James.galbraith

US President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office on May 28, 2020. | Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images

It could affect hundreds of thousands of foreigners stranded abroad.

President Donald Trump signed a proclamation Monday temporarily blocking the entry of foreign workers coming to the US on certain visas — including the sought-after H-1B visa for skilled workers — through the end of the year.

The proclamation is the latest in Trump’s series of crackdowns on legal immigration during the coronavirus pandemic. The move, which will affect hundreds of thousands of people who had planned to come to the US, is necessary, according to a senior administration official, because Americans face staggeringly high unemployment levels as a result of the pandemic.

The proclamation, which will go into effect at 12:01 am ET on June 24, will prevent foreigners from coming to the US through a variety of visa categories, including H-1B visas, which the tech industry has come to rely on, as well as the H-4 visa for H-1B recipients’ spouses. It would similarly restrict foreigners transferring to the US offices of their multinational companies through L visas, including business executives; some scholars and people participating in cultural and work exchanges on J-1 visas; and temporary workers in nonagricultural industries on H-2B visas.

“Under ordinary circumstances, properly administered temporary worker programs can provide benefits to the economy,” Trump wrote in the proclamation. “But under the extraordinary circumstances of the economic contraction resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak, certain visa programs authorizing such employment pose an unusual threat to the employment of American workers.”

There are a few key exceptions to the proclamation: It does not affect immigrants who are already in the US, existing visa holders, temporary workers in food production industries, and health care workers and researchers fighting Covid-19. But the restrictions would still impact hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

Still, the proclamation might not immediately shift the status quo since many US consulates, which process visa applications for foreigners overseas, remain closed due to the pandemic. The closures have caused visa issuances to drop precipitously in recent months.

The pandemic has given Trump long-sought opportunities to implement restrictions on legal immigration. He has already effectively shut down asylum processing on the southern border and temporarily barred the issuance of new green cards for 60 days. He will extend that ban on green cards through the end of the year, the official said Monday.

The official said that the latest proclamation would open up roughly 525,000 jobs for Americans. But it’s not clear that companies will be able to fill those jobs with American workers with the necessary skills and experience. Many employers would face challenges filling positions requiring specialized skills, particularly in STEM fields where there are well-documented labor shortages that help drive economic expansion and create jobs for native-born workers.

The proclamation could therefore create uncertainty for employers who are facing a legitimate gap in their workforce, as well as the Americans they employ.

“This order is economically baseless,” David Bier, an immigration policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute, said in a statement. “It will hurt the recovery and U.S. workers. Foreign workers create demand for other better jobs for U.S. workers elsewhere in the economy. Restricting migration will not lower unemployment, but it will harm American businesses — that are struggling to make it through this period — who employ both Americans and immigrants.”

Additional regulatory changes to legal immigration

The Trump administration is also weighing a slew of additional changes to legal immigration via regulation.

The official said the administration is finalizing a rule that would deny work permits to asylum seekers who cross the US border without authorization. For asylum seekers who cannot afford to be unemployed and are not eligible for most public benefits, that means they would need to either give up their asylum claims in the US altogether or find under-the-table jobs in the shadow economy.

Trump is also planning to eliminate work permits for people who have been ordered deported or who have committed crimes in the US, which encompasses roughly 50,000 people per year, the official said.

Trump is pursuing reforms to the H-1B visa program, in which demand consistently outstrips the supply of visas. More than 85,000 immigrants get H-1B visas for skilled workers annually, including more than 1,000 apiece for workers at tech giants such as Google and Amazon. Recipients are currently selected by lottery, but Trump is proposing to instead prioritize workers with the highest wages and raise the program’s minimum wage requirements.

He is also proposing to bar the issuance of H-1Bs to outsourcing firms that bring in employees, primarily from India, on these visas to fill IT positions — at times displacing American workers — a practice that lawmakers in both parties agree should be prohibited through reforms. The largest of these firms, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, consistently receive more H-1Bs than even the largest US tech companies.

These regulatory changes, however, could take months, if not years, to implement. And Trump may not have time to carry out those changes if former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, wins the presidential election this fall.

The fraught debate over H-1Bs and why suspending them won’t help economic recovery

The H-1B program is a pipeline for foreign talent, particularly in the fields of computer science, engineering, education, and medicine. The program has its flaws, but shutting it down likely won’t help the vast majority of job-seeking Americans during this crisis.

The application process for H-1B visas is expensive, costing about $10,000 per worker, usually paid by an employer. But without these visas, many companies argue they would face difficulty filling jobs that require specialized skills or degrees. The business community has consequently in recent years lobbied Congress to increase the cap on H-1B visas.

While many businesses are facing a legitimate gap in their workforce and pay their skilled foreign workers a fair wage, some employers have used H-1Bs to fill positions cheaply — sometimes at the expense of American workers.

Federal guidelines say the H-1B program should not “adversely affect the wages and working conditions” of Americans. The question of whether H-1B workers are generally underpaid and drive down American wages has proved difficult to answer, spurring disagreement among researchers. But it’s clear that employers have, in fact, been able to use the H-1B program to displace Americans.

Most employers aren’t required to show that they have advertised a job to Americans and that there are no qualified Americans available to fill the position before hiring an H-1B worker. That has allowed companies ranging from Disney to the electric utility Southern California Edison to the coronavirus antibody test producer Abbott Labs to lay off US workers and replace them with H-1B workers with lower salaries — in some cases, even ordering the US workers to train their replacements.

Even so, experts say that amending the program to ensure foreign workers don’t displace Americans is preferable to ending it. Lawmakers in both parties have sought such reforms to the H-1B program for more than a decade, including Sens. Dick Durbin and Chuck Grassley. Their latest bill mirrors much of the regulatory changes to the H-1B program that Trump is proposing, clamping down on outsourcing companies that rely on H-1Bs, ensuring that companies have to look for qualified American candidates before hiring H-1B workers, and prioritizing high earners.

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The State Department’s top spokeswoman on Monday muted the line of a reporter asking about John Bolton’s book during a briefing extolling press freedom.

The Department convened a telephone briefing ahead of its designation of four additional Chinese news outlets as foreign missions. But when David Brunnstrom, a journalist from Reuters, asked whether U.S. allies had reached out to the assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the wake of Bolton’s book, his line was muted.

“That’s not what this call is about,” the department’s spokeswoman, Morgan Ortagus, said in response to the question.

After Brunnstrom continued his question, Ortagus said, “AT&T, we can mute that line.”

In his forthcoming memoir, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser claimed that Trump tried to enlist China’s help in his reelection campaign. The White House has sought to discredit Bolton and portray his book as filled with lies.

A CBS News reporter, Christina Ruffini, wrote on Twitter that the silencing of the journalist came during the State Department’s attempt to highlight the importance of a free press. Monday’s designation of additional Chinese outlets as foreign missions essentially labels the organizations as state-controlled propaganda.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has had a fractious relationship with the media. Most notably, he publicly accused NPR host Mary Louise Kelly of lying to him in January.

The State Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the Monday briefing.

President Donald Trump’s top spokesperson on Monday defended his use of the term “kung flu” to describe the novel coronavirus has sickened millions across the globe, asserting that the president was merely trying to emphasize the virus’ place of origin in China.

The phrase has been identified by many — including counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway — as racist. But McEnany insisted on Monday that the president's remark was far from out of line even as she avoided directly answering questions as to whether the term is indeed racist.

“It's a fair thing to point out as China tries to ridiculously rewrite history, to ridiculously blame the coronavirus on American soldiers,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters during a news briefing, rejecting reporters’ characterization of the remark as racist. “President Trump is trying to say, 'no, China, I will label this virus for its place of origin.'”

Trump used the term Saturday night during his first campaign rally since being sidelined by the pandemic in March, musing about how many different descriptors the virus has.

“It's a disease that without question has more names than any disease in history,” he said at the event in Oklahoma, which like more than two dozen states is experiencing a spike in new infections. Trump continued: “I can name kung flu, I can name 19 different versions of names. Many call it a virus, which it is. Many call it a flu, what difference?”

The president’s use of the term revived accusations of racism after, in March, Trump came under fire calling the pathogen the “Chinese virus” despite complaints that such rhetoric is xenophobic and could put Asian Americans at risk of increased discrimination as the disease continued to spread.

At the time, the president argued that he was countering conspiracy theories promoted by some Chinese officials that the virus had been unleashed by the American military on the Chinese city of Wuhan.

When CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang tweeted in March that a White House official used the term to her face, Conway demanded to know who used the term, which Conway called “wrong” and “highly offensive.” Conway went so far as to demand that Jiang name the official who used the term during an exchange with the White House press, telling the CBS reporter that "I'd like to know who they are... You can't just say that and not name them. Tell us who it was."

McEnany offered a different assessment of the term at her Monday briefing.

“The president does not believe that it is offensive to note that this virus came from China,” McEnany said Monday when asked about Conway’s condemnation of the term.

Reporters continued to pepper McEnany about Trump’s comments, and McEnany in turn pointed to instances in January and February when the press used terms like “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” to describe the pathogen. She continued to return to that point as she deflected reporters’ contention that nobody in the press had used the term “kung flu.”

“I would be more than happy to go through CNN's history,” McEnany told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins as she rifled through her notes. “On February 9th you guys talked about the Wuhan coronavirus. On January 23 you guys talked about the Wuhan coronavirus. On January 22, the Wuhan virus. I can write it all out for you.”

Asked if Trump regretted his use of the term, “regardless” of what media outlets called the virus early on, McEnany replied: “The president never regrets putting the onus back on China, pointing out that China is responsible for this, and in the process standing up for U.S. troops who are being blamed by China in a campaign of misinformation.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook introduces the company’s new operating systems at its Worldwide Developers Conference. | Apple

The company’s new operating systems want you to know — and control — who’s watching you online.

Apple is cracking down on what it allows other companies to know about you. The company announced on Monday that iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur will feature a host of improved privacy features that will give users better control over their data and knowledge over what apps and websites know about them. This is great for users who don’t like the idea of, say, a period tracker app sending their data to a company they’ve never heard of. It’s bad news for that company they’ve never heard of.

Over on iOS, the mobile operating system that powers iPhones, apps will now have to get your permission before they can track your data, which is used to target ads to you based on that behavior. Apps often come loaded with secret trackers that send data, such as your location, device type, or usage time, to big companies like Facebook or Google or to the lesser-known brokers like Unacast or Cuebiq. These companies usually have their trackers in several, even thousands, of apps, allowing them to track your data across all of them. Your identity is typically anonymized and hidden behind a unique advertising identifier assigned to your phone. Privacy experts, however, will tell you that nothing is truly anonymous, and we’ve seen how it’s possible to re-identify someone.

If you’re wondering how location data firms, which have been helping public health authorities track the spread of coronavirus, knew so much about where we go, these hidden trackers are how.

Apple has offered users a way to opt out of this tracking for a while now. In Safari, you can find it by going to Preferences > Privacy, and then scrolling all the way down to find the switch. But most people don’t do that, either because they’re not aware the feature exists or they simply can’t be bothered. Now, Mac and iOS users will know right from the start that their apps want to track them because they’ll have to actively give the app permission to do so.

Why would anyone choose to be tracked, you wonder? Well, the case advertisers like to make is that it means the ads you get will be more in line with your interests. Assuming most people decide not to allow their apps to track them, this could fundamentally change the mobile app ad tech industry. The ads will still be there, of course, but they’re worth a lot less if advertisers can’t target them to certain audiences — which means less money for the companies that make the apps.

“This announcement is a great step forward for privacy,” Bennett Cyphers, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Recode. “For years, trackers in mobile apps have used the identifier for advertisers (IDFA) to silently profile users by default. Apple never should have added the IDFA to iOS in the first place, but it’s good to see the company cede control back to users.”

The second change in iOS14 is that apps will now have to put something akin to a “nutrition label,” as Apple described it, on their apps that tells users what data may be collected about them or used to track them.

Apple

You’re probably aware of some of this already — apps have to ask your permission to access your contacts and location data, for instance — but some of the things shown on the sample label, like device identifiers, aren’t generally known. You can find this information in app privacy policies, but most people don’t read those policies because they’re usually too long and complicated. Now, information about privacy policies will be served to the user in an easily readable form.

“The devil will be in the details of implementation,” Jen King, the director of consumer privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, told Recode. “For example, will users understand what’s being asked of them with respect to opting-in to data tracking? Will Apple educate their users about the different practices they are highlighting in the App Store feature summaries? A concern I have is that they give their users a set of new tools without sufficiently explaining what they are for and how they work.”

These moves are somewhat of a surprise given how entrenched in the app ecosystem user tracking is. But the updates are also in line with some other recent privacy-conscious decisions Apple has made. Apple’s web browser, Safari, now blocks cookies by default. Rival Google, which makes the Android mobile operating system and the Chrome browser, does not yet have these privacy-protecting features by default. (Google has a massive mobile and web advertising business.) But according to Google, a cookie ban is coming to Chrome within the next two years, and now that Apple has taken the initiative to turn mobile ad tracking off by default, Google may well follow.

“This puts iOS firmly ahead of Android in terms of user control,” Cyphers added. “Android still allows all apps, and all third-party trackers, to access a user’s mobile ad ID by default. This clearly favors the interests of advertisers and data brokers over the interests of regular people. There’s now no excuse for Google to continue allowing this kind of tracking without clear and specific consent.”

Speaking of Safari, Apple also announced that its upcoming macOS Big Sur will include an update to the company’s web browser that gives users an easy-to-access “Privacy Report” right up next to the URL field. In a single click, the report will tell users which website trackers the browser has blocked.

Apple

If you have tracker blocking extensions or use browsers like DuckDuckGo or Firefox, you’re probably familiar with how these work. If you aren’t, then you’ll probably find the sheer number of trackers on a typical website alarming and appreciate a way to significantly reduce — but probably not completely eliminate — them.

Apple hasn’t set a release date for iOS 14 or macOS Big Sur, but expect them sometime later this year.

Open Sourced is made possible by the Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

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In a relief for 700,000 young immigrants and their families, the Supreme Court last week ruled that the Trump administration illegally ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, meaning the program stays in place for now. But while the decision came to the relief of beneficiaries, thousands of otherwise eligible youth who haven’t been able to apply because the administration stopped accepting new applications in 2017 are still in limbo.

“There are about 66,000 of them, according to an estimate by the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan research center, and they could be eligible to apply for DACA after the Supreme Court decision,” The Marshall Project’s Julia Preston reports. “But it is not clear that Trump will let them in.”

Preston reports that among them is Maria Garcia, a 17-year-old who just graduated from high school with a perfect GPA. She should eligible to apply, along with many other youths—like Adolfo Martinez. The Washington Post reported in 2018 that he didn’t apply when he turned 15 because the “$495 application fee was hefty, and he was only in ninth grade. Then the Trump administration stopped accepting new applicants,” the report continued.

But while the lower courts would eventually force the administration to keep the program in place, it was kept open only partially. Current and former applicants were allowed to renew their two-year work permits and protection from deportation, while new applicants like Garcia and Martinez were kept out entirely. 

Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision, “[s]ome legal scholars argued that the administration is required to restore the program with no delay and begin taking new applications,” Preston reported, with Yale Law School professor Marisol Orihuela telling her: “The effect of the ruling is we go back to life as it was before September 2017.”

But rather than beginning to accept new applicants right away, an official from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) sent out an unhinged statement “implying that they will defy the U.S. Supreme Court on their decision,” United We Dream Florida state coordinator Tomas Kennedy tweeted. The USCIS statement also called DACA “illegal” when the Supreme Court ruled no such thing. What was illegal, the court said, was how the Trump administration ended the program.

Trump has continued to threaten to again rescind the program, but the fact is that undocumented youth and their advocates beat him in court, and he’s long lost in the court of public opinion, which has decidedly said that undocumented youth should stay. “USCIS must immediately accept DACA renewals and new DACA applications,” Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas tweeted, “and restore the DACA program to its original state before termination.”

The urgency is now, said immigrant rights advocate and DACA recipient Astrid Silva. She tweeted that her organization, Dream Big Nevada, received a massive number of calls from potential applicants immediately following the Supreme Court decision. But with USCIS and other Trump officials, like acting Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf, only attacking the court’s decision with no word about new applicants, those young people continue to remain in limbo.

”My baby Dreamers, as I call them are anxious and confused to their future,” Silva tweeted. “USCIS needs to reopen first time applications now!”

We already know that the Republican Party deals mostly in hypocrisy. On top of that mountain of manure is the Trump administration and its shameless revolving door of hypocrites and thieves. As poll after poll shows that Trump is somehow becoming more unpopular every day, the Trump administration has pivoted to the Grand Old Party playbook of voter suppression. Trump has continued to push conspiracy theories of nonexistent mass voter fraud, while threatening U.S. states if they dare promote more democratic election measures.

Business Insider reports that Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, voted by mail in Indiana’s June GOP primary. Color me not-at-all-surprised! Even better, according to Business Insider, the Pences “used their old address in the Indiana governor's mansion, which they moved out of in December 2016 as they started the transition to their new home in Washington D.C.”

Now, the Pences are very well within their legal rights to claim residence in Indiana in order to vote in their state’s primary. In fact, they seem to be within their legal right to use their old taxpayer-funded address—now shared with current Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb. And while hypocrisy seems to have become the political cabal’s brand, what they are actually pushing is racism. Just racism and white supremacy.

When Trump says that his personal vote-by-mail experience is different than the rest of the country, and when White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defends her record of more than a decade voting by mail by parroting Trump’s claims that they’re different, they are reinforcing one thing: their administration’s focus on white essentialism. People like Trump and Pence and McEnany are okay to vote and people who benefit from being able to vote by mail in other places … are somehow not.

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Apple today confirmed its widely rumored plan to switch to custom processors for its Macs, promising "incredible" performance and features.


Building on its industry-leading A-series chips for iPhones and iPads, Apple wants Macs with its custom silicon to have the highest performance with lower power usage. Apple says the vast majority of Mac apps can be quickly updated to be "universal" with support for both Intel-based Macs and those with Apple's custom silicon.

Starting today, developers will be able to apply for a Mac mini with an A12Z chip inside to help prepare their apps for Apple's custom silicon. The special Mac mini will be running the macOS Big Sur beta and the latest version of Xcode.

Apple said that it expects its first Mac with custom silicon to launch by the end of 2020, and it expects to transition its entire lineup within the next two years.
This article, "Apple Transitioning Macs to Custom Chips With 'Incredible' Performance Within the Next Two Years" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Medical workers in protective gear collect a sample from a person at a coronavirus testing station in Seoul, South Korea, on June 11, 2020. | Chris Jung/NurPhoto via Getty Images

A holiday weekend in May has been linked to small outbreaks in the Seoul area.

After an aggressive — and mostly successful — push to limit the spread of the coronavirus, South Korean health officials have announced that the greater Seoul area is experiencing a second wave as the number of infections rises.

The number of new cases flatlined in late April due to a nationwide contact tracing and testing effort. But relaxed social distancing guidelines have triggered a series of small, but concerning, outbreaks — like one in May linked to a 29-year-old man who tested positive for Covid-19 days after partying at Seoul nightclubs with more than 7,000 people.

Jung Eun-kyeong, the director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, confirmed Monday that the rise in cases is likely linked to increased socializing over a May holiday weekend and could continue to spread unless South Koreans engage in social distancing.

“As long as close contact amongst people continues to take place, the coronavirus trends in and around Seoul have the makings of the next big wave,” she said.

Officials announced 17 new cases on Monday, which is down from the 48 and 67 new cases reported the two days prior. Although these double-digit numbers are small compared to countries bearing the brunt of the pandemic, they’re unmistakably higher than the single-digit numbers South Korea was reporting in late April and early May.

In response to the recent spikes, Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon said he would resume stricter social distancing guidelines if the city sees an average of 30 new cases for three days, or if hospital occupancy reaches 70 percent. The city of Daejeon — which is south of the capital — announced Monday it would ban gatherings in public places like museums and libraries, according to the BBC.

Before the second wave, South Korea flattened their curve

South Korea was one of the first countries to experience a serious outbreak of the coronavirus. The first case was reported on January 20, and the number of new cases peaked on February 29, when more than 900 new cases were diagnosed in a 24-hour period.

But the outbreak was quickly managed by widespread testing and contact tracing initiatives, which allowed the country to avoid implementing large-scale lockdowns like the United States.

In addition to drive-through and walk-up testing, South Korean officials communicated information about new spikes and social distancing protocols through emergency text messages. Smartphone apps also helped South Koreans receive preliminary diagnoses via telemedicine.

Our World in Data

The government also used phone tracking, credit card records, surveillance video, and personal interviews to conduct contact tracing to alert people who may have interacted with a carrier of the virus.

Things appeared to be as normal as they could be during a pandemic — on April 15, South Koreans could vote in elections in person as long as they had a face mask and gloves, and in early May, social distancing restrictions were eased.

To date, South Korea has recorded more than 12,400 cases and 280 deaths — far less than the United States and Brazil, which lead in positive cases with more than 2 million and 1 million, respectively.

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Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer wants answers for why the attorney general of the United States abruptly ousted one of the nation's most prominent U.S. prosecutors over the weekend—the prosecutor who also happened to be conducting several investigations into Donald Trump and his associates.

Schumer asked the Justice Department's inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility to jointly investigate whether the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), Geoffrey Berman, was "removed for partisan political purposes, to influence an investigation or prosecution, or to retaliate for his actions in any specific investigation or prosecution."

Berman had most prominently been conducting several inquiries into Trump's inner circle, including one probe that led to the arrest and prosecution of Trump's former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen. Berman's work also led to the indictment of a Turkish state-owned bank for which Barr had been trying to get a settlement to avoid prosecution. Berman has also been focused on Trump's more recent lawyer and fixer, Rudy Giuliani, and has led the prosecution of two Giuliani associates: Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Berman is a Republican who contributed to Trump's election campaign, but his independence as head of the SDNY has rankled Trump.

Barr's actions amount to one of the most blatant signs yet that he is presiding over a totalitarian system of justice that deems Trump and his political allies to be above the law. It, in fact, represents a total breakdown of the rule of law in the United States.

In his letter, Schumer reminds Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Director Jeffrey Ragsdale that their offices undertook an "identical investigation" in 2006 after the mass firing of multiple U.S. attorneys during the Bush administration. 

Schumer also reminds them that Barr lied, in writing, about Berman supposedly "stepping down" when the Justice Department originally announced Berman's departure. Berman hadn't been informed of the announcement and initially declined to leave because he wasn't directly appointed by Trump. Barr then sought Trump's personal intervention in Berman's ouster, at which point Berman agreed to leave after Trump officially "fired" him.

"This corrupt firing cannot be explained by cause and gives the impression that the President interfered in ongoing criminal investigations into himself and his associates," Schumer writes, reinforcing the blatant abuse of power by both Barr and Trump.

Trump has been engaged in an administration-wide loyalty purge that includes the ouster of a handful of Pentagon officials, about a half dozen inspectors general, and now the person who arguably holds the most prominent U.S. attorney post in the nation. Barr already shook up the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C. just before he interfered in the cases of Trump allies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.

Apple today announced a much-desired change being made in iOS 14: incoming phone calls will no longer take up the entire screen.


This article, "Phone Calls Will Finally Stop Taking Up the Entire Screen in iOS 14" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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The gnawing in retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez’s gut began in June 2015, when Donald Trump rode a golden escalator to the basement of Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for president. In his impromptu speech, Trump likened Mexican immigrants to a plague. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume,” the candidate offered almost as an afterthought, “are good people.”

“I immediately flashed back to my first battalion commander telling me I was not good enough to compete with West Pointers because of who I was and where I came from,” says Sanchez, a Mexican American raised poor in south Texas, and who ultimately would serve as commander of all coalition ground forces in Iraq.

Over the next five years, as Trump made the transition from Republican nominee to president, Sanchez’s disgust at Trump’s actions only grew. There was Trump’s attack on Muslim Gold Star parents. His contention that a judge presiding over a lawsuit against him could not be impartial because the judge was Hispanic. His travel ban on Muslims. His refusal to condemn white supremacists following racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. His separating Latino families at the southern border, and his efforts to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and deport so-called Dreamers. His Cinco de Mayo celebration involving a photograph of himself eating a taco bowl, grinning.

Through all of this, Sanchez held his fire. Then came June 1 of this year. Demonstrators gathered peacefully on Lafayette Square outside the White House to protest the police killing of a black man in Minneapolis, George Floyd, were driven off by federal authorities wielding batons and pepper spray so that Trump, a self-proclaimed “law-and-order president,” could pose for pictures outside a nearby church while clutching a Bible.

For Sanchez, 69, it was the last straw. He had to speak out.

“I believe the president is a racist,” he told me. “The statement has to be made.”

[Read: The last stand of Ricardo Sanchez]

For a former officer of Sanchez’s rank to openly brand the president a bigot—as he does in a 1,322-word statement on racial injustice—is unprecedented, military historians say.

“The overtly racist comments and discriminatory actions of our current President,” Sanchez wrote, “have convinced me that this administration does not actually view racial diversity as a pillar of American strength, and that it is choosing to actively ignore many elements of our Constitution.”

In his statement and in a subsequent interview, Sanchez also took aim at the military for what he contends has been its systemic failure to provide equitable opportunities for individuals of color at the flag-officer level. The modern armed services are widely regarded as being among the most forward-leaning of American institutions in striving to afford equal opportunity for all. But those aspirations, in Sanchez’s view, fall woefully short at the high end of the command chain. Only recently was General Charles Q. Brown Jr. promoted to Air Force chief of staff, becoming the first African American service chief in the nation’s history.

“When I retired in 2006,” Sanchez wrote, “only three Hispanic officers had achieved the rank of Lieutenant General in the history of the Regular Army. Of those, only one became a four-star General. Even at our best, we must continue to challenge ourselves.”

Following aggressive police actions against protesters in Lafayette Square and around the country, a handful of top military officers issued striking criticisms of Trump. Former Marine Generals James Mattis and John Kelly, Trump’s former secretary of defense and a former White House Chief of Staff, respectively, as well as retired Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have variously taken Trump to task for his deficient leadership skills, his divisive rhetoric, and his apparent incapacity to fathom traditional civil-military relations. Now, in his statement, Sanchez openly expresses what many civilian leaders have long asserted: that the president appears to care little for the welfare of Americans who are not white.

[Read: James Mattis denounces President Trump, describes him as a threat to the Constitution]

“This is not me being Hispanic,” Sanchez told me. “This is me advancing the ideals of the Constitution I’ve fought to defend my entire adult life.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment on Sanchez’s statement about Trump.

Flag officers such as Sanchez are indoctrinated in a culture that makes clear that they answer to civilian authority, not the other way around. They are trained early on to put service to the Constitution and the nation above obeisance to any one elected civilian leader. But they’re taught at the same time never to openly criticize the civilians under whom they serve. This is what makes Sanchez’s decision to speak out against Trump in such an unvarnished manner all the more remarkable.

“I think it’s enormously significant,” says Professor Beth Bailey, the director of the Center for Military, War, and Social Studies, at the University of Kansas. For Sanchez “to move beyond the careful language that has been used by others works, in many ways, against everything he has been trained to do. But it is also the fulfillment of everything he’s been trained to do.”

To be sure, high-ranking military leaders have publicly found fault with presidents or presidential administrations at times in the past. In 1862, Union General George B. McClellan lashed out at Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, for not providing him more fresh troops following the bloody Seven Days Campaign; McClellan went public two years later in a book he published, which he used as campaign literature when he ran against Lincoln as a Democrat. After World War II, in what became known as the “Revolt of the Admirals,” a succession of naval icons—Chester Nimitz and William “Bull” Halsey among them—trooped before Congress to scold Harry Truman for granting the Air Force, not the Navy, primary responsibility in defending the nation from nuclear attack. More recently, in 1993, the retired General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, a hero of the Gulf War, testified that a proposal by Bill Clinton to lift a ban on gays serving in the military threatened to create a “second-class armed force.”

What’s different in this case, historians say, is that the likes of Sanchez, Kelly, Mattis, and Mullen are criticizing not just the president’s policies, but his character flaws, which they say make him unable to lead the nation effectively. If Trump were in the military, those flaws would have likely killed his career early on. “I served for 26 years in the Army,” says Gregory A. Daddis, a retired Army colonel and West Point graduate who directs a master’s degree program in War and Society at California’s Chapman University. “I’ll tell you that if Donald Trump commanded any brigade or division in the U.S. Army, he would have been relieved years ago for creating a toxic command climate.”

Trump talks tough and likes to look tough. He often uses the military as a backdrop to promote his tough-guy image for the benefit of his supporters. But in the process, Daddis says, Trump perpetually disregards the basic leadership principles and morality in which the officer corps is steeped, leaving many within its ranks fearful that the security of the nation’s social, economic, and political institutions is being threatened by the president himself.

“This is much more about what I would argue is a defense of the professional military ethic and how these senior officers like Sanchez see the president as an antithesis to that,” Daddis says. “And that, I think, is pretty historic.”

The historian Andrew J. Bacevich Jr. a retired Army colonel and West Point graduate, notes that military leaders took particular umbrage after Trump strolled to his church photo op in the company of Army General Mark Milley, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s highest-ranking officer, effectively using Milley as a prop.

“Trump crossed a hitherto sacrosanct boundary when he lured General Milley into participating in a political stunt, thereby implicating the senior-most officer on active duty in partisan politics,” says Bacevich, who is president of the nonpartisan Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Because Milley accompanied Trump that day garbed in his camouflage Army combat uniform, he gave off the impression that U.S. military forces were now helping attack law-abiding protesters at the behest of America’s law-and-order president. Milley later apologized for his presence and said it was a mistake.

This is not the first time Sanchez has created controversy by criticizing an American president.

[Adam Serwer: Trump gave police permission to be brutal]

During his one-year stint as the head of U.S.-led ground forces in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, an insurgency erupted into civil war. News accounts of American National Guard troops abusing Iraqi detainees at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison forced Sanchez to retire. An Army inspector general’s investigation ultimately cleared him of any misconduct but found failures of oversight at all levels. Sanchez later published a book, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, in which he denounced George W. Bush’s rush to war as “a strategic blunder of historic proportions” that needlessly endangered the lives of poorly trained, inadequately equipped troops. A devout Christian who often ends his conversations with “God bless,” Sanchez later acknowledged harboring thoughts that certain senior Bush-administration officials deserved to be sent to hell for having prompted the war on false pretense. He declined to name names.

In 2011, Sanchez considered running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Texas Republican Ted Cruz, but ultimately decided not to after his wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor (she’s since recovered) and a fire destroyed their house. These days he serves as CEO of a small San Antonio–based company that refurbishes telecommunications equipment. He professes no political ambition. In hindsight, Sanchez says, he’s inclined to think that abandoning his pursuit of elected office might have been a good thing, given the sacrifice of personal values for political expediency often required of members of Congress.

I asked Sanchez what effect Trump winning reelection in November would have on race relations. He didn’t hesitate before responding:

“I cannot see any path that would lead toward repairing or bridging the divides we have in this country, and that’s very dangerous. For the first time in my life, I have seen Americans calling Americans ‘the enemy.’ We have to move ourselves back to some form of tolerance. I don’t see that getting better under Trump.”

Here is the text of the complete statement.

STATEMENT ON RACIAL INJUSTICE AND DISCRIMINATION

During this time of instability and crisis, every American who believes in our Constitution must answer the call to duty. Countless American citizens, especially those of color, have suffered at the hands of racial injustice, police brutality, institutional discrimination, and inequality. Their souls demand action if we hope to preserve the ideals of American Democracy.   

The horrific, unjust stories that have repeatedly played out on the national stage (most recently involving Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor) are unmistakable symptoms of America’s continued struggle with systemic racism and police brutality. Our national leaders must acknowledge that America has found itself in the grips of systemic racism, which continues to manifest itself in the worst possible way—the killing of Black Americans and other people of color. We must not tolerate it. We must not condone it. We must not ignore it any longer.

The ugliness of racial discrimination has manifested itself repeatedly and unmistakably in our police force’s treatment (and mistreatment) of black Americans and other people of color, but the problems run much deeper than any amount of brutality inflicted on our fellow Americans. As a nation, the United States continues to largely exclude people of color at our highest levels of leadership in just about all elements of American society, whether in the boardroom or at the highest levels of military leadership. The economic disparity that plagues our communities and limits the opportunities afforded to people of color in general (and black Americans in particular) stands in stark contrast to the experience of the rest of us. To build a better America, one that truly upholds the values on which this nation was built, we must overcome the greed, ignorance, and hate that have brought us to where we stand today.

Every American who believes in the promises embedded in our Constitution—of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and equal rights for all—needs to take a stand. We must bring substantive and enduring change to the lack of equal justice and equal opportunity for communities of color.

Once again, a clarion call for solidarity is being heard across all forms of media, and public statements are being drafted and released to the public by the leaders of an ever-wider variety of companies. Many of these executives speak of the need for fundamental and enduring change, but otherwise show no evidence of having helped to enact it in the days and weeks preceding a racially charged headline. Sadly, the racial imbalance in the leadership of so many of these companies speaks louder than any post on social media ever could. Their messages of support and solidarity must be followed by real, structural change if we ever hope to achieve lasting progress.

Over the course of my lifetime, America’s leadership has been quick to issue politically correct, carefully drafted statements of rhetorical support in response to the suffering of minorities, especially our black community, simply because it is expected of them. Then, as soon as the crisis subsides, America reverts back to its familiar, deeply embedded discriminatory institutional biases. Let us end this cycle and let us end it now.

Public statements of support from a broad spectrum of American society are necessary and can certainly be helpful in this time of need. When coupled with the diversity of the protesters who have come together in recent weeks, I believe we are witnessing a grassroots movement that will force America to continue its quest toward equal rights and non-discrimination. America is slowly reenergizing its march toward the vision of equality for all.

Any attempt to deny diversity, in all its forms, as a foundational pillar for the strength and greatness of America puts our march toward justice, equal rights, and equal opportunity at risk. In my experience, diversity is what makes our military a shining example of what equal opportunity can foster within a Democratic society. America’s military has achieved a level of equality and opportunity for advancement that is incomprehensible to political and military leaders from other nations around the world. I truly believe that America’s military is the closest our society has come to achieving the American ideal of equal opportunity and justice for all. That being said, why is it that people of color have not had equitable representation at the flag-officer level? The recent confirmation of General Charles Brown as the U.S. Air Force chief of staff is a historical event. General Brown is the first African American service chief in American history. When I retired in 2006, only three Hispanic officers had achieved the rank of lieutenant general in the history of the Regular Army. Of those, only one became a four-star general. Even at our best, we must continue to challenge ourselves.

Currently, America’s standing as an example of unity, strength, and equal opportunity for the rest of the world has been undeniably diminished.  Our hyper-partisanship continues to divide us. The actions of racist, extremist elements must be explicitly condemned. If we do not condemn those actions, then we implicitly encourage them, and that is in direct opposition to our goal of equality for all.

Over my lifetime, I have witnessed the effects of systemic racism, and it remains an enduring problem in America today. Continually refusing to accept that systemic racism exists serves only to strengthen the worst tendencies of those who aim to spread fear and hate and who aim suppress those that are “not like them.”

Through inaction and implicit support, we continue to perpetuate the underlying, often subtle discriminatory practices that lead straight to injustice and inequality. These attitudes have created dangerous divisions and a hyper-partisan environment in which many Americans look at anyone with views contrary to their own as “the enemy.” This makes it easy for a leader to issue an order that leads to the abuse of fellow Americans who are exercising their Constitutional rights. As the commanding general in Iraq at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal, I am very familiar with the dangers of official orders being stretched to the point of abuse, as well as what can happen when individuals view their enemies as subhuman. America must immediately address this growing issue and once again move society to a point where we are tolerant of dissenting views.

Ultimately, America’s leadership, at all levels, must have the moral courage to do what is right rather than what is politically expedient. Our citizens expect it and our Constitution demands it. Unfortunately, at this point in our country’s history, moral courage seems an uncommon virtue. Currently, it seems more difficult than ever to directly address racial discrimination, given the stated positions and comments coming from our highest levels of leadership. The overtly racist comments and discriminatory actions of our current president have convinced me that this administration does not actually view racial diversity as a pillar of American strength, and that it is choosing to actively ignore many elements of our Constitution.    

For 33 years of my adult life, I served my country and fought for equal opportunity and equal rights for all Americans. I served alongside countless young men and women who wore our country’s uniform and embraced the ideals that seemed to allow the United States to shine as a beacon of hope for all of humankind. None among us ever expected that we would be put in the position of taking military action against our fellow Americans for exercising the very rights that we had sworn to defend. Yet that is exactly what many of our young men and women in uniform are facing today.

Every American should be gravely concerned when our leadership strays from the rights and values established by our forefathers as the guiding light for American Democracy.

We must always remember and staunchly defend the founding principles of our nation.

We must remain vigilant. We must remain strong.

Above all, we must remain united.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Trump's horror at losing control of his base could prove an iconic moment.

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Donald Trump used a whole lot of words to refuse to say “no” when asked if he really told his administration to slow down coronavirus testing. During his flop of a Tulsa rally Saturday, Trump had bragged about doing exactly that, saying “testing is a double-edged sword” and “when you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people; you're going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down please.” White House officials had claimed Trump was joking, except that it sure didn’t look like he was, and the statement was in line with other things he’s said about the negatives he perceives in testing.

Asked about it on Monday, Trump tried to deflect and dodge, but it was Trump, so he also fumbled and stumbled and confirmed that his view is that testing causes cases. “If it did slow down, frankly, I think we’re way ahead of ourselves, if you wanna know the truth. We’ve done too good of a job,” he ultimately said.

But it was what came immediately before that line that was the most telling. Trump had been rambling on about how “Every time you do a test, it shows more and more cases” and “You’re showing people that are asymptomatic, you’re showing people that have very little problem, you’re showing young people that don’t have a problem.”

The reporter finally moved to pin him down: “But did you ask to slow it down?”

And the most telling moment, more telling than the flood of words that had come before, was the “Uhhhhh” Trump started his response with, before moving on to the non-denial of “If it did slow down, frankly, I think we’re way ahead of ourselves, if you wanna know the truth. We’ve done too good of a job.”

Watch that “Uhhhh.” It’s at 44 seconds into the video below. 

More than 120,000 people are dead and he says “We’ve done too good a job.”

More than 120,000 people are dead and it’s clear that the official White House talking point is “we’ve tested 25 million people,” as they continue to fight the battle, defensive about how slow the U.S. was to start testing in remotely adequate numbers. That 25 million came up as acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf tried to defend Trump’s Saturday remarks.

“What you heard from the president was frustration—frustration in the sense of that we are testing, I believe we've tested over 25 million Americans. We've tested more than any other country in this world,” Wolf said on CBS' Face the Nation. “Instead, the press and others, all they want to focus on is an increasing case count.” As if what’s important is the simple number, rather than the effectiveness with which it’s been used to slow the case count and prevent deaths.

More than 120,000 people are dead. “We’ve done too good a job.”

Marshall Billingslea, special presidential envoy for arms control, arrives for the US-Russia meeting at the Palais Niederoestereich in Vienna on June 22, 2020. | Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images

The US and Russia are in the middle of nuclear talks. But Trump’s top nuclear envoy is very focused on China.

If you want to understand just how badly US negotiations to control the spread of nuclear weapons are going, all you need to do is look at a tweet from the country’s top arms control negotiator.

On Monday, Marshall Billingslea began two days of talks with his Russian counterpart over how to possibly extend New START, a 2011 deal that limits the size of the American and Russian nuclear arsenals. Among other things, it allows Washington and Moscow to keep tabs on each other’s nuclear programs through stringent inspections and data sharing — thereby curbing mistrust about each other’s nuclear and military plans.

The treaty is in effect until early next year, but there’s an option for President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to extend the accord up to five years, which the Kremlin has already said it’s willing to do without preconditions. But as of now, even with negotiations underway, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen — meaning the last major nuclear accord between the world’s two largest nuclear powers is nearing extinction.

Here’s why: The Trump administration, which has already withdrawn from other arms control treaties because it felt they benefited Russia more than the US, doesn’t want to extend the agreement until and unless China decides to join in on it. “The president has directed us to think more broadly than the current arms control construct and pursue an agreement that reflects current geopolitical dynamics and include both Russia and China,” a senior administration official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We’re continuing to evaluate whether New START can be used to achieve that objective.”

That’s why the US extended an “open invitation” to Chinese officials to join the US and Russia in Austria this week, even though Beijing has long said it won’t sign on to New START since its arsenal of around 300 bombs is so much smaller than Washington’s and Moscow’s. The Chinese government didn’t accept the offer, leading Billingslea to take a swipe at the country on Twitter.

This was not taken well by Russia or China. The Russians reportedly asked for the flags to be taken down ahead of the meeting, and the top arms control official in China’s foreign ministry blasted Billingslea in response to the tweet.

It’s worth noting that experts agree China should adhere to some form of modern-day arms control since it’s rapidly building up a formidable arsenal. A future with unrestrained Chinese nuclear, hypersonic, and cyber development is unquestionably a more dangerous one, they say.

But those same experts also note there’s little to no chance of having China join New START.

Which only leaves one conclusion: The Trump administration’s pressure on China is really about something else. “This is all kabuki designed to give Trump an excuse to withdraw from New START,” Caitlin Talmadge, a nuclear expert at Georgetown University, told me.

How America’s China obsession could soon decimate US-Russia arms control

The talks in Vienna are seemingly off to a bad start, and America’s focus on China may be a big reason why.

“The US administration currently is so obsessed with China,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, the lead negotiator for Moscow, told reporters on Monday. “The Chinese idea overshadows, in my view, everything else.”

That’s important — not because a Russian official said it, but because nuclear negotiations are hard. They require hashing out very specific details and wheeling and dealing from both sides, which inevitably eats up a lot of time. It took the Obama administration and Russia about seven months to negotiate the original bilateral deal, with sustained involvement from the Oval Office. If the Trump administration’s goal is to beef up New START instead of simply extending it for up to five years, then it’s quickly running out of time.

Should the US remain obsessed with getting China involved against its wishes, though, then it’s likely real negotiations can’t begin in earnest, some experts say.

“The US focus on China is sucking all of the oxygen out of bilateral talks with Russia,” said Andrey Baklitskiy, a nuclear expert at the PIR Center, a think tank in Moscow. “With China adamantly opposing joining the trilateral arms control negotiations, Washington might end up with no agreements with either Moscow or Beijing, but with some viral photos.”

Talmadge also worries about that possibility. “That would be a terrible mistake and represent the first time in decades that the two largest nuclear powers in the world — the United States and Russia — lack a treaty constraining their strategic nuclear weapons,” she told me.

Indeed, Trump has already withdrawn from two arms control treaties featuring Russia, loosening the restrictions on both countries’ arsenals and military movements. Losing New START would completely untether the two from each other and give both capitals more freedom to build up their stockpiles. That could be good news for Russia, which already wants to greatly enhance the weapons it has.

Billingslea’s tweet, then, was meant as some triumphant, bombastic play to compel China to the negotiating table. Instead, Billingslea demonstrated that the US is really playing itself — and putting the world in danger in the process.

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Today we learned that Donald Trump, who is a garbage human being in literally every way it is possible for someone to be a garbage human being in, is mad at his niece for writing a mean book about him because, he says, she signed a nondisclosure agreement with him and is “not allowed” to do that. Yes, his own niece. Of course.

Axios reports that in an interview, Trump insisted his niece, Mary L. Trump, author of the upcoming Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man is "not allowed to write a book." Evidently referring to the brutal legal fights in the family when Donald's garbage father died, Trump said: "When we settled, she has a total [...] signed a nondisclosure." And that it is a "very powerful" nondisclosure. The one he has with his niece. Who he hates.

This is, of course, unsurprising. Trump's cruelty towards the rest of his extended family has already been documented (see: attempting to kill off Mary's half-brother in an act of sociopathic revenge), his insistence on nondisclosures is obsessive and legendary, and to repeat: garbage family. Total, complete disaster of a family.

It seems difficult to believe that Mary Trump would write a book subtitled "How my family created the world's most dangerous man" if the only outcome were severe financial harm. On the other hand, she is a psychologist who apparently detests his garbage-filled guts, is an apparent liberal (or at least, she’s not conservative), and according to Vanity Fair, she is "very determined" to see the book released. Maybe the "severe financial harm" part was considered acceptable collateral damage. (It's also not clear how much money Mary L. Trump and brother Fred III got in the settlement Donald is referring to, but knowing Donald, it might not be as much as, say, the book advance for writing a tell-all about Typhoid Hitler.)

The soon-to-be released book is also said to reveal that Mary is the one behind the leaking of certain Trump tax documents to The New York Times, a leak that appeared to demonstrate massive tax fraud by Trump. Truly, there is no love to be lost between new author Mary and her malignant, thickheaded uncle.

Whether Donald Trump will actually attempt to stop publication of the book—as the White House did with John Bolton's self-serving tell-all—is another question. Unless he wants to claim that his lifelong cruelty and stupidity is now classified information, there's no obvious route available to him to stop it. Donald's declaration that she's "not allowed to write a book," then, is an empty threat. She's allowed. The worst he can do is what he always does: File a raft of lawsuits, tell his kept attorney general William Barr to investigate her for something-something-Deep-State, and shriek about it on Twitter.

All of it will only serve to sell more books. And Mary Trump's book is already likely to be more well-received than John Bolton's book, because John Bolton's book was written by John Bolton.

The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling extending workplace discrimination protection to cover sexual orientation and gender identity was cheered by LGBTQ people and allies. Indeed, the June 15 decision represents a big win in the fight for LGBTQ equality.

But buried towards the end of a 33-page majority opinion written by conservative stalwart Justice Neil Gorsuch is a sober warning that those celebrating the decision might have initially missed.

In his reading, the religious beliefs of an employer may “supersede” the Title VII protections now being extended to the LGBTQ community in its resolution of Bostock v. Clayton County. It is an issue that courts will likely have to decide on a case-by-case basis in the future. But Gorsuch notably referred to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress in 1993 to protect an individual’s practice of their faith, as a “super statute” and emphasizes the court’s mandate to uphold “the promise of the free exercise of religion enshrined in our Constitution.”

Religious rights

In short, Gorsuch’s caveat means that discrimination against LGBTQ people in the workplace may be far from over. In fact, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity may even be legally protected under the basis of protecting the free exercise of religion.

In addition to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 21 states have religious exemption laws that could conflict with the Supreme Court’s ruling in defense of LGBTQ worker rights. For instance, Mississippi HB 1523, implemented in October 2017, allows people who have “the sincerely held religious beliefs” that marriage “should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman” and that “gender” refers to “biological sex determined at birth” not to provide services, including housing and employment, to LGBTQ people. That may protect religious employers who choose not to hire or to fire an employee who is LGBTQ.

As sociologists who have spent the last four years studying people’s beliefs about LGBTQ nondiscrimination and religious exemption laws, we have observed how public debate on the issue has centered around the perceived views of two groups: conservative white evangelical Christians and LGBTQ people. Our research has found that both groups frame the issue as a fight against discrimination.

In 2015 and 2018, we surveyed a representative sample of over 1,000 residents in Nebraska.

One of 26 states without a law prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, Nebraska is directly affected by the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling.

But despite its population trending conservative, Nebraskans displayed widespread support for LGBTQ rights. Our results indicate that about three out of four Nebraskans support legal protection for gays, lesbians and transgender individuals from job discrimination and oppose giving religious business owners the right to refuse service to customers based on their sexual orientation.

A majority of those we surveyed who identified as Trump voters or who were frequent church attendees did support the right of a religious business owner to refuse service to someone who is gay or lesbian. But even in this group, 62% also said they supported LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws.

But by analyzing over 900 open-ended responses justifying positions on LGBTQ protections and religious exemption laws, we found that respondents – regardless of their position on the matter – justified their views by saying they were rejecting unequal treatment.

Unfair treatment

For example, some respondents who opposed laws protecting LGBTQ individuals in the workplace explained that “there should never be any type of discrimination” or stated “we are all equal.” This group frequently suggested that since equality has already been achieved in America, sexuality and gender identity should not be given special protection.

Respondents disagreed over who is at risk of receiving unfair treatment in the debate over nondiscrimination laws – people who are religious or LGBTQ individuals. As one respondent who opposed religious freedom laws wrote, “I oppose because I don’t want someone’s religious beliefs to determine how I or my family live our lives. Why are their beliefs more important than mine?”

This statement is remarkably similar to one written by a respondent who supports religious freedom laws: “No one (either side) should be forced to do something they don’t believe in, that makes them very uncomfortable.”

These are examples of a broader trend. National surveys suggest that 55% of Americans of Americans believe gay and lesbians people experience a lot of discrimination. About the same amount say evangelical Christians experience some or a lot of discrimination.

Back to court?

Both sides of the debate over religious freedoms and LGBTQ rights use the language of equality and opposition to discrimination. But they have different perspectives on how these fundamental American values play out in the public sphere.

Now federal law protects both the free exercise of religion and LGBTQ individuals from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

As Gorsuch alluded to in his majority opinion, these two seemingly contradictory protections are likely to collide with one other in the future. And it will again be left to the courts to decide whose claim to protection has the greater validity.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Kelsy Burke, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Emily Kazyak, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Buried Detail in SCOTUS Workplace Bias Ruling Puts LGBTQ Rights and Religious Freedom on Collision Course appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler said Sunday that while Attorney General William Barr deserves to be impeached, doing so would be a "waste of time." He told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union," that instead the House would punish Barr by withholding $50 million in Justice Department funding.

"I don't think calls for his impeachment are premature any more than calls for the President's impeachment were premature, but they are a waste of time at this point," Nadler said, following Barr's firing of Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Berman has been investigating Rudy Giuliani and others in the Trump circle, as well as whether Deutsche Bank, with all its ties to both Trump and Jared Kushner and his family, has been laundering money. That's on top of everything else Barr has done, encapsulated in this Twitter thread to show he will do anything to cover up for and protect Trump. Yes, he deserves to be impeached. No, Senate Republicans should not be allowed off the hook, they should be forced to reckon with the walking mound of corruption that is Bill Barr.

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Nadler said as much Sunday. "We've seen a pattern of […] Barr corruptly impeding all these investigations, so this is just more of the same," he told Tapper, noting that Berman's office had numerous cases involving Trump associates. Nadler also said that the Republican Senate is "corrupt" and that was demonstrated when it blew off Trump's impeachment this winter. But, he said, that would just happen again with Barr, so it's not worth the effort. Which is totally not how to demonstrate to the American voting public that the Senate Republicans are corrupt. A functioning House Judiciary Committee would have the impeachment hearings against Barr, calling in Berman and all the other casualties of Barr's corruption, and force the Senate to deal with it. That's what protecting the rule of law is supposed to be all about, which is Nadler's ultimate job, since he's the one holding that Judiciary Committee gavel.

The weekend's events just punctuated how important it is right now to shine a very bright light on Barr's corruption on behalf of Trump. In case you missed the bizarre episode over the weekend, Barr fired Berman in favor of his personal friend Jay Clayton, a corporate lawyer who's been Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who has never once prosecuted a case, could get the job. The exchanges leading up to Berman's actual capitulation were bizarre, to say the least, with Barr initially stating on Friday evening that Berman was stepping down, which Berman emphatically denied. Then Barr said okay, he's not stepping down so Trump is firing him, to which Trump said nope, not him, this was all Barr's idea. In the end, Berman, a loyal Republican who had even donated $5,400 to Trump's 2016 campaign, capitulated.

Barr has proven again and again that he considers his job to be Trump's personal lawyer and protector, with a big dollop of racism authoritarianism on top. Barr was even responsible for that horrific Trump Bible photo op, "essentially assuming battlefield control over a hodgepodge of security forces in Washington for days from a command center he set up" to violently clear protesters from Lafayette Square for the publicity stunt. The man is dangerous. He must be held accountable, and the Senate Republicans have to be forced to decide whether they'll do it.

One of the true joys of the past weekend was Donald Trump's humiliating rally attendance in Tulsa, and it’s the gift that keeps on giving as the finger-pointing continues. Trump and his campaign officials had touted expected crowds close to a million people, and the campaign had shown, with plans for a big overflow area to be addressed by Trump and Mike Pence, that it wasn’t just bragging—it expected huge crowds to materialize. Instead, the overflow area was dismantled without being used and the inside of the 19,000 BOK Center was mostly empty, with a crowd of less than 6,200.

Campaign manager Brad Parscale is fighting to save his job, insisting that fake registrations by TikTok teens and K-pop stans did not account for the embarrassing turnout. The thing is, if he’s telling the truth on that, it still leaves him having inflated expectations ahead of a rally that underperformed by normal standards, let alone the inflated ones. An unnamed “Republican with direct knowledge of the president’s thinking” told The Washington Post: “We won’t really know how safe Brad is until we see how long this goes on for in the news cycle.”

The official campaign story is that scary scary protesters frightened away literally hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters who intended to be there—despite Trump's threat that protesters would be met by police brutality, and despite years of Republican swagger about their own toughness. Trump is constantly fantasizing about his supporters beating up protesters, a fantasy reflected in the crude T-shirts many of those supporters like to wear to rallies. But when it came to it, apparently they were just too scared.

“The fact is that a week’s worth of the fake news media warning people away from the rally because of COVID and protesters, coupled with recent images of American cities on fire, had a real impact on people bringing their families and children to the rally,” Parscale claimed. Except that all those hundreds of thousands of registrations he’d been bragging about happened against the exact same media and protest backdrop. So it still doesn’t hold water.

(Brief digression: Trump campaign officials keep talking about the people who were too worried to bring their children. To an event at which Trump aggressively played on racism. Apparently that was family-friendly content, but walking past some protesters would have been a bridge too far.)

Some observers have noted that the campaign’s bragging about expected crowd size might itself have suppressed attendance. If you think half a million people are going to turn up and you’re not going to get into the rally, maybe you don’t go. But that’s also not enough to account for the drop-off from nearly a million to … nearly 6,200. No, there’s no way this doesn’t reflect both diminished enthusiasm for Trump and reluctance to go to a non-socially distanced COVID-19 superspreader event in the making.

The official story from the White House via press secretary Kayleigh McEnany is that Trump “was not angry at all” and in fact “was in good spirits on Marine One” because the rally “was a huge success.” Yeah, sure, Kayleigh. He looks like he was in great spirits.

NASCAR is investigating after a noose was found in the Talladega Superspeedway stall of the only full-time Black NASCAR driver. Bubba Wallace had pressed NASCAR to ban Confederate flags, which it had already for its teams and workers but extended to fans at events. That made Wallace a target for racism even prior to the discovery of the noose.

Wallace said in a statement that “Today’s despicable act of racism and hatred leaves me incredibly saddened and serves as a painful reminder of how much further we have to go as a society.” NASCAR also released a statement pledging action: “We will do everything we can to identify the person(s) responsible and eliminate them from the sport. As we have stated unequivocally, there is no place for racism in NASCAR and this act only strengthens our resolve to make the sport open and welcoming to all.”

A member of Wallace’s team found the noose and reported it; Wallace never saw it, not that that makes anything about this okay. 

He made clear in his statement, though, that he understands what’s going on, saying “Nothing is more important and we will not be deterred by the reprehensible actions of those who seek to spread hate. As my mother told me today, ‘They are just trying to scare you.’”

In fact, he continued, “This will not break me, I will not give in nor will I back down. I will continue to stand proudly for what I believe in.”

According to reports, NASCAR tightly controls access to its garages and there are cameras at the facility.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), a leading proponent of DC statehood. | Douglas Graham/Roll Call/Getty Images

If Democrats take back the White House and the Senate, DC is likely to become a state — but only if they bypass the filibuster.

The House of Representatives voted 232-180 to grant statehood to the District of Columbia on Friday. That marks the first time in the nation’s history that either house of Congress approved legislation granting full statehood and congressional representation to DC’s more than 700,000 residents.

For at least the next several months, the bill is highly unlikely to travel far beyond the House. There’s little chance that the Republican-controlled Senate will agree to give two senators to an overwhelmingly Democratic city. And even if the bill somehow managed to pass the Senate, President Donald Trump has said that Republicans would be “very, very stupid” to allow DC statehood. He’s all but certain to veto the bill.

But statehood for the District of Columbia, whose residents pay federal taxes but have no vote in Congress, is arguably closer than it’s ever been. Trump trails Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who endorsed DC statehood in 2015, by more than 8 points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Polls now indicate that Democrats have a good chance to regain the Senate as well, despite malapportionment that gives Republicans an unfair advantage in the fight for control of Congress’ upper house.

Not that long ago, DC statehood found little support within the halls of Congress. The last time the House voted on statehood, in 1993, the bill failed 153-277. Democrats, in what now looks like an extraordinary act of political malpractice, did not push statehood when they last controlled both houses of Congress and the White House in 2009-2010. President Barack Obama did not endorse DC statehood until 2014.

But Democratic support for statehood swelled as the party was forced to confront the impact of a malapportioned Senate that overrepresents white and rural states, effectively giving extra seats to Republicans. Among other things, that malapportionment cost Democrats control of the Supreme Court. If the Senate were fairly apportioned, Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland would be a justice right now.

The recent protests against police violence, and Trump’s decision to deploy federal law enforcement and national guard personnel to the nation’s capital, also bolstered the case for statehood — because DC has less autonomy than a state, it is more subject to the whims of federal leaders. As DC Mayor Muriel Bowser wrote in the Washington Post, “this blatant degradation of our home right before my own eyes offered another reminder — a particularly powerful one — of why we need statehood for the District.”

Indeed, many statehood advocates view their cause as part of the broader struggle that animates the protesters. “The protests across America isn’t just a call for policing reform,” according to Stasha Rhodes, campaign director for 51 for 51, an organization pushing for DC statehood. The protests are “also a call to challenge the very institutions that allow white supremacy and racism. The fact that over 700,000 mostly black and brown people do not have a vote in Congress is racism.”

But even if Democrats dominate November’s election and win majorities in both houses, DC statehood still faces two significant obstacles. One is the filibuster, which could potentially allow Republicans to block statehood with just 41 votes in the 100-member Senate.

If the filibuster is overcome, moreover, it is likely that Republicans will file a lawsuit seeking to strip DC of its statehood. With Republicans controlling the judiciary, that lawsuit has a shot at prevailing, even if it rests on weak legal arguments.

The filibuster may be the biggest obstacle to DC statehood

The filibuster, a practice that allows a minority of the Senate to block legislation, is one of the most consequential accidents in American history. In 1805, shortly after he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Vice President Aaron Burr returned to the Senate to deliver a farewell speech. In that speech, Burr suggested that the Senate make changes to its rules, including eliminating something called the “previous question motion,” a process that was rarely used prior to Burr’s speech. The Senate followed Burr’s advice in 1806.

But eliminating the previous question motion turned out to be a horrible mistake, because this motion was the only process allowing the Senate to cut off debate among its members. No one recognized Burr’s error for 35 years, until 1841, when the first filibuster occurred. Without a way to end debate, rogue senators could delay Senate action indefinitely by insisting on “debating” a proposal forever.

Since this first filibuster, the Senate has changed its rules several times to make it harder to sustain a filibuster. Current rules permit a bloc of 60 senators to end a filibuster using a process known as “cloture,” and invoking cloture to confirm a presidential nominee only requires 51 votes — a simple majority. A process known as “reconciliation” also allows some legislation to pass with only 51 votes, but reconciliation is typically limited to fiscal legislation and is subject to a complicated set of rules.

Absent a very creative interpretation of the rules governing reconciliation, in other words, the DC statehood bill would likely require 60 votes to pass the Senate. So unless Democrats utterly crush Republicans in November, picking up at least 13 seats, Republicans will almost certainly have enough Senate seats to filibuster DC statehood.

Many statehood activists, including some powerful left-of-center organizations, have made overcoming the filibuster their mission. More than two dozen have united under the banner of 51 for 51, a coalition that includes old guard unions like American Federation of Teachers, and rising young organizations such as Indivisible and the judicial reform group Demand Justice. Their goal is to “make DC the 51st state with 51 votes in the Senate.”

“It is no longer enough to just voice your support for DC statehood,” Rhodes, 51 for 51’s campaign director, told me. “You have to have the courage to change the rules, and stand up for the people of Washington.”

Eliminating the filibuster entirely will be difficult. In 2017, 61 senators signed a letter asking Senate leadership to oppose “any effort to curtail the existing rights and prerogatives of Senators to engage in full, robust, and extended debate as we consider legislation before this body in the future.” The effort was led by Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Chris Coons (D-DE), and was joined by more than two dozen Democrats.

Biden’s views on the filibuster are somewhat complicated. 51 for 51 claims him as a supporter, pointing to a video where he agrees with a tracker who asks him if he supports making DC a state “with 51 votes in the Senate.”

But Biden also told the New York Times editorial board that he does not support “abolishing the legislative filibuster.”

These two statements, however, are not necessarily in tension. There is a middle path between eliminating the filibuster entirely and permitting Republicans to filibuster DC statehood — treat statehood bills like confirmation votes.

The ostensible purpose of the filibuster is to allow senators to continue debating a legislative proposal, and potentially to make changes to that proposal. This is one reason it makes sense to exempt confirmation votes from the filibuster’s supermajority requirement. Legislation can be debated and amended by senators, but it’s not like senators can amend a nominee. There is much less for senators to debate when their only choice is to vote “yes” or “no” on a particular individual nominated for a high-level job.

A similar logic could be applied to statehood bills. Such bills aren’t entirely beyond debate — senators might quibble about what to name a state, or its precise borders — but the primary question before the Senate in the DC statehood bill is whether DC should be a state. Statehood is not a subject like, say, health reform, where lawmakers will have strong feelings about details such as whether health plans should cover contraceptive care, or the right amount to spend on training nurse practitioners.

So the Senate could amend its rules to allow new states to be admitted with a simple majority vote, while leaving in place the filibuster for ordinary legislation.

Without some tweaks to the Senate rules to prevent Republicans from filibustering statehood, however, it is likely that DC statehood is doomed.

Republicans will probably ask the Supreme Court to strike down DC statehood

The primary advantage of statehood is that it grants federal representation to the residents of the state. Statehood makes it less likely that the voices of DC residents will be ignored by Congress.

But DC is not entirely bereft of power in federal elections. The 23rd Amendment effectively grants three Electoral College votes to “the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States.” Under this amendment, which was ratified in 1961, DC has as much say in presidential elections as the “least populous State.”

Should DC become a state, however, it is likely that Republicans will seize on this nearly 60-year-old effort to enfranchise DC residents as a reason to disenfranchise those same votes. And, with the Supreme Court controlled by a Republican majority that is often very hostile to voting rights, it is possible that five justices will cite the 23rd Amendment as a reason to deny statehood to DC.

In 1993, the conservative Heritage Foundation published a paper by lawyer R. Hewitt Pate, arguing that DC could not be admitted as a state without a new constitutional amendment. The 23rd Amendment, Pate argued, presents “perhaps the most difficult constitutional problem” facing DC statehood advocates.

Pate claimed that the 23rd Amendment’s reference to “the District constituting the seat of Government” establishes the current District of Columbia as a “permanent constitutional entity.” He also suggested that the 23rd Amendment’s language limiting DC’s electoral votes to the number controlled by the “least populous State” permanently prevents DC from holding more than three electoral votes.

But Pate’s argument makes a hash out of the 23rd Amendment’s text. Though the amendment states that “the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as Congress may direct . . . a number of electors” (federal and DC law establish that these electors are chosen in a popular election), the amendment never states that the boundaries of this district cannot be expanded or contracted by statehood legislation.

Indeed, the DC statehood bill does not eliminate the “District constituting the seat of Government,” it merely shrinks it to a much smaller area that includes many of the buildings where the federal government conducts official business.

League of Women Voters of the District of Columbia

The 23rd Amendment does create one potential anomaly. If the DC statehood bill passes, the new state would be entitled to representation in the Electoral College just like any other state. Meanwhile, the rump federal district would also be entitled to three electoral votes under the 23rd Amendment.

But there’s an easy fix for this problem. Because the 23rd Amendment provides that the federal district’s electors shall be appointed “in such manner as Congress may direct,” Congress could simply pass a law providing that these three electoral votes will go to whichever presidential candidate would otherwise win the Electoral College — or, even better, Congress could award these three votes to the national popular vote winner, thus reducing the likelihood that the loser of the popular vote will become president.

There is, in other words, no good constitutional argument against DC statehood. As Viet Dinh, who served as an assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, told a Senate hearing in 2014, “nothing in the Twenty-Third Amendment prohibits the admission of [DC as a state]. Because the [DC statehood bill] will preserve a federal ‘District constituting the seat of Government of the United States.’”

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court is controlled by Republicans — and the Court’s Republican majority is often hostile to voting rights legislation. So there is at least some risk that the Court’s current majority might strike down DC statehood.

Admitting DC would make the United States more democratic

The strongest argument against admitting DC as a state is that DC statehood would, at least on paper, exacerbate the problem of Senate malapportionment. If DC does become a state, it would be the third-least-populous state in the nation. Only Wyoming and Vermont have fewer residents.

As a practical matter, however, admitting the bright blue District of Columbia as a state would help counterbalance the advantage malapportionment gives to Senate Republicans. And it would ensure that hundreds of thousands of Americans are not denied their right to vote.

“From our perspective, the Senate is broken and undemocratic,” Rhodes told me. “There are many examples of this, but the most blatant example is that 700,000 residents of Washington, DC, are not allowed to participate in the democracy that surrounds them.”

In the current Senate, Democrats actually control a majority (26-24) of seats from the most populous half of the states. Republicans owe their Senate majority to their crushing 29-21 lead in the least populous half of the states.

The GOP’s advantage, moreover, is only likely to grow with time. Right now, more than half the country lives in the nine most populous states. By 2040, according to a University of Virginia analysis, half the country is expected to live in just eight states. About 70 percent of the country will live in 16 states — meaning that 30 percent of the population will control 68 percent of the Senate.

Meanwhile, one of the best predictors of partisan voting patterns is population density. Dense regions tend to prefer Democrats, while sparsely populated regions prefer Republicans. As Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden describes this phenomenon, “as you go from the center of cities out through the suburbs and into rural areas, you traverse in a linear fashion from Democratic to Republican places.”

Barring a political realignment, in other words, the United States may be barreling toward a future where Republicans enjoy a permanent majority in the Senate — regardless of whom a majority of the country wishes to lead them. Admitting a single urban state probably won’t be enough to level the playing field between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, but it will mitigate the problem.

Nor is it especially unusual for the party that controls Congress to admit states for political reasons. In 1864, Republican President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation admitting Nevada, then a barely populated desert with a few thousand residents, into the union as a state. Nevada didn’t have many people, but the few people who did live there were overwhelmingly Republican.

A dozen years later, President Ulysses Grant, also a Republican, signed legislation admitting the state of Colorado. According to the most recent census, Colorado had fewer than 40,00 residents when it became a state. Colorado was also dominated by Republicans at the time.

After Republicans defeated Democratic President Grover Cleveland in the 1888 election, they celebrated by splitting the GOP-dominated Dakota into two territories and admitting both of them as states. Today, there are still two Dakotas because Gilded Age Republicans wanted four senators instead of just two.

Meanwhile, Republicans successfully blocked New Mexico from becoming a state until 1912. Cleveland’s Democrats had hoped to admit New Mexico, which favored Cleveland’s party.

These sorts of tactics are the kind of constitutional hardball that political parties have freely embraced in a nation that, nonsensically, gives two senators to every state regardless of population. It would be best if the Senate were abolished, or at least apportioned by population.

But, until that day comes, admitting DC as a state would make the United States more small-d democratic. It would mean that over 700,000 DC residents were no longer disenfranchised. And it would provide a counterbalance to the arbitrary and anti-democratic advantage that Senate Republicans currently enjoy.

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[Some lessons on writing from the masters.]

I've written a new book about language (you can see it here), and Eugene and friends have kindly consented to let me discuss it this week (thanks, Eugene!). The book talks about why the prose of Lincoln, Churchill, Holmes, and other greats is so compelling, and asks what we can learn from them about how to write better ourselves. The book is part of a series on rhetoric—a sequel to this one and this one (which will be reprinted later this summer).

The new book's general claim is that our culture of advice about good writing doesn't explain the power that Lincoln achieved with his words. The usual story is that the best writing is the most efficient—that clarity and concision are everything. It's hard to argue with this; who doesn't want to be clear? But writing can be clear and powerful, clear and memorable, clear and full of fire, or clear without any of those things. The book argues that rhetorical force isn't created by efficiency alone. It's created by the use of contrasts.

Consciously or not, Lincoln understood this. It's how he wrote. Here I will talk about one example: contrast in the kinds of words you use.

English is a language built mostly out of two others. Much of it was created out of the language of invaders who came to Britain around 450 ad from Anglia and Saxony (in what we'd now call northern Germany). About 600 years later the French invaded and brought their language with them, too; it was derived from Latin. The new French competed with Old English, and the outcome was a language—modern English—built out of both.

Often words with similar meanings from the two languages were both turned into English words, such as make (Saxon) and create (from French), or need (Saxon) and require (from French). So in English you can say almost anything with two kinds of words: short, simple ones with Saxon origins, or fancier ones that come from Latin.

It's a fun parlor game to name a Latinate equivalent for every Saxon word you can think of.  If a word ends with –tion or similar suffix, or if it could be made into a similar word that does, then it's usually derived from Latin. Thus the Latinate word acquire can become acquisition or acquisitive; but the equivalent Germanic word get doesn't take endings in that way.

In any event: advisers on English style have long said that it's best to use Saxon words when you can, because those words are most clear and forceful. If you need a single rule, that's as good as any. But Lincoln didn't create his great effects by sticking to one kind of word or another. He created them by skillfully mixing the two kinds of words, and doing the same with other aspects of his language.

For example, Lincoln especially liked to start a sentence with Latinate words and then end with a Saxon finish.  Look at this famous passage from his "House Divided" speech in 1858:

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

The first half of the sentence has lots of Latinate words: opponents, slavery, arrest, course, ultimate, extinction, advocates. Then it ends with 14 words of one syllable in a row, all of them Saxon except "States" (which might as well be). He expresses the hope in large, uplifting words, and the threat in words that are short and simple. The first round sets up the second.

Another example, this from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address:

Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.  —Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865).

This is another good case of a simple finish used for the sake of contrast. The opinions and purposes of the parties are put in Latinate words (deprecate, nation, survive, accept, perish). The fact of what happened next is stated in solemn words of one syllable. Large words for complex intentions, plain words for plain truths.

The point: Lincoln is well-known for his love of simple language, but he was also at home with Latinate words and mixed the two types to strong effect.  He especially liked to circle with larger words early in a sentence and then finish it simply. This pattern let him offer intellectual or idealistic substance and then tie it to a stake in the ground.

If you want to experiment with this idea, try finishing your arguments with words that are simpler and shorter than the ones you've recently been using—in other words, with a Saxon clincher.

If you'd like to read more about these ideas, you can find the book here.

If you enjoy this work, and if you can afford to do so, please consider helping me keep it sustainable in 2020, by joining Sparky’s List! Also, you can pre-order my forthcoming book, Life in the Stupidverse, through indiebound.com or directly from the local bookstore of your choice.

STATNews:

How many needless Covid-19 deaths were caused by delays in responding? Most of them

Due to exponential viral spread, our delay in action was devastating. In the wake of the U.S. response, 117,858 Americans died in the four months following the first 15 confirmed cases. After an equivalent period, Germany suffered only 8,863 casualties. Scaling up the German population of 83.7 million to America’s 331 million, a U.S.-sized Germany would have suffered 35,049 Covid-19 deaths. So if the U.S. had acted as effectively as Germany, 70% of U.S. coronavirus deaths might have been prevented.

That means they were infected two weeks ago, or so. And could spread disease. And now we wait. Fortunately, only 6200 showed in Tulsa.

Tim Miller/Bulwark:

Make Arenas Empty Again

In Tulsa, the Trump campaign transitions to farce.

The Trump on display in Tulsa was not a strong man steeling himself for a crackdown against protesters while standing astride a silent majority of mask-eschewing followers with a death wish.

Instead, out from behind the curtain came a weak and whiny D-list Rodney Dangerfield, obsessed with minor slights and not getting enough respect from the Fake News Media that he claims to hate but seems to be kind of super into.

I’m reading news reports of the rally like reading The Boston Globe after a Yankees win for the Schadenfreude. 

Harry Enten/CNN:

There's no sign of 'hidden' Trump voters

Even though the national polls were accurate in 2016, one of the complaints I hear most often about the polls is that Trump's supporters are either lying or won't talk to pollsters. Polls like Ipsos get around that argument because they use machines (e.g. they're done online) to conduct the interviews. There's no reason to lie to a machine. If Trump was doing significantly better in these non-live interview polls, then these critics of the polls may have a point.

The evidence indicates these detractors are, at least in this moment, wrong. There's no sign of shy Trump voters. Trump doesn't do any better in polls without a live interviewer.

The average of national surveys (accounting for the fact that some pollsters survey more often) this week from pollsters who didn't have a live interviewer put Biden up over Trump 50% to 39% (10 points unrounded). That's a huge advantage and very similar to the latest live interview poll average that has Biden up 51% to 41%.

Are you a K-pop stan? Read this and this:

• WaPo: Trump rallies in red-state America — and faces a sea of empty blue seats
• AP:  Trump comeback rally features empty seats, staff infections
• NY Times:  Trump Rally Fizzles as Attendance Falls Short of Campaign’s Expectations
• CNN: Sick staff and empty seats: How Trump's triumphant return to the campaign trail went from bad to worse
• Jonathan Allen/NBC: Trump's deflating Tulsa turnout reveals a deeper problem for him
• Politico: Trump campaign blames protesters for disappointing turnout at Tulsa rally
• Bloomberg: Trump’s Tulsa Rally Adds to Week of Warning Signs for Campaign

The headlines Trump was hoping for, amirite?

The visuals Trump was hoping for, amirite?

WaPo:

The battle over masks in a pandemic: An all-American story

Mask-wearing for some people is an identifier of broader beliefs and political leanings. Like so many issues rooted in science and medicine, the pandemic is now fully entangled with ideological tribalism. This has played out before: helmets for motorcyclists, seat belts in cars, smoking bans in restaurants. All of those measures provoked battles over personal liberty.

Now it’s masks and the coronavirus, with face coverings emerging as an emblem for what cleaves the nation. A flurry of recent studies supports wearing cloth face coverings as a means to limit transmission of the novel coronavirus, which causes the illness covid-19. To many people, masks represent adherence to civic duty and a willingness to make individual sacrifices for the greater good of public health. To others, masks symbolize government overreach and a violation of personal liberty.

President Trump does not wear a mask, even when in the company of staffers and other officials who do. His press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said Friday that she will not wear a mask at the Trump rally Saturday in Tulsa.

The thing about Tulsa is that it’s part of chaos theory: maybe nothing happens this time because you got lucky. But many more rallies are planned, and you can’t keep getting away with it.

Miami Herald:

Local governments should order people to wear masks in public, Florida doctors say

Mask-wearing for some people is an identifier of broader beliefs and political leanings. Like so many issues rooted in science and medicine, the pandemic is now fully entangled with ideological tribalism. This has played out before: helmets for motorcyclists, seat belts in cars, smoking bans in restaurants. All of those measures provoked battles over personal liberty.

Now it’s masks and the coronavirus, with face coverings emerging as an emblem for what cleaves the nation. A flurry of recent studies supports wearing cloth face coverings as a means to limit transmission of the novel coronavirus, which causes the illness covid-19. To many people, masks represent adherence to civic duty and a willingness to make individual sacrifices for the greater good of public health. To others, masks symbolize government overreach and a violation of personal liberty.

President Trump does not wear a mask, even when in the company of staffers and other officials who do. His press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said Friday that she will not wear a mask at the Trump rally Saturday in Tulsa.

This is the Louisiana DPH:

Michelle Norris/WaPo:

Why did it take so long to set Aunt Jemima free?

Her name should have fallen off boxes and bottles years ago, and the fact that it didn’t suggests that the companies that controlled the brand for more than a century have all been slaves to profit — holding onto a valuable trademark that’s internationally known and historically offensive.

I admit to having a complicated relationship with Aunt Jemima. She occupies a secret branch of my family tree. For a period of time in the late 1940s and early 1950s, my grandmother, Ione Brown, was part of an army of women who worked as traveling Aunt Jemimas, visiting small-town fairs and rotary-club breakfasts to conduct pancake-making demonstrations at a time when the notion of ready-mix convenience cooking was new.

I never knew about my grandmother’s work until long after she died. It was one of those things my family never really talked about. I learned about it while researching a family memoir called “The Grace of Silence.” I learned that she made good money and covered a region including Iowa, the Dakotas, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. She was often treated like a celebrity in small towns, but could not stay in local hotels. She kept an eye out for houses that had a small sign in the window that said “TOURIST,” a code for homes that provided lodging and meals to black people.

Complicated history, take a moment to learn about it.

Stephanie McCurray/Atlantic:

The Confederacy Was an Antidemocratic, Centralized State

The actual Confederate States of America was a repressive state devoted to white supremacy.

For the four years of its existence, until it was forced to surrender, the Confederate States of America was a pro-slavery nation at war against the United States. The C.S.A. was a big, centralized state, devoted to securing a society in which enslavement to white people was the permanent and inherited condition of all people of African descent.

Christine Emba/WaPo:

A monumental shift

Memorials to white supremacy are falling. What will replace them?

In Philadelphia, protesters vandalized a statue of former mayor and police commissioner Frank Rizzo. Known for his brutal policing of black and LGBTQ communities in the 1960s and ′70s, Rizzo opposed school integration and encouraged his constituents to “vote white.” The statue was later removed from its place of honor across from Philadelphia’s City Hall and is now in storage.

The above is a visual/photographic story, click for the full experience.

And then his big rally:

NEW YORK — John Bolton’s memoir officially comes out Tuesday after surviving a security review and a legal challenge from the Justice Department. But over the weekend, it was available in ways even his publisher is hoping to prevent.

A PDF of “The Room Where It Happened” has turned up on the internet, offering a free, pirated edition of the former national security adviser’s scathing takedown of President Donald Trump, who has alleged that the book contains classified material that never should have been released.

“We are working assiduously to take down these clearly illegal instances of copyright infringement,” Simon & Schuster spokesperson Adam Rothberg said Sunday.

Piracy has long been a top concern among publishers, especially in the digital age, although the actual impact on sales is undetermined. “The Room Where It Happened” has been No. 1 for days on the Amazon.com bestseller list. The Associated Press was among several news outlets that obtained early copies of the book and reported on its contents.

On Saturday, a federal judge ruled that Simon & Schuster could publish the book despite the Trump administration’s contention that it compromised national security. “The Room Where It Happened” was originally scheduled for March, but was delayed twice as the White House reviewed the manuscript.

Bolton’s legal team has said that he spent months addressing White House concerns about classified information and that Bolton had been assured in late April by the official he was working with that the manuscript no longer contained any such material.

Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office via Getty Images

The officers say they were forbidden from interacting with Derek Chauvin because they were deemed a “liability” based on their race.

Eight nonwhite corrections officers who worked at the jail holding Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, have filed discrimination charges with Minnesota’s Department of Human Rights claiming that they were prevented from guarding or having contact with Chauvin on the basis of their race.

The accusations are likely to intensify already-fierce criticism of the city’s criminal justice system as tainted by personnel and policies that discriminate against the city’s black residents.

According to the Star Tribune, which obtained a copy of the charges, Chauvin was booked at the Ramsey County jail on the day he was charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter for asphyxiating Floyd with his knee.

All officers of color were told they could potentially be a “liability” in handling Chauvin and were ordered to work on a separate floor, according to the Star Tribune.

The charges also allege that a black acting sergeant who is usually tasked with overseeing high-profile inmates was told to stop patting down Chauvin and replaced with white officers. A white officer reportedly allowed Chauvin to use her cellphone, in violation of jail protocol.

“I understood that the decision to segregate us had been made because we could not be trusted to carry out our work responsibilities professionally around the high-profile inmate — solely because of the color of our skin,” wrote one black acting sergeant in the charges. “I am not aware of a similar situation where white officers were segregated from an inmate.”

The attorney representing the eight officers of color, Bonnie Smith, said it was a blow to the morale of the officers as it signaled mistrust based on their race.

“I think they deserve to have employment decisions made based on performance and behavior,” she said, per the Star Tribune. “Their main goal is to make sure this never happens again.”

The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office initially denied reports on social media that nonwhite officers were barred from contact with Chauvin. Jail Superintendent Steve Lydon reportedly told his superiors that his steps to remove nonwhite officers from around Chauvin were meant to “protect and support” them. He has since been demoted.

“Out of care and concern, and without the comfort of time, I made a decision to limit exposure to employees of color to a murder suspect who could potentially aggravate those feelings,” Lydon said in a statement given during an internal investigation, according to the Star Tribune.

The alleged actions by jail officials implicitly suggest that some leaders in the metro area corrections system place more trust in white officers than nonwhite officers to act professionally. And they are likely to further increase scrutiny of the criminal justice system in Minneapolis.

As protests over the death of George Floyd spread in Minneapolis and across the globe, the state’s Department of Human Rights launched an inquiry into allegations of racial bias in the Minneapolis Police Department. Now, an inquiry into the Ramsey County corrections agency is expected as well, the Star Tribune reports.

According to the New York Times, black people make up 20 percent of Minneapolis’s population, but are more likely to be “pulled over, arrested and have force used against them than white residents.” And more than 60 percent of the victims in police shootings in the city between 2009 and 2019 were black. MinnPost reported in 2015 that “Black people make up less than 6 percent of Minnesota’s population ... but made up 35 percent of the prison population.”

“The truth is we do not have a good history,” Jamar Nelson, a community activist, told the Times in May in the wake of Floyd’s death. “The biggest complaint is that the community feels the Police Department is racist, bigoted and uncaring about the black community.”

Police reform legislation in the state stalled this weekend as Republicans and Democrats could not come to an agreement. Critics say the police union has promoted a toxic culture among law enforcement in Minneapolis, as racial justice activists Kandace Montgomery and Miski Noor have explained:

Racism in the Minneapolis Police Department is far from hidden. A 2007 racial discrimination lawsuit brought by Black police officers (including current Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, before he became the branch’s leader) stated that the head of the police union openly wore a white power patch on his motorcycle jacket. This is the same lieutenant who called Black Lives Matter a “terrorist organization” and hosted the police union’s “Cops for Trump” T-shirt fundraiser.

Montgomery and Noor have called for a radical reorganization of criminal justice in the city. “[We] believe that it is time for Minneapolis to divest from violent policing infrastructure and invest in strengthening Black communities,” they wrote.

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President Donald Trump is expected to extend through the end of the year foreign-worker restrictions that were initially enacted in April because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Trump will expand on the executive order blocking most people from receiving a permanent residency visa, or green card, by including most guest workers who come to the United States for temporary or seasonal work. That will encompass skilled workers in specialty occupations, executives, and seasonal workers who work in industries such as landscaping, housekeeping and construction, according to the two people, as well as a Department of Homeland Security official. Agricultural workers and students will not be included.

The new order is expected to continue to have broad exemptions, including for health care professionals and those entering for law enforcement or national security reasons, which will be expanded to include those with economic interests. New exemptions will probably include au pairs.

We’re going to be announcing something tomorrow or the next day on the visas,” Trump told Fox News on Saturday. “You need them for big businesses where they have certain people that have been coming in for a long time, but very little exclusion and they’re pretty tight.”

The end-of-the-year extension makes it likely that the president will try to make immigration a focus of his reelection campaign, just like in 2016, when Trump promised to build a wall on the southern border and deport millions of migrants who arrived in the country illegally. In his inaugural address, Trump promised to build with American labor. “We will follow two simple rules: buy American and hire American,” he said.

Conservatives and hard-line immigration groups had been urging Trump to do more for months, contending that the initial order didn’t go far enough because of the skyrocketing unemployment rate and an election only months away. Four Republican senators — Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas, Charles Grassley of Iowa and Josh Hawley of Missouri — sent a letter to the president asking for a pause in guest worker visas for 60 days to a year, “or until unemployment has returned to normal levels.” Six House members, including the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), followed with their own letter.

Trump’s first executive order, signed in April, is due to expire on Monday. It’s unclear whether he will sign one or two additional orders. The White House did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday.

The new executive order will probably anger business leaders who insist that foreign workers are still needed, even with so many Americans out of work, in order to keep vital industries staffed.

As the coronavirus outbreak initially spread, the Trump administration quietly continued to allow foreign workers to enter the country, even easing requirements for immigrants to get certain jobs — allowing electronic signatures, waiving the physical inspection of documents and extending deadlines. Then Trump abruptly tweeted that he would stop all immigration into the U.S. as the unemployment rate soared to nearly 15 percent. But the next day he agreed to scale it back.

Trump has already restricted foreign visitors from China, Europe, Brazil, Canada and Mexico, and paused most routine visa processing and refugee cases — meaning the new actions may not have been necessary.