James.galbraith

On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examined coronavirus conspiracy theories in depth, diving in to “why they’re so appealing, how to spot them, and what you might be able to do about it.”

Oliver first explained that over half of Americans consistently endorse at least one conspiracy theory, admitting that he is “not immune” to believing them either.

“Embarrassingly, there is a part of me that thinks the Royal Family had Princess Diana killed,” Oliver said. “I know that they didn’t because there’s absolutely no evidence that they did. But the idea still lingers. Because it felt too big an event to be accidental – there had to be some intent there. And experts will say that that is actually a huge draw of conspiracy theories. They help explain a chaotic uncertain world and appeal to the human impulse called proportionality bias, which is the tendency to assume that big events must have big causes.”

Added Oliver: “These theories have always been appealing, and have actually been particularly seductive during global health crises. … All of this would be dangerous enough before you take into account that one of the most prominent spreaders of conspiracies on Earth is the current president of the United States. … And I cannot believe I’m saying this, but the person with the clearest sense of just how deeply cynical Trump’s use of conspiracy theories is, is [Rush Limbaugh].”

Limbaugh, Oliver showed in a clip, observed that Trump never says he believes in the conspiracy theories but just sends them out into the universe where they blow up among his supporters.

Oliver, as he often does, provided a solution to at least some of the problem. He urged viewers to be critical and ask themselves, ” Is there a rational, non-conspiracy explanation? … Has this been held up to scrutiny by experts? … And how plausible is this conspiracy, as a practical matter?”

He also gave his solution a celebrity twist.

“What experts say is that the most effective way to approach someone is not by shaming them for believing something, or overwhelming them with counterevidence, but to try and be empathetic, meet them where they are, and nudge them to think a bit more critically,” he said, before introducing a series of videos starring John Cena, Catherine O’Hara, Billy Porter, Paul Rudd, and Alex Trebek.

Oliver collected the videos on a special website called The True True Truth. He encouraged you to share them with your dipshit uncles and other conspiracy theorists at home.

Check out clips

The post John Oliver Beats Down Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories with Help from Catherine O’Hara, Billy Porter, Paul Rudd, Alex Trebek, and a Shirtless John Cena: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

A man walks past the New York Stock Exchange on April 30. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, millions of people in the US have lost their jobs and businesses have closed across the country, leading to nationwide economic distress. | Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images

“The cliff is totally visible in front of us”: The future is grim if Congress doesn’t act on the economy.

The country is ambling toward a cliff, putting millions of Americans’ lives and livelihoods in danger and all but ensuring prolonged economic distress nationwide. It didn’t have to be this way. Yet here we are, unable to shake out of it.

The Covid-19 pandemic tossed much of the US economy into disarray earlier this year. Millions of Americans lost their jobs, and businesses across the country closed their doors as part of a planned shutdown. In March, Congress passed the CARES Act, an ambitious $2 trillion stimulus package to try to stop the bleeding. The plan was to buy the country time to get the virus under control and begin to safely reopen to get the economy on track to recovery.

But things have not gone according to plan. Amid reopenings, coronavirus cases are spiking across the country, and many states and cities are reversing course. There are signs the recovery that was happening is dissipating. And now many of the measures that kept so many American households afloat in recent months are about to come to an abrupt end. It’s not clear what, if much of anything, Congress and the White House plan to do about it.

“It could be cataclysmic,” said Angela Hanks, deputy executive director of the progressive group Groundwork Collaborative. “I don’t think there’s any way to overestimate what happens when you have a pandemic worsening, not improving, when we have an economic crisis that’s intensifying, and frankly, there’s no response.”

At the end of the month, the extra $600 per week of unemployment insurance benefits put in place under the CARES Act is set to expire, which could affect some 33 million workers. In the coming weeks and months, eviction moratoriums and mortgage and student loan forbearance programs will wind down. Small businesses continue to struggle to stay afloat, and many of those that got loans have used them up already. State and local governments are still in dire need of financial assistance. These issues aren’t ones that only plague the parties that are directly affected; they also have knock-on effects across the economy. Not being able to pay rent isn’t just a problem for the tenant — it’s also a problem for the landlord.

It’s an urgent situation, but many people in government aren’t treating it that way. We’re sleepwalking toward catastrophe.

“The cliff is totally visible in front of us, and yet we’re not ready,” said Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist. “It’s probably already too late to avoid enormous hardship.”

“We designed an economic response that was predicated on a public health response that did not materialize”

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Stability Act, or CARES Act, signed into law by President Trump in March, was an unprecedented act of fiscal policy by the US government. It entailed measures that would have once seemed unthinkable, including an extra $600 in unemployment benefits, $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans, and billions of dollars in forgivable loans to small businesses. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews recently laid out, the Covid-19 response was larger than the stimulus policies put in place in response to the Great Recession and, from a fiscal standpoint, bigger than the New Deal.

It made a difference. Personal incomes actually went up in April thanks in large part to unemployment insurance and stimulus checks. Poverty rates didn’t increase.

“We’ve basically kept income growth where it was before,” said George Pearkes, a global macro strategist at Bespoke Investment Group. “If you take the market income and unemployment insurance, then income from households looks about stable.”

The stimulus bill was far from perfect. Many unemployed people struggled to get the money they deserved, and some issues, such as state and local budget shortfalls, were not addressed. But in aggregate, the social safety net worked.

“When incomes get destroyed, people still have certain kinds of liabilities and expenses to pay off,” said Skanda Amarnath, director of research and analysis at the think tank Employ America. “This was exactly where we needed different types of fiscal policy measures to replace the lost income.”

The stimulus bill had with it an underlying assumption that the economy would improve by the summer, and that was predicated on the country getting its outbreak under control. But the country didn’t — a series of public policy and leadership failures at the federal, state, and local levels have allowed the virus to thrive.

“We designed an economic response that was predicated on a public health response that did not materialize,” said Trevon Logan, an economist at Ohio State University and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

States such as Texas, Florida, Arizona, and California have begun to close down parts of their economies again as coronavirus cases rise, and other states have paused some reopening plans. And even where lawmakers are ignoring the problem, consumers, workers, and businesses can’t.

According to data from Glassdoor, job openings are falling, and JPMorgan’s consumer spending tracker has flattened. Data from the team management software provider Homebase shows states that have seen an increase in Covid-19 cases have seen a reversal in hours worked at small businesses. While it appeared jobs lost in May and June were beginning to come back, that’s started to stall.

“Just across the board, there’s a litany of indicators that progress has slowed, and that’s going to have bad impacts on labor markets,” Pearkes said.

What’s at stake

The US hasn’t fixed the coronavirus problem, so the question now is whether the government tries to prop up the economy while it (hopefully) tries to do that, or whether it leaves the economic problem as unaddressed as the public health one.

One of the most pressing points of concern is the extra weekly money to the unemployed, which is set to expire at the end of the month. As Vox’s Li Zhou recently laid out, if the program is allowed to expire, some 33 million people who have been kept afloat by those benefits will take an enormous hit. Congress is still haggling about it, and the outcome remains uncertain.

“The loss in payments that we’re looking at here is going to be about twice as big as a share of GDP as the Obama stimulus was at its peak,” Krugman said. “We’re talking about a really big fiscal contraction about to hit an economy that is nowhere near recovered.”

This would leave millions of workers staring down a dark tunnel. Many would be forced to go back to work in risky situations, putting not only their own health at risk but also their families’. And it’s not clear that there are enough jobs for them to return to.

“There’s going to be a disruption in a significant amount of income for many households,” said Damon Jones, an economist at the University of Chicago. “People are going to be unnecessarily suffering.”

The issue stretches far beyond unemployment. Much of the money given out through the Paycheck Protection Program to keep workers paid has been spent, and many small businesses were locked out of those loans altogether. There is evidence people are already hurting. An estimated one in three people in the US missed their housing payments in June, and while we’ve seen a recovery in the aggregate unemployment rate, for Black workers, that progress hasn’t been shared.

“We already know that family food insecurity has increased dramatically with the pandemic and is racially disproportionate. Missed mortgages and rent payments, even with the CARES Act, are substantial,” Logan said. “If there’s no additional support, we will see a significant number of household balance sheets go to immediate insolvency.”

The longer the pandemic goes on, the worse the economic fallout gets. Some companies that hoped to weather the storm for a few months are deciding they have no more time to spare. Both United Airlines and American Airlines have signaled they may lay off thousands of workers in the fall. And as compared to the restaurant and retail jobs temporarily lost at the outset of the pandemic, many of the job losses happening now are permanent.

“Those companies don’t have a real plan to bring you back,” said Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan and former Obama administration official. “It’s thoughtful, these layoffs. And I’m not trying to say they’re good, I’m saying they’re not a rushed decision. They are crunching the numbers, they’re looking forward, they’re doing their best to forecast for the next six months, and then they’re saying they can’t sustain this level of payroll.”

It’s not just what Congress needs to do again but also what it hasn’t done yet. State and local governments are facing enormous shortfalls that still haven’t been addressed. There is still no broad plan on what to do about kids and schools, and child care is an economic problem. Even if it doesn’t affect everyone personally, all the moving parts create a broader drag on the economy that makes the recovery harder and longer. And all these crises are mounting on top of longstanding systems of racial and economic inequality in the country.

“There are things we can do now to stem the bleeding, but fundamentally, it’s exposed that our economy isn’t prepared for a shock of any kind, let alone the scale of economic crisis that we’re seeing now,” Hanks said.

You can’t pretend your way out of a pandemic

This is not the version of 2020 anyone wanted, including the White House and Congress. But this is the reality we are in: A pandemic has set off an economic calamity, and neither front is under control. The disease is still spreading, and much of the country is struggling to stay above water.

The urgency of the situation feels almost undeniable, and yet in some quarters, it’s being denied. The president’s strategy seems to be hoping that if you ignore the pandemic, it will just go away, and whenever anyone asks about the economy, just point to the stock market, which has become completely disjointed from reality. Many Republican governors are opting to take the same route, as are many Republicans in Congress. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants companies to get liability protections if their workers get sick through 2024.

“It’s been wishful thinking all the way that Trump wanted to preside over a roaring economy spurred on by tax cuts and has simply refused to accept that we have a crisis that requires, at least for the time being, more government, not less,” Krugman said. “You can’t really have a roaring economy when people are afraid to go out.”

Hanks made a starker assessment: “In a moment where we are about to see millions of people go broke and have no recourse, among Leader McConnell’s proposals is a corporate liability shield that lasts until 2024 and a capital gains tax holiday. I don’t know anyone who would be helped by any of those things, but I do know a lot of people who would be hurt by losing unemployment insurance.”

There are certainly ideas and proposals out there to continue to support the economy and get people the help they need during the pandemic. House Democrats passed the HEROES Act as an ambitious follow-up to the CARES Act, but so far, it’s been untouched in the Senate. And some believe the bill isn’t enough. More recently, a group of progressive organizations including Color of Change and the Sunrise Movement sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pushing them to incorporate paycheck guarantees and anti-monopoly measures in legislation.

The clock is ticking, and the hard truth is that on some fronts, it might be too late. It took states a long time to ramp up their unemployment insurance systems to meet the CARES Act’s expansion; ramping down and then up again is going to cost precious time. It’s not enough to just pass legislation — it also has to grind through the administrative system to be put into place.

At the outset of the pandemic, Congress rushed to react with three separate pieces of legislation. Lawmakers had time to craft a follow-up bill since then, but Senate Republicans, at least, largely haven’t used it. Congress has procrastinated into another urgent situation very much of its own making.

“They’ve had a lot of time to figure this out, and they’re just waiting,” Stevenson said.

It’s a failure of astounding magnitude. The US has been incapable of getting the pandemic under control, and now the government is resistant to addressing the resulting economic reality. There were so many ways to not end up here.

“If this is as bad as it feels like to everyone, how is it possible that our representatives can move forward comfortably?” Jones said. “What does it say about how well-functioning our democracy is?”

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Updated at 2:45 p.m. ET on July 30, 2020.

Through the mid-20th century, southern segregationists relied on the Senate filibuster as their ultimate legislative weapon to block equal rights for Black Americans. Now the renewed struggle over those rights may doom the filibuster itself, perhaps as soon as next year—as former President Barack Obama signaled when he dramatically endorsed ending the filibuster at Representative John Lewis’s funeral today.

With Donald Trump struggling in the polls, Democrats now are eagerly contemplating the possibility that the November presidential election could deliver the party unified control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time since 2009. But that excitement is tempered by the recognition that under any scenario, Republicans will almost certainly still control enough Senate seats to block most of the Democrats’ ambitious agenda through sustained filibusters.

That prospect raises alarms among advocates for a broad range of causes, including climate change and immigration reform. But after this spring’s nationwide outpouring of protest following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many Democrats believe that if the party wins unified control, issues of racial inequity and civil rights may create the greatest pressure yet to eliminate the filibuster. At Lewis’s funeral in Atlanta, Obama previewed how intense that pressure could grow when he described the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic” and flatly declared it should be eliminated if it is used to block a new Voting Rights Act—which Democrats have already named after Lewis—and other electoral reforms.

Leaders of the burgeoning racial-justice movement are unequivocal in warning Senate Democratic leaders that they risk an eruption if they achieve unified control yet allow Republican filibusters to kill civil-rights initiatives that pass the House, as bills on police reform, voting, and other issues have in this session.

That “will be unacceptable,” Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change, a leading racial-justice organization, told me. “It will be unacceptable to people who have waited a long time. It will be unacceptable to people who are already skeptical of electoral politics. It will be unacceptable that a body that is deeply unrepresentative of a diverse America is telling people to wait more time.”

Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, an organization that mobilizes women of color, sends the same blunt warning. “It’s unacceptable to say there is nothing we can do, that we must be held hostage by Republicans who have enabled a Trump presidency and a set of policies that have hurt us,” she told me. “We can’t be held hostage by the filibuster.”

[David Litt: The Senate filibuster is another monument to white supremacy]

Democrat Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the Senate’s chief advocate for ending the filibuster, agrees that civil-rights concerns (along with climate change) may be the issue that forces the party to roll back or eliminate the tool if they win the majority. “I think it’s unacceptable to campaign on issues and to say you care about them, and then hand [GOP Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell the ability on behalf of powerful special interests to block those efforts,” Merkley told me. On racial-equity policies in particular, Senate Democrats can’t allow “one person the veto to stop them from happening.”

The filibuster, which traces back to the 19th century, allows the minority party to block action on Senate bills by extending debate. In 1917, the Senate required a two-thirds vote to end a filibuster; in 1975, that threshold was lowered to three-fifths, or 60 members in the current Senate. But the upper chamber can restrict or eliminate the filibuster itself with only a simple majority. A Democratic-controlled Senate voted in 2013 to end the filibuster for presidential appointees, including lower-court judges; four years later, after Trump took office, Republicans abolished it for Supreme Court nominees too. “The Senate seems to be on a very steady march towards majority rule,” Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me.

But the filibuster, for now, endures for legislative proposals. While the budget “reconciliation” process could allow Democrats to pass bills related to federal spending—likely including plans to expand the Affordable Care Act—with a simple majority, that tool cannot be stretched to encompass many other party priorities, such as immigration, gun control, LGBTQ rights, much of the climate agenda, and racial-equity issues.

Democrats, both inside and beyond the Senate, have been sharply divided on whether to try to end the filibuster; several senators have expressed concern about losing their ability to stop Republican policies if and when the GOP next achieves unified control. Joe Biden, who was mostly a conformist during his 36 years in the Senate, has never expressed much enthusiasm for elimination, though earlier this month he did say he’d “take a look at” ending the filibuster if Republicans become too “obstreperous” in opposition.

Merkley says his conversations with colleagues about the filibuster “are different” now than before—partly because the prospect of seizing Senate control is within sight, partly because they’re more and more frustrated by the erosion of open debate in the chamber. In addition to eliminating or restricting the filibuster, Merkely wants to restore senators’ ability to offer unlimited amendments on pending legislation, something that McConnell and his predecessor, the Democrat Harry Reid, severely limited.

For most of the Senate’s history, “amendments have been common and supermajority votes have been rare,” Merkley says. “Now it’s the opposite. The Senate has really deviated from its historic tradition … [of] every senator being able to put ideas on the table, force votes on those ideas, and therefore create accountability on those issues.”

[Read: The world John Lewis helped create]

Several factors are converging to propel civil-rights concerns to the center of the growing debate over the filibuster’s future.

One is that Democrats are unlikely to win unified control in the first place without big turnout in November and big margins among voters of color. Another is that this spring’s protests galvanized attention on racial inequality for voters across the Democratic coalition. Adding to the pressure is the widening racial gap between the parties and the diverging Americas they represent. Republican senators largely represent the least racially diverse states, and almost all of them rely preponderantly on white votes even in states that are more diverse, particularly in the South. And because Republicans dominate less-populated states, the current Republican majority in the Senate won about 14 million fewer total votes than the Democratic minority, according to calculations by Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings. (That tabulation excludes the two Republican senators appointed to their positions, Kelly Loeffler of Georgia and Martha McSally of Arizona.)

For all these reasons, many racial-justice advocates include the filibuster in their list of structural barriers that perpetuate white-conservative minority rule and unfairly impede the nation’s nonwhite communities from acquiring political influence commensurate with their growing size. (Also on that list are the Electoral College, voter-suppression laws, and the constitutional requirement that each state have two senators regardless of population.)

Democrats can’t cede control on civil-rights and racial-equity issues to a “group of senators who are less and less representative” of the country, Allison told me. The “filibuster is a tool that they use to impede progress. We have got to think about the broader structure in order to enable a multiracial-reflective democracy. If we don’t have those conversations—one protest to the next, one campaign fight to the next—it’s harder to gain traction and to craft a government that is more responsive to the people.”

Another reason racial equity could be the issue that breaks the filibuster is the mechanism’s history. It is routinely used by the Senate minority to block action on almost any issue that cannot be shoehorned into the reconciliation process. But for most of the last century, the filibuster was deployed primarily by southern segregationist Democrats, in many cases with support from Republican conservatives, to prevent action on civil-rights measures such as fair housing and anti-lynching laws. When the Senate approved the Civil Rights Act in 1964, after a titanic four-month struggle on the floor, it was the first time the body ever broke a southern filibuster on civil rights.

If a Republican minority blocks civil-rights legislation again in 2021, “the pressure to get rid of the filibuster would be unbearable, and [Democrats] would have to get rid of it,” predicts Adam Jentleson, a former deputy chief of staff to Reid and the author of an upcoming book about the Senate, Kill Switch. Starting next year, Democrats “simply could not explain” to their coalition and the broader public alike that they would fail “to pass a new civil-rights agenda in deference to the procedural tool that was invented by segregationists to uphold Jim Crow and white supremacy. That is an unsustainable argument for Democrats to make.”

Signals from the current Congress suggest this debate could gel very quickly in 2021, because Democrats appear much more likely than in the past to generate simple-majority support for the biggest elements of the modern racial-equity agenda.

Long after the 1960s, the House Democratic caucus included a large number of members from southern and rural districts dominated by culturally conservative non-college-educated and non-urban white voters. Race-related policies often split the caucus in two. But especially since the 2018 midterms, House Democrats predominantly represent the nation’s major metropolitan centers, and they’ve shown extraordinary unity in passing a suite of civil-rights measures whose scale has generally been overlooked.

[Read: Abolishing the filibuster is unavoidable for Democrats]

House Democrats have passed H.R. 1, a sweeping election-reform bill that would vastly expand access to voter registration, mail balloting, and early voting; reform the congressional-redistricting process and campaign-finance laws; and undo some of the laws Republican-controlled states have passed to impede voting access. They’ve passed a new Voting Rights Act that would undo the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which opened the door to the wave of voter-suppression laws approved in GOP states in recent years. They’ve passed far-reaching police-reform legislation drafted in response to the Floyd protests. And they’ve passed legislation to make Washington, D.C., with its large Black population, a state. House Democrats, incredibly, supported all four bills unanimously, except for a single “no” vote on D.C. statehood from Representative Collin Peterson, who’s running for reelection in a Minnesota district Trump won by 30 points.

If they retain their majority next year, House Democrats would unquestionably pass all of these bills again. And the companion bill to each of these has widespread support in the Senate. For instance, all 47 senators who now caucus with the Democrats have endorsed a new voting-rights act sponsored by Leahy, the former Judiciary Committee chairman, as well as the Senate companion to H.R. 1.

In a world where Democrats achieve unified control, the filibuster will be the final obstacle for most, and perhaps all, of these proposals—not to mention sweeping immigration reform, gun control, workplace protections for the LGBTQ community, and other issues that the House would likely approve. And Democrats will know that control could be tough to maintain. The last four times a president—of either party—went into a midterm with unified control, voters have revoked it. (That list includes Trump in 2018, Barack Obama in 2010, George W. Bush in 2006, and Bill Clinton in 1994.) No party has controlled all the levers of government for more than four consecutive years since 1968. In all likelihood, Allison says, unified government would provide Democrats “a short window” of opportunity after 2020.

A Senate Democratic majority could vote to eliminate the filibuster immediately after it takes control, before any legislative action begins. But most political observers I’ve spoken to believe they may resist taking that step until they face a Republican filibuster blocking them on a specific bill they want passed—as Biden suggested in his comments earlier this month.

That means one of the most important choices facing Democrats may be picking the issue that forces the filibuster’s future to a head.

Merkley predicts that even if Democrats can’t agree to end the filibuster on all legislation, they might be willing to eliminate it for measures such as H.R. 1 and the new voting-rights act. “There’s such a sense that protecting and taking on the gerrymandering, voter suppression, and dark money is so important, it could well be a case … where every Democrat would come together to support a simple-majority” vote requirement, he told me.

That would be a momentous step. But it likely wouldn’t satisfy civil-rights activists, who are impatient for action on other issues with more immediate effects on day-to-day life than changes to the underlying electoral rules. Which is why some observers believe police reform is the issue most likely to crystallize the debate over the filibuster.

Such people think a Republican Senate minority, conscious of history, might look to cut a deal on police reform, because they wouldn’t want that to become the dispute that potentially ends the filibuster—and positions them as the modern heirs to southern segregationists such as Richard Russell and Strom Thurmond. Yet few signs suggest that many Republicans would accept the reform measures that the House has already passed and might build on next year. And that could make police reform the crucible that ultimately cracks the weapon of the filibuster, forged into its modern form through decades of “massive resistance” to civil rights.

“I do think it’s going to take a substantive issue to provide the motivation for senators to get rid of the filibuster,” Jentleson says. “In this environment, it is probably better to do it on an issue like police reform. There would be some serious historical continuity there that would add an extra layer of poetic justice to it.”

Virginia state trooper Charles Hewitt is under investigation after a video of him violently harassing and threatening a Black driver, Derrick Thompson, went viral online. According to NBC News 12, the incident took place in 2019—pre-COVID-19 pandemic—and action was not taken until video, shot by Thompson himself during the encounter—found new life online in recent days. Hewitt has been placed on leave pending this new investigation of the year old example of abuse of power. According to the police, the incident began with Hewitt pulling Thompson over because his tags were expired. What ensued is textbook police racism and overreach.

In the video, which you can watch below, Thompson can be seen talking to the camera, explaining that the police officer (Hewitt), flanked by other Virginia state troopers is reaching into his car and unlocking his car. “They just illegally entered my car.” From there, the tatted-up, overgrown Hewitt, with his angry red face, illustrates virtually everything wrong with law enforcement’s interactions with Black people, and specifically Black men.

While Thompson speaks to the camera in a very calm voice, a voice that most people would be hard-pressed to exhibit in a similar situation, Hewitt leans down and puts his face inches from Thompson, saying “Take a look at me. I‘m a fucking specimen right here, buddy. You have gotten on my last nerve.” It is at this point that Thompson, as calm as a saint, explains, “Sir, you are on camera, I have my hands up. I am no threat to the officers.”

As Thompson is saying he is no threat to the officers—something that is very easily understood by anyone listening or watching the video—Hewitt interrupts him to say “You’re gonna get your ass whopped in front of Lord and all Creation.”

Take the first two things that Hewitt says to Thompson. Run those through your head. Watch the video below and see how there is no context in which Hewitt isn’t terrorizing Thompson. At this point, Thompson swivels the camera so that you can see that not only is there a state trooper behind Hewitt, there is at least one other officer on the passenger side of his door. According to Virginia police, Hewitt smelled marijuana in the car. Shockingly, nothing even resembling marijuana was found in the car.

At this point, Hewitt tells Thompson he is giving him “one more chance,” telling him “you can film the whole thing!” Thompson continues speaking in a calm voice, saying he feels “threatened,” and “unsafe.” Remarkably, Thompson is able to keep his thoughts collected as he narrates exactly what is going wrong in this situation. “I have just been threatened by a law officer, as two other officers stand by and say absolutely nothing. Willing to participate. My passenger door was opened. My driver’s door was opened.”

Thompson explains that he is not “resisting,” and Hewitt begins taking off his seat belt, and then grabbing one of his raised hands, to which Thompson politely asks Hewitt to “please stop touching me.” This sets off the possibly supplement-soaked Hewitt to scream at Thompson while pointing his fisted finger into Thompson’s face. “I’m giving you to the count of three! Don’t do this. Don’t do it.” 

At this point, Hewitt says that “now you’re being arrested for disobeying an officer.” To which Thompson repeats incredulously, “Obeying a law officer? Sir, I have been unlawfully detained.” It is at this point that the true sociopathy of Hewitt’s actions are revealed as Hewitt begins counting to three, and at the count of two, points to the camera, smiling, and saying “Watch the show, folks,” as he forcibly wrestles and grabs Thompson around the neck, and before the camera falls down Thompson can be heard saying “My life is in danger.” While there is no more image, the camera continues recording audio of this arrest. You can hear Hewitt yelling “How do you like that? How do you like that?” and telling Thompson that he is resisting. 

According to Thompson’s lawyer, Joshua Erlich, while there were no drugs found in his car, and expired tags are a moving violation, Thompson was convicted of obstructing justice. Erlich told NBC 12 that Thompson “had lacerations to his head that were bleeding profusely. He also had some injuries to his legs. … He asked several times for medical treatment and did not receive it.”

More than a dozen members of the neo-Nazi group National Socialist Movement (NSM), many of them armed, marched on Williamsport, Pennsylvania on Saturday and held a rally in the city’s Brandon Park.

PennLive reports: “The NSM had applied for a permit to rally Saturday but Mayor Derek Slaughter denied it as he did for all mass gatherings in July due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Members noted they showed up anyway and accused Slaughter, the city’s first African-American mayor, of not believing in the Constitution. The referred to him using the ‘N’ word.”

In video captured by On The Pulse News, NSM members are heard using racial slurs and making threats at protesters.

“We got a n—-r over here talking sh*t from a safe distance,” shouted one NSM member.

“Black Lives don’t f**king matter. Fuck you n—-r!” another yelled.

The group was met by protesters and police, who kept the two groups separated during a clash as the NSM was leaving the park.

Though not captured on film, PennLive reports that “a female member proclaimed ‘God hates the gays’ and led a chant against them using the ‘F’ word.”

“The NSM actively promotes intolerance of those of Jewish faith, as well as African Americans, and the LGBTQ community,” NorthCentralPA reports.

The post Armed Neo-Nazi Group Menaces Pennsylvania City, Making Racist, Homophobic Threats: ‘God Hates the Gays’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

In the last two weeks, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that there are “many, many people in jail right now—many, many people in jail, all over the country” for attempting to topple Confederate statues. And then there was the sequence from Trump’s appearance on Thursday, in which he promised, “many exciting things … Things that nobody has even contemplated, thought about, thought possible, and things that we’re going to get done … we can honestly say nobody has ever going to see eight weeks like we’re going to have.” He continued, “We’re going to get things done that they’ve wanted to see done for a long, long time.”

Trump did not say who “they” were, but it’s not hard to guess what the things are. Because a day earlier, Trump made it clear that one of the “detailed” and “thoughtful” things he has planned for next week is a federal takeover of multiple cities from “the left-wing group of people” that voters have elected as governors, mayors, and other local leaders. “Next week, we’re going to have, I think, a very exciting news conference because we’re going to be talking about some of these cities that — where the Democrats running them have just lost control of the cities. So that’ll be very interesting.”

Interesting … may not be the right word.

On Saturday morning, it did seem as if the national media had finally noticed that Portland, Oregon exists. Video of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler demanding the removal of uninvited federal troops from his city’s streets appeared on multiple broadcasts, as did video of those unidentified federal forces kidnapping people off the street and forcing them into unmarked vans. 

The New York Times has detailed the last fifty days of protests and unrest in Portland. The article does a good job explaining the many steps between the protests against police violence and systemic racism that grew in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, and how those protests eventually led to unarmed protesters being shot in the face by federal officers. That story includes a spiral of protest actions, over-response from police, escalation of tensions, and events such as a July 4th exchange with protesters directing fireworks toward the federal courthouse while police returned a hail of rubber-coated bullets, pepper balls and tear gas … for three hours.

But the biggest takeaway of “how did we get here” when it comes to unidentified men in camo dragging people into vans, or blasting them in the face, is simple: Donald Trump wants it that way.

A year ago, it might have seemed possible that Donald Trump could be reelected, based on the complacency of a white America willing to overlook—or reward—three years of racism and corruption in exchange for an extra nickel on their paychecks and the satisfaction of knowing they had a leader who was making white supremacy fashionable again. But with COVID-19 revealing just how impossibly weak Donald Trump’s leadership really is, and coming off a year in which Trump’s impeachment brought a cascade of testimony to his pettiness and insecurity, any concept that Trump might hold onto power in anything resembling a normal election is out the window.

If the American people can go to the polls, or even better, mail in a ballot, to select their choice in November, Trump will lose in all but a handful of the most blood red states. In fact, his slide over the last month has been so precipitous, it’s hard to predict that any state is unthinkable in the fall.

Trump knows this. In response, he’s going with what has always worked for him in the past—racism, the shock doctrine, and fear. Trump intends to sell his followers on a vision of America where Democratic states and cities are not just less important than red states, but a threat to real Americans. A threat that must be dealt with. What’s going on in Portland right now is the prototype for Trump’s America. 

As the Times article—and the mayor, and the governor, and everyone on the scene—makes clear, the presence of federal forces in Portland has greatly escalated the violence and tension in the city. It’s only since these forces appeared on the scene that “it’s gotten really brutal.” That’s because the federal forces have no respect for the usual tension and back-and-forth that exists between protesters, even the most peaceful protesters, and police. Here’s a scene in downtown Portland from a week ago.

Last Saturday, the crowd was 100 or so. It was very chill—nothing going on beyond the now-normal occupation of the Justice Center. And feds came out grabbing people seemingly at random and beating people with sticks. There was the kid who got shot in the head and his skull was fractured. 

The federal forces didn’t just shoot an unarmed student in the head. They shot the relationship between the police and the protesters. They blew away an already tentative sense of cause and effect. They made it clear that there are no rules. Anyone could be hurt at any time for any thing. Or for nothing.

This is not accidental. In both the protests in Washington D. C. and what’s going on in Portland, the forces sent in by Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and acting Director of Homeland Security Chad Wolf are people completely untrained in dealing with either public demonstrations or even normal law enforcement. These are ass-kickers, and they’ve been sent in to kick ass. 

They are not there to make things better. They are very, very much there to make things worse.

And they’re being successful. Early on in the sequence of protests in Portland, a man called “Legend” started providing free food to protesters. His efforts got him tear gassed, but the community response ended up allowing him to create an always-open spot where anyone—protester, homeless, or just hungry—could come in for a free plate of food. The community rallied around him, local merchants provided supplies, voluntary contributions covered all the costs. Other services grew up around “Riot Ribs,” including free medical care, and even help in finding jobs and homes for those on the streets. But after the federal forces smashed the unspoken agreement between the police and protesters, the location was stormed, Legend and everyone else involved was driven away or arrested, and all the donated food was confiscated. A fence was put up to make sure no one could come back. The relationship between the police and protesters went way down. The chance of violence … through the roof.

This is exactly the kind of outcome Trump is going for. It does Trump no good to have people sitting around sharing food, helping their community, and planning for the future. He needs there to be violence. So he, and Barr, and Wolf, are creating it. They have no intention on stopping with Portland. The United States is currently undergoing the greatest crisis it has faced in a century. At the same time, it is wrestling with the greatest reconsideration of civil rights in half a century. Trump has no interest in dealing with the former, and nothing but distaste for the latter. He’s creating a crisis on top of crisis on top of a crisis because … racism and fear. In the end, it’s all he ever brought to the game.

Fox News and right wing sources are already selling their audience on a vision of America in which blue states and cities are in “anarchy” and where violence “demands” a federal presence. It fits exactly with their claims that had the gun-waving couple in St. Louis not directed a military weapon at passing protesters, they would have been “murdered” and their house “would be ashes.” They mean to make violence not just understandable, but inevitable.

Trump means to send federal forces to Chicago, and Seattle, and anywhere else he can think of, explicitly to insert the chaos and violence that justifies taking even more federal control. And it would not be too much to believe that action is headed toward something very like a declaration of martial law, or a federalization of police forces.

However, there is one thing that can slow Trump’s action: Visibility. The right wing has been getting a stream of “antifa violence” fed to them 24/7 since the George Floyd protests began. They’re plenty ready for Trump to crack some skulls and shoot some protesters. What happened to John Lewis on that bridge in Selma may have shocked the nation, but Trump supporters are eagerly waiting to see that kind of bloodshed on their screens. Every note of racism and fear has been played to not just make them want it, but feel like they need it.

There has to be more visibility for everyone else. A momentary blip on the news, 50 days into protests and over a week after federal forces blew apart the situation, is far from enough. What’s happening in Portland needs to be elevated not just because it’s frightening, and a huge threat to America, but because when it’s seen up close, the intention is also obvious, crude, and even more than a little ludicrous.

Mayor Wheeler has forcefully renewed his call for the withdrawal of federal forces. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has made it clear that Trump is “looking for a confrontation” in hopes of turning violence in Portland into votes in Ohio or Michigan. Even the U. S. Attorney for the District of Oregon has called for an investigation into an action that his boss has played a major role in organizing (So don’t be surprised to hear about another U. S. attorney “resigning”). 

But the most important thing at the moment may be to elevate the videos and reports from those on the ground. To join in saying that this is unacceptable. And to make it clear to Donald Trump that you see what he is doing.

Joe Biden on July 14, 2020, in Wilmington, Delaware. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“The most transformative presidents in our nation’s history — Lincoln, FDR, LBJ — were not ideologues.”

Progressive groups overwhelmingly favored confrontational leftists like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren during the 2020 primary campaign. And many pretty clearly favored younger, more diverse rising stars like Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg over Joe Biden. Biden, after all, is not only a paid-up member of the “establishment,” he’s a veteran of the long shadow cast over American politics by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — a guy who voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq, of multiple pieces of legislation deregulating the banking industry, of the 1994 welfare reform bill, and of the “tough on crime” 1994 criminal justice bill.

Biden is now the presumptive nominee, but progressives still fundamentally do not see him or his team as kindred spirits. Many, however, are becoming more optimistic about Bidenism. His platform is in many ways a surprisingly progressive approach to policy that the left sees as a triumph of their own work in trying to change the terms of debate in American politics.

Biden “envisions a massive public sector role for job creation,” points out Faiz Shakir, who managed Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. He doesn’t think Biden has suddenly become a left-wing hero. But he credits Biden, Biden’s team, and mainstream Democrats more broadly with “understanding that in Covid times there needs to be thinking about bold practical measures.”

Republicans have so far failed in their attempt to convince moderate voters that Biden is a socialist snake in the grass. Even as broader American society sees a genuine upsurge of left-wing radicalism both in the streets and in the realm of ideas, public perception of Biden continues to hold that he is closer to the middle ground than President Donald Trump.

Republicans have been reduced to trying to argue that Biden is just a Trojan horse for other, far more left-wing, figures in the party. But it’s an argument that founders since Americans just watched Biden win an extended primary campaign in which he was repeatedly assailed for failing to meet various progressive litmus tests.

Biden won the primary handily by convincingly slapping a moderate label on a policy agenda that is nonetheless far bolder than the one pursued by Barack Obama or proposed by Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“That’s his genius now,” one pillar of the Democratic establishment who’d initially preferred several younger candidates from the moderate lane told me.

The Overton window, explained

Biden is not progressives’ champion: He does not push the envelope in the ways they want, and he has not endorsed their most ambitious ideas. But public opinion has been shifting leftward, and Biden’s thinking has shifted with it, creating a platform that progressives are genuinely excited about.

It’s “the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in the modern history of the party,” Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, a group famous (or infamous) for backing left-wing challengers to incumbent congressional Democrats, tells me.

They also see his approach as a triumph of sorts in changing the scope of what is acceptable to discuss in national politics. The “Overton window” came up repeatedly. The idea is that at any given time, only a certain set of ideas is deemed worthy of mainstream discussion, and where the contours of that set, or window, are located has meaningful impact on political outcomes. Ideas like Medicare-for-all, a Green New Deal, defunding the police, and wealth taxation did not win in the primary, but they did establish significant beachheads in public consciousness and contribute to an environment in which Biden's very ambitious agenda can be seen as moderate.

Biden, says Shakir, “is not leading the Overton window movement, but he’s also not disregarding or moving against it.”

Shahid observes that “the most transformative presidents in our nation’s history — Lincoln, FDR, LBJ — were not ideologues fully aligned with the most radical movements of their time.” Instead, they at times worked with activists to move the ball forward and at other times trimmed their sails to meet the constraints of public opinion.

Biden threads the needle on police reform

Police reform, a topic that was not at the forefront of the public agenda during the primary, is nonetheless a spot-on case study in how Biden threads the needle between an increasingly influential left and an unpopular incumbent president.

The mass public has grown considerably more skeptical of American policing over the past four years, according to a Pew survey released last week. In contrast to the prevailing attitudes of 2016, most Americans now say the police do a poor job of calibrating their use of force appropriately to the situation, that they do a poor job of treating all racial groups equally, and that they do a poor job of holding themselves accountable when misconduct occurs.

That creates a public mood now favorable to many reform ideas Biden has embraced, like curbing qualified immunity, conditioning federal police funding on new training and diversity initiatives, and reinvigorating federal oversight of police departments.

What left-wing activists want Biden and other politicians to do, however, is defund the police, an idea that Biden does not support. The window of discussion has shifted left, and Biden sits squarely in the middle of it — a onetime champion of “tough on crime” politics who’s now backing a once-unthinkable list of reform demands.

He’s helped in staking out this ground because policing issues have in some ways become less racially divisive inside the Democratic Party coalition.

“Overwhelming shares of Democrats of all races support reforms,” Jocelyn Kiley, the associate director of research at Pew, tells me. And when it comes to cutting police funding, the idea is popular with younger Democrats but unpopular overall, and that’s true across racial groups. “By and large, that support is equally high among white Democrats as it is among Black and Hispanic [Democrats].”

Kiley helped me break down the numbers in a different way and explains that among Democrats, 43 percent of whites, 42 percent of African Americans, and 32 percent of Hispanics want to see cuts, with the rest preferring either flat or increased funding. Indeed, increasing police spending is more popular with Black and Hispanic Democrats than with white ones.

But as my colleague Aaron Ross Coleman writes, a narrow focus on police funding ignores an important point: “Black people view poor policing as an aspect of a broader state failure to provide adequate public goods and services.” And that’s where the progressive side of Biden’s agenda shines through.

Biden is proposing a substantial expansion of the welfare state

While Trump would clearly like to ride a white backlash against Black Lives Matter to reelection, in reality he has ceded the middle ground in the culture war to Biden. Trump is refusing to acknowledge any need for change. Biden eschews a unpopular headline demand while embracing reform proposals that activists do like and the mass public is now willing to listen to. And he can get away with it with his base of working-class African Americans in part because when it comes to the public investment side of the ledger, Biden is squarely there, especially with regard to low-income communities.

Indeed, as Ezra Klein and Roge Karma wrote in December, the dynamic of the 2020 primary was that on economic policy, “by the standards of the Democratic Party in 2008, the moderates look like leftists.”

• Biden wants to quadruple federal spending on low-income housing assistance.
• He is proposing to triple federal spending on low-income K-12 schools.
• He wants to double Pell Grants and make community college free.
• Separately from the housing assistance money, he’s calling for a $100 billion investment in an affordable housing trust fund.
• His transportation platform includes a $10 billion special set-aside for transit projects in high-poverty areas.

Then on health care, especially as modified by the joint task force with Bernie Sanders, Biden’s plans are more aggressive than they sound, featuring a Medicare-administered public option that, as Ella Nilsen explains, “would cover a range of people, including low-income Americans who are not eligible for Medicaid, and anyone who elects to choose the public option from the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Those who currently get health insurance from their employers would also be eligible.”

Biden’s health plan also features the extremely mundane-sounding idea of switching the ACA subsidy formula to be pegged to the price of a gold plan rather than a silver plan. This means, basically, extra money for every family earning less than 400 percent of the poverty line. (Biden has also pledged to lift the subsidy cap for people earning more than that.)

This is all a formally race-neutral agenda, but given the realities of American economic life, it amounts to not just a game changer for low-income households but a significant blow to the systemic economic gaps between Black and white Americans.

Shakir, who managed Bernie Sanders’s campaign, says the Biden agenda is strikingly progressive on these points not despite Biden’s moderate profile but because of it.

Biden “starts with a politics of what’s possible at a particular moment and time,” he says, and the broad consensus in the Democratic Party is that what’s possible has changed.

Shahid uses the same analogy: “Progressives often shift the Overton window and the establishment steps through the door a few years later ($15 minimum wage is a good example), while the left moves on to other policies.”

Playing to win on climate change

The task force process probably scored its biggest win for the left on the subject of climate change, where a group co-chaired by John Kerry and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accelerated the pace at which Biden calls for electricity to be 100 percent carbon-free.

Varshini Prakash, the co-chair of the Sunrise Movement, hailed the outcome of the process, saying that “we now have a Democratic unity position that begins to reflect what young people have been shouting relentlessly — that the climate crisis is not some far off threat.”

Sealing the deal here was eased somewhat by the unique dynamics of the climate issue. On health care, the left-coded position involves replacing existing private insurance with a government-funded program, which requires broad-based tax increases that make moderate Democrats wary. On climate, by contrast, the longstanding dynamic has been that moderates want to focus climate efforts on carbon pricing (which is to say, an unpopular broad-based tax increase), while the left derides this as neoliberalism and calls for a more command-and-control approach.

Biden is a decidedly moderate politician but less of a wonkish technocrat type than Obama was, so he’s happy to deemphasize a politically unpopular moderate idea. Instead, task force proposals (like earlier work from House Democrats on forging a party consensus) focus on the stick of regulation and the carrot of massive public investment (both of which generally poll well) while avoiding calls from climate activists for bans on fracking and nuclear power that alienated labor unions and some moderates.

Here, as on health, poverty, and police reform, Biden is essentially stepping into the sweet spot of the Overton window, and activists are happy with the result. The same could be true on immigration if the stars align correctly, but it also could turn into the difficult exception to the rule.

A tale of two immigration plans

Of course, not everything works out so neatly. On the immigration disputes that have at times defined Trump-era politics, the three-way tug-of-war among activist demands, public opinion, and the institutional realities of American government are complicated.

On an aspirational level, Biden’s immigration plan takes the core Obama-era concept of a path to citizenship for the long-settled and otherwise law-abiding unauthorized immigrant population and runs with it. While the “Gang of 8” legislation that Obama championed paired that idea with huge investments in more stringent border enforcement, Biden’s current proposals don’t take that direction. Instead, they entail a forthright expansion of legal immigration by eliminating certain caps on green card issuance.

This would have been a risky political stance in Obama’s day, but Gallup recently reported that for the first time on record, more Americans favor increasing rather than decreasing immigration flows.

If Democrats score a huge landslide win, picking up many Senate seats, and then contrive to end the filibuster, it’s possible that something like this — perhaps incorporating some enforcement ideas progressives don’t like or limiting the ambitions somewhat — will happen and it will all go according to plan.

But if not, Biden is going to be stuck in the much more treacherous situation of presiding over an immigration enforcement apparatus that’s been taken with the mission of deporting a population that, theoretically, Democrats believe should be legalized and set on a path to citizenship.

“The big thing to remember is that Obama was not universally loved among immigration advocates,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, but activists “pushed him in his second term into becoming a lot more lenient on some issues of immigration.”

That pivot, from being the “deporter-in-chief” who set a record for removals that Trump has not yet matched to attempting a sweeping series of executive actions to bestow formal protection from deportation on millions of people, involved a long series of tough battles.

The Obama administration tried, fitfully, to push the immigration enforcement apparatus to exercise more discretion in whom it targeted — facing both a lot of internal pushback from front-line US attorneys and immigration agents and a lot of blowback from advocates who said he wasn’t meeting his commitments. Trump has very much thrown the levers in the opposite direction, and reversing course in a substantive way will involve taking on some in-the-weeds battles.

Reichlin-Melnick predicts that when it comes to staffing DHS and DOJ and actually implementing policy, there’s going to be “a fight between making symbolic changes and making systemic changes.”

Similarly, Biden has formally committed to not just rolling back the cruelest aspects of Trump’s clamp-down on asylum but to generally walking away from the deterrence-oriented approach that Obama took as well. That’s easy to say in private meetings with activists or even around a policy task force negotiating table that also features a half-dozen higher-profile issues.

But immigration activists have real doubts as to whether Biden would stick with that plan if arrivals start surging again, and cautious politicos have real doubts as to whether it would be wise to do so. On enforcement topics in general, the left has won a lot of elite battles inside the Democratic Party, but it’s less clear how much the larger window of public opinion has really shifted or how much those newfound views will hold together without Trump as a foil.

Personnel is policy

The practical functioning of the American government is never so neat and tidy as a bunch of plans on a piece of paper. Contemporary administrations do what they can through the legislative process and then fall back on controlling the machinery of the administrative state. And here, as Elizabeth Warren (quoting Reagan-era conservatives) likes to say, the key point is that “personnel is policy.”

You can love Bidenism without loving Joe Biden, but when legislative dealmaking breaks down and it becomes incredibly relevant who holds which sub-Cabinet jobs, the personal identity of the Biden team becomes a much bigger deal. That’s why many progressives have become so invested in pushing Warren as a VP option — they’d like her Rolodex as close to the West Wing as possible.

Biden’s transition team, though still skeletal at this point, is encouraging to the left; it’s headed by Ted Kaufman, who is probably the most progressive member of the true Biden inner circle. But that inner circle also includes Bruce Reed, a longtime bête noir of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and is generally (as you would expect) a very establishment-oriented group of people.

Realistically, an administration led by Barack Obama’s vice president is going to feature a lot of personnel continuity with the Obama administration, whether the left likes it or not. The establishment’s own views have, however, shifted considerably to the left over the past 15 years, in part as a result of changes in the objective environment and in part because of shifts in public opinion.

In that sense, moderate Joe is nobody’s Trojan horse. But it’s still the case that when you peek at what’s inside, it’s a much more transformative agenda than a superficial glance at the outcome of the primaries would lead you to believe.

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This week Medium's editor-at-large argued remote working could kill Silicon Valley in a new article on Medium's business site "Marker" — because working remotely could bring an end to those "serendipitous encounters" which lead to blockbuster products: Tech serendipity is the means to an end in Silicon Valley. "You bring together a density of entrepreneurs and capital with a belief in crazy ideas and a readiness to fund them, and you manufacture serendipity at higher rates than if it were evenly distributed," said Shaan Hathiramani, the CEO of Flockjay, a San Francisco education startup, who is among those wrestling with how to replicate the chance encounter. But in a future remote dispersion of workers that all but excludes the unexpected, face-to-face encounter, what will Silicon Valley lose...? Dozens of startups and legacy companies are trying to solve the serendipity crisis. Among them are Gather, a Silicon Valley startup, and Hopin, a U.K. company, both of which see the answer in conference apps: You watch online talks, then — just as you would at a physical conference — you go onto a "coffee break," a virtual room where you can "bump into" just about anyone else at the event. You can also sign up to be paired with people with whom you might have similar interests. "It's like a coffee break at TED," said Paul Saffo, a futurist at Stanford. Last week, Microsoft released a new feature for its Teams conferencing app called "Together Mode," which uses A.I. to cut out the images of everyone in a call and assemble them in a virtual setting, such as a theater. The sensation is to remove some of the fake-togetherness of Zoom calls, which is a real advance for the typical work meeting... If the past is instructive, the pandemic will pass and many daily routines will return. Hordes of people will return to the office, but large numbers won't. Some will pick up and move. At that point, today's effort to digitalize serendipity will pick up more urgency. Video conferencing and other software will get better, and some companies will claim their product fosters the unscripted moment in truly innovative ways, blind to demographics. The question is whether that solution will include a continued place for Silicon Valley.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TALLAHASSEE — The coronavirus was sweeping Florida in April when state Surgeon General Scott Rivkees warned that people in the state might have to social distance for up to a year. Minutes later, an aide to Gov. Ron DeSantis whisked him out of the briefing.

The aide, DeSantis communications director Helen Aguirre Ferré, blamed Rivkees' abrupt removal on a scheduling conflict. But state records obtained by POLITICO challenge that assertion.

Rivkees, at the April briefing with reporters, had gone off message. As spring breakers descended on Florida's beaches in the spring, the DeSantis administration script was to downplay the dangers of the virus among young people.

Ferré at the time said Rivkees had to leave the briefing early because he had another scheduled meeting with Adrian Lukis, a deputy chief of staff at the governor's office.

On Wednesday, a DeSantis’ public records employee said the office had no record of the state surgeon general meeting with a deputy chief of staff. The governor's office did not respond to a request for Lukis' calandar for April 13.

High-level meetings typically are accompanied by briefs, notes, background information and other documentation, such as calendars and invitations. But in the case of the April 13 meeting Ferré said took place, no paper or digital record appears to exist, according to records officials in the governor's office.

In response to a POLITICO request for such documents, DeSantis’ office on Wednesday provided documentation of an April 13 meeting that included Rivkees, Lukis and others. That meeting ended at 11 a.m., four hours before the 3 p.m. coronavirus briefing Rivkees was pulled from.

The documents included a calendar invite to a handful of people, including Lukis and Rivkees and an email notification showing Lukis had accepted the meeting invitation.

No such records exist for the meeting that Ferré described when reporters in April asked about Rivkees’ abrupt exit from the briefing.

In an email to POLITICO on Thursday, Ferré said Rivkees and Lukis had a separate, unplanned meeting.

“Open Government provided you all responsive records,” Ferré said. “In addition to that previously scheduled morning meeting, Dr. Rivkees had a meeting with Deputy Chief of Staff Adrian Lukis in the afternoon. Meetings at the EOG are concurrent throughout the day.”

Ferré, who on Thursday announced she was leaving DeSantis’ office, did not answer follow-up questions and Lukis did not respond to emailed questions.

Rivkiees and DOH spokesperson Alberto Moscoso did not respond to requesst for comment.

Rivkees, who leads the Florida Department of Health, has had few public appearances since and hasn't attended a DeSantis coronavirus briefing since May. He regularly meets in private with the governor, according to the governor’s public daily calendars.

Rivkees made his social distancing comment on April 13, two weeks after DeSantis issued his first coronavirus executive order. At the time, the Republican governor was working to beef up protection for nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, but largely downplayed the outbreak's overall impact.

“We don’t have a vaccine at the present time, so our mitigation measure is the social distancing, six feet away from each other,” Rivkees said during the briefing. “As long as we are going to have Covid in the environment, and it is a tough virus, we are going to have to practice these measures so that we are all protected.”

He said “probably a year if not longer” when asked how long those measures would be in place.

A week later, DeSantis named a task force of state business leaders tasked with making Florida one of the first states to reopen its economy after the pandemic-related shutdown. It entered its phase one reopening May 18, and entered parts of phase 2 on June 1. The second phase lifted certain restrictions on bars, restaurants, gyms and movie theaters.

At the time, Florida’s infection numbers were relatively good, but they deteriorated after the reopening.

The state now has become an international hot spot for the virus. Florida reported another 11,345 infections on Friday and has reported nearly 5,000 deaths from Covid-19.

The United States lost one of its great living heroes Friday night with the death of Rep. John Lewis. Lewis, 80, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2019.

Lewis was first elected to the House in 1986, but he first came to national prominence in the 1960s as a civil rights activist. He was a Freedom Rider in 1961, a speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, beaten and arrested repeatedly without ever giving up the fight. In 1965, Alabama state police fractured his skull as he led a march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma—a bridge that really needs to be renamed. During his decades in Congress, Lewis never gave up his call for activists to make “good trouble, necessary trouble.”

“Generations from now,” President Barack Obama said as he gave Lewis a Medal of Freedom in 2011, “when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind—an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time; whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now."

Tributes and remembrances are pouring in:

And people are remembering Lewis by going back to his own words:

As COVID-19 continues to tragically break new records of spread throughout the country, our testing capacity is beyond strained. Places like California, early in its response to the growing pandemic, are finding themselves hard-pressed to test enough people fast enough. Meanwhile, insufficient and slow testing and not enough stimulus support from the federal government for the overwhelming majority of Americans has led to new outbreaks.

Florida has been one of the hardest-hit places, with a Republican-led state government unwilling to either acknowledge the scope and breadth of the problem, and surging cases. The denialism of the problem is only made more criminal by the federal government and Republican officials’ unwillingness to be open about our terrible response. Some of the biggest problems facing the United States right now—as the right wing of this country is unwilling to provide aid to Americans in need, and instead would like to “reopen” the country in the hopes of getting enough of an economic bump to somehow protect conservative seats—are shortages in testing facilities and tests and the ability to analyze those tests in a timely matter.

Daily Kos community member SemDem wrote about his ongoing experience trying to get tested in Florida. Sadly, that experience is not unique, it is the rule. Living in the Bay Area, I’ve heard of people running fevers who have been advised by their physicians to get tested, but must wait at least one week before they can even get an appointment to be tested—let alone find out the results of that test. This makes managing the safety and well-being of any business, or school for that matter, an impossibility. Does this mean that every time a student, a teacher, or someone in contact with any of those people runs a fever, or has a bad cough, that schools or workplaces must quarantine for a couple of weeks to find out? Who pays for this? Who else is tested during that time?

Those questions and others—specifically surrounding the vague reopening of schools—can be read about here. But while none of this is even theoretically possible to work without testing, there seems to be very little will on the part of conservative states and the federal government to work to flatten the curve enough in order to allow for our testing capabilities to catch up. 

However, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, boasting like an imbecile, has convinced numerous sports owners and players to try and bring the bread and circuses athletics provides, even though the health ramifications are dubious. He even made professional wrestling entertainment an “essential service.”

Right now, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and Major League Soccer are all trying to do the pre-season training needed to begin what will pass for short seasons. Disney World has a “bubble” it created for MLS and the NBA. There has already been COVID-19 spread inside of said “bubble.” But more importantly, while hundreds of Floridians wait in lines and wonder if and when they can get tested for COVID-19, sports leagues are reportedly testing players and receiving results for those tests multiple times per week. 

To be sure, there are a lot of jobs connected to sports reopening, but most of those jobs aren’t coming back this year regardless of whether or not you are able to watch your favorite sport on television at some point in 2020. Stadiums and arenas will not have fans, concession stands will not be open. Meanwhile, the approximately 19,000 tests that will be needed—per week—to approximate a healthy environment for these athletes might be better spent trying to get the problem under control in the state these players are inhabiting right now.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was released from the hospital earlier this week after a minor procedure to clean out an infection surrounding a stent implanted during an earlier bout with cancer. However, the justice released a statement on Friday morning making public the fact that her cancer returned earlier this year and she began a round of immunotherapy in February followed by chemotherapy treatments in May. 

All of this sounds bad, and is certain to mean that someone at the Senate has been dispatched to follow Mitch McConnell around and mop up the drool. However, the statement indicates that the chemotherapy has been, so far, effective. “My most recent scan on July 7 indicated significant reduction of the liver lesions and no new disease.” Ginsberg indicates that she is continuing bi-weekly chemotherapy treatments and has no intention of stepping down from the court. This is not the end for the beloved RBG, and she still insists that she can go “full steam” at her job on the court.

Statement from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

On May 19, I began a course of chemotherapy (gemcitabine) to treat a recurrence of cancer. A periodic scan in February followed by a biopsy revealed lesions on my liver. My recent hospitalizations to remove gall stones and treat an infection were unrelated to this recurrence.

Immunotherapy first essayed proved unsuccessful. The chemotherapy course, however, is yielding positive results. Satisfied that my treatment course is now clear, I am providing this information.

My most recent scan on July 7 indicated significant reduction of the liver lesions and no new disease. I am tolerating chemotherapy well and am encouraged by the success of my current treatment.  I will continue bi-weekly chemotherapy to keep my cancer at bay, and am able to maintain an active daily routine. Throughout, I have kept up with opinion writing and all other Court work.

I have often said I would remain a member of the Court as long as I can do the job full steam. I remain fully able to do that.

Witness video showed more than five Los Angeles police officers surrounding a wheelchair-bound man after they knocked him out of his chair and threw it out of his reach at an unplanned protest Tuesday. While video of the incident attracted more than 1.9 million views and inspired much criticism of local police, authorities gave a substantially different account of what happened in a news release about the incident.

Los Angeles police claimed in their statement Wednesday that officers were responding to an unrelated matter when protesters targeted them in downtown Los Angeles. Two women were reportedly showing signs of being in "a mental health crisis" when officers came across a man yelling at and pushing another man, police said in the statement. Officers later identified the screaming man as 53-year-old David Dixon. They also discovered he had a felony warrant for assault with a deadly weapon and proceeded to detain him, according to the police statement.

“As the officers were preparing to leave the area with Dixon and the two women, an estimated group of 50 protestors who were marching in the area surrounded the officers and began chanting ‘Let them go,’" police said.

Authorities added: “A man in a wheelchair, Joshua Wilson, punched an officer in the face and a use of force occurred between the officers and Wilson.” During that encounter, an officer says a man identified as Mario Chacon tried to grab at a cop’s equipment, according to the police statement. “The officer attempted to stop Chacon and another use of force occurred,” police said. “During the confrontation Chacon tried to take a baton from an officer and pushed another officer. At one point, the crowd tried to grab onto Chacon and pull him away from officers who were arresting him for battery on a police officer.”

Chacon, Wilson, and Dixon were eventually taken into custody at the Central Division Police Station, and officers found a loaded gun in Wilson's backpack, which had been on his wheelchair, police said. “Wilson was seen by medical personnel prior to being booked for Ex Con with a Firearm. Chacon received medical treatment at a local hospital, was treated and released and booked for Battery on a Peace Officer. Dixon was booked for a felony warrant,” police said. Three officers and one sergeant reported minor injuries in the incident and were treated.

Social media users responding to the Los Angeles Police Department’s tweet about the incident raised questions about whether officers were telling the truth in their description of what happened. "An arm flailing around is not a punch," content creator Dakota Broussard tweeted. Susan York, another Twitter user, asked in her tweet: "It took six cops to subdue a man in a wheelchair who has no use of his legs? There was cause to throw his wheelchair around? Did he really have a gun or was one ‘found’ after you had him for a while?"

The incident involving the protester isn’t the first time California authorities have been accused of using excessive force against a man in a wheelchair. Los Angeles police are accused of shooting a wheelchair-bound homeless man in the eye with rubber bullets during a protest June 2. After the incident, advocates for homeless men, women, and children joined Black Lives Matter and other activists in filing a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department June 5, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The activists tried to get a restraining order to stop police from using batons and tactical projectiles on protesters while the suit is being litigated, but a federal judge turned that request down Tuesday, according to the Los Angeles Times. U.S. Dist. Judge Conseulo B. Marshall ruled that the plaintiffs didn't prove protesters would be “likely to suffer irreparable harm” without a temporary order. Meanwhile, the city “offered undisputed evidence that protests have continued after June 3, 2020, but no mass arrests or use of kinetic projectiles and batons has occurred, which tends to dispel,” Marshall wrote in her opinion.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told the newspaper that the violent tactics from police, who are also accused of holding protesters in jail for more than 12 hours for curfew violations, had “no place in the City of Angels … The civilian Police Commission’s Inspector General is reviewing the footage and will ensure a full investigation of incidents depicting excessive uses of force, which could lead to officer discipline or removal,” Garcetti said. “Every incident has a larger context, but our officers must keep the peace, without violence.”

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Kate Brown says that the Trump administration is "adding gasoline to a fire."

Transgender people and their supporters gather in Parliament Square to protest against potential changes to the Gender Recognition Act on July 4, 2020 in London. | WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The Housing and Urban Development proposal instructs shelters to try to spot trans women by height, facial hair, and Adam’s apples.

A proposed Housing and Urban Development rule would allow federally funded homeless shelters to judge a person’s physical characteristics, such as height and facial hair, in determining whether they belong in a women’s or men’s shelter, according to a copy of the rule’s text obtained by Vox. Advocates say this ultimately targets both trans women and cisgender women with masculine features, which could force them into men’s shelters and put them at risk for harm.

The proposed rule, which was first announced by HUD in a press release issued on July 1, would essentially reverse the Obama-era rule that required homeless shelters to house trans people according to their gender identity. While the new rule would bar shelters from excluding people based on their transgender status, it would also allow shelters to ignore a person’s gender identity — and instead house them according to their assigned sex at birth or their legal sex. In other words, a trans woman can’t be turned away from a shelter for being trans, but she can be forced to house in a men’s shelter.

Dylan Waguespack, a spokesperson for True Colors United, an advocacy group that focuses on supporting LGBTQ homeless youth, told Vox in early June that HUD Secretary Ben Carson is “talking out of both sides of his mouth.”

“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,” he told Vox. “It creates unsafe conditions and unsafe barriers to housing and services for trans people in the midst of a global pandemic.”

The copy of the rule obtained by Vox has already passed congressional review, according to several sources familiar with the process, which is one of many steps needed before the text is released publicly. When asked about the text and status of the rule, HUD pointed Vox to their July 1 press release.

The rule’s language, according to the leaked text, states that single-sex shelter staff “may determine an individual’s sex based on a good faith belief that an individual seeking access to the temporary, emergency shelters is not of the sex, as defined in the single-sex facility’s policy, which the facility accommodates.”

In order to do this, HUD will allow shelter staff to take into account “factors such as height, the presence (but not the absence) of facial hair, the presence of an Adam’s apple, and other physical characteristics which, when considered together, are indicative of a person’s biological sex.”

In essence, the proposed rule encourages women’s-only shelter staff to use a visual appraisal of a woman’s appearance to judge whether that person is woman enough to use the facility.

If a shelter operator judges a homeless woman’s appearance to not fit what they believe is her assigned sex at birth, they would then be allowed to ask for proof of that person’s sex before housing her in the woman’s facility.

“Evidence requested must not be unduly intrusive of privacy, such as private physical anatomical evidence. Evidence requested could include government identification, but lack of government identification alone cannot be the sole basis for denying admittance on the basis of sex,” reads the rule’s text, as it currently stands.

There are two main problems with forcing trans homeless people into spaces that correspond with their birth-assigned gender rather than their gender identity. The first is that such a policy exposes trans people, especially trans women, to potential violence and sexual assault inside those spaces. And as a result, trans people are more likely to choose sleeping in the streets rather than risk going to a shelter.

Because of a cycle of discrimination and poverty, trans people are more likely than their cisgender peers to experience homelessness. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, 29 percent of trans people live in poverty, and one in five trans people in the US will be homeless at some point in their lifetimes. The numbers are even starker for Black trans people: A 2015 report indicated that 34 percent of Black trans people live in extreme poverty, compared to 9 percent of Black cis people.

And while the rule is likely to fall hardest on trans women, it also opens the door to targeting butch women with more masculine presentations, as has already happened with gendered bathroom policing.

Waguespack told Vox Friday that Carson is showing a “willful disregard for the survival of transgender people” and risks putting trans people in harm’s way. “He’s on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of the law,” he said. “It’s critical that trans people across the US hear the message loud and clear that they are legally entitled to gender-appropriate homelessness services under the law.”

Democratic lawmakers have pushed back on the proposed rule

The proposed HUD rule is the latest in a long line of anti-trans policies rolled out by the Trump administration. Almost immediately after he took office in 2017, the administration rolled back an Obama-era memo for schools to fairly treat trans students. Then in July of that year, Trump announced he would be ordering the military to ban trans people from serving. The administration went after trans prisoners as well in May 2018, deciding that in most cases, trans people should be housed according to their assigned sex at birth.

Perhaps most critical was the administration’s attack on LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections in the Affordable Care Act, finalized in a new rule on June 12.

Even though it has yet to be released, the HUD rule has already received congressional pushback. In a letter to HUD Secretary Ben Carson dated June 29, Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) urged the agency to reconsider the release of the HUD rule because of the Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County on June 15, which held that discrimination against trans people is considered sex discrimination.

“The release of a potentially applicable Supreme Court decision during the period of our regulatory review is unique and raises concerns about the applicability and implementation of the proposed rule,” reads Wexton and Waters’s letter.

Carson responded to the lawmakers with a letter of his own on July 13, which was obtained by Vox, rejecting the premise that Bostock would apply to the proposed rule. “[A]n individual’s sex is relevant in the specific category of cases covered by the Department’s proposed rule, which is concerned with single-sex temporary or emergency shelters,” read the letter. “These facilities, by virtue of their temporary nature, are not deemed ‘housing’, do not fall within the purview of the Fair Housing Act. Therefore they may lawfully elect to serve only one sex. We note that the Bostock decision assumed that ‘sex’ referred ‘only to biological distinctions between male and female.’”

Carson goes on to claim that the existing rule, which requires shelters to house trans people according to their gender identity, “permits any man, simply by asserting that his gender is female, to obtain access to women’s shelters.”

Associating vulnerable trans women with predatory men is a classic anti-trans dog whistle. In truth, there’s no evidence of wide-scale instances of men posing as trans women just to enter women’s spaces. Instead, advocates say the opposite is true — that putting trans women in men’s shelters is a recipe for harassment and potential assault.

Even the rule’s text admits that there’s little proof that trans women are a threat to cis women in women’s shelters. “While HUD is not aware of data suggesting that transgender individuals pose an inherent risk to biological women, there is anecdotal evidence that some women may fear that non-transgender, biological men may exploit the process of self-identification under the current rule in order to gain access to women’s shelters,” reads the proposed rule.

Carson and Wexton have had a lengthy — and public — back and forth on trans issues, stemming back to a May 2019 hearing of the House Committee on Financial Services in which the lawmaker asked Carson whether the agency had any plans to change the Equal Access rule, which currently requires homeless shelters to house trans people according to their gender identity. At the hearing, Carson said there were no plans to do so, but the very next day the agency announced its intention to change the rule.

Wexton immediately called the move out on Twitter.

In an October 2019 HFSC hearing, Wexton challenged Carson over comments in which he called trans women “big, hairy men” at an internal meeting with HUD staff in San Francisco a month earlier. Carson refused to apologize, instead decrying “political correctness.”

On Friday, Wexton again clashed with Carson over the proposed rule in responding to his letter. “Secretary Carson’s insistence on pressing forward with this discriminatory policy — despite the Bostock ruling and clear consensus among experts and service providers opposed to this rule change — betrays a disturbing determination to target and endanger trans Americans,” she said in a statement to Vox. “The Secretary has made one bad faith argument after another to try and push this anti-trans rule forward, and the weak justifications he makes in this letter are no different.”

Once the HUD rule is published in the Federal Register, it then goes up for public comment for 60 days. One of the issues HUD is asking for public comment on is what physical characteristics should a shelter operator be able to use to judge a person’s “biological sex.”

“HUD requests comments on what are good faith considerations that are indicative of a person’s biological sex. Should HUD define what constitutes a good faith belief for determining biological sex and what type of evidence would be helpful for determining an individual’s biological sex? How, if at all, should government IDs be considered?” reads a passage in the public comment section of the rule’s text obtained by Vox.

Advocates say this asks the public for thoughts on how shelter operators might legally spot a trans person. “The idea that there could be a list of characteristics for an intake staffer at a homeless shelter to refer to in order to decide where someone will be forced to sleep — or even decide if they can access shelter at all — is Orwellian at best and, at worst, reminiscent of early 20th-century eugenics,” said Waguespack.

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President Donald Trump lost his composure after Fox News’ Chris Wallace fact-checked him concerning Democrat Joe Biden’s position on police reform.

Fox's Chris Wallace fact checks Trump and tells Trump that he's wrong to claim that Biden wants to defund the police. pic.twitter.com/arNNZb8K01

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 17, 2020

Trump claimed in the interview, set to air Sunday, that Biden wants to “defund the police.” In a clip released Friday by Fox News, Wallace asks why violent crime is up in major cities including Chicago and New York City. “How do you explain it and what are you going to do about it?” Wallace says.

“I explain it very simply by saying they’re Democrat run cities, they’re liberally run, they’re stupidly run,” Trump responds.

“Liberal Democrats have been running cities in this country for decades—” Wallace says.

“Poorly,” Trump interjects.

“Why is it so bad right now?” Wallace says.

“They’ve run them poorly,” Trump says. “It was always bad, but it’s gotten totally out of control, and really it’s because they want to defund the police, and Biden wants to defund the police.”

“Sir, he does not,” Wallace responds, fact-checking the president.

“Look, he signed a charter with Bernie Sanders—” Trump says.

“It says nothing about defunding the police,” Wallace responds, cutting Trump off before he has a chance to lie again.

“Oh, really? It says abolish, it says defund — let’s go!” Trump says, throwing up his hands before slapping them on his legs in disgust, then turning to his staff and saying, “Get me the charter please!”

That’s where the interview clip ends, but Wallace offers this follow-up: “That led to a very interesting exchange where he had his staff go out and get the highlights from that 100-page compact that the Biden team and the Sanders team had signed. And he went thought it and he found a lot of things that he objected to that Biden has agreed to, but he couldn’t find any indication, because there isn’t any, that Biden sought to defund and abolish the police.”

On Twitter, Wallace earned praise for standing up to Trump and calling out his lie, and before long the veteran reporter was trending.

Chris Wallace makes Trump look bigly stupid. These kind of freak outs were common on ‘Apprentice’ tapings. @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/WHZMhOAbVe

— NoelCaslerComedy (@CaslerNoel) July 17, 2020

Oh f*ck…
Chris Wallace owns him. https://t.co/yqRkA6PYTb

— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) July 17, 2020

Chris Wallace fact-checked Trump and Trump sent someone to get proof that what he was saying was right and couldn't find it.

Trump doesn't even realize how detached from reality he is. He's not playing five-dimensional chess. He's just delusional and rambling.

— JRehling (@JRehling) July 17, 2020

Chris Wallace just Trumped Trump pic.twitter.com/JNfvn7Xb1i

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) July 17, 2020

Thank you Chris Wallace for calling Trump out on his claim that Joe Biden wants to defund the police. It’s right there on Biden’s website that he actually wants to give the police $300 million more in funding. #VoteBlueToEndThisNightmare

pic.twitter.com/mixLMPt6CE

— Mrs. Krassenstein (@HKrassenstein) July 17, 2020

Donald Trump is really losing it when Chris Wallace confronts his lies. Chris is the only real journalist left at Fox news. pic.twitter.com/jKs4Sh6Xtj

— Republicans for Joe Biden (@RepsForBiden) July 17, 2020

“Give me the charter, please.” Look at how dismissively Donald Trump talks to his staff. The body language. The tone. The man has zero respect.

It’s wonderful when reporters call Trump out and make a total fool of him. Kudos, Chris Wallace! pic.twitter.com/53x5vkWDdQ

— Russell Drew (@RussOnPolitics) July 17, 2020

I cant believe Trump agreed to do an interview with Chris Wallace!! He is NOT Sean “Fred Flinstone” Hannity or Tucker “White Supremacist” Carlson who will let Trump say any LIE unchecked!! #ChrisWallace checks him when he lies about @JoeBiden!! This is how you do it!! https://t.co/vmwxMpVxHy

— Dan Pereira (@ddanpereira) July 17, 2020

Chris Wallace called out the lie, didn’t back off, and forced Trump’s lying ass to take a break from the interview and Wallace still pointed out after “searching” Trump was still wrong. It wasn’t even hard to do. The rest of the interviewers are just too chickenshit to do it

— Stephen White (@sgw94) July 17, 2020

Trump throws a temper tantrum when someone dares to fact check him.

I’m surprised he agreed to do an interview with Chris Wallace. https://t.co/qOnbeSYd7r

— Thor Benson (@thor_benson) July 17, 2020

Any reporter who continues to refuse to fact check trump because they fear him or care about access should be embarrassed and humiliated that a Fox reporter like Chris Wallace has the courage to do it every damn time.

— Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) July 17, 2020

Narrator:

This was the moment when trump realized he lost Fox News

Chris Wallace pic.twitter.com/42DhzPx7U8

— ABlackWomanWhoDontGiveAF*ck (@battletested5) July 17, 2020

The post Hotheaded Trump Blows a Gasket When Fox News’ Chris Wallace Fact-Checks Lie About Biden’s Stance on Police Reform: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Donald Trump's beta run for flooding a city with armed unmarked, unidentified forces took place in Washington, D.C., right alongside his botched Bible photo op that sent his approval ratings plummeting. Now Trump is executing the next phase of his totalitarian fantasy in Portland, Oregon, a western city that was bound to attract far less press coverage than power plays in the nation's central media corridor between New York and Washington, D.C.

This time around, Trump and his Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf have not only deployed unmarked forces, they're also snatching people off the streets without cause and effectively interrogating them. Take Mark Pettibone, a 29-year-old, who was kidnapped by these secret Gestapo-like forces while he was walking home from a peaceful protest in the wee hours Wednesday morning. Though he had done nothing wrong, men in green military fatigues jumped out of an unmarked van, descended on him, apprehended him, drove him to a federal courthouse, then eventually read him his Miranda rights and asked if he would waive those rights to answer some questions. When he said he wouldn't, they let him go. No explanation. No identification. Pettibone doesn't even know if he was officially arrested because it was all such a shady mess of a deal.

If you're wondering what these extrajudicial kidnappings look like, some have been caught on video.

According to local journalist Garrison Davis and the NPR affiliate Oregon Public Broadcasting, that video is very typical of what's been playing out for about a week now. Several men jump out of an unmarked van, often intent on a single target, and if possible, take them into custody while never identifying themselves or giving any explanations whatsoever.

Local officials and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown have condemned the actions of these unmarked troops, saying Department of Homeland Security Sec. Wolf is intentionally on a “mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes.”

“This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety,” Brown said in a statement. “The President is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government.”

Wolf also released a statement Thursday clearly intended to defend the lawlessness of his unmarked forces, which appear to be paramilitary troops operating under orders from Homeland Security. Along with excoriating local leaders for failing to bring "a violent mob" of "lawless anarchists" under control, Wolf listed about a month and a half's worth of supposed violations that apparently warrant disappearing people from the streets of a major American city in his view. Many of them list "violent anarchists" who "graffitied" federal buildings. In other words, watch out for those kids with spray paint.

Wolf also tweeted out praise for the forces Friday. "Our men and women in uniform are patriots. We will never surrender to violent extremists on my watch," he said. It's apparently lost on him that these paramilitary forces aren't "in uniform" if they're unmarked. 

But what Wolf hasn’t done to date is provide any justification for these kidnappings. 

"The obvious question about the people that are arrested off the street is, what's the probable cause?" NBC Justice Correspondent Pete Wilson said Friday on MSNBC. "And we just haven't gotten a good answer to that question yet." 

Wolf sounds like a problem in search of a solution—which would be removal from office in any reasonable, law-abiding administration. Instead, Wolf's shadow forces are an obvious extension of Trump's twisted brain that's clearly eager to inflict more lawless evils on the nation if Americans give him a second chance this November. 

Trump doesn't just want to be the nation's president forever—he wants to be its forever dictator. Nothing would please him more than having federal forces at his fingertips indefinitely to cater to his every sick whim.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis issued a warning this week that the loss of Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (PUC), the $600 boost to weekly unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, by the end of the month will "result in large income losses" particularly to younger workers in food preparation and health care, and will "generate hardship for families, […] impair their financial positions and potentially degrade their ability to service debt." Meaning they won't be able to make rent, car, or credit card payments and eat, all at the same time. The hardest hit demographic, the Minneapolis Fed found for at least the four states in its region, is the 16 to 34 age group—the likeliest to be getting UI. That's the group likeliest to have young children in the household, as well.

But that's not going to bother all the "pro-life" Republicans in the Senate who agree with their leader Mitch McConnell who says that the $600 boost these people got through an earlier coronavirus relief bill was "a mistake." They want those payments to end. McConnell right now is writing his version of the next relief bill, which will at the very least cut those payments as well as try to force school reopening and provide liability protections for businesses and schools that don't provide protection from the virus to workers or customers against infection. "There's going to be a heavy emphasis in the bill I'm going to unfold next week on education. I know it will be costly," McConnell said. "We need to find a way to safely get back to work, and we feel, I feel, like the federal government will have to play a financial role in helping to make that possible." Making sure people actually live and come out of this on the other side in less than total financial ruin isn't on McConnell's agenda. The Grim Reaper of legislation is the Grim Reaper of everything these days.

Republicans involved in McConnell's process—these aren't negotiations and they do not include Democrats—say he's now considering more than $1 trillion, his previous limit, but that could be because his goal of getting school kids' butts back in classrooms will cost more than he originally bargained for. What he and at least one White House adviser insist is that $600/week boosts to unemployment won't be included. "We can't allow those benefits to be extended, or we're not going to have a jobs recovery in the fall," said Stephen Moore, a Trump adviser and supposed economist.

That's despite the warnings from the Federal Reserve and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that these payments, at least in some amount, have to continue. The Chamber sent a letter to McConnell saying that "completely withdrawing the $600 risks significant individual hardship as well as a drop in consumption that holds back economic recovery." They're calling for a cap on the weekly payments of $400, but want them to cover as much as 90% of people's previous wages, indexed to state unemployment rates.

Senate Democrats have their own a plan to extend the $600 payment and tie it to unemployment rates in the states, having it incrementally reduce as states' unemployment rates are reduced. Once they drop below 6%, the extra payment would be cut off. For the House Democrats' part, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is having none of it. "They make a big fuss over $600 when they were willing to give $2 trillion in tax breaks at a cost of $2 trillion to the national debt—to give tax breaks to their friends," she said Wednesday on MSNBC. "People need the $600."

By the way, that tax break has netted U.S. billionaires—not just millionaires but billionaires—$584 billion in just the first three months of the pandemic. That's a 20% spike in their wealth. Another 29 new billionaires have been added in the pandemic, up to 643 now. Yay, us.

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Friday she expects to play a part in President Donald Trump’s reelection effort but stopped short of committing to a reprisal of her role as campaign manager.

Conway, Trump's 2016 campaign chief for the final months leading up to Election Day, has been widely credited with steadying the president's uneven campaign and guiding it to an unexpected victory that November. With Trump's campaign similarly floundering in 2020, the counselor to the president said she expects to be involved in the president's debate prep as she was in 2016.

Asked whether she would be willing to step in again as campaign manager, Conway replied that "I want to be where my best and highest use is for the president."

"I was also the only woman in the debate prep most of the time,” the counselor to the president said in reference to her tenure with the 2016 Trump campaign. “And I would expect that even if I have to take vacation time, I will be there as well, because that's going to be must-see TV.”

Trump appointed Conway, a GOP pollster and consultant, as his campaign manager in August 2016, replacing Paul Manafort. She assumed control of the president's initial White House bid at a perilous moment, seizing the reins amid Trump's feud with a Gold Star family and reports of Manafort's ties to Russian-backed Ukrainian politicians.

In the White House, the former campaign manager has continued as one of the president's most prominent public-facing defenders but has also taken on a policy role, in particular on the issue of opioid abuse.

“I am here at the White House, where the president wants me to be,” Conway said. “I still believe that a president running for reelection, those fortunes rise and fall mostly on what is done where he is, in this building.”

On Wednesday evening, Trump replaced Brad Parscale as campaign manager, promoting deputy campaign manager Bill Stepien into the top job. Parscale will remain with the campaign, overseeing its digital operation as he did in 2016. A spokesman for Trump's campaign insisted on Thursday that the shakeup did not amount to a demotion for Parscale.

Trump has lagged badly in public polling in recent weeks, trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in both national polls and surveys conducted in battleground states. Conway suggested the president might improve his poll numbers by reprising his daily coronavirus news conferences.

“The president's numbers were much higher when he was out there briefing everybody on a day-by-day basis about the coronavirus. Just giving people the information,” Conway told Fox, adding that some in the administration disagree with her. “I think the president should be doing that.”

Trump’s once-frequent coronavirus briefings, which sometimes lasted two hours or more, were curtailed in late April following the president’s unfounded speculation that injecting disinfectants could ward off the virus.

The Pentagon on Friday unveiled a new policy that effectively bans the display of the Confederate flag — without actually naming it.

The policy, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO ahead of the official rollout, reflects an effort to find a compromise on the divisive issue, as Defense Secretary Mark Esper strives to satisfy military leaders without irking President Donald Trump, who has criticized NASCAR for banning the flag.

A draft version of the policy reportedly explicitly banned the Confederate flag on Defense Department property. Yet the official language simply lists the types of flags that are allowed to be displayed, including the American flag; the flags of the U.S. states, territories and the District of Columbia; military flags and those of allies.

"The flags we fly must accord with the military imperatives of good order and discipline, treating all our people with dignity and respect, and rejecting divisive symbols," Esper wrote in the memo. The guidance applies to the public displays of flags by service members or DoD civilians "in all DoD work places, common access areas, and public areas."

Exceptions to the ban include museum exhibits, license plates, grave sites, and works of art "where the nature of the display or depiction cannot reasonably be viewed as endorsement of the flag by the Department of Defense."

Trump has made no secret of his opposition to banning the Confederate flag outright, criticizing NASCAR for doing so and saying he views flying the flag as “freedom of speech." Trump has also proclaimed his opposition to other efforts by the military to address racism and diversity, including removing the names of Confederates from 10 Army bases.

The decision not to name a specific, prohibited flag was "to ensure the department-wide policy would be apolitical and withstand potential free speech political challenges," a defense official familiar with the decision told reporters ahead of the policy rollout.

In recent weeks, Esper has faced mounting pressure from the military service leaders to ban the Confederate flag outright, POLITICO first reported, since protests swept the nation in the wake George Floyd's death.

The Marine Corps this spring took the lead and banned the flag on all Corps property, followed by U.S. Forces Korea. The Navy later announced it was preparing its own ban. Esper supports the Marine Corps' decision in particular to ban the flag, the official said. But the defense secretary had told the services to pause these efforts until he could issue a department-wide policy.

The new policy does not change those initiatives, or limit the services from enacting their own stricter regulations. The services "are still free to act on other flags," the official said.

The White House is aware of the policy change, the official said.

"What has always united us remains clear — our common mission, our oath to support and defend the Constitution, and our American flag," Esper wrote in the memo. "With this change in policy, we will further improve the morale, cohesion, and readiness of the force in defense of our great nation."

Authors tend to focus on different body parts for men and women, and the descriptions used for each body part also vary. For The Pudding, Erin Davis parsed a couple thousand books to see the scale of the skews.

Tags: body, Erin Davis, gender, Liana Sposto, literature, Pudding, words

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A federal court has ordered the Trump administration to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision last month on DACA and fully reopen the program to new applicants. The court’s ruling finding the administration had illegally ended the program was certified on Monday, yet U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had yet to announce anything about accepting new applications, meaning officials were defying the court’s order:

USCIS must now accept new applications following the Maryland order, attorneys said on Twitter. “Administration will be accepting new #DACA applications!” attorney Amy Maldonado tweeted. “New court order makes mandate explicit,” tweeted immigration reporter Alisa Zaira Reznick. So USCIS, fully reopen the program to potentially hundreds of thousands of new applicants now. That’s not an ask, that’s an order.

A horrific combination of incompetence and villainy.

Eliot Engel first won his seat in Congress in 1988, in a primary that helped end the old corrupt Bronx machine. Today, according to the official call by the Associated Press, he lost his June primary to newcomer Jamaal Bowman, in a race that became a national symbol of the rise of a new wave of progressives.

A lot is happening in Engel and Bowman’s sliver of the Bronx and Westchester—and a lot is changing. The New York district was home to the state’s first reported coronavirus case, in March, but it’s also home to neighborhoods as different as Riverdale and Co-Op City, a long-standing Jewish community with a burgeoning population of color that has shown little interest in waiting for change. “You know what Donald Trump is more afraid of than anything else? A Black man with power,” Bowman said during his primary-night speech. I asked him why when we spoke shortly after the primary. He told me Trump is “a racist, and a fascist, and he has benefited from white supremacy his entire life. And when you carry that ideology—white supremacy not just as skin color, but as mindset, as ideology—when you benefit from that, you can’t tolerate a Black man or a person of color with power who is not afraid to speak up for themselves, to speak truth to power, to engage in the community in the way that might be undermining to you.”

Bowman ran for more than a year in what had been a crowded field, slowly building off his reputation as a popular local middle-school principal to gain support. Engel had the backing of all the local Democratic forces. Then the race, like so much else, changed with the pandemic. In May, I rang the doorbell of Engel’s house in a Washington, D.C., suburb a day after he advertised being part of a mask handout in his district, and he answered the door. It turned out that he hadn’t been back to his district in months, though he told me, “I’m in both places.”

By then, other issues were gaining prominence, accentuated by the pandemic—eventually exploding into the district’s own Black Lives Matter protests. Bowman joined several marches, and said he would keep joining protesters when he’s in office. And if he does get to Congress, as is now expected, he said he’s ready to be part of a newer, more aggressive group of progressives. Should there be Tea Party–style shutdowns led by progressives, for example? “We’ll see,” he told me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

---

Edward-Isaac Dovere: What does your win, and the others, tell us about where politics are in this country? Is this just a couple of results among a few thousand Democratic primary voters in New York, or do you think there is something else going on?

Jamaal Bowman: I think there’s something else going on. I’m a first-time candidate running against a 31-year established corporate Democrat, if you will. That indicates a yearning and a passion for change and fresh voices and fresh ideas. People are starting to realize that the system has failed them—and people have known that for a long time the system has failed them and is failing them. And in order to change the system, we need to get the right people into office. Even the protests and the process across the country, it’s a clear example that people want something new and different and fresh, and they are sick and tired. Enough’s enough, and they’re ready to hit the streets and risk their health during a pandemic to demand change.

Dovere: Was that tapping into the same frustration with the status quo as Donald Trump in 2016, or is it specific to progressive politics?

Bowman: We run on our values, our working-class roots and experiences, and on policies that the majority of Americans—whether they identify as progressive or liberal or not—agree with and care about: universal health care, fully funding our public schools, environmental justice, criminal-justice reform. Poll after poll shows that the majority of the American people care about these things. What’s different—different between a candidate like me and a candidate like Trump—is that my experience is rooted in serving in the community for the last 20 years, a community that has been mostly ignored and disenfranchised by a political and economic system that Trump is a part of over the course of my lifetime. So that’s the major difference. He ran as a reality-TV wealthy white man in this country. My background is: I’m a Black man in America, victim of police brutality, victim of institutional racism, working-class from working-class roots. That connection to the people in this district is what galvanized them to come out in pretty high numbers to support our campaign.

Dovere: The issue of Eliot Engel’s residency became a big one during this race, particularly after I reported finding him at his home in Maryland when he said he was at events in his district. Why did that matter?

[Read: Why this Democrat won’t go home]

Bowman: What you discovered just revealed and confirmed that he’s not here. When you live in NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority], for example, and your front door has been broken and your mailboxes have been broken and the elevator has been broken for four years, and whenever it gets fixed, it gets broken again, and you can’t get maintenance done in your apartment, and you can’t find fresh organic food at the local supermarket, and your schools are underfunded, it makes it worse that your congressperson is not physically living in the district and not engaging and connecting and leading on the issues that impact your quality of life every day.

Dovere: How much do you think the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd changed your race?

Bowman: I shared personal stories of police brutality and police harassment throughout the campaign, prior to this. I was 11 years old when I was initially brutalized by the police, just for horse-playing with my friends and not responding to the police in the way they wanted me to. I was thrown against the wall, handcuffed, had my face dragged on the ground, had a nightstick to my back because of this incident, only to be let go without charge—as an 11-year-old. There were multiple times I was pulled over by the police, handcuffed, taken into custody, only to be released without charge. This happened at least two or three times in my life. I have been very transparent with those things prior to the George Floyd murder. After the murder, I did a direct-to-camera video and I was crying, I was sobbing. I just want to share my feelings in that moment. I had people in a district telling me, you know, how my voice was needed more now than ever at this moment in this country’s history. I hate that it took for the world to see the murder of another Black man.

Dovere: But so far, we haven’t seen many substantial results happen, and the protests have mostly faded. Would you call them a success?

Bowman: I don’t know if I would agree that we haven’t seen results. One could argue that our victory is a result. There were protests all throughout this district. I attended many of those. And I got a chance to speak at many of those. We still have the presidential election, and how are we going to organize in support of Joe Biden to help him get elected? And how are we going to continue to organize to work with President Joe Biden and also hold him accountable to what the American people are demanding at this moment?

Dovere: You said in your primary-night speech, “You know what Donald Trump is more afraid of than anything else? A Black man with power.” What do you mean?

Bowman: Well, because he’s a racist, and a fascist, and he has benefited from white supremacy his entire life. And when you carry that ideology—white supremacy not just as skin color, but as mindset, as ideology—when you benefit from that, you can’t tolerate a Black man or a person of color with power who is not afraid to speak up for themselves, to speak truth to power, to engage in the community in the way that might be undermining to you. That’s what it is. And when I say “Black man,” I also mean Black people and people of color and white allies who are done with institutional racism. The collective power that we possess is what’s going to ultimately defeat Trump both as a president, but also as an idea—the idea of Trump or someone else coming along at the end, trying to leverage reality-TV stardom and wealth based on a rigged system to win the presidency.

Dovere: You also said “the system is rotten” because of the people, like Jeff Bezos, who’ve been increasing their wealth while the pandemic economy has left so many others in need. What’s the argument for trying to get into the system through Congress and not just tearing it down from the outside?

Bowman: It’s about political imagination and a vision centered on the most vulnerable in our society. It’s an inside-out strategy: You work within the system to change the system, while also engaging those outside the system more in the grass roots to craft the right policy and procedures and build the right coalitions to make transformative change throughout the entire system. I’m going to be the kind of congressperson where I’m going to be at rallies with the people, fighting for justice and being present and showing them that they have a fighter and a champion in Congress with them and for them.

[Read: The enormous scale of this movement]

Dovere: Would you want to see the progressives in Congress act more like the Freedom Caucus has, holding up compromises? Would you support shutdowns?

Bowman: I don’t know. That’s a bridge we cross when we get there, right? We’ll see. Who knows what’s going to happen? But in terms of the day-to-day work with my colleagues—that’s the work. The work is dialogue. The work is listening. The work is learning. The work is rooted in our values and meeting the needs of our constituents. And right now we have a system that doesn’t work for the majority of the country, and the country knows it.

Dovere: How different do you think the Democratic Party is from what Joe Biden thinks of it as?

Bowman: I don’t know. Our country is best when every person in this country feels valued and is a part of our democracy. And the Democratic Party—that’s the essence of what the Democratic Party should be. That’s the Democratic Party of FDR, LBJ, you know, really fighting for the working class and the poor and really trying to move civil rights and human rights and economic rights forward. I think there are aspects of the party that lost its way, and now we have corporate interests who are dictating how politicians are supposed to behave.

Dovere: You’ve won a primary against an incumbent in a district where the Democratic nominee is certain to win—which means it’s six months of the district being represented by a person who just lost. What are you going to do with that time?

Bowman: For me, that’s six months of building relationships within the district and building coalitions within the district and making our district a strong voice for democracy, racial and economic justice, and uplifting the voices of those in the working class and the poor.

Dovere: Are you going to put in an application for membership in the Squad?

Bowman: Absolutely. I’m going to submit it right away.

A liquor store patron in Colorado threw an epic tantrum — which she filmed and posted to social media herself — after both employees and fellow customers yelled at her for not wearing a mask on Wednesday.

“I was harassed and assaulted, then thrown out of Molly’s Spirits in Lakeside, Colorado for not wearing a mask,” the woman, Ruby Mosso, later wrote in her intro to the video on Facebook. “A customer ran her cart into me, workers and managers shoved me and put their hands in my face. Lakeside cops did nothing. I asked cops to get her, so I could press charges and they refused.”

Westword reports: Several of these statements are contradicted by the video itself, which is accurately labeled as a “Pandemic Freakout” in a Reddit thread that has generated well over 5,000 comments. The video begins with Musso saying, “‘Kay, there you go, let’s record now,” as she focuses her phone camera on a mask-wearing patron. The woman pushes her cart very close to Musso and [tells her to “get out of this f–king store.”] Musso responds, “Oh, really. Wow. Okay, that’s harassment. I’m filing charges.” … “An order is not state law,” insists Musso, who appeared in a photo of demonstrations against a vaccination bill that’s now law published last month by the Denver Post. “You guys have no idea what legislature process is.” Near the end of the video, she declares, “I did nothing! I did nothing! I did nothing but not wear a mask, and look at all these Nazis in Nazi America. Nazi America! Oh my God, I love it!”

Mosso later told KDVR-TV she “has a medical condition that causes her extreme panic and anxiety when she wears a mask.”

The store’s owner, Rufus Nagel, told the station the business has received threatening phone calls in the wake of the incident.

“People calling us telling us we’re Nazis and destroying the American dream or something like that. Honestly, we’re just trying to do the best we can,” Nagel said.

Molly’s Spirits also issued a statement on Facebook: “We understand that tensions are high in nearly every aspect of life right now, which is part of the reason we’ve been so pleased to provide consistency for our staff and customers by keeping our doors open. Since the onset of the pandemic, we have implemented many policies and procedures to keep our community safe, including regular deep cleanings, the launch of our curbside pickup offering, an expanded delivery service, capacity limits to encourage social distancing, and the installation of sneeze guards at each of our cashier stations. We also require our customers, staff and vendors to wear face coverings at all times in our stores. Molly’s provides masks for those who arrive without one and offers accommodations to those who cannot wear a mask with the option for curbside pickup, delivery or a personal shopper. As of 5 p.m. on July 14, all businesses in Jefferson County must require face coverings for entry, pursuant to an Emergency Public Health Order from the county. We will continue to enforce our policy that requires face coverings while inside our stores, just as we require shoes and a shirt for service, because we want to keep our community safe and because we want the economy to remain open as we find our new ‘normal.'”

Watch KDVR’s report below.

The post Anti-Mask Karen Rants About ‘Nazi America’ After Being Told to ‘Get Out of This F–king Store’: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Sec. of State Mike Pompeo is apparently feeling a bit nostalgic, and the time periods he seems to want Americans to mentally retreat to are the decades during which Black people were considered three-fifths human. In a Washington Post op-ed Thursday, Pompeo argued that America needs to be reminded of its foundational principles. Under the headline "American diplomacy must again ground itself in the nation’s founding principles," he wrote: “Never before have America’s founding principles been under such relentless assault.”

Pompeo’s examples of what he deemed “relentless assault” included protesters who are frustrated with a racist and violently oppressive system tearing down statues of this nation’s founding fathers—otherwise known as slave owners. They don’t exactly invoke sentiments of pride and reverence for all Americans, but far be it from Pompeo to actually reveal any thought toward the well-being of Black people when he makes his ridiculous assertions. This time, he took to ripping on The New York Times’ 1619 Project, “which contends that the essence of America is entwined with slavery and racism.” I didn’t realize that was still up for debate in a nation built on stolen land, but apparently to Pompeo it is.  

The secretary of state went on to contend that although “justified” in their outrage over the death of George Floyd, the protest movement seeking justice for his family has ”given way to outrageous efforts to erase American history by tearing down statues of our nation’s founders.” Following the toppling of a statue of Thomas Jefferson outside of a high school in Portland, Ore., Pompeo wrote: “Never has knowledge of our founding principles been more urgent.”

One of those beloved principles Pompeo so cherishes is “freedom,” but depending on the pigment of your skin, you may not be free to walk, jog, drive, or even have a bowl of ice cream in your own home without being brutalized or even killed by police. Still, Pompeo seems to think protesters fighting police brutality and racism are the ones who need reminding of the concept of freedom in America.

“Freedom has always been at the center of the American political order,” he wrote. And for those of us who are even somewhat knowledgable about the history of Black and brown people in this country, do try to contain your laughter, because this isn’t where Pompeo ends his op-ed.

He goes on to write: “The Declaration of Independence proclaims that every human being is endowed with certain unalienable rights, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that governments are instituted to secure these rights; and that all legitimate power springs from the consent of the governed.”

It’s a beautiful declaration that I too wish all Americans respected, but I would argue that the people who need reminding of its meaning aren’t the ones knocking over statues. Pompeo should pen his next written rant to the Americans killing others with reckless disregard for human life because they can’t recognize their own biases. 

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RELATED: 'I am permanently blind in my left eye': Police target reporters covering George Floyd protests 

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LAWSUIT: Minneapolis police ruthlessly attacked journalists at George Floyd protest

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As the protests over the police murder of George Floyd spread across the nation, and especially as those protests began to bear fruit in terms of real change in attitudes toward policing, symbols of racism, and support for Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump saw an opportunity. That opportunity wasn’t to embrace this moment and move the nation forward. Trump never thinks that way. Instead, Trump went deep into Nixonian demands for “law and order.” Only what Trump means by that isn’t really law, it’s force. And it’s not really order, it’s fear.

What’s now happening in Portland, Oregon, is a deployment of that strategy. Unidentified men in camouflage uniforms on are on the ground in Portland over the express orders of both the governor and the mayor. And they are taking people off the streets for simply being protesters, no crime required. They aren’t arresting people, because these aren’t really police. This is military rendition. Or even more accurately: extrajudicial kidnapping. It’s happening repeatedly in an American city, and it’s barely bringing notice. Pay attention to Portland: What's going on is a trial run for what Trump is bringing to the rest of the nation.

This isn’t the first version of Trump’s nameless, badgeless, not-so-secret police. Trump did a test run in Washington D.C., where Barr rolled out a “policing force” of various elements taken from the sub-basement of the Justice Department, including forces within the Bureau of Prisons meant to quell uprisings in federal facilities. There was absolutely no justification in deploying these people, and absolutely no chain of command. They reported to Barr and Trump, local officials be damned. 

Now a similar force has been deployed in Portland. As The Washington Post reports, a flood of “men in green military fatigues” and driving unmarked vehicles, many of the apparently rental cars, have appeared in areas of Portland. This time, instead of the Bureau of Prisons, the source of the unbadged “police” appears to be the U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security—in other words, bounty hunters and border patrol. None of them are trained either in dealing with protests or even ordinary law enforcement. They have already shot one unarmed, peaceful protester, and as the Post account relates, are taking others off the street without charges, and holding them without access to an attorney. They’re behaving as if they are beyond all laws, because, thanks to the backing of Trump and Barr, they absolutely are. That includes laws in Oregon that don’t allow the use of tear gas against protesters—Trump’s un-secret police are using it anyway.

As Oregon Public Broadcasting reports, following a night of peaceful protest in which there were no clashes with police, “people in camouflage were driving around the area in unmarked minivans grabbing people off the street.” These federal forces have been driving around Portland in unmarked vehicles since at least Wednesday. They have repeatedly detained people without explanation, or providing information. 

There’s a name for that action. It’s called kidnapping, and it’s a federal crime. Except that these are sanctioned federal criminals.

In an interview with Fox News, acting DHS Security Secretary Chad Wolf made it clear that the federal government was acting not just without the knowledge of state and local officials, but over their express opposition. “Earlier this week, I called not only the mayor but the governor," said Wolf. "I offered DHS support to help them locally address the situation that's going on in Portland. And their only response was, 'Please pack up and go home.'”

Wolf made it clear that DHS wasn’t leaving. And his conversation with Fox’s Sean Hannity made it absolutely clear that this is not a law enforcement action—it’s a campaign strategy. As with the earlier situation in Seattle, Fox and right-wing media are exaggerating the situation in Portland to a degree that makes it unrecognizable to anyone on the ground. On Fox, Portland is “a city under siege” by a collection of rampaging radical forces including, of course, antifa. It’s a city that has “descended into chaos,” and can only be saved by Trump sending in federal forces to bash heads and … that’s just. Just bash. The presence of Trump’s forces in Portland has increased tension and violence. By design.

What’s happening in Portland is so over the line of what should be acceptable federal action, that the line can’t even be seen from there. It’s no coincidence that on the same day these forces started dragging people into unmarked vans, Trump spoke about his plans to expand this scheme. In words that directly supported those of Wolf, Trump made it clear that just because people elected a mayor or a governor, doesn’t mean he has to respect their choice. 

“The left-wing group of people running our cities are not doing the job they’re supposed to be doing,” said Trump. He then said that this “group of people” should be asking for his help, but since they refuse, he’s going to send people anyway, because “we can’t have happen what’s happening.” In an interview Wednesday evening, Trump made it clear he intends on “sending people in to clean it up” in other cities. And repeatedly stated that people would see what he meant “next week.”

In another interview on Fox News, Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan declared that all the protesters were criminals, along with his eagerness for what is coming. “I don’t want to get ahead of the president and his announcement,” said Morgan, “but the Department of Justice is going to be involved in this, DHS is going to be involved in this; and we’re really going to take a stand across the board. And we’re going to do what needs to be done to protect the men and women of this country.”

While most of America is fixed on dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, Fox and other sources on the right are offering their audience a whole different sort of threat. They’re presenting cities across the country—unsurprisingly, cities with lots of Black and brown residents—as dangerous centers of “anarchy” that simply must be put down. What Donald Trump is offering this audience is a new entertainment: He will put a federal boot on the throat of these cities, and he will press. No matter what any governor, or mayor, or representative has to say.

This is the pushback he’s offering against signs that white privilege may be slipping. Trump isn’t just surrounding himself with Confederate statues and other symbols of racism.Trump is so determined to have his second Civil War, that he’s willing to fire the first shot—and in Portland, it’s already been fired. 

Last week, Vice President Mike Pence revealed that the Trump administration was going to press forward with school reopenings at any cost—even if children were at risk. "We don’t want the guidance from CDC to be a reason why schools don’t open," Pence told reporters at a White House task force meeting.

It seemed like a talking point that would die a hard and fast death since Pence was basically admitting the administration was more committed to reopening schools than to protecting the health of children, not to mention their entire extended families. But that turned out to be wishful thinking in a White House that repeatedly pumps life into the most monstrous ideas imaginable and then watches with delight as they leave death and destruction in their trail.

So naturally, on Tuesday Pence repeated almost the same exact talking point at another task force briefing, noting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance shouldn't stand in the way of reopenings. And on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany expanded the White House stance beyond the reaches of just CDC recommendations.

"The president has said unmistakably that he wants schools to open," McEnany told reporters at the White House briefing. "When he says open, he means open and full, kids being able to attend each and every day at their school. The science should not stand in the way of this."

Not just the CDC, folks—Trump won't let any "science" whatsoever dissuade him from his reckless push to reopen schools.

McEnany highlighted a quote from former Stanford Neuroradiology Chief, Dr. Scott Atlas, who told Fox News Wednesday that "everyone else in the world and the western world, our peer nations are doing it. We are the outlier here."

The White House still seems baffled by the concept that the U.S. experience isn't even remotely comparable to that of countries like Germany and New Zealand, where they contained the virus through rapid testing and tracing before moving to reopen schools.

A Quinnipiac University poll Thursday showed just 29% of voters approve of Trump’s handling of reopening schools, and 62% believe it’s unsafe to open elementary, middle, and high schools this fall. The American public clearly gets that Trump and his minions are rushing into school reopenings with exactly the same gusto they applied to reopening state economies, which has now caused a massive surge in cases that makes it practically impossible to reopen schools in many states in any sort of responsible way. In Florida, for instance, nearly one-third of children are testing positive for coronavirus, according to the Sun Sentinel. Worse yet, the Palm Beach County health director is warning that there may be potential long term effects of the COVID-19 on children despite a low likelihood of them dying from it.

“They are seeing there is damage to the lungs in these asymptomatic children. ... We don’t know how that is going to manifest a year from now or two years from now,” Alonso said. “Is that child going to have chronic pulmonary problems or not?”

Death, long-term health issues, further community spread—none of that concerns Trump, his White House, or even most elected Republicans, judging by their silence. It’s just a party of sociopaths now.