks—a portion of the White House staff feels it’s critical that Trump get back out there and pretend to care about the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Americans currently infected with SARS-CoV-2 and the millions threatened by COVID-19. Even Trump wasn’t all that keen on getting back at that podium after listening to the months of jokes that resulted from his last off the cuff suggestion on internal disinfectants.
So the White House made a deal—Trump can talk about whatever he wants, not just the pandemic that threatens every family in the nation. That’s right. What’s being sold to the networks as a coronavirus briefing is really just Free Airtime for Trump to lie about anything he likes. China. Antifa. Obama. You can absolutely bet it’s going to all be there.
The best suggestion for a coronavirus briefing that only features Trump, is that Trump is also the only one who should be watching it.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at an event on February 19 in Washington, DC. | Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for DVF
Lazy and overtly partisan arguments would be likely to prevail with the Supreme Court.
On Friday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg released an unsettling statement. This May, she explained, she “began a course of chemotherapy (gemcitabine) to treat a recurrence of cancer.” Doctors discovered lesions on her liver, and, after less aggressive treatment “proved unsuccessful,” the justice began chemotherapy.
Ginsburg’s most recent cancer screening, which took place on July 7, “indicated significant reduction of the liver lesions and no new disease.” And she’s beaten cancer several times before. So there is reason to hope that the 87-year-old justice will continue to serve on the Court for a good while longer.
But the outcome of decades of future Supreme Court decisions is likely to turn on whether Ginsburg, a feminist icon and the seniormost member of the Court’s liberal wing, continues to serve until after President Trump leaves office.
In 2016, the Senate’s Republican majority refused to vote on — or even hold a hearing on — President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill a Supreme Court vacancy that opened up after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. At the time, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed that the “next president” must choose who fills this seat in order to “give the people a voice in filling this vacancy.”
Four years later, McConnell has made quite clear that he only cares about giving the people a voice when that voice could benefit the Republican Party. Asked in 2019 whether the Senate would confirm a Trump nominee if a vacancy opened the same year as the 2020 election, McConnell smiled and replied, “oh, we’d fill it.”
Indeed, some Senate Republicans are already talking about filling a Supreme Court vacancy even if they are repudiated at the polls. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told an Iowa public television show on Friday that “if it comes to an appointment prior to the end of the year, I would be supportive of that,” even if it means filling the seat in a “lame-duck session.” With Republicans controlling 53 seats in the current Senate, Democrats would have to convince four Republican senators to block a Trump nominee to prevent a lame-duck confirmation.
The stakes, if a vacancy does open up on the Supreme Court, are enormous. Though Chief Justice John Roberts, frequently the median vote on the current Supreme Court, is very conservative, he is both less partisan and less aligned with movement conservatism than his fellow Republican justices. He sometimes rejects conservative legal arguments that are poorly reasoned or transparently partisan, or that ask him to move the law to the right faster than he is willing to go.
If Trump gets to replace a liberal justice like Ginsburg, however, this check on Republican power is likely to disappear. Trump spent the past three and a half years filling federal appellate courts with staunch conservatives, often with the guidance of conservative organizations such as the Federalist Society. That gives him a deep bench of potential Supreme Court nominees who are unlikely to disappoint the GOP in the future.
The Court has already moved significantly to the right since it handed down some decisions protecting LGBTQ rights, limiting police surveillance, and preserving most of Obamacare — among many other things. If Trump fills a seat currently held by a liberal justice, those decisions are potentially in grave danger.
To be sure, there’s always some amount of unpredictability in the Supreme Court. Sometimes, a conservative justice is torn between competing ideological commitments, some of which lead them to form occasional alliances with their liberal colleagues. And it’s always possible that several conservative justices could be forced to leave the Court shortly after a Democratic president takes office.
But, realistically, if Republicans gain a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, they are likely to hold that majority for a long time. And with six votes, Republicans could afford to have one of those six cast an occasional, futile vote for a liberal outcome.
Roberts is less tolerant than his fellow Republican justices of bad lawyering by conservatives
The Supreme Court completed its most recent term a little more than a week ago, a term that featured several high-profile — if narrow — losses for conservative causes. Notably, Roberts broke with his fellow Republicans in two cases where conservative advocates presented unusually weak arguments to his Court.
Roberts typicallyvotes to limit abortion rights, and his recent opinion in June Medical Services v. Russospends several pages criticizing the Court’s decisions protecting those rights. Nevertheless, Roberts reluctantly voted with his four liberal colleagues to strike down a Louisiana law requiring abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital — a credential that is very difficult for these doctors to obtain, and that does little or nothing to improve health outcomes in abortion clinics.
The reason for Roberts’s vote was simple: The Louisiana law at issue in June Medical was, in all relevant respects, identical to a Texas law the Supreme Court struck down four years earlier in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016). “I joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided,” Roberts wrote in his June Medical opinion. But he concluded that the principle of stare decisis — the doctrine that courts should generally be bound by their prior decisions — compelled him to strike down Louisiana’s law.
The striking thing about Regents is the utter pointlessness of the Trump administration’s decision to bring this case all the way to the Supreme Court. If the administration wanted to end DACA, it should have corrected its paperwork error instead of spending years unsuccessfully trying to convince the courts to excuse this error.
In many cases, Roberts’s insistence on legal and procedural regularity will only delay conservative outcomes — Roberts, for example, is still overwhelmingly likely to dismantle the constitutional right to an abortion once abortion opponents bring him a better case. But Roberts’s formalism also places significant constraints on the Court’s Republican majority, and on the Republican Party’s ability to set policy through litigation.
when, in writing for the majority of the Court, I adopt a general rule, and say, “This is the basis of our decision,” I not only constrain lower courts, I constrain myself as well. If the next case should have such different facts that my political or policy preferences regarding the outcome are quite the opposite, I will be unable to indulge those preferences; I have committed myself to the governing principle.
Roberts appears somewhat committed to this same principle that procedural rules and inconvenient precedents cannot simply be tossed aside because they stand in the way of a conservative outcome. The other four Republicans appear far less committed to this principle, given their willingness to cast aside principles like stare decisis in cases like June Medical.
And, if Trump gets to fill another seat currently held by a liberal justice, then Roberts will no longer be the swing vote. It is likely that a majority of the Supreme Court will ignore many of the constraints that, as Scalia wrote a generation ago, prevent judges from ruling by fiat.
America becomes even less democratic if Trump gets to fill another Supreme Court seat
The United States is hardly a paragon of democracy. Americans have a president who received nearly 3 million fewer votes than his Democratic opponent in 2016 and a Senate where, thanks to malapportionment, the Republican “majority” represents 15 million fewer people than the Democratic “minority.” Both of Trump’s justices were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the nation.
Meanwhile, the Court’s Republican majority has been a disaster for democracy. In this past term alone, the Court handed down three significant orders limiting voting rights in a pandemic — including a Texas order that effectively allows the state to make it very easy for older voters (who tend to favor Republicans) to obtain absentee ballots, while making it impossible for most younger voters to do the same.
“There are already five conservative votes on the Supreme Court to dismantle campaign finance reforms,” according to Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University and an expert on money in politics. In this sense, Torres-Spelliscy told me, a third Trump justice would only provide a “superfluous 6th vote” for the Court’s decisions undermining these laws.
At the time, Thomas was the only justice who took this position, but the Court has changed significantly in the decade since Citizens United was handed down. Justice Neil Gorsuch frequentlyprovides a second vote for Thomas’s most radical opinions.
Similarly, as an aide to then-President George W. Bush, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a 2002 email that there are “constitutional problems” with laws imposing limits on how much donors can give directly to candidates — one of the few campaign finance laws left untouched by decisions like Citizens United. That suggests that Kavanaugh could join Thomas in striking down more campaign finance laws.
And then there’s Justice Samuel Alito. Though Alito did not join Thomas’s opinion in Citizens United, he is arguably the most reliable Republican partisan on the Supreme Court. As Adam Feldman, a lawyer and political scientist who runs the website Empirical SCOTUS, told me, Alito “is the sole conservative justice on the Court not to join the liberals in a 5-4 decision” — meaning that he has never once cast the deciding vote for a liberal outcome. (The one plausible exception to this trend is Alito’s brief opinion in Gundy v. United States (2019). But, in Gundy, Alito endorsed a conservative deregulatory project that is rejected by all four of the Court’s liberals.)
It is unlikely, in other words, that Alito would cast a liberal vote in a campaign finance case if four other justices already support a conservative outcome.
A third Trump justice could also erect new barriers before the right to vote. Although the Roberts Court has already dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act, the primary law preventing racial voter discrimination, it has thus far left in place the law’s “results test,” which prohibits any law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
Thus, while the Act is much weaker than it was just a decade ago, it still retains some vibrancy. Many state laws that disenfranchise voters of color remain illegal.
But Roberts is a longtime opponent of this safeguard against racism in elections. According to the voting rights journalist Ari Berman, Roberts was the Reagan Justice Department’s point person in a failed effort to scuttle the results test. As a young lawyer, Roberts “wrote upwards of 25 memos opposing” such a test, according to Berman.
Roberts may have the votes right now to effectively dismantle what remains of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court has not heard a major Voting Rights Act case since the relatively moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy was replaced by the hardline conservative Justice Kavanaugh, so we don’t know how far the current Court is willing to go in dismantling what remains of the Voting Rights Act.
At the very least, however, every Republican added to the Supreme Court increases the likelihood that the remainder of the Voting Rights Act will fall.
20 million Americans could lose health coverage in the middle of a pandemic if Trump appoints another justice
Chief Justice Roberts famously broke with his fellow Republicans in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), a decision upholding most of the Affordable Care Act. Three years later, in King v. Burwell (2015) Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy broke with their fellow Republicans again to reject a new attack on Obamacare.
But Kennedy is no longer on the Court. And if one of the four liberal justices is replaced by Trump, it’s far from clear that there will still be five votes to preserve the landmark legislation that provides health coverage to approximately 20 million people.
And, if Trump does get to fill an additional Supreme Court seat, Obamacare could fall quite rapidly. The Supreme Court plans to hear oral arguments in California v. Texas, the latest case seeking to repeal Obamacare by judicial decree, in the fall.
The plaintiffs’ arguments in Texas are, frankly, outlandish. They rest on the assumption that, when Congress repealed a single provision of the Affordable Care Act in 2017, that requires the courts to dismantle the entire law. But the fact that these arguments are widely viewed as ridiculous — even by many conservative legal scholars — won’t necessarily deter most of the Supreme Court’s Republicans from voting to strike down Obamacare.
On the eve of oral arguments in NFIB, the first Obamacare decision, the plaintiffs’ arguments in that case were also widely viewed as misguided. An American Bar Association poll of Supreme Court experts found that 85 percent believed the Affordable Care Act would be upheld, and another 9 percent believed the Court would dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction.
That didn’t prevent four justices from voting to repeal the entire law. And, if Trump gets to fill another seat on the Supreme Court, that four could become five.
LGBTQ Americans could be stripped of their constitutional rights
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that federal civil rights law prohibits workplace discrimination against LGBTQ workers, is probably safe. That decision was 6-3, with both Roberts and Gorsuch voting with the majority.
But the Court’s constitutional decisions protecting LGBTQ rights stand on far more precarious ground. Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Supreme Court landmark decision establishing that same-sex couples enjoy the same marriage rights as opposite-sex couples, was a 5-4 decision with Kennedy in the majority. Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which placed strict limits on the government’s ability to prohibit sexual activity between consenting adults, and Romer v. Evans (1996), which held that the government may not pass laws solely to express “animus” against gay people, were both 6-3 decisions with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Kennedy in the majority.
O’Connor and Kennedy were replaced with hardline conservatives.
It’s possible, in other words, that all three of these decisions could fall even if no vacancy opens up on the Supreme Court — although, for that to happen, a state would likely have to pass a law that violates Obergefell, Lawrence, or Romer to test whether the Supreme Court would strike that law down. If Trump gets to fill another seat, it is even less clear that the Court’s new majority will value stare decisis more than it values a conservative approach to LGBTQ rights.
It’s also possible that the Court could leave decisions like Obergefell nominally in place, but allow states to deny many rights to LGBTQ Americans. The Court, according to Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, “might permit states to undermine Obergefell by treating married same-sex couples differently in some ways — for example, by permitting states to favor straight couples in adoption or family benefits or even in the definition of who is a legal parent.”
Minter’s view was echoed by Josh Block, a lawyer with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project. While Block said he does not think a newly constituted Court “would vote to overrule Obergefell completely and allow states to ban marriage outright,” he fears that the Court’s new majority “could allow states to treat those marriages differently.”
Indeed, that’s more or less the approach that Gorsuch took in Pavan v. Smith (2017). Obergefell held that the Constitution protects same-sex couples’ right to marry “on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.” In Pavan, a majority of the Supreme Court struck down an Arkansas law that treated married same-sex couples differently than married opposite-sex couples with respect to which names appear on a birth certificate.
Gorsuch dissented, in an opinion joined by Thomas and Alito. His opinion suggested that states may be able to discriminate against same-sex couples so long as they argue that “rational reasons exist” for the discrimination.
The EPA could become a hollow husk
As a general rule, Congress may legislate in two different ways. The simplest way is to enact a law commanding certain individuals or businesses to behave in a certain way. Thus, for example, if Congress wishes to limit pollution, it can pass a law commanding power plants to install a particular device that reduces emissions.
But Congress may also lay down a broad policy and instruct a federal agency to issue relatively easily updatable regulations implementing that policy. The Clean Air Act, for example, provides that certain power plants must use “the best system of emission reduction” that currently exists, while also taking into account factors such as cost. It also gives the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to issue binding regulations instructing energy companies on which systems they must use to limit emissions.
That way, the regulations can adapt as technology evolves. Congress still sets the overarching policy — the impacted power plants must use the “best system of emission reduction” — but EPA determines what that “best system” is at any given moment in time.
In Gundy v. United States (2019), however, Gorsuch called for vague new limits on Congress’s power to delegate regulatory power to agencies. And, while Gorsuch’s opinion in Gundy was technically a dissent, all five members of the Supreme Court’s Republican majority have since signaled that they are supportive of Gorsuch’s approach.
Current precedents typically require courts to defer to Congress’s decision to delegate regulatory power to an agency. Gorsuch would replace these precedents with a new standard providing that a federal law permitting agencies to regulate must be “‘sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain’ whether Congress’s guidance has been followed.”
Under Gorsuch’s approach, judges — and ultimately, Supreme Court justices — would get to decide which federal laws delegating power to an agency are “sufficiently definite and precise,” and which ones should be struck down.
So it will matter a great deal who sits on the Supreme Court. In a post-Gundy world, courts will have far more power to make discretionary calls about which regulations they wish to uphold and which ones they wish to strike down. That means that a more conservative Court will tend to strike down more regulations favored by Democrats.
Police could gain far more power to engage in surveillance
The current Supreme Court is arguably more friendly to criminal defendants than it was 20 years ago. For many years, the Court was dominated by conservatives incubated in the “tough on crime” rhetoric preferred by presidents like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The current Court, by contrast, is more likely to see criminal justice cases through a libertarian lens.
While it’s important that justices like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh sometimes take a broad view of the rights of criminal defendants at trial, Roberts’s support for limits on police conduct is likely to prove more consequential — because the overwhelming majority of criminal suspects never receive a trial to determine their guilt.
“97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in plea bargains, with defendants pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence,” according to a 2012 analysis by the New York Times. So Supreme Court decisions protecting trial rights only impact a small minority of defendants.
The gap between Roberts and his fellow Republicans was most on display in Carpenter v. United States (2018), where Roberts voted with his four liberal colleagues, and held that police “must generally obtain a warrant supported by probable cause” before obtaining cellphone records that can be used to track an individual’s movement.
Carpenter was a significant case because, as Justice Kennedy wrote in dissent, the Court has typically held that “individuals have no Fourth Amendment interests in business records which are possessed, owned, and controlled by a third party.”
But Roberts recognized that, as police gain more and more technologically sophisticated methods of tracking criminal suspects, the Constitution must recognize new limits on these methods. It’s one thing to say that police can track every number dialed on a particular phone, but it’s another thing altogether to say that police can turn each individual’s cellphone into a homing device that monitors their every movement.
If Roberts is no longer the swing vote, Carpenter could potentially fall. At the very least, the Court is likely to grow less skeptical of police overreach, and less fearful of the awesome surveillance power given to police by new technology.
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There is a battle right now for the absolute worst governor in America and, unsurprisingly to readers of this website, all the top contenders are from the Republican Party. Let’s review.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem
First up is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. She resisted stay-at-home orders in April, leading to a massive outbreak. In June, she released a video calling for "more freedom, not more government" while lashing out at the media. In July, she hosted Donald Trump himself for a no-mask appearance that was more of a campaign rally at Mount Rushmore. Noem had previously asked Trump to overturn the ban on fireworks around the monument. The ban went into effect after a pine beetle invasion devastated the area, leaving lots of dry timber to fuel fires, and because of concerns that fireworks debris was poisoning groundwater. Never mind it all, Noem and Trump wanted a big show of freedumb with no masks, even during one of the worst health crises in American history. For what it’s worth, there were rumors Trump liked her so much he was considering replacing Mike Pence with Noem, although people in Trump’s orbit later shut that down.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds
Next up is Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds: another governor who resisted shutting things down to flatten the curve and then oversaw a spike, mostly in agricultural sectors where immigrants working at meat processing plants bore the brunt of the outbreak. Today she is drawing the ire of teachers and school administrators after she abruptly changed the state’s policies and demanded students attend in-person this fall for at least half the regular school days. As noted in the Des Moines Register, this has sent parents and teachers into "chaos." The paper notes it is the “most concrete misstep in addressing the next school year. It throws into chaos families' expectations about school as they continue to confront rampant uncertainty about COVID-19 in many other aspects of their lives.”
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp
And now we head further south, where the top contenders all reside. Crossing over the Mason-Dixon line, we have Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia. He rode into office on a wave of voter suppression, suppression that he directly created and implemented in his previous role as secretary of state. Kemp proudly resisted shutdown orders until the data clearly showed that the virus was beginning to spiral out of control. We were fully into the month of April and full-blown efforts to “flatten the curve” when Kemp held a press conference saying he’d just learned asymptomatic people could spread the disease, something the rest of us were all aware of because we listened to the scientists from the start. Making this even worse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are headquartered in Atlanta. All he had to do was consult with literally anyone at the CDC for this information.
And when Donald Trump saw his poll numbers beginning to slide and started barking about ordering everything to open back up, Kemp was right there to lead the charge. When Trump’s charge to reopen was criticized and his numbers slumped even more, he quickly threw Kemp under the bus, criticizing him for reopening too soon. Even today, as the science is clear as day that masks are critical in reducing the spread of the disease, Gov. Brian Kemp has the gall to sue Atlanta for requiring masks in the city. Bless his heart.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt flouts mask recommendations with his family
When that COVID wind came sweeping down the plains, Gov. Kevin Stitt largely refused to wear a mask. Sure he was telling folks in March they were "safer at home," but over on his Twitter account, he was proudly defying expert advice to stay home, avoid indoor spaces, and wear masks, sharing photos of his family out to dinner in a crowded restaurant. He has since deleted this tweet after announcing on July 15 that he is the first governor in the country to test positive for COVID.
And while the restaurant photo drew national attention, that same week he shared photos at a junior livestock show that took place indoors, with not a mask in sight.
And now onto Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or as he is now called on Twitter: Ron DeathSantis or Rona DeSantis. In late May, DeSantis appeared with Vice President Mike Pence in Florida to spike the ball, raging against the media for what he called “knee-jerk headlines” after images from crowded Florida beaches went viral. He was basically claiming victory over an enemy that was, in reality, just getting started. When he raged at the media on May 20, Florida was averaging 527 new cases per day. Today the Sunshine State reported 10,347 new cases, the sixth consecutive day in a row the state has exceeded 10,000 new cases a day. On Sunday, Florida topped 5,000 deaths. For what it’s worth, in early May, experts estimated Florida would have 5,440 deaths by Aug. 4. DeSantis brushed it off, calling it “conjecture.” Turns out that estimate was low.
And that leads us to the Show Me State of Missouri, where Gov. Mike Parson has shown himself to be a total buffoon. You might be thinking, even worse than DeSantis? I’m here to to sadly affirm this to be true. As a lifelong Kansas Citian (from both sides of this Kansas-Missouri state line), it is hard to understate just how embarrassed and frankly how frightened I am to live in this state right now. Like Donald Trump, Mike Parson seems intent on inflicting maximum harm on the residents of the state’s urban centers. From sending the National Guard to Kansas City during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests (which served only to turn up the temperature of protesters, instantly creating tension and conflict where there had been very little), to vowing to pardon the St. Louis couple who pointed guns at peaceful protesters as they walked down the street in front of their tacky St. Louis mansion if charges end up being filed in the case, Parson keeps lowering the bar.
Then there was the embarrassing display at the White House, where he slathered praise on Donald Trump during a made-for-television July 7 meeting on reopening. His comments were widely mocked both nationally and back home in Missouri. Shortly after traveling to D.C., Parson returned home for a steak fry event—no masks, no social distancing, and with most of the programming taking place indoors. This happened in mid-July 2020, with all the information we have about how this disease spreads.
� Governor Mike Parson (@GovParsonMO) July 12, 2020
And don’t even get me started on his steak cooking. What he did is a disgrace to good steaks everywhere.
From the start of the COVID-19 crisis, Parson’s leadership has been abysmal. As the entire nation was heading into a shutdown and every public health expert on the planet was cautioning for social-distancing, staying in, and avoiding indoor spaces, Parson was sending the exact opposite message to his constituents. This was Mike Parson on March 15.
Teresa and I joined our family this morning to pray for our state and for our county on this National Day of Prayer. pic.twitter.com/XUHIFBJV4g
� Governor Mike Parson (@GovParsonMO) March 15, 2020
No masks, indoor space, defying all public health experts: It is no wonder Missouri ranks dead last in state public health funding. And I do mean dead last, because Missourians die due to these budgetary decisions.
Finally, in an interview on Monday with conservative radio host Marc Cox, Parson insisted children go back to school full-time and that children who contract COVID will simply be sent home. “These kids have got to get back to school. They’re at the lowest risk possible. And if they do get COVID-19, which they will — and they will when they go to school — they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctor’s offices. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.”
And that, my friends, was the icing on the freedumb cake for me and why I had to move Mike Parson to the top of the list. Where does Mike Parson think those kids are going? They are going home to mom and dad. They are going home to grandparents who live in the home. They are very, very likely to spread it to their teachers and support staff. Where are those adults supposed to go? What are the protocols when a teacher contracts COVID? Is there testing available in each school? How many substitute teachers are willing to take their place? Sen. Elizabeth Warren rightly took Parson to task for his comments on reopening schools, saying, “This is willfully endangering our kids—and entire communities—for political gain. Forcing schools to reopen without providing them with the resources they need to do so safely is reckless, dangerous, and the last thing we should do.”
So how does your governor stack up? Who did I miss? Sound off in the comments below. For those of you who don’t live in South Dakota, Iowa, Georgia, Oklahoma, Florida, or Missouri, what is it like having a governor who isn’t a mouth-breathing, science-denying, anti-life, authoritarian-praising, bad steak-cooking incompetent?
A demonstrator carries a “Not my president” sign outside the Colorado Capitol on the eve of the Electoral College vote in Denver, on December 18, 2016. | Chris Schneider/AFP/Getty Images
Why the framers created the Electoral College — and why we need to get rid of it.
One of the biggest problems with American democracy is that it’s not democratic.
Two of the last five presidents were elected despite losing the popular vote, more than half the Senate is elected by roughly 18 percent of the population, and voting districts are increasingly gerrymandered in ways that disenfranchise the people who live there.
Our process for choosing the president, the Electoral College, is probably the strangest and most explicitly anti-democratic feature of the American political system. It was conceived in part as a firewall against majority will in case the mob ever elected someone grotesquely unqualified for the office. (It, uh, didn’t work.)
But the history is more complicated than that. Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional scholar at Yale, has argued that the Electoral College was a concession to the slave states at the time of the founding. Another popular theory is that the Electoral College was designed to prevent presidential candidates from ignoring the smaller, less populated states.
Whatever the case, there’s no denying that the Electoral College is anti-democratic. According to Democratic data scientist David Shor, “The Electoral College bias is now such that realistically [Democrats] have to win by 3.5 to 4 percent in order to win presidential elections.” So why is it still around? What purpose does it serve today? And more importantly, can we get rid of it?
Jesse Wegman, an editorial board member at the New York Times, has made a definitive case against the Electoral College in his book Let the People Pick the President. Among other things, Wegman argues that the Electoral College creates a false picture of a country reduced to red and blue states when, in fact, the United States is a purple country — and Americans pay a huge price for upholding a system that doesn’t represent that diversity.
I spoke to Wegman about the shoddy origins of the Electoral College and why he thinks we have to eliminate it back in July, but the conversation is still relevant. Joe Biden has opened up a wide lead over Donald Trump in the national polls, but the race is by no means over, thanks to the Electoral College. If Trump loses the popular vote by a few million votes and somehow manages to win the election by securing 270 electoral votes, discontent over this antidemocratic relic may well boil over.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
You explain in the book how slipshod and hurried the process of conceiving the Electoral College was. No one really believed in it all that much and it was cobbled together at the last minute and only adopted because every other idea failed to win enough support. Were there any justifiable reasons for creating it in the first place?
Jesse Wegman
You can certainly look at things from the framers’ perspective and say it’s understandable that they were concerned about how to elect the president. It had never been done before. They were building this out of whole cloth and the concerns that they had were real.
One of the major concerns was that many of the delegates didn’t want Congress involved in electing the president since they had just created a system built on a separation of powers. Another concern was that citizens would never be able to make an informed decision about national candidates because they just wouldn’t have the information they needed, given the nature of communications technology back then.
Sean Illing
What would you say was the foremost reason they created the Electoral College?
Jesse Wegman
I don’t think there was a foremost purpose. As you said, they were scrambling to get this thing done and they debated it endlessly for something like 21 days. And none of the other proposals, like a national popular vote, had enough support to get into the Constitution.
But I’d say the driving force was to get the Constitution finished and sent out for ratification. Beyond that, the main issues were keeping the election of the president out of Congress’s hands and ensuring the electors who made up the Electoral College knew who the candidates were and could make wise decisions.
And then of course you had the immovable obstacle of slavery and ensuring that the slave-holding states didn’t unravel the whole process. James Madison himself said during the middle of the convention that “the popular vote is the fittest way to elect a president,” but that the South wouldn’t go for it. And he says this more than once. So it’s clear that the Founders knew the slave states had a ton of leverage.
Sean Illing
We know the process of passing it was flawed. We know it was the product of brutal compromises. But has the Electoral College ever operated the way it was intended to operate?
Jesse Wegman
No — with the possible exception of the first two elections when George Washington was on the ticket. But after that, we basically had electors who were not operating in what the framers thought of as the best interests of the country. The electors were just party hacks. That was clear by 1796, and it’s just as clear today. The electors have never been these disinterested, neutral, wise men the founders imagined.
Sean Illing
Why have all the attempts to reform or abolish the Electoral College failed?
Jesse Wegman
I think that the most common reason is because one or both political parties have seen themselves as benefiting from it in some way. So it’s almost always a short-term political calculus that keeps the college alive. It’s very rare that it’s about anything relating to democratic principles or some notion of what’s fair or just. No one thinks the Electoral College was a brilliant constitutional invention, but it’s been preserved over the years for political reasons.
Sean Illing
Okay, but the dynamics have changed, right? Now the Electoral College benefits the Republican Party almost exclusively.
Jesse Wegman
You’re right that the college has typically leaned toward one party or the other — that was true in 2016 and almost certainly true for 2020. But I’d also say that it’s harder than we think to say that definitively in advance of an election.
Republicans won the 2004 election, but the Electoral College actually gave the Democrats a boost. If 60,000 votes went the other way in Ohio, George W. Bush would have won the national popular vote by 3 million votes, but John Kerry would’ve been elected. So the advantages aren’t so fixed.
But yes, I concede the point you’re making: Right now, the Electoral College benefits Republicans pretty clearly, and a split election is much, much more likely to go the Republican candidate.
Sean Illing
A lot of people who hear these sorts of objections to the Electoral College think it’s just sour grapes from liberals who don’t like the current outcome of the system. How do you respond to that?
Jesse Wegman
I’m as upset as anybody who experienced their preferred candidate winning more votes and not being elected. I think it violates our basic sense of what majority rule means. All I would say to those people is, look at Trump’s tweet in 2012 arguing that the Electoral College is a disaster for democracy. The circumstances of that tweet is that on Election Night 2012, early exit polling was suggesting that Mitt Romney might win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College to Obama. So the mere possibility that that could happen triggered Trump’s tweet, and all I’ll say is that I sympathize.
Sean Illing
And it’s actually happened twice in the last 20 years for Democrats —
Jesse Wegman
Right! And I’ll bet any amount of money that the moment it happened in the other direction, you would see exactly the same reaction from the other side, and that’s because everybody in their gut feels the unfairness of a system that does not put the person with the most votes in the White House.
The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
What would you say is the biggest myth or misconception about the Electoral College?
Jesse Wegman
This idea that somehow small states currently have a voice under the Electoral College system, and that they would lose that voice under a popular vote, is just the exact inverse of reality. Right now, small states have no voice because they, like big states and medium-size states across the country, are not battleground states. The only states that matter in a winner-take-all Electoral College scenario are battleground states, and those are the states where the candidates spend virtually 100 percent of their time and money trying to win.
There are 13 states with three or four electoral votes. We call those the small states. One of those states, New Hampshire, is a battleground state. New Hampshire gets more attention from both campaigns every four years than all the other 12 small states combined. The small states are a complete nonentity right now.
Sean Illing
What about the claim that big cities would dominate a popular election?
Jesse Wegman
As a factual mathematical matter, that’s just untrue. The biggest cities in the country don’t come close to having enough votes to swing a national election. They can’t even swing elections for governor in their own states. New York City didn’t vote for George Pataki. Los Angeles didn’t vote for Pete Wilson in 1990. The 50 biggest cities in the country represent about 15 percent of the population. Even in fairly big cities with more than 350,000 people or so, roughly 40 percent of the vote goes to Republican candidates — and in any case it’s far from zero. And often in rural areas, the same electoral math holds.
And then just by comparison, the rural areas of America also represent about 15 percent of the population, and they vote about 60/40 in favor of the Republicans. So big cities and rural America are essentially a wash in every presidential election. So the idea that big cities would somehow suddenly decide who the president was for everybody else is just wrong on the math.
Sean Illing
A central focus of your book is this idea that ending the Electoral College would change the way candidates campaign and therefore the sorts of issues they prioritize. Why is that a big deal?
Jesse Wegman
It’s a great question, and I think it really gets to the heart of what the problem is here. When candidates only visit a few states and even a few regions in those few states, you really see a warping of policy priorities. Both Democratic and Republican candidates focus on issues that are important to, say, coal miners in Pennsylvania or auto workers in Michigan, but those aren’t the only issues in the country. And if you have a campaign that is forced to pay attention to everyone in the country and has to treat every vote as equally important, which is what a popular vote election would be, this would solve these problems and it would be more fair to the country as a whole.
Issues like immigration reform, health care reform, background checks on guns — these are things that the vast majority of the country supports, and it’s very hard to get presidential candidates to really get behind them if they aren’t the key issues for voters in battleground states.
Sean Illing
The most common defense of the Electoral College is that it’s a kind of last-resort firewall against a manifestly unfit president. Now, obviously, our current president proves how useless that firewall is, but is there a case, in principle at least, for keeping the Electoral College on these grounds?
Jesse Wegman
No, it’s a terrible reason. And you just explained why: Donald Trump. If ever there was a candidate who should have been stopped by what we think the Electoral College was designed to do, it was Donald Trump in 2016. But the reverse happened. So the reality is that the Electoral College has never really worked as a firewall against unfit candidates because it’s a fundamentally partisan institution. The 2016 election ought to put an end to this argument forever.
Sean Illing
There’s at least one way to effectively end the Electoral College without technically abolishing it. Can you explain what that is?
Jesse Wegman
It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it’s a quite simple way of using the Electoral College that the framers designed as a means to a popular vote. It’s not an end-run around the college, as people like to call it. It draws on the Constitution, which gives states almost total authority to award their electors however they want. So the idea is that states who join it agree to award all of their electors to whichever candidate wins the most votes in the nation, not in their state, which is how most states do it now. It’s an elegant and clever solution to this problem.
Sean Illing
Do you think we reach a breaking point where the status quo loses its legitimacy and we’re confronted with a genuine political crisis?
Jesse Wegman
People often say to me, “Well, how is this ever going to happen? Republicans have to get on board, and they’re never going to do it.” Everybody always has a reason for explaining why this isn’t going to work. I think that overestimates the American people’s tolerance for a system in which majority rule is violated repeatedly. If this happens again in 2020, I think you’ll see a much stronger push to get the compact passed in a few other states that are right now either considering it or may soon.
We’re in a moment where people are thinking about constitutional reform in a way that they rarely do, and there’s an openness to changing our basic structures and to question our basic assumptions about how government works. The way we pick our president is one of the prime places where those new ways of thinking could really lead to concrete change.
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Donald Trump Jr. has a new book coming out next month, and he’ll have a powerful ally helping him sell it: the Republican National Committee.
The RNC is buying copies of the first son’s forthcoming “Liberal Privilege,” which it will offer to donors who contribute at least $75. The committee orchestrated a similar fundraising campaign last year around Trump’s previous book, “Triggered” — a move that led to accusations that the RNC was boosting sales to land him in the coveted top slot of The New York Times bestseller list.
Republican officials insist the goal is simply to use the book as a fundraising tool. The committee spent over $100,000 on copies of "Triggered," which resulted in donations totaling around $1 million, and allies of the younger Trump argued that the book would have risen to the top of the bestseller list regardless, given his loyal conservative following.
The RNC, which is planning to purchase “Liberal Privilege” on a rolling basis to keep up with donor demand, is receiving copies at below-retail price, cutting into any profit margin Trump may receive. Party officials also note the president's son is self-publishing, meaning that he didn’t get an advance for the book and will be responsible for any costs associated with it.
“While I was offered a generous book deal by my previous publishers, I turned it down and decided to self-publish,” Trump said in a statement. “The RNC was able to raise almost a million dollars from their fundraising campaign with my first book, ‘Triggered.’ I look forward to helping them fundraise once again for the benefit of the Republican Party.”
“Liberal Privilege” is slated for release in late August to coincide with the Republican National Convention. But the committee is being offered the book before it hits stores, to entice contributors. The fundraising drive is set to begin Tuesday.
It isn’t the first time a party committee has used a book for fundraising purposes. In 2017, the National Republican Senatorial Committee raised money off a book written by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The National Republican Congressional Committee, meanwhile, ran a fundraising effort centered around a book by Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas.
Trump’s preelection book is expected to go after Joe Biden and his family, resuscitating accusations that Hunter Biden financially capitalized on his father’s vice presidency.
“Don Jr.’s first book was a fundraising powerhouse for the party, and we have no doubt this book will be the same,” said Mandi Merritt, an RNC spokeswoman. “His books are highly popular with donors across the country, and the money raised will help us deliver victories in November.”
President Trump at the “Salute to America” Fourth of July event at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on July 4, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Modern presidents have rejected white nationalism, but Trump has advanced its agenda.
President Donald Trump has a symbiotic relationship with white nationalists.
It’s been a constant in nearly every element of his presidency: The white nationalist violence in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was followed by a pronouncement that there were “some very fine people on both sides.”
The election of Congress’s most diverse class in 2018 ever was met with tweets demonizing women progressives of color, telling them to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” Even Covid-19, a disease spun out of the animal kingdom, has been cast as a foreign foe that was at best the fault of — and, at worst, created by — nonwhite people, with the president insisting on using racist language around it. And Trump arguably launched his political career by appearing on shows like Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor in 2011 to speculate that “maybe” President Barack Obama’s birth certificate “says he is a Muslim.”
As president, Trump energizes white nationalists on two levels: with his rhetoric and through his staffing and policy choices. In turn, many have given him their support. In doing so, Trump has given an overt platform to white nationalists in a way that is unprecedented in the modern political era.
His economic policies have rewarded those already holding wealth (a mostly white group), and his much-vaunted “greatest economy” was not as great for people of color — particularly Black Americans, whose unemployment rate has been at least 2 percentage points higher than the general unemployment rate for the entirety of Trump’s tenure. In fact, a kinship with white nationalist ideas can be found in just about any part of the Trump administration’s policy, from health care to foreign affairs.
All of this is not to say that the Trump administration has run the country exactly as the leader of a white nationalist group would. “But they are doing a lot of things that are ideologically compatible,” Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, told Vox. “And I think it creates a road toward political action for a movement that might not have seen one in an earlier historical moment.”
White nationalism, white supremacy, and white power, briefly explained
The white nationalist movement is a complex one, and it overlaps with other ideologies, particularly those of white power and white supremacy, that are brought up in discussions of racism, history, and the misguided belief that white people are superior to people of color. But the terms “white nationalism,” “white power,” and “white supremacy” each mean something different. And to understand how the Trump administration relates to white nationalism, it’s important to understand what white nationalism is and what it is not.
Nationalism typically refers to strong support for a country akin to patriotism, as in the nationalists who want to put “America first.” But nationalism can also refer to self-determination, such as the Scottish nationalists who want an independent Scottish state.
White nationalism has more in common with this latter form of nationalism: It advocates for a physical or spiritual white state.
“The nation in white nationalism is imagined as the Aryan nation,” Belew said. White nationalism is “the idea that white people are going to unify together as one national polity either in a white homeland or a white nation — or even in a white world — through the violent killing or exclusion of other people.”
There are many routes to accomplishing this vision, but Belew stressed white nationalists generally are not “interested in the United States as a nation.” Instead, they aspire to replace the United States with something like the white state imagined at the end of The Turner Diaries, a central white nationalist text describing a war against people of color.
This is why, Belew said, “When we think about white nationalism, it’s important to remember that it is a deeply revolutionary and deeply anti-democratic project.”
The overall white power movement, on the other hand, goes beyond questions of statehood and has little regard for borders. As Belew told my colleague Jane Coaston, it is what connects New Zealand’s Christchurch shooter to white nationalists in the United States, and is primarily a social, rather than strictly political, movement that she says is incredibly diverse “in all ways other than race.”
“The white power movement is a broad-based social movement of interconnected groups of people that includes the Klan, Neo-Nazis, radical tax protesters; it includes some segments of boogaloo now; it includes some segments of militia groups,” Belew said. “It’s all across the country: It’s urban and suburban and rural; it has men and women and children in it, and people across class backgrounds.”
As that list would suggest, white power is a movement that provides a home for white supremacists — people who, as political scientists Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith write in Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, believe “that white people are inherently superior to people of color and should dominate over people of color.”
This definition, Lopez Bunyasi told Vox, captures the ideological portion of white supremacy, but she noted there is also a structural facet.
Structurally, Lopez Bunyasi and Smith write, white supremacy is “the systematic provision of political, social, economic, and psychological benefits and advantages to whites, alongside the systematic provisions of burdens and disadvantages to people who are not white.” White supremacy isn’t just an ideology; it is an actual system that has been used to build government and create policy in the real world.
It’s this sort of white supremacy, Stony Brook University sociology professor Crystal Fleming told Jenée Desmond-Harris in a 2016 piece for Vox, that has been “a constant throughout history.” The concept provided for the enslavement of Black people, the genocide of Native Americans, and the overall allocation of resources in manners that benefit white Americans. And it is a system that still exists today, keeping people of color out of jobs, universities, and political power. Which means everyone — regardless of whether one subscribes to white supremacist beliefs — lives in a white supremacist system.
Trump has embraced this system and has glorified some of its uglier moments, like its production of the Confederate States of America. He does not advocate for the sort of white nationalism depicted in The Turner Diaries, but his rhetoric has certainly elevated white Americans — and sometimes white supremacists and nationalists — over Americans of color. And as Belew notes, when it comes to the idea of white power, “there is a lot of very concerning evidence that, if not Trump himself, there are people in his administration who really do understand what it means.”
The Trump administration’s relationship with white nationalism goes beyond the president
It’s not only Trump who gives a voice to white nationalists. Key people in his administrationchampion their beliefs.Chief among them is White House senior adviser Stephen Miller.
A trove of more than 900 emails Miller sent to the alt-right publication Breitbart in 2015 and 2016 — both while an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and a member of the Trump campaign — suggests Miller has deep ties to the white nationalist movement.
The emails, which were analyzed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, touched on race or immigration. Some of the messages included links to white nationalist articles, while others included white nationalist slang. Miller also promoted The Camp of the Saints, a white supremacist book that casts immigrants of color as savages who subsist on feces, as well as praise for the nativist, hard-line immigration policies of the 1920s.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller is one of several key people in Trump’s administration who have championed the beliefs of white nationalists.
Those emails saw Miller citing in particular the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. Historian and author of The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas Monica Muñoz Martinez notes that act had “quota systems to restrict immigration from nations deemed to have populations that were racially undesirable.” Those quotas allowed more immigration of people from Western Europe and fewer people coming from other nations, while banning immigration from Asia. As Muñoz Martinez explains, these policies were designed by eugenicists and are admired not only by Miller but by the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler.
Miller has emulated those eugenicists in his crafting of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, and he’s doing so with Trump’s blessing. Muñoz Martinez told Vox, “One hundred years ago, Mexicans were called murderers and rapists and bandits,” and now, “Trump says Mexicans are murderers and rapists and drug dealers.”
As Vox’s Nicole Narea has explained, Miller designed the public charge rule that allows immigrants to be excluded from the US based on whether they are “likely to end up relying on public benefits in the future.”
More recently, Miller was reportedly involved in creating the executive order that froze certain green card applications and family reunification initiatives due to the coronavirus. That order was followed in June by another that blocked entry for a wider variety of foreign workers, as well as a Supreme Court decision allowing for expedited removal of immigrants seeking asylum.
But ties to white nationalism go beyond Miller to include figures like Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist and Trump campaign CEO who led Breitbart, described in 2016 by Vox’s Zack Beauchamp as “a leading light of America’s white nationalist movement accused of using misogynistic, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, and barely hidden racist language throughout his professional life.”
Bannon was fired in August 2017, but in his brief tenure, he seeded the White House with his “economic nationalism” philosophy, which has been criticized as rebranded white nationalism. And he helped develop the policies that defined Trump’s early days — most notably the Muslim ban. Bannon’s ideas about immigration remain entrenched due to figures like Miller, and his divisive rhetoric on domestic and foreign policy continues to come out of Trump’s mouth.
Bannon’s thoughts on matters like staffing still hold weight. For instance, he has helped usher in his ally Michael Pack to run the US government’s global news agencies, which include Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “We are going hard on the charge,” Bannon told Vox’s Alex Ward.
Pack, Ward notes, began his tenure by firing four top officials (after two others quit to protest his hiring) and by mandating the agencies promote editorial content that reflects the president’s worldview, leading to fears his tenure will see official US news networks become mouthpieces for the sorts of white nationalist-adjacent content that populated Breitbart.
Bannon is not the only former official whose ideology remains influential. Perhaps no fired member of the administration’s presence is still felt as strongly as that of Miller’s old boss, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose tenure atop the Justice Department was marked by the enactment of policies that spoke to the line of thought laid out in The Turner Diaries.
Pursuing a “tough on crime” approach, Sessions crafted policies that actively endangered the lives and liberty of Americans of color, particularly Black Americans. These included mandating federal prosecutors to push for maximum punishment for low-level drug crimes, which Black Americans are disproportionately more likely to be charged with. He also pushed a failed attempted to have federal prosecutors more aggressively pursue marijuana cases. Black Americans are more likely to be arrested for possession than white Americans nationally, again despite marijuana usage being about equal across racial groups.
Sessions successfully limited federal oversight of police departments found to have engaged in civil rights abuses as well as discriminatory and violent policing and, like Miller and Bannon, pursued an aggressively restrictive immigration policy.
He, too, has spoken fondly of the 1924 immigration act, in discussing increasing immigration with Bannon on Breitbart Radio in 2015 while still a senator, saying, “it was good for America.”
Once in the Trump administration, Sessions emulated the policies of the 1920s by “using every power he possessed as attorney general to ensure that the scales of justice tip toward punishment of unauthorized immigrants as often as possible,” as Dara Lind wrote for Vox.
As is the case with Miller, Sessions’s policies have achieved exclusionary white supremacist aims — and fed white supremacists’ narratives about the dangers of Black people. Through Miller and through other former allies still in the administration like Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, who is currently the chief of staff of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Sessions’s ideas live on in the administration despite his departure. His policies survive as well.
Adherents of old and new forms of white nationalism can find a hero in Trump
When these actions — and all the other things Trump has done that align with white nationalist thought and values — are taken together, the president begins to appear as someone able to unify traditional forms of white supremacy and more modern modes of white power and white nationalism.
“The Klan would wrap themselves in Christianity,” Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton University historian and author of The History of White People, told Vox.(Painter is also a signee of a letter criticized, in part, because of its association with prominent anti-trans figures and themes.) “And in the American flag as well. So they were patriots and they were Christians in their own eyes. I don’t see any contradiction in Trump’s embrace of Confederate monuments and his embrace — literal — of the American flag.”
As the Klan did, the president has cloaked himself in the symbols of Christianity. He posed with the Bible. He highlighted virtual church services on Sundays throughout the pandemic. And he has endeavored to signal he is an ally to Christians across the nation, from promising to prioritize Christian refugees to taking strong positions on matters from the celebration of Christmas to abortion, even though he has few personal ties to Christianity or religion in general.
Will Vragovic/Tampa Bay Times/Getty Images
Donald Trump hugs the US flag during a rally in Tampa, Florida, on October 24, 2016.
Similarly, Trump has worked to use the flag — sometimes even hugging it — as well as other American symbols like Mount Rushmore, to signal that his policies, white nationalist aligned or not, are American. And to argue criticism of those policies is anti-American.
Even the president’s rabid defense of Confederate statues — many of which were erected during periods of Black activism and serve as warnings to people of color to stop striving for equality — is revealing.This is not to say that Trump is using the monuments as part of a campaign of terror and intimidation. But positioning himself as a champion of America allows him to cast their concerns as unpatriotic extensions of a “left-wing cultural revolution” that wants “to overthrow the American Revolution.”
In connecting and conflating white men who tried to destroy the United States with prominent Revolutionary figures like Thomas Jefferson, the president highlights the thing that connects them: the barbaric ways they treated nonwhite people.
“There is a kind of white nationalism that’s about infusing whiteness into the nation,” Belew said. “For the activists that are taking to the streets and training in paramilitary camps, the nation isn’t the United States; they are not at all interested in defending the United States. They want to defend the white nation. And they want to do that, often, by overthrowing the United States.”
This impulse mirrors the goals of the radical white nationalists of the Confederate States of America and is reflected in the president’s policies — particularly around immigration — and in tendencies his critics would call anti-democratic. “To the extent that that ideology has actually crept into governance, it’s shocking,” Belew noted. “Because it’s a revolutionary thing that is attempting to undo the very government where they sit.”
Trump’s immigration policy is notable not just for the ways it excludes people of color but for how it deems white immigrants the “right” type of immigrants.
In 2018, Trump said he’d like the US to have fewer immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean — instead, he wanted immigrants from the majority-white Norway. In practice, he has put up barriers to immigration for citizens from countries with majority people of color populations, including those with Muslim majorities, while casting them as “some of the most vicious and dangerous people on earth.”
In June, Trump announced a temporary ban on green cards and the suspension of several work visas that are often used by immigrants of color, particularly those from India. Other countries that have been especially affected by Trump’s immigration policy include Vietnam, China, Mexico, and South Korea. Stuart Anderson, the founder of the immigration think tank National Foundation for American Policy, noted those four countries saw drastic reductions in immigration during Trump’s first two years in office, with immigration from China falling about 21 percentage points in that period.
Amid these declines, Trump reportedly hoped to find ways to “fast track” immigration from Europe — with former US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland assigned in 2018 to work on the plan with Miller and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Through exclusion and the push to recruit white immigrants, the Trump administration has advocated for a rigid border policy for nonwhite immigrants and a more porous, generous one for those who are white. This advances the aims of white nationalism that transcends border — and that suggests the sovereignty of US borders matters less when the Trump administration is thinking of the role the country might play in advancing the global white nation than it does when thinking of the country as a discrete entity.
White nationalist goals can only be achieved by dismantling the US government, and there, too, Trump has appeared to align with a violent element, like when he called on armed groups to “liberate” their states.
There are countless other examples, but the point is, Trump has contributed to the political unraveling of the United States some modern white nationalists see as necessary to achieve their goals. He has not done so by violently overthrowing the government. But he has taken steps in the direction these white nationalists want to go.
Trump’s rejections of white nationalism are meaningless
As much as he has embraced it, Trump has made some attempts to distance himself from white supremacy and white nationalism. Following a racist mass shooting in El Paso (one perpetrated by a shooter whose manifesto mirrored some of Trump’s rhetoric on Latinx immigration), Trump said, “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America.”
But words like these are nothing more than language uttered in between statements hewing closely to white supremacist and white nationalist ideals.
Just weeks before the El Paso shooting, Trump called the majority-Black district of former lawmaker Rep. Elijah Cummings a “dangerous & filthy place” and a “rat and rodent infested mess,” adding, “No human being would want to live there.” It’s language that mirrors the characterization of people of color in The Camp of the Saints, and it not only casts a popular Black leader as inept, it implies he and his constituents are somehow less than human.
Just a little over a month after saying “hate has no place in America,” Trump said of the gang MS-13, which was started by Salvadoran immigrants: “They take young women. They slice them up with a knife. They slice them up — beautiful, young.”
All these things, which happened in the span of less than two months, ticked many white supremacist and nationalist boxes — Jewish people as untrustworthy, people of color as predators with a predilection for young women, and Black people as subhuman — rendering the president’s rejections of various white power ideologies meaningless.
It’s a cycle Trump has trapped himself in, and one that continues even now.
“After these atrocities, like when the George Floyd video came out, he didn’t say anything for a long time,” Painter noted. “I mean, he said, ‘Oh that was terrible,’ and then in the next breath, he went back to his race-baiting.”
And it is a cycle that is difficult to escape. As Muñoz Martinez said, “We are living in a nation that was inspired by the principles of white supremacy.”
So ingrained are those ideas, she pointed out, that even the first presidential administration run by a Black American reflected them, particularly with respect to immigration, with policies that incarcerated children in harsh conditions that spawned lawsuits.
“We have to remember that the policies that the Trump administration created, and the kind of inhumanity that we see, built upon the infrastructure that had already existed,” Muñoz Martinez said, adding that white nationalist and white supremacist “ideals shaped our society and shaped our institutions, and shaped our public societies and laws, our policing mindset. And we haven’t replaced that.”
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Fucking insane. These are not police. They're border thugs.
We begin today’s roundup with The Washington Post and its editorial on the Trump administration’s latest election ploy strategy of deploying federal agents to Democratically-led cities to foster unrest:
THE RIGHT to protest is enshrined in the Constitution; any attempt by government to squelch it forcibly is an affront to our most cherished values. Vandalism and violence of the sort that, for more than a month, have attended the mostly peaceful protests in Portland, Ore., are different: antithetical to public order, a blow to blameless property owners and, as a political matter, a gift to President Trump.
The president is a master of distraction and misdirection; predictably, he has seized on the disorder in Portland to deflect attention from the pandemic and to exploit the country’s deepening tribal divisions, which have served his political purposes so well. In the name of restoring order, he has weaponized law enforcement officers, uniformed as shock troops. Rather than de-escalate, they seem deployed to inflame what was already a volatile series of daily demonstrations.
Michelle Goldberg’s analysis at The New York Times adds more with historical context as well:
There’s no way to know the affiliation of all the agents — they’ve been wearing military fatigues with patches that just say “Police” — but The Times reported that some of them are part of a specialized Border Patrol group “that normally is tasked with investigating drug smuggling organizations.”
The Trump administration has announced that it intends to send a similar force to other cities; on Monday, The Chicago Tribune reported on plans to deploy about 150 federal agents to Chicago. “I don’t need invitations by the state,” Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said on Fox News Monday, adding, “We’re going to do that whether they like us there or not.”
Golberg cites Yale historian Timothy Snyder on why we should all be outraged:
“This is a classic way that violence happens in authoritarian regimes, whether it’s Franco’s Spain or whether it’s the Russian Empire,” said Snyder. “The people who are getting used to committing violence on the border are then brought in to commit violence against people in the interior.”
Here’s what the next federal response must include:
Start with funding the robust public health measures we know will work to address this crisis: ramped-up testing, a national contact-tracing program and supply-chain investments to resolve medical supply shortages. Without these measures, we will not be able to adequately reopen safely, more people will die and there will be no economic recovery.
Our schools face enormous challenges, like figuring out whether and how to safely reopen, how to help students who fell further behind because of distance learning — disproportionately students of color. The next legislative package should include at least $500 billion to stabilize state and local governments and at least $175 billion for our public schools to help them reopen safely, avoid teacher layoffs and provide the mental health and other services our children require.
Meanwhile, Catherine Rampell calls out Republicans in Congress for threatening to cut off much-needed unemployment aid:
Unless Congress acts fast, America’s fragile economic recovery is poised to nosedive off a cliff. [...] [T]he main problem now is that there just aren’t many jobs available.
Job vacancy postings are still down about aquarter from precrisis levels. And while it seems possible that, on the margin, some workers might turn down work because they want to keep getting that government cheese, the generosity of benefits do not, on net, appear to be holding back employment growth.
“So far, there is no evidence that the [federal $600 payments] had either job finding or job leaving effects in the May and June data,” according to a detailed analysis of Labor Department data from Ernie Tedeschi, Evercore ISI’s head of fiscal analysis.
Furthermore, there are much more serious problems with unemployment insurance than generosity. Millions of eligible laid-off people have not been getting their benefits because state unemployment systems are either ancient and decrepit or have been deliberately designed to not pay out benefits. Something very badly needs to be done either to help and/or force states to fix their systems, or simply take over the administration entirely.
On a final note, here is Eugene Robinson’s tribute on how we can all remember Rep. John Lewis:
How, then, should we remember this great man? Not with fuzzy, feel-good encomiums but with a clear-eyed look at his monumental accomplishments and the work still left undone. [...]
Lewis would urge young audiences not to follow the rules but to “get in good trouble” by pushing for fairness and justice. “Get in the way,” he would exhort activists who were pushing, often rudely, for positive change. “Keep getting in the way.”
Roy Den Hollander, the self-described “anti-feminist” attorney who authorities say is the chief suspect in the shootings of the son and the husband of a federal judge in New Jersey, attacked that judge by name in misogynistic, racist writings he wrote over a period of years and posted in bulk on the Internet Archive. Den Hollander, who describes himself as a Trump volunteer in his writings, called the judge an “affirmative action” case who affiliated with those who wanted “to convince America that whites, especially white males, were barbarians, and all those of a darker skin complexion were victims.”
Esther Salas’s 20-year-old son was killed in the attack at their home on Sunday, and her husband was wounded. Den Hollander was later found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in Rockland, New York. Den Hollander’s insults toward Salas were included in a 2,028-page collection of writings he posted online in 2019 under the username Roy17den, a handle that mirrored his Twitter account, @roy17den, and the email address he used both in personal letters and in court filings.
“Female judges didn’t bother me as long as they were middle age or older black ladies,” he writes when discussing a lawsuit he filed that went before Judge Salas, the first Hispanic woman appointed a federal judge in New Jersey. “They seemed to have an understanding of how life worked and were not about to be conned by any foot dragging lawyer. Latinas, however, were usually a problem—driven by an inferiority complex.”
Along with the attacks on Salas, Den Hollander’s writings also go after President Barack Obama (who he said has an “obsession to turn America into a banana republic”), Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (who he claimed was “angry that nobody had invited her to her high school senior prom”), Hillary Clinton (whose supporters were “teary-eyed, sad-sack, PC loonies watching their power of intolerance go down the drain”), and an Obama appointee (whom he describes as part of “that Orwellian party of feminists, ethnics, Muslims, illegals and queers who think they are superior to everyone else, especially white males.”)
In contrast, he writes in the same sprawling document that he was a volunteer for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who he said “was telling the truth about illegal aliens in his bid for the Presidency.” Den Hollander describes “leaving the law library in the early afternoon for Trump Tower, 12 blocks up Fifth Avenue, to make telephone calls during the primaries and the general election.” Recounting his time working for the campaign, he says most of his fellow volunteers “were aging baby boomers like me. Once in a while some hot young model chick would show up to make calls. They never sat next to me.” The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a question about the nature of Den Hollander’s volunteer work, or whether they had any record of his involvement.
Den Hollander, who was 72, held deeply misogynistic beliefs about women and filed a series of lawsuits against what he considered unfair advantages they had over men. One of those suits, in which he argued that it was unconstitutional for women not to be subject to military draft, reached Salas’s court in 2019. Salas did not throw out the suit, as many of Den Hollander’s previous cases had been. She instead allowed the lawsuit to proceed through the court system. But Den Hollander was upset by what he considered to be Salas’s delaying of the case. He complained that she allowed the Department of Justice to file its fourth motion to dismiss the case, suggesting she was “trying to keep this case in her court until a weatherman showed her which way the legal winds were blowing.”
“Salas clearly wanted to further her career by moving up the judicial ladder to the Court of Appeals or maybe even the Supreme Court,” he writes. “After all, there was now a Latina seat in the form of Sotomayor on the Court.”
Judge Salas came from a disadvantaged background. She is the daughter of a Cuban immigrant; her home burned down when she was 10, and her family lost everything. Salas eventually earned her bachelor’s and law degrees from Rutgers University, became a public defender, and was elected president of New Jersey’s Hispanic Bar Association. “For this little girl from Union City to grow up and become a U.S. District Judge—it’s beyond words,” she told a local reporter after she became a federal judge in 2006.
Den Hollander, who turned his hatred of women into a string of media appearances over more than a decade, saw Salas’s biography differently. “It was the usual effort to blame a man and turn someone into super girl—daddy abandoned us, we were indigent, which means they lived off of the taxpayer, but we overcame all odds,” he writes in one of the documents posted online last year. He describes Salas’s decade as a public defender as “representing lumpen proletariat ne’er-do-wells.” Her “one accomplishment,” he says, was being a high-school cheerleader.
He also attacks Justice Sotomayor, saying she was “52 years old, prime age for a Feminazi.” His voluminous writings—more than 10,000 pages of PDFs—show a deep sense of grievance against women, especially his mother, who he claims told him, at age 4, “I wish I had listened to your father and never had you!” He calls her a witch, a “Nazi loon,” and “another malevolent female.” He also describes kissing girls in third grade frequently enough that their parents complained to their teacher. The document, one of several he uploaded to the Internet Archive, is a disturbing but by now common coda to high-profile incidents of gun violence: the suspected shooter leaving a trail of arguments and anger in random corners of the web. Many of them involve a hatred of women and people of color, and connect broad claims about the world with very personal claims of grievance.
“All my life I saw other people, even strangers in the street, as potential enemies with whom conflict seemed more likely than cooperation,” he writes. “I understood that, except for my few friends, I didn’t like people because they scared me; and when someone is afraid, he hates others for causing him the humiliation and himself for allowing it. But where did this ever-present fear come from—my genes or the way my mother raised me? I opted for the culpability of my mother with some assistance from my father.”
He also writes viciously about a Russian woman he says he married, calling her a “mafia prostitute.” Den Hollander writes at length about the time he spent living in Russia, including time he says he spent working for Kroll Associates. At one point, he describes difficulties he said he was having with the U.S. government, claiming it had “confiscated” his U.S. citizenship. “Boy, was I glad I didn’t vote for Obama—wrote-in Putin instead,” he writes.
“Perhaps the Violence Against Women’s Act could get my citizenship back,” he added. “All I’d have to do is date an American girl then accuse her of abuse.”
Some of his interest in Russia is clearly tied to his support of the president. On the question of meddling in the 2016 election, he writes that, during the debate over Clinton’s email server, he had “what I thought was a great idea to help Trump.” If Russian intelligence had hacked the server, he would try to use an old Russian contact to dig up her emails. “So I contacted a GRU buddy requesting a few copies of the bleached or classified emails, if they had them. Telling him, I’d make them public through my media contacts.” His contact, he claims, said that GRU didn’t have the emails, which he took as a sign that “they did not hack the server or they wanted Hillary to win.”
In August 2016, Den Hollander filed a lawsuit against seven prominent political journalists, alleging that they were part of a racketeering scheme against Trump. “The PC-Feminists had taken over much of the news media since I had worked in TV News in the 1970s and 1980s as a writer and political producer,” he writes. His “evidence” for the reporters’ crimes was 30 pages of transcripts of their reporting that he claimed was unfair to Trump. He later expanded his legal targets to include a total of 17 reporters and seven major news organizations, including the major broadcast networks, The New York Times, and The Washington Post: “Twenty-four lying, prevaricating and dissembling media defendants—alright!” He expresses disappointment that, “unlike some of my other cases, this one attracted zero media attention.”
He was elated by Trump’s election (“Every so often truth and justice win out”) and says he attended his inauguration in January 2017, bringing with him his red Make America Great Again hat and describing Trump’s “American carnage” speech as “short but solid.” He says he was being interviewed by a French TV reporter when “some Antifa millennial” interfered with the camera shot. Implausibly, he claims that he showed mercy by not using “a spear hand strike” on the Millennial, because “he would have been dead,” and that a local D.C. police officer was so impressed with his toughness that he asked Den Hollander “to apply to my squad.”
“I did volunteer work for Trump’s campaign because I hate PC-Feminism more than I hate America,” he writes. “If I had hated America more, I would have worked for Hillary’s campaign.”
On page 1,776 of his PDF, he writes something that would ring chillingly accurate this week: “The Feminists should be careful in their meddling with nature. There are 300 million firearms in this country, and most of them are owned by guys.”
And on page 1,880: “It makes no sense for men to disarm in the face of an evil that wants to exercise totalitarian power over them. They have a right to revolt against that tyranny, to take it down. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the tyranny of George III or the Feminists.”
Researchers from the University of Stirling, UK, have embedded ceramic spheres in aluminum foam to create a material that couldn't be cut with angle grinders, power drills or water jet cutters. "They dubbed it Proteus after the shape-shifting Greek god, for the way the material metamorphosed in different ways to defend against attacks," reports New Scientists. From the report: "It's pretty amazing," says Miranda Anderson at the University of Stirling, UK, who worked on the project. Rather than just being a hard surface that resists external pressure, the material turns the force of the drill or cutting mechanism back on itself, as the ceramic spheres create vibrations that disrupt the external force. "It actually destroys the cutting blade through the sideways jerky vibrations that it creates, or it widens the water jet's spray," says Anderson.
The material has a second defense mechanism. Attempting to cut it breaks the ceramic spheres into smaller fragments which are even harder and act like very tough sandpaper. "So the attack mechanism causes the material to become more resistant to the attack," says Anderson. While an angle grinder took 45 seconds to cut through steel armor used to protect against explosive mines, it was rendered inoperative by Proteus. The only comparable structure in the natural world is diamond, says Anderson, but Proteus is cheaper and lighter, making it practical for a range of applications, from security doors and barriers to shoe soles or elbow pad and forearm guards for workers. She believes it can be mass-produced, as there is no shortage of the metals and ceramics it is made from. The new material has been reported in the journal Scientific Reports.
A recent Monmouth poll showed that a majority of Pennsylvanians — 57 percent — believe there are “secret” voters in their communities who support Trump but won’t tell anyone about it. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew explains why that is unlikely. They also consider the future of Black politics as politicians who were leaders of the civil rights movement, like Rep. John Lewis, die or leave office. Plus, they check in on the state of the race for the Senate.
You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.
The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.
So pull on the purse strings. Jesus fucking christ
Department of Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf couldn’t answer lawmakers’ questions about his department’s response to the Portland protests, according to a letter from a key committee reviewed by POLITICO.
In the letter, the Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security and 17 other Democratic members wrote that they are “profoundly troubled” by reports that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials violated the Constitutional rights of protesters in Portland, Oregon by illegally detaining them.
“Our concerns are only heightened by your inability to answer questions posed to you during a call on Saturday,” Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and the lawmakers wrote.
The letter noted reports of DHS officers seizing protesters off the streets in Portland without explanation. The city has had five weeks of protests, its mayor told NPR on July 19. The protests included a “small handful of people who were engaged in criminal activity,” he said, but appeared to be subsiding until federal officers intervened. The mayor, Ted Wheeler, said their presence made the situation worse.
The letter asks DHS for a host of new documents, including all DHS personnel communications about the deployment of officers to Portland. They also asked for documents on training DHS personnel received and on detentions. The committee’s deadline for DHS is July 27.
But officials likely aren’t holding their breaths; the letter also noted that the department ignored a previous missive about DHS’s response to nationwide protests that broke out after a white police officer in Minneapolis killed a Black man, George Floyd, by kneeing his neck for almost nine minutes.
When it looks and smells like collusion, we can start calling it collusion.
Popular Information has yet another scoop on Facebook's continued preferential treatment of conservative disinformation-mongers, and once again it touches The Daily Wire, the far-right and often misleading site that reliably tops Facebook's lists of top articles due in large part to Facebook willingly overlooking the site's network of dodgy and rule-breaking promotional pages.
And once again, Facebook appears to have stepped in to undo a fact check that correctly identified false information in a conservative story—this time after Republican Rep. Mike Johnson contacted the company to complain.
If the situation feels familiar, it is. A conservative piece yet again dismissing concerns over climate change was labeled "partly false" by a group of third-party fact checking "partners" due to repetition of already-debunked claims. That led to the article being shared with an attached warning, upon which the conservative author complained to Facebook.
Which quickly escalated, reports Popular Information, to top-level conservative Facebook executives like Joel Kaplan and Nick Clegg—after which the "partly false" warning was removed from the conservative article.
Popular Information reports that they obtained internal Facebook documents related to the reversal. Republican operative Joel Kaplan weighed in to say that "stakeholders" found the fact check "biased" and noted "incoming" from (climate denier) Rep. Mike Johnson's office complaining about it. The fact checkers defended the rating based on, you know, the part about it making false claims. And Facebook's own communications team was wary of going against the fact checkers because Facebook was already getting heat for its special treatment of the conservative site.
Soon afterwards, the fact check was removed without explanation. The piece's errors remained uncorrected.
Apparently Facebook's Republican executives were not overly concerned that once again fudging its own fact checking to better boost conservative positions would make the site even less credible. The platform continues to dismiss calls to rein in its own position as a mega-purveyor of organized disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. Whether this is because the vast majority of that disinformation skews towards the personal ideologies of Kaplan and other hired executives or is simply an effort to wring maximal money out of the business, regardless of damage done, is unknown.
The United States, already in possession of the largest number of infections in the COVID-19 pandemic, seems strangely committed to making things worse. As new infections have shot up to record levels, a major retailer made basic protective steps optional before reversing its decision, while the governor of Georgia is moving to block any local authorities from acting to protect their citizens. This is despite the fact that the head of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has said: "If we could get everybody to wear a mask right now, I really think in the next four, six, eight weeks, we could bring this epidemic under control."
And it's not just masks. Health experts are nearly unanimous in indicating that reopening schools should only take place in the context of having a low infection rate in the community, classrooms redesigned to allow greater social distancing, and distance learning used where needed. But the Trump administration is threatening to withhold funding from any schools that do not fully reopen for in-person education. Meanwhile, the administration is attempting to downplay the value of one thing—more testing—that could help us understand the virus's progression through our population.
They have apparently forgotten that the House is a thing.
Donald Trump met with Republican congressional leadership and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin Monday, and the participants all laid out for members of the press corps just how little they intend to do in the next 10 days to save the American people and economy from ongoing coronavirus fallout. It started, as usual, with a lie from Trump. "[W]e're working and negotiating with the Democrats on trying to get a plan that helps small businesses, helps people, helps this country," he said. They are not. Democrats have been shut out of this process, as Mnuchin admitted immediately after Trump said that.
"[Chief of staff] Mark [Meadows] and I have been working very hard over the last two weeks, with Mitch [McConnell] and Kevin [McCarthy], on really what we see as the focus is kids and jobs," Mnuchin said. By kids, he means forcing schoolchildren back into classrooms and by jobs, he means forcing people back into unsafe workplaces. Later on he added "kids and jobs and vaccines. We're going to make sure that we have a vaccine by the end of the year for emergency use." Because that can be done by presidential fiat, apparently—after all the teachers and children have been sent back to school and infected their entire families. Mnuchin said the starting point for the bill would be $1 trillion, which is about $9 trillion short of what's necessary, but a rebuke to McConnell who had been insisting previously that it would have to remain in the billions. Mnuchin said they will “make sure that before the enhanced unemployment insurance expires [at the end of July], that we pass legislation so that we can protect Americans that are unemployed."
The extent to which they will agree to do that is not clear. The enhanced unemployment benefits end on July 25. Mnuchin says they're working on a "technical fix on enhanced unemployment," so there's every possibility that it will remain, but not at the $600/week level that's allowing the unemployed to stay afloat as prices for essentials rise and the pandemic continues with no end in sight and no intention on the part of the administration to do anything to make it end (except declare there will be a vaccine by the end of the year).
Among the other non-starters for Democrats, who will have to pass this in the House for it to become law, is McConnell's insistence on liability protection, which is really the only thing he talked about Monday. "[I]f you’re looking for a theme here, think liability protection for those who have been trying to deal with the pandemic," he told reporters. "We don't need an epidemic of lawsuits on the heels of the pandemic we're already struggling with." That and Trump's insistence that there be a payroll tax cut, which will do nothing to stimulate the economy and will only harm Social Security.
The outlines of the Republican plan so far also include no new money for cities and states, but give local leaders more leeway on how the remains of the previously granted $150 billion can be spent. The state would get money for schools, which would include private schools—another flash point for Democrats—and would be dependent upon schools reopening, according to TheWashington Post's inside sources. That's not going to pass muster with Democrats, either, who are still pushing the $3 trillion HEROES Act the House passed more than two months ago.
"Unfortunately, by all accounts the Senate Republicans are drafting legislation that comes up short in a number of vital areas, such as extending unemployment benefits or funding for rental assistance, hazard premium pay for frontline workers, or investments in communities of color being ravaged by the virus, and many other necessary provisions," Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said in a letter to his conference Monday. "Democrats will need to fight hard for these important provisions."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted that Congress will have to spend more, and spend it to keep people safe. She told reporters late last week that this bill "is about the survival of our economy. If we don't invest the money now, it'll be much worse," she said. "If we don't invest in further testing and getting the equipment to do it, it will be worse. If we don't put money in the pockets of the American people with their direct payments and unemployment insurance, it will be much worse."
CBP is going to get its wings massively clipped for this. They're not a free-ranging federal police force to be deployed by a wannabe dictator and his idiot thugs.
Police confront demonstrators as Black Lives Matter supporters protest in Portland, Oregon on July 4, 2020. | John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
“At this point, we’re already in a constitutional crisis,” an Oregon attorney told Vox.
Oregon’s governor doesn’t want them. Oregon’s senators don’t want them. Portland’s mayor and city commissioners don’t want them. And Portland’s residents don’t want them.
And yet, at the urging of President Donald Trump, federal officers are roaming the streets of Oregon’s biggest city in unmarked vehicles, detaining protesters without identifying themselves.
Multiplereports and videos clearly show heavily armed federal law enforcement officers dressed in camouflage stepping out of unmarked civilian vans and forcibly detaining anti-racism and anti-police brutality demonstrators on the streets of Portland, often far away from any federal property (where federal officials have jurisdiction). In many instances, those taken into custody hadn’t clearly violated any laws.
After several days of fear and confusion as reports of these mysterious activities piled up, the Trump administration acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had officers from Border Patrol and other agencies use unmarked vehicles in Portland last week to protect federal property, namely a federal courthouse in the heart of the city, which has been tagged by graffiti and had a small fire and broken windows.
Trump administration officials, especially acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, have defended the aggressive tactics. They’ve portrayed the largely peaceful George Floyd-inspired protests in the city, which have lasted over 50 days and at times led to some property destruction and minor attacks on authorities, as a “violent mob” of “lawless anarchists.”
This is happening on the streets of our hometown of Portland, OR.
We will continue to resist. They are fucking with the wrong city #TheResistance
“The city of Portland has been under siege ... by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city,” he said in a lengthy July 16 statement. “Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.”
“DHS will not abdicate its solemn duty to protect federal facilities and those within them,” he added.
But critics say the heavy-handed approach is an overreaction to mostly peaceful protests and detrimental to the rule of law. “This is the stuff of fascist regimes, not American democracy,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told me. “It’s important that we don’t have secret police in America,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) also said in an interview.
Two direct consequences have come out of the national controversy.
First, activists and the lawyers who represent them say the once-dwindling crowds are growing again in response to the federal government’s actions. “More and more protesters are coming out each night,” said Ashlee Albies, a local attorney who represents Don’t Shoot Portland, a civil rights organization. “There are more protesters now than there are feds.”
Second, a legal battle is now underway, pitting Portland’s citizens against afederal government with broad statutory authorities. Few, though, believe the courts will compel the Trump administration to stand down. At most, it might lead federal law enforcement to act more cautiously, but they’ll still operate in areas where locals don’t want them to.
Which means the events in Portland are likely to persist for quite some time, testing the limits of federal authority in American cities and the resolve of those who live in them. “At this point, we’re already in a constitutional crisis,” said Juan Chávez, a lawyer and director of the civil rights project at the Oregon Justice Resource Center.
Activists say Portland police were abusing their power before federal officials arrived
Two months ago, the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by police officers in Minneapolis, sparked nationwide protests calling for racial equality and expansive police reform. As in other American cities, thousands took to the streets of Portland and vowed to keep the pressure on local and federal leaders. But the situation in Portland quickly turned ugly.
From the start, Portland’s police force used tear gas to maintain order. Such measures led a US district judge on June 9 to ban the use of tear gas except in instances “in which the lives or safety of the public or the police are at risk.” That order would be expanded two weeks later to include rubber bullets and other nonlethal munitions.
In the midst of the legal battle, Portland’s police force claimed order was unraveling as statues of Confederate generals and former Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were defaced or torn down.
State lawmakers passed a law saying local police could only use tear gas on protesters if police declared that a “riot” was underway that could severely impact the safety of officers and property. That provided law enforcement quite a loophole to continue using tear gas, local activists told me — one that police have exploited since.
That not only angered protesters but also impacted uninvolved citizens. In some cases, the tear gas would waft into residential areas, affecting drivers, homeowners, gas station attendants, and public transportation riders far away from the standoff.
But in some ways that wasn’t so surprising, locals said: Portland’s police had long been known to use aggressive tactics, as evidenced by a recent incident in which officers swarmed a protester on his bicycle to arrest him.
WATCH - Portland Police officers knock a protester off of his bicycle and arrest him outside of Lownsdale Square Park near the Federal Courthouse downtown #LiveOnK2pic.twitter.com/tow0GzeyzW
Portland’s police department continued to defend its actions, though, claiming such measures were necessary to tamp down unruly or unlawful protests.
Tear gas “is uncomfortable, but effective at dispersing crowds,” Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell said in a July 1 video posted to Twitter. “We would rather not use it. We would rather have those in the area follow the law and not engage in dangerous behavior.”
Deploying tear gas and other crowd-control methods didn’t compel all protesters to stop demonstrating, but they did lead to a reduction in numbers, activists said. Still, any amount of protesters tussling with law enforcement was apparently too much for President Donald Trump, so he got involved.
The feds come to Portland
On June 26, Trump signed an executive order to send federal officers to cities around the country to protect statues, monuments, and federal property. Five days later, Wolf, the acting Department of Homeland Security secretary, formed the Protecting American Communities Task Force to coordinate the response nationwide.
“DHS is answering the President’s call to use our law enforcement personnel across the country to protect our historic landmarks,” Wolf said in a July 1 statement. “We won’t stand idly by while violent anarchists and rioters seek not only to vandalize and destroy the symbols of our nation, but to disrupt law and order and sow chaos in our communities.”
According to DHS, the new task force would “conduct ongoing assessments of potential civil unrest or destruction and allocate resources to protect people and property,” which might “involve potential surge activity to ensure the continuing protection of critical locations.”
The task force was put together in haste. The units DHS would send didn’t have the proper training to deal with mass demonstrations, per a Homeland Security memo prepared for Wolf and reported by the New York Times on Saturday. And yet, groups like “BORTAC” — a Border Patrol unit that mainly investigates drug dealers and acts like a SWAT team — deployed to Portland in early July.
They and other federal law enforcement officers assembled at the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse, drawing the attention of protesters and prompting a crowd to form outside the building. But on July 1 — the day the task force was formally announced — the federal officers really made their presence known. They came out of the boarded-up building and fired pepper balls at the demonstrators before retreating back inside.
That was the first clue activists got that the feds would be more involved than initially expected. Washington said federal officials would be in Portland mainly to protect federal property and investigate federal crimes, said Chávez, the civil rights attorney, but “we knew then and there that that wasn’t all they were doing.”
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler was nervous about what he’d seen and called for an end to violent protests and a review of police tactics on July 3. “I am calling for a full and thorough review of all use of force tactics and meaningful public transparency,” he said.
But the federal government’s involvement only escalated from there.
On July 12, 26-year-old protester Donavan LaBella was shot in the head by federal officials with a “less lethal” munition while he held a boombox in front of federal officers. His mother said LaBella sustained facial and skull fractures requiring reconstructive surgery. That episode sparked a major outcry from the city and state’s most prominent politicians.
“The events of last night at the federal courthouse were the tragic and avoidable result of President Donald Trump, for weeks, continuing to push for force and violence in response to protests,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said in a statement at the time. “President Trump deploying armed federal officers to Portland only serves to escalate tensions and, as we saw yesterday, will inevitably lead to unnecessary violence and confrontation.”
And in the last week or so, it appears federal officers have taken their mandate a step further by riding around Portland in unmarked vehicles and detaining suspects in ways critics say amounts to kidnapping.
Perhaps the best-known case is that of Mark Pettibone. He and his friend were returning home from a protest at the courthouse in the early hours of July 15. The protest had been mostly peaceful, and law enforcement agencies hadn’t used tear gas against demonstrators that day.
But around 2 am, unidentified people in camouflage stepped out of a van and threw Pettibone into the back of it against his will. Pettibone, who claims he did nothing suspicious or illegal, told Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) on July 16 that “I had my beanie pulled over my face so I couldn’t see and they held my hands over my head.”
After driving around downtown for a while, the armed men took him inside a building, which Pettibone would only later learn was the federal courthouse. “It was basically a process of facing many walls and corners as they patted me down and took my picture and rummaged through my belongings,” he told OPB.
Pettibone was placed in a cell before two officers came to read him his Miranda rights, though he says they didn’t say why he was under arrest. Pettibone didn’t waive those rights and instead demanded to speak to a lawyer. Roughly 90 minutes later, the officials let him go without recording his arrest or charging him with any crime.
In a subsequent interview with the Washington Post, Pettibone said he still doesn’t know exactly who arrested him or why.
Federal agents deny having detained Pettibone and haven’t answered reporters’ questions about that and other similar incidents. But Pettibone’s account, reflected in other people’s testimonials and videos, seems to show that this is a new — and highly irregular, if not illegal — practice by federal authorities. Even if the agents have a small patch on their arm that says the name of their agency, the fact that you can’t tell who they are, they won’t say who they are, and they ride in unidentified vehicles while wearing camouflage (not their usual uniforms) makes them unmarked.
“Detaining human beings is generally not a lawful tactic just to talk to people,” said Joshua Geltzer, the executive director for the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University.
The situation has become so fraught that even Portland’s police department has distanced itself from the federal actions. “At times, federal officers may take action in proximity to Portland officers ... We may take action near them,” Lovell, the police chief, said last week. “The federal officers have their objectives and the Portland Police Bureau has our objectives. We don’t direct federal officers’ actions, and they do not direct ours.”
Such a statement was likely offered ahead of what Lovell surely suspected was an imminent legal fight — one that has just arrived.
“If this can happen here in Portland, it can happen anywhere”
If you ask federal officials about their conduct in Portland — namely operating in secret to detain suspected offenders of federal law — they say they’re just maintaining law and order while following the president’s directives.
“While the US Customs and Border Protection respects every American’s right to protest peacefully, violence and civil unrest will not be tolerated,” a spokesperson for the agency told me, echoing Wolf’s assertions that “violent anarchists have organized events in Portland over the last several weeks with willful intent to damage and destroy federal property, as well as injure federal officers and agents.”
The spokesperson stressed two other points. First, the spokesperson said that CBP agents do identify themselves — including wearing insignia of their department (as in the tweet below) — but don’t display their names “due to recent doxxing incidents against law enforcement personnel who serve and protect our country.”
.@CBP will continue to arrest the violent criminals that are destroying federal property & injuring our agents/officers in Portland. CBP will restore and maintain law & order. pic.twitter.com/fYgzpTwPWh
Second, the spokesperson said CBP supports the Federal Protective Service, a DHS agency charged with safeguarding federal property in Portland and elsewhere.
Members of those forces are allowed to arrest those suspected of crimes, carry weapons, and even investigate potential offenses on or off federal property, experts say (though how far off that property is permissible and what reasonable suspicion authorities must initially prove is up for debate).
There are many possible violations to look into as protesters have graffitied and launched fireworks at federal buildings and property, as well as thrown objects like rocks and bottles at US government agents.
Even so, Georgetown’s Geltzer says the level of force must match the suspected offense — and that shooting protesters in the face with projectiles or detaining them in shadowy ways doesn’t do that. “No one excuses bad behavior, but it doesn’t change what an appropriate response looks like,” he told me. Law enforcement can of course speak with suspects if they assent, Geltzer continued, but “what’s not okay is going to the point of forcible arrest — against someone’s will — without probable cause.”
One would think federal authorities would act more cautiously because the city and state didn’t invite them in to help, experts said.
So far, federal authorities have yet to show real evidence to back up claims of probable cause, save for a litany of alleged violations by Wolf in his July 16 statement. Below is a screenshot of a few sections from that list.
That lack of clarity is partly why Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum last Friday filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies involved in the federal response in Portland. Per her office’s press release last week, the motion, if granted, “would immediately stop federal authorities from unlawfully detaining Oregonians,” thereby protecting their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights (among others).
“Every American should be repulsed when they see this happening,” Rosenblum said in a statement at the time. “If this can happen here in Portland, it can happen anywhere.” She clearly has the support of Oregon’s US politicians, with Wyden, Merkley, and two representatives on the same day calling for a probe into federal law enforcement.
“This abuse of power demands an investigation, and those federal agents involved should find their federal employment terminated,” Wyden told me.
Beyond the legal matters, though, there’s also a question of whether the federal officers’ tactics are even effective at calming down the protests — or whether, as most experts I spoke to said, they’re inflaming the situation further.
First, there’s the basic issue of federal officials not wearing specific identifying uniforms or insignia or otherwise clearly identifying themselves to those they’re detaining.
Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the Brennan Center for Justice, told me the practice of officers identifying themselves before detaining suspects is equally important for officers’ safety as for citizens’. The person under suspicion may not believe federal officers are who they really are, instead believing they are members of militias or even just random vigilantes. Portland, after all, has become an epicenter in the US for far-right violence, replete with ordinary citizens dressing like soldiers to make a political point and scare their enemies.
Such confusion makes policing in this way harder. “How are [suspects] supposed to know that it’s a federal official arresting them?” German asked. “Without proper insignia, the interest in resisting is much greater,” potentially escalating to violence. It’s also possible, but less likely, that federal officials will mistake each other for protesters or militia groups in similar uniforms. “We don’t want to be pitting law enforcement against one another in the streets of an American city,” German noted.
Then there’s the broader issue of using harsh tactics to attempt to quell demonstrations.
Edward Maguire, an expert on protest policing at Arizona State University who co-authored a well-regarded (free) book on the subject, said the federal government’s strategy to use overwhelming force will surely backfire.
Simply put, his research from observing the policing of protests around the world shows authorities who use over-the-top tactics spark a massive backlash. The “moderates” in the crowd — that is, those protesting peacefully and who don’t break the law — start to embrace a more radical stance toward law enforcement aiming to control the protest. Instead of calming everything down, then, authorities end up with “a lot of people who are really pissed off,” Maguire said.
The Trump administration is committing this cardinal sin of protest policing in Portland. “The response that we’re seeing from the federal agents is unskilled, lacks any coherent underlying strategy, and seems almost perfectly designed to escalate tensions rather than reduce them,” Maguire told me. “It’s almost cartoonish it’s so ridiculous.”
The implications are chilling. On one hand, you have a federal government determined to quash protests with ever-increasing force. On the other hand, you have demonstrations that at one point were winding down but are now ramping up again in direct response to the heavy-handedness.
And so far the escalating standoff shows no signs of dissipating.
No one is backing down
Talk to Portland’s protesters and their lawyers, and it’s clear they expect to stay the course despite federal pressure.
“We’ve been shot at, gassed, and beaten over the last two months — and we still haven’t given up,” said Chávez, the Oregon Justice Resource Center attorney. “The intimidation is part of the intent,” but “the only thing that can stop this is people power.”
“People in Portland are not going to back down, so the feds should just leave,” said Albies, the attorney for civil rights activists in the city. “The more they attack protesters, the more they demonstrate that property is more important than human rights and human lives.”
But listen to the statements from those in charge of the federal response and it’s equally apparent they will continue this campaign. “We must protect Federal property, AND OUR PEOPLE,” Trump wrote in a Sunday tweet.
We are trying to help Portland, not hurt it. Their leadership has, for months, lost control of the anarchists and agitators. They are missing in action. We must protect Federal property, AND OUR PEOPLE. These were not merely protesters, these are the real deal!
Likely bolstered by the president’s vocal support, acting DHS chief Wolf — fresh off a visit with federal officers in Portland the week before — told Fox News on Monday that “I don’t need invitations by the state, state mayors, or state governors to do our job. We’re going to do that, whether they like us there or not.”
"I don't need invitations by the state, state mayors, or state governors to do our job. We're going to do that, whether they like us there or not.” — acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf pic.twitter.com/Rr2P8q6Ut1
With no one backing down, tensions have continued to skyrocket. On Sunday night, protesters broke into the Portland Police Association’s office and lit the building on fire, according to the city’s police.
People have broken into the Portland Police Association office and lit the building on fire.
That same evening, federal officers launched tear gas at members of Mothers Against Police Brutality who had formed a human shield in front of demonstrators. They were mainly chanting, “Leave our kids alone!” per someone at the scene, who also noted that at least one of the mothers was pregnant.
The women on the right in white are a group of moms protesting against police brutality in Portland. The canister police toss is tear gas. pic.twitter.com/raEsSh41HW
Despite the rising tensions, the Trump administration is apparently pleased with overall results. It appears the federal government is considering a similar response in Chicago, which would surely cause an even bigger uproar due to the size of the city and Trump’s racially charged comments about violence there. It would also crystallize that Trump and others believe such measures are the only way to handle nationwide protests, results be damned.
That’s why Albies and other activists believe a definitive stand must take place in Portland — or else risk similar scenes metastasizing around America. “Litigation is not going stop this. Political action is not going to stop this. People power is not going to stop this,” she said. “But all of that together will place maximum pressure on the police and federal government.”
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A rule from President Donald Trump’s administration practically spits in the face of equal rights protections under law by allowing homeless shelters to refuse transgender people based on how they appear, according to a Vox analysis of the rule. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson announced a modification to part of the Equal Access rule July 1 and claimed that the federal government’s goal was to “empower shelter providers to set policies that align with their missions, like safeguarding victims of domestic violence or human trafficking.”
What the rule actually does is detail loopholes for shelters looking to work around a Supreme Court decision banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Even though the new rule could allow shelters to force tall trans women or those with facial hair, for example, into all-male shelters, the Trump administration is actually trying to pass off the rule as a protection for shelter inhabitants, advocates told Vox.
“The new rule allows shelter providers that lawfully operate as single-sex or sex-segregated facilities to voluntarily establish a policy that will govern admissions determinations for situations when an individual’s gender identity does not match their biological sex,” federal officials said in Carson’s news release. The rule is also aimed at better accommodating “religious beliefs of shelter providers.”
“This important update will empower shelter providers to set policies that align with their missions, like safeguarding victims of domestic violence or human trafficking,” Carson said in the news release. “Mission-focused shelter operators play a vital and compassionate role in communities across America. The Federal Government should empower them, not mandate a single approach that overrides local law and concerns. HUD also wants to encourage their participation in HUD programs. That’s exactly what we are doing with this rule change.”
Dylan Waguespack, a spokesperson for the homeless youth advocacy group True Colors United told Vox Carson is “talking out of both sides of his mouth” in early June. “They are trying to put forward this narrative in which transgender people are protected from discrimination, but in fact, when you read the proposal itself, it does the exact opposite,” Waguespack said. “It creates unsafe conditions and unsafe barriers to housing and services for trans people in the midst of a global pandemic.”
National Center for Transgender Equality Executive Director Mara Keisling said in a statement LGBTQ Nation obtained that, “one in three transgender Americans has been homeless at some point in their lives, and this proposal would have them sleep on the street rather than get help.” Keisling went on to say that homelessness is “especially dangerous for transgender homeless persons, particularly transgender persons of color, who face harassment and threats from private individuals, as well as elevated rates of policing and violence within police custody.”
“When combined with President Trump’s recent policy proposals to increase criminalization of homelessness, while cutting HUD’s affordable housing budget and rolling back support for Housing First, it is clear that getting transgender persons off the street and out of harm’s way is a matter of life and death,” Keisling said in the statement.
Diebold Nixdorf, which made $3.3 billion from ATM sales and service last year, is warning stores, banks, and other customers of a new hardware-based form of “jackpotting,” the industry term for attacks that thieves use to quickly empty ATMs.
The new variation uses a device that runs parts of the company’s proprietary software stack. Attackers then connect the device to the ATM internals and issue commands. Successful attacks can result in a stream of cash, sometimes dispensed as fast as 40 bills every 23 seconds. The devices are attached either by gaining access to a key that unlocks the ATM chassis or by drilling holes or otherwise breaking the physical locks to gain access to the machine internals.
In previous jackpotting attacks, the attached devices, known in the industry as black boxes, usually invoked programming interfaces contained in the ATM operating system to funnel commands that ultimately reached the hardware component that dispenses cash. More recently, Diebold Nixdorf has observed a spate of black box attacks that incorporated parts of the company’s proprietary software.
COVID-19 got major help from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and for-profit detention executives in decimating one immigration prison in Virginia and creating the single worst outbreak of any such facility in the nation, Daily Beast has found. Facing lawsuits demanding the release of detained people amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, the agency instead shuffled many to Immigration Centers of America (ICA) in Farmville—and to disastrous results.
The report said that as of last weekend, “at least 268 out of around 360 detained people” and at least 22 guards at the for-profit prison have tested positive. “Both former ICA Farmville employees who spoke with The Daily Beast described an administrative staff more concerned with making money than with the health and lives of its detainees and its workers,” the report said.
ICE has refused to release even children and their parents together from migrant family jails across the nation amid the pandemic, with unconfirmed acting Department of Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf comparing it to a “jailbreak.” But ICE certainly isn’t alone in this abuse. The report notes that ICA’s director has always had the ability to refuse transfers, “[b]ut he did not exercise that right,” Daily Beast said. ICA also claims that since the facility is half full, detained people have space to social distance. Not so, some said.
“A detainee The Daily Beast will call Freddy said that was misleading,” the report said. “’No, we’re sleeping like we’re partners. The beds are basically attached to each other. The space here is small,’ Freddy said.” The detained man also pushed back on claims that nearly all of the positive cases at the facility are asymptomatic. “No, that’s a lie. Here, everyone has symptoms,” he said in the report.
Keep in mind that so much of this misery is happening because of mass detention policies. The agency has always had the ability to just release people, but that would mean showing some humanity to immigrants. “In my opinion, to avoid releases, they’re shifting people around the country or moving them to other detention facilities outside of south Florida,” immigration attorney Heriberto Hernandez told Daily Beast. He said that when one client tested positive at ICA, “all they did was give him cold medicine.”
Conditions at the ICE detention center in Farmville are inhumane and unforgivable. More than 70% of the population is sick with #COVID19. I am demanding answers, and again calling for the immediate release of all ICE detainees. Read my full letter: pic.twitter.com/4zrmy4x6hY
— Rep. Gerry Connolly (@GerryConnolly) July 17, 2020
Also keep in mind that ICE has also played a major role in spreading this virus across the world. An investigation by The New York Times and The Marshall Project last month “tracked over 200 deportation flights carrying migrants, some of them ill with coronavirus, to other countries from March through June. … So far, the governments of 11 countries have confirmed that deportees returned home with Covid-19.” At the Mexican camp where asylum-seekers have been forced by the Trump administration to wait out their cases, some have also become sick. “This was avoidable,” Refugees International tweeted.
But really so much of this cruelty has been avoidable. ICE currently has more than 22,000 people in custody right now, with nearly 1,000 of them testing positive for COVID-19. ICE’s website still lists only 45 employees as having tested positive because the agency excludes contracted workers from its tally. In reality, 900 detention staffers have tested positive, private prison executives recently told Congress. So not only is the administration intentionally keeping people in harm, it’s being intentionally misleading.
“We think we’re going to die at any time,” detained immigrant “Michael” told Daily Beast. “The help we need we’re not getting. We think we’re going to die without seeing our families. A lot of people here are suffering.”
If only there were a body of government who had oversight powers...
Donald K. Sherman, deputy director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, D.C., and Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, have a warning for the nation: Donald Trump's election of crony and big donor Louis DeJoy to leave the U.S. Postal Service "threatens to corrupt one of America's most trusted institutions at a key moment." The institution is the U.S. Postal Service, and the key moment is November's election, conducted in the middle of a pandemic.
"Without increased and sustained scrutiny of DeJoy's leadership of the Postal Service, our democracy could face dire consequences," Sherman and Albert write. "Having a political ally with ethical and competence questions like DeJoy lead the agency potentially puts November's election at risk." Millions of voters are going to be voting absentee this year because of the coronavirus. The perfect storm of a pandemic, the most corrupt person to ever sit in the Oval Office, a Republican rubber stamp in the Senate, an already-weakened Postal Service, and a Trump lackey in charge of the institution is extraordinarily dangerous. From now until Nov. 3 is a short timeframe for Trump to destroy public trust in both the Postal Service and in the election system, but it appears he's going to do his damnedest.
In his Fox interview Sunday with Chris Wallace, Trump threatened to ignore the results of the election should he lose, and said: "You don't know until you see, I think it depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election," Trump said. "I really do." That's despite the fact that "Trump himself and over 20 members of his family, administration, campaign team, and other top officials in his orbit have voted or tried to vote by mail in recent years."
Of course it's different when you're set to lose—again—the popular vote. He's got an accomplice now in the Postal Service. Already LeJoy has moved to sabotage the Postal Service with a number of edicts that will end up forcing carriers to slow down delivery of the mail, including first-class mail. That this particularly hurts Indigenous, Black, and Latino people—particularly those who live in rural areas and those who don't have access to privatized delivery systems—is a very large part of the point for Trump. That it also harms rural people who rely on the Postal Service, many of whom voted for Trump last time around, is an unfortunate byproduct. It will be a painful byproduct, however, for a lot of Republican senators who represent states with large rural populations.
Facebook has touted its fact-checking process as one of the ways it intends to fight rampant disinformation heading into the 2020 US presidential election. New reports about the way the site handles the fact-checking of climate science stories, though, make clear that fact-checking can only work as well as Facebook allows it to—and that the months from now to November are going to be a slog.
Facebook does not employ fact-checkers directly but rather works with a range of third-party organizations to rate how true or false content shared in categories is. The efforts are not universal, however. While Facebook has heavily invested in efforts to stem the overwhelming tide of false and misleading COVID-19 information, for example, it does not heavily fact-check information related to climate change.
The New York Times recently explained the platform's reasoning behind how it handles climate change. Facebook considers opinion content largely exempt from review—and climate change can, as far as Facebook's rules are concerned, be a matter of opinion.
Just before 6:30 a.m. on June 15, sleep-deprived and feet afire with blisters, Joe “Stringbean” McConaughy crossed over Vermont’s border with Massachusetts. After subsisting mostly on watery mashed Oreos and Fritos for the final miles, McConaughy finished a grueling trek along Vermont’s Long Trail in 4 days, 23 hours and 54 minutes — the fastest an athlete has been known to traverse the entire trail without a prearranged support crew. The 273-mile trail through the Green Mountains takes an average hiker between 20 and 30 days to complete and is known for relentless black flies, knee-deep muddy stretches and varying terrain from thick forest to alpine tundra. It is the oldest long-distance trail in the United States and one of the classics for attempting a fastest known time.
Fastest known times, or FKTs, are set by endurance athletes running or hiking a route, either alone or in teams. The goal is to set an unofficial record for finishing a course in the shortest possible time. In an FKT attempt, there are no bibs, no crowds and no medals. Whether deep in Appalachia or on the lip of the Grand Canyon, athletes are able to compete while maintaining physical distance from others. It just might be the perfect coronavirus pursuit. And as it turns out, the FKT scene has exploded this year.
As COVID-19 shut down state after state, many organized endurance races were canceled or rescheduled. The New York City Marathon — which would have celebrated its golden anniversary this year — and the never-before-canceled Boston Marathon are among the most well-known and highly anticipated races that have been nixed. In the ultra-trail-running world, cornerstone races Ultra Trail du Mont-Blanc in Europe and Barkley Marathon in Tennessee have also been scrapped this year.
For athletes who ramped themselves into peak form for spring and summer marathons, there are a few options other than scaling back their training plans. They could do what one guy did and run a marathon on his terrace during lockdown. They could join a number of virtual races. Or, they could lace up and run through the night from the Canadian border to Massachusetts, like McConaughy did.
So how many athletes are following suit? We took a look at the data from FastestKnownTime.com, the central website for submitting FKTs, to see just how many records have fallen so far this year.
Runners submitted 3.8 times as many FKTs through June of this year as in the same period a year ago. “Not only in the numbers, but there’s been a huge uptick in the amount of work for us,” said Peter Bakwin, one of the creators of FastestKnownTime.com. There is no official governing organization for FKT routes and records, but Bakwin and his co-founders, Buzz Burrell and Jeff Schuler, act as the volunteer commissioners for approving routes and verifying times. FKT attempts had been gaining in popularity even before this year, but submissions in the past few months reflect the type of growth Bakwin and Burrell expected to see five years from now. Many of the submissions cited canceled races as the reason for the FKT attempt, they said.
Some associations that care for long-distance trails like the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail are recommending that through-hikers postpone or cancel their hikes this year to avoid spreading the virus on trails and into nearby towns.23 Those who hit the trails anyway are advised to stay local and be self-supported (so, carry what you need on and off the trail and avoid going into local towns or using trail amenities like outhouses). Because rules and recommendations have changed often in the past few months, Bakwin and Burrell are reluctant to play police. “Early on we did have to confront that question and basically we don’t want to have to verify what’s legal with changing laws — we just don’t have the capacity to do that,” Bakwin said.
But the site is also getting submissions from people who are creating their own local adventures, which means many new, interesting routes. A loop through Central Park might not seem creative on its face, but Aaron Zellheofer added an interesting new mechanic: Rather than running a single loop as fast as he could, he aimed to run as many laps of the main road as he could during the hours the park was open (6 a.m. to 1 a.m.). He ran 11 6.1-mile laps.
“We were OK with it because Central Park truly is classic, the route around the park is defined, and his timing was also very defined,” Burrell said. “And there are millions of people who live right there, so that’s one that a lot of people could contest,” Bakwin added.
Lockdowns have left many with time to plan routes and strategies for an FKT. The sport is inherently creative in that runners only have to adhere to a fairly vague seven-point list when crafting a route. That flexibility also allows nonelite runners to submit a route’s first FKT, earning them a spot on the website. “Often they’ll [submit a route and] say, ‘My time can easily be beat,’” Bakwin said. “But, you know — if you can’t be fast, be first.”
Though the majority of the site’s FKTs are for routes in the United States, times can be submitted for courses in any country. And this year, Bakwin said he has seen a surge of routes in Europe, particularly from Germany, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and the U.K. “I don’t know why, but some countries are totally into it,” Bakwin said. “I think they must have just got wind of it, and when one or two guys start talking about it over it there, I’m guessing the community is not that big.”
In preparation for 2020, Bakwin and Burrell put together a list of 10 “premier routes” (all in the United States) to encourage FKT attempts this year. The goal is to attract more elite athletes who are more likely to have a corporate sponsor who will help track and document the attempt, which the site’s organizers hoped will quell some verification controversies in previous FKTs.
FastestKnownTimes.com breaks record attempts down into three categories: supported (getting help or supplies from people you’ve arranged to meet up with along the way), self-supported (no prearranged help, but cadging food or water from people you happen across is allowed) and unsupported (you carry everything you need from start to finish.24) McConaughy had set out to attempt an unsupported FKT on the Long Trail, but he ended up accepting water along the route, turning his trek — in which he cruised at around 54 miles a day — into a self-supported FKT. Less than a month later, Brett Mastrangelo attempted to usurp McConaughy’s record but had to call it quits two days in because of a leg injury. And plenty of other athletes are making their FKT attempts on premier routes this year: Sarah Hansel just completed the first unsupported women’s attempt at Nolan’s 14 (a route covering 14 mountains in Colorado) on July 8, while Avery Collins started the trail but did not finish. Liz Anjos is in the second week of her attempt on the Appalachian Trail. Two others are publicly posting the tracker data during their FKT attempts as they challenge the current supported and self-supported records on the Colorado Trail.
Will the popularity of the FKT continue? Before the pandemic, Bakwin and Burrell couldn’t have predicted that the sport would catch fire this year, and they’re not sure what to expect after races can safely start again. “The unforeseen consequences of a global pandemic are many and surprising,” Bakwin said. “I would guess that once races start happening again, some of the traffic will taper off, but some people will have found a new thing that they will make part of their training and racing season rather than races.”
Good news! Donald Trump says he'll be signing a complete replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act in two weeks! Actually within two weeks! That's what he told Fox's Chris Wallace in the totally otherwise unhinged interview that aired Sunday. Okay, totally unhinged.
"We're signing a healthcare plan within two weeks, a full and complete healthcare plan," Trump told Wallace. "We're going to sign an immigration plan, a healthcare plan, and various other plans." Oh, yeah, immigration, too. Might as well throw in infrastructure. In two weeks. That's after he said on Thursday that he was soon "going into the world of health care—very complete health care, and we have a lot of very exciting things to discuss." Very complete health care. In two weeks. While Congress is fighting over the next phase of coronavirus relief—and it’s going to be a fight—and the national defense authorization.
In case you're wondering, no, the Republicans have not broken their decade-long logjam and do not have a plan, of any kind, to replace Obamacare. It's safe to say at this point that they will never have a plan to replace Obamacare. If Trump has a plan, it will be the same as how he decided to tackle coronavirus: Do nothing and blame the governors.
And now it's incumbent on the media to not just amplify his campaign events.
Donald Trump told reporters on Monday that he may send more federal law enforcement agents to major cities around the country, because what they’re doing in Portland (gassing moms and abducting private citizens) is going so well.
#BREAKING: President Trump says he may send "more federal law enforcement" to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, and other cities to deal with unrest: "In Portland they’ve done a fantastic job." pic.twitter.com/Pe6aDv6AVt
Those idiots deserve each other. Unfortunately, they're going to do damage to the country too
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has been, from the start of his political career, a complete ideologue. A tea party darling, Meadows led the U.S. House Freedom Caucus—the crazy wing of the crazy party. Among his greatest hits was voting against Hurricane Sandy relief, leading the charge for the 2013 government shutdown, and providing the catalyst (via a resolution) for Republican House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation in 2015. And he was oh-so-loyal to Donald Trump from day one.
One would think, however, that being a back-bencher in a chamber with 435 seats was different than actually being in charge of staff. One would further think that once put in actual charge would lead one to behave more responsibly. But nope. In Meadows, Trump finally found someone as destructively stupid as he.
Exhibit A: There are lots of reasons Trump has f’d up the national response to the global mass death event wreaking havoc in our country. Turns out, Meadows is a big one. In one corner, you had Trump too afraid to lead, over his head, and stewing that the virus was so unfairly harming his reelection chances. In the other corner, you had ….
Casting the decision in ideological terms, Mr. Meadows would tell people: “Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that they have the answer for all of America.”
Funny. In South Korea, Seoul thought they had the answer for all of South Korea. And they got control of the virus in zero time flat. Same thing in New Zealand, where Wellington squashed the virus through their entire nation. Berlin took over in Germany, and new cases are just a handful of days and schools can safely reopen.
All over the world, federal governments have smartly decided to take control of the national response to a virus that knows no boundaries. It is only in the countries that have royally screwed things up, that states and other municipalities have been left to try and salvage what they can—places like the United States, Brazil, and Russia.
In other words, you have to be a special kind of asshole to think that the most powerful and best-resourced governmental institution should sit out a pandemic raging throughout the country. But, if you remember that Meadows voted against federal aid for disaster-struck Texas and Louisiana, well then, it makes more sense, right?
Some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers are adamant that the best way forward is to downplay the dangers of the disease. Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, has been particularly forceful in his view that the White House should avoid drawing attention to the virus, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Mr. Meadows has for the most part opposed any briefings about the virus [...]
Guys, don’t draw attention to the virus. No one will notice this thing that is killing a thousand people a day. If we pretend it’s not there, then it disappears!
Gonna stress this again, because those words are so unbelievably stupid that it beggars the mind: Mike Meadows thinks that ignoring the virus will help Trump. He thinks that the thing that is the number one concern of voters will cease being a concern if only the White House pretends it doesn’t exist.
So Meadows’ grand plan is:
1. What virus?
2. Open schools.
3 ….
4. Reelected!
Given that Trump systematically purged his team of any semblance of competence, it’s only fitting the chief of staff he finally settled on is as stupid as he. The only problem is that, with real power, he’s causing real damage to our nation. Something that is, unfortunately, true of every Trump official.
Said Silverstone: “I was really well-received by the gay community after Clueless came out. They’ve always been my people. I don’t know if it’s just this film or my vibe that’s endeared me to them, but that has always been my favorite aspect of the film. Particularly what it means to gay boys.”
“Christian Siriano [the fashion designer] is like my real-life Christian, Silverstone added, referring to her crush in the film who is revealed to be gay. “Whenever we hang out he’s basically like my boyfriend. We love each other so much and I’m sure some of that stems from him really admiring Clueless and what Cher meant to him and all of his friends growing up.”
It was truly a minor point, in the overall confusion that was Donald Trump's interview with Fox host Chris Wallace on Sunday, but Trump continues to hold up his 2018 success on a medical screening test measuring cognitive decline as evidence of his "perfect" genius. He returned to the point again yesterday, suggesting he and challenger Joe Biden be given the same test, and was very insistent.
"It's not that hard a test," noted Wallace. "They have a picture and it says 'what's that' and it's an elephant." That did not sit well with Dear Genius Leader, Identifier of Elephants. And so we find ourselves here again: Trump once again using his ability to pass a pre-dementia screening test as go-to evidence of his brilliance, telling his interviewer, who took the same test on a lark, that he could not possibly match his own clock-drawing, elephant-identifying brilliance.
I'm no doctor, but "has insisted for two years that being able to pass the Montreal Cognitive Assessment is go-to evidence of a vast intelligence, each time dismissing anyone and everyone who attempts to explain its true purpose" should probably be its own separate cognitive assessment test. It isn't merely that Trump is unnecessarily proud; he remains quite convinced that nobody could possibly do as well on a pre-dementia cognitive assessment test as he has done. The transcript is a bit loopy.
"I'll bet you couldn't even answer the last five questions," Trump tells Chris Wallace. "I'll bet you couldn't, they get very hard, the last five questions."
"Well one of them was count back from 100 by seven," replied Wallace. "Ninety three..."
"You couldn't answer many of the questions."
To be clear, this is a test that measures your ability to do rote tasks involving memory and cognition, given primarily to those suspected of having issues with either. And yet, here in 2020, we have Donald J. Trump challenging both his presidential challenger and, apparently, anyone else in earshot to match his (claimed) "perfect" score.
Docs don't give a cognitive test to measure intellect. We give it to assess cognitive defects. Trump calling questions on this test difficult should raise some red flags about dementia and inability to serve. pic.twitter.com/4cAmhC5Zpu
Sigh. All right. Let's take a look at "the last five questions." While the test has different versions and so we can't quite identify which specific questions Trump was asked, that one there is a good representative sample.
The last and presumably hardest question: Where are you. No, literally, what building are you in, in what city. What's the date? Day of the week?
Stand back, Joe Biden. You'd dealing with a guy who knows it's Monday. Betcha Albert Einstein himself couldn't top that.
Another of the last five questions asks you to name as many words that begin with "F" as you can in one minute. So, for example, you could list off, um, fat festering felonious failing fails on far-flung foul-faced flying fumbling failure, for funsies.
What about repeating a three-digit string backward? Any other Americans want to give that one a go, thus proving your own presidential caliber?
It seem inevitable that Trump is, sooner or later, going to demand one of the debates be premised around who can best prove their genius via dementia screening test. God help us, it's going to get to that point, isn't it?
MODERATOR HUGH HEWITT: "Mr. President, if the similarity between a 'banana' and an 'orange' is that they are both fruits, what similarities are there between a 'train' and a 'bicycle?'
TRUMP: "The similarity there, Hugh, is that a train is big and powerful, and a bicycle can be big and powerful too, if there's a big guy on one. Like a really big guy. With tears in his eyes, because he's so proud of what America has become under my leadership."
HEWITT: ...
TRUMP: "Also I've never owned either one. I could, because I'm rich, but never have."
HEWITT: "The next question is for you, Vice President Biden. Please draw a clock."
Seriously though, the person in charge of the entire country, during a global pandemic, has for two years been unable to grasp the difference between passing a pre-dementia test that every fully functional human is expected to muster a passing score on and a test which proves him to be superior to everyone around him, bar none. The man has had access to every expert the United States has to offer, and for two years now none of them have been able to successfully explain to him that the "test" was not what he thinks it is.
Is it his narcissism, his ignorance, his dishonesty, or what?
(@Vote4Beckford) 
(@10Plus20Birdy) 
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at an event on February 19 in Washington, DC. | Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for DVF
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