In a new op-ed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company is going to expand its efforts to register new voters on Instagram and Facebook in the 2020 presidential election. | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
“We should trust voters to make judgements for themselves,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in response to critics.
After deflecting criticism that it is not doing enough to stop the spread of political misinformation, Facebook says it’s expanding its efforts to get people to vote in the 2020 US presidential elections.
Starting in July and running through November, the company will begin reminding US users to register to vote with a message at the top of their Facebook and Instagram feeds. It will also point users to a new Voting Information Center that will tell people where and how they can vote in their geographic area, and it will surface verified posts from state election officials and local election authorities. The company plans to show this Voting Information Center to 160 million people in total, and aims to help 4 million Americans register to vote — that’s twice the number of voters the company says it helped register in the 2016 presidential elections, using similar efforts. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced details about the plan, which he called the “largest voting information campaign in American history” in an op-ed in USA Today on Tuesday evening.
Zuckerberg seemed to acknowledge recent criticism for his handling of Trump’s posts in his recent op-ed, and argued that encouraging people to vote was a better course of action than moderating politicians’ posts.
“Everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say — and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content,” wrote Zuckerberg. “We have rules against speech that will cause imminent physical harm or suppress voting, and no one is exempt from them. But accountability only works if we can see what those seeking our votes are saying, even if we viscerally dislike what they say. Ultimately, I believe the best way to hold politicians accountable is through voting, and I believe we should trust voters to make judgements for themselves.”
Internally, some Facebook employees have been calling on Zuckerberg to take a middle-ground approach rather than simply leaving up or taking down controversial posts by politicians. Instead, they want Facebook to consider a “non-binary” action that would label those posts as misleading or contentious, similar to what Twitter did with Trump’s mail-in ballot statements in May.
Facebook did not respond to a request for follow-up questions about the voter information center in time for publication.
Here’s what the reminder to vote and the Voting Information Center will look like on Facebook and Instagram, respectively:
Facebook
Facebook
The company is also giving people the option to turn off political ads on their feed, following the company’s move in January to let people limit how many of those ads they see. Despite public debate and its competitors’ changing positions, Facebook allows politicians to lie in advertisements on its platform, arguing that it would amount to censorship.
Considering Zuckerberg’s longstanding ethos that Facebook should not be an “arbiter of truth” on contentious political speech, his decision not to intervene with world leaders on controversial posts about voting, but instead surface more seemingly objective information, makes sense. The issue for Facebook is that this approach is increasingly scrutinized by both the public, politicians, and even the company’s own social media competitors. Zuckerberg’s efforts to register more voters likely won’t appease critics who argue that the company still isn’t doing enough to mitigate the harm that political misinformation on social media can inflict on the democratic process.
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And yet the DOJ signed off on this shit. They don't get a free pass for following their obviously improper orders.
A million years ago, in the time before the coronavirus pandemic—a time also known as January—former National Security Advisor John Bolton had a chance to do this nation a solid. In both the House and the Senate, testimony in Donald Trump’s impeachment made it clear that Bolton was a key witness to the events during which Trump had attempted to suborn false statements from the Ukrainian government in an attempt to get a political edge over Joe Biden. Bolton then exacerbated the calls for his appearance at the hearings by leaking excerpts from an upcoming book and promising that there was blockbuster info both in connection to Ukraine and to Trump’s other foreign entanglements.
Even with Republicans putting on a genuinely history show of cowardice in voting to listen to no witnesses at all, Bolton had an opportunity. He didn’t have to testify in the Senate, he just had to … testify. He could have gone on any news show in America and made a genuine impact by revealing the information he knew about Trump’s lies, attempted bribery, incompetence, and profiteering. Instead, Bolton stayed silent, choosing to wait for the moment when his book was released to maximize his own profits while simultaneously assuring that he would not be there when his nation needed him most. So now Bolton’s book is here. Or almost here. Because despite months of review and revision to remove anything that could be considered classified, Donald Trump has now declared that everything is considered classified. Every single word that ever dropped from Trump’s lips has been retroactively classified by Trump. And now he’s suing Bolton to block the release of his book.
Even the title of Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, suggests that Bolton was witness to a crime. And he’ll share the salacious details with the rest of us … for a price. On the one hand, there would be a definite satisfaction if Bolton, who found he liked teasing the nation more than providing vital testimony, never got to profit from his book. His abdication of his responsibilities, not just as a former government official, but as a citizen, was so egregious that watching Bolton and Trump locked in a fruitless legal snarl from now until both have shuffled off, would seem like justice of a sort.
As The New York Times reports, Trump’s suit claims that Bolton has broken an agreement for review of the manuscript and that he’s unilaterally deciding that it’s okay to go forward with the material in the book. Bolton handed over draft copies of the manuscript for review in 2019, and Bolton made changes in response to a set of initial requests. But after that, the response from the Trump White House was to simply not respond. Bolton never got the standard written release to mark the end of the review.
The suit charges Bolton with “breach of contract” in proceeding with publication and distribution of the book without securing that White House approval. Since the Justice Department now acts as Donald Trump’s personal law firm, the DOJ has asked a federal judge to both claw back Bolton’s payment for the book, and tell Bolton to get Simon & Schuster to pull copies from the shelf. The fact that the suit doesn’t name the publisher directly is an indication of just how fragile Trump’s suit really is. There are a semi-infinite number of previous cases that can be referenced when it comes to trying to block the publication of material that’s deemed to be classified, and very few of them are helpful to Trump’s position. So instead the suit skates around trying to extract either money or action directly from the publisher and attempts to both go after Bolton’s pocketbook and force him to act to block sales of the book.
On the one hand, the careful tiptoe made by the DOJ in framing the suit to skirt the publisher is a sign that even William Barr understands how tenuous this attempt to block the book really is. On the other hand, the suit includes claims that Bolton leaked classified information. Leaking classified information is a federal crime. Bolton hasn’t been charged with that crime, but including that claim in the lawsuit certainly suggests that if he doesn’t agree to a further delay of the book, those charges could appear.
But … overall the effort from the DOJ seems to be halfhearted. Everything points to this being more an exercise in Barr making Trump happy than a serious attempt to block publication. Simon & Schuster has actually printed and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of Bolton’s book to warehouses, and even book stories, across the nation. There’s not so much as a request for a restraining order—even a temporary order—that would stop the publisher from simply giving stores the thumbs-up to begin sales.
Trump’s suit seems to be a good deal of smoke, but there’s little sign it contains any fire. Bolton’s book is going to be released. That doesn’t mean it should be bought.
“Officer Karen” and “McMuffin” trended on social media Wednesday after a video of a police officer having a breakdown over her McDonald’s Egg McMuffin order went viral.
In the clip, the woman, dubbed “Officer Karen” by Twitter because of her apparent inability to put things into perspective, launches into a dashcam diatribe because she is inconvenienced and has apparently been experiencing difficult days as a police officer. Based on the location she provides in the clip, ‘Officer Karen’ appears to be from Richmond Hill, Georgia.
So, the internet is talking about putting things in perspective.
Says Officer Karen, holding back tears: “I said ‘don’t bother with the food because right now I’m too nervous to take it.’ It doesn’t matter how many hours I’ve been up. It doesn’t matter what I’ve done for anyone. Right now I’m too nervous to take a meal from McDonald’s because I can’t see it being made. I don’t know what’s going on with people nowadays, but please, just give us a break. Please just give us a break. I don’t know how much more I can take. I have been in this for 15 years and I have never ever had such anxiety about waiting for McDonald’s drive-thru food. So please just have a heart and if you see an officer just tell them ‘thank you.’ Because I don’t hear ‘thank you’ enough anymore.”
McMuffin is trending because this woman had a full meltdown about having to wait for her order.
Officers collapsing into self-pity because they’re mildly inconvenienced… while a whole lot of Americans fear for their lives when they see them coming.
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) June 17, 2020
And people have thoughts:
Officer Karen's story about waiting for her McDonalds Egg McMuffin is way worse than the guy who was killed for sleeping on line at the Wendy's drive-thru. Yeah, it isn't. Get a grip lady.
No, she is having a meltdown because something in life that has arisen out of terrible harms to others is now causing her some inconvenience and concern as a white person.
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) June 17, 2020
Officer Karen calling for backup after having a mental breakdown for not receiving her breakfast meal pic.twitter.com/WnyJmGIHoX
Fucking officer Karen crying over a mcmuffin and saying "I don't hear thank you enough anymore." White entitlement is never self aware. So sad. #OfficerKaren
This is the funniest thing on Twitter today. By far. If it helps the mental defectives who share in Officer Karen‘s pain, black folks have been waiting for their order for 100s of years and they get murdered instead of denied a McMuffin. Pound sand, fool.
While Officer Karen is trending, a reminder a Martin Gugino is still hospitalized with a fractured skull and is yet unable to walk. pic.twitter.com/tMosJzZFoq
Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz watches his team warm up before a Big Ten Conference college football game between the Illinois Fighting Illini and the Iowa Hawkeyes on November 23, 2019, at Kinnick Stadium, Iowa City, Iowa. | Keith Gillett/Icon Sportswire
“The football players are looking at this and going, ‘Wait a second, they need us at this point even more than we need them.’”
In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, several of college football’s most prominent athletes are speaking out about racism and racial injustice on their campuses — some for the very first time.
But what’s more surprising is that in 2020, major college football coaches and programs are finally starting to listen. From joining Black Lives Matter protests to removing long-tenured staffers accused by players of racial bias, college football programs are beginning to respond to demands from players — players on whom those programs rely.
These athletes are part of a movement taking place across the sports world, from Nascar to (belatedly) the NFL, a movement centered on black athletes that is demanding real changes to benefit the athletes upon whom many of these sports rely.
But there’s something unique about the power dynamics in college football. I spoke with Andy Staples, a college football writer at the Athletic, who told me that football players at big-time programs have realized something very important: “Without them, there is no athletic department.” As many universities make deep cuts to athletic programs in a fiscal response to the coronavirus pandemic, Staples said that athletic directors are well aware that college football, a multibillion-dollar industry attracting hundreds of thousands to stadiums and tens of millions of viewers every year, is the golden goose they need to survive.
“[Programs] have to have a football season or basically everybody loses their jobs because there’s no money,” he said. “So the football players are looking at this and going, ‘Wait a second, they need us at this point even more than we need them.’”
“We have a chance to set the bar for college football”
Roughly 50 percent of Division 1 college football players are black, a number that rises a bit to 51 percent of players in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and even higher to 61 percent of players in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) — the two conferences that have produced 13 of the last 14 national championship-winning teams.
But black players have often been made to feel unwelcome at best, unwanted at worst, at some of the very programs that heavily recruited them. For example, at the University of Iowa, which is in the Big Ten Conference, dozens of black players have detailed racist bullying and invectives they’ve received from high-level staff, particularly former strength and conditioning coach Chris Doyle.
The highest-paid strength and conditioning coach in the country until he separated from the university on Monday, Doyle once allegedly told a player who was contemplating quitting the sport, “Maybe you should take up rowing, you know? Oh wait, black people don’t like boats in water, do they?”
Other current and former players spoke out on social media about a general attitude at Iowa football that seemed to make black players, and blackness itself, anathema to high performance at the university. For example, the program banned players from wearing their hair in cornrows. And Doyle was far from the only coach to make offensive comments; that group included the head coach’s own son and offensive coordinator, as the Athletic’s Scott Dochterman writes:
“Doyle made a comment about sending back to the GHETTO,” wrote former defensive back Diaunte Morrow. Doyle “‘(told me) to go back to the streets.’ I’m not from the streets!” said ex-defensive lineman Brandon Simon. Former running back Akrum Wadley said that when he walked off the practice field while wearing a Nike face mask to keep warm, a coach “asked if I was on my way to rob a liquor store or bank.” (Wadley’s mother told Hawkeye Nation the coach was [offensive coordinator] Brian Ferentz, and that she brought it to Kirk Ferentz’s attention at the time.)
I spoke with Marc Morehouse, a University of Iowa beat writer for the Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who told me that at the school, “This culture has always been borderline bully, fully military and aggressive against black culture.”
The University of Iowa has roughly 35,000 students, and while just 3 percent of students at Iowa are black, that number jumps to 46 percent of Iowa’s scholarship football players. But Morehouse told me that the Iowa football program under the tenure of Kirk Ferentz — with 21 years under his belt, the nation’s longest-serving high-level college football coach — has spent more time constructing an image of staid continuity than addressing real concerns from players about racism within the program. “He’s been building a grandpa image with the help of a public relations firm,” he said. “You miss shit like your strength coach telling kids to go back to the ghetto.”
But the murder of George Floyd seemed to rock the very foundations of Iowa’s football world. Following a team discussion led by Ferentz about the murder of George Floyd and his perspective, more than 50 current and former players spoke publicly about racist bullying and behavior at Iowa. Doyle was placed on administrative leave on June 6, and on June 15, the university announced that it was “parting ways” with the former coach. But Doyle will receive a $1.1 million buyout and full health benefits for the next 15 months, which one Iowa basketball player described on Twitter as an “outrage.”
During a press conference on Friday, Ferentz said that he’d had a number of conversations with former players and staff and had heard that the coaching style used was “at times demeaning and created unnecessary frustration and anxiety.” And he added, “One byproduct of that is some of our black athletes were feeling that they can’t be themselves in our culture. And to that end, we must be more inclusive and more aware.”
Staples noted during our conversation that many coaches are trying to educate themselves during this moment. “Most coaches really do care about their players. They want them to succeed. They want them to be happy. And I think there’s a lot of coaches that are looking and saying, how can I help understand better so that I can do the job better?” (And it doesn’t hurt, from their perspective, that speaking out in favor of racial equality could also help recruit and retain future players.)
For example, on June 6, Ferentz lifted the program’s ban on players tweeting. Two days later, safety Kaevon Merriweather tweeted out a statement in support of players potentially kneeling during the National Anthem to protest racial injustice. “DON’T COME TO US EXPECTING US TO DO FOR YOU WHEN YOU CAN’T SUPPORT THE BLACK ATHLETES ON THIS TEAM AND THE DECISIONS WE MAKE AS A TEAM.”
If you think you could possibly call yourself an Iowa Football fan and you can not agree with what I said and what this team is standing on. Then stop calling yourself a fan, IMMEDIATELY‼️ BECAUSE I CAN PROMISE YOU THAT WE DO NOT CARE‼️ pic.twitter.com/DgYFY56ojv
During a press availability on Friday, Merriweather clarified that the team had not yet decided on kneeling. But he added that being able to use Twitter was a boon: “It feels pretty good to have another outlet that I can express myself.”
Dave Zirin, a sportswriter at the Nation, told me that Twitter and Instagram had fundamentally altered the space for athletes to talk about issues of major importance to them, even in just the last five years. “Social media has changed everything. It allows for direct communication without the filter of sportswriters, many of them hold their own biases. It punctures the privilege of white sports [fans], particularly [getting] white college football fans to confront their own privilege and force them to take a side.”
And he added that another voice had played a big role: Colin Kaepernick, and the athletes who followed his example when the former NFL quarterback first sat, then took a knee during the National Anthem to protest police brutality.
“Colin Kaepernick has fundamentally changed ‘jock culture,’” Zirin told me. “Sports — and football in particular — so often an arena and symbol of reaction, is now leading in the fight against racist policing and the entire criminal justice system. It’s a remarkable shift, and I do believe that Colin Kaepernick is first and foremost responsible for that shift. But we can’t forget the hundreds of high school and college athletes who took a knee between 2016 and 2018, who started debates and conversations in their communities on a small-scale grassroots level.”
An exercise of real power
This is far from the first time the politics of racism have roiled the world of college football, a sport one historian said carried “an unmistakable whiff of the plantation.” Black players at universities from Berkeley to Michigan State risked their scholarships to speak out against racism in the 1960s and ’70s. And more recently in 2015, players at the University of Missouri helped to force out Missouri system president Tim Wolfe by threatening to refuse to play or take part in football activities.
That’s because in real-world terms, black college football players are part of an infrastructure that brings in billions of dollars to universities, cable networks, and sponsors — an entire industry, in fact.
As the New York Times’s Mike McIntire told my colleague Sean Illing in 2017, “Again, we’re talking about a multibillion-dollar business here, and we’re talking about universities that are generating hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of these athletes.”
For example, the University of Michigan football team (full disclosure: my alma mater and my rooting interest) brought in an average of $127 million from 2014-2016, for a net profit of about $75 million. Michigan’s head football coach, Jim Harbaugh, makes $7.5 million per year. As an avid college football fan, I pay subscription costs to two paid Michigan-centered football news services, each of which employs a roster of journalists and recruiting experts.
All of that money — from the university to the coach to the fees paid by ESPN and ABC to broadcast games to the people paid to write about which high school sophomore has received an offer to play at which university — is based on the labor of college football players, many of whom are black. To put it bluntly: If they don’t play, the infrastructure crumbles.
This means that in 2020, college football players simultaneously have markedly little self-agency but considerable power to attempt to shift the attitudes of coaches and fans alike. They cannot be paid for their labor, but they can force change.
How will fans respond?
I asked Zirin about how players speaking out about racism on social media might impact their relationship with fans. He said that he thought it was far too early to say. “College athletes I speak to are treated like half heroes and half chattel on their campuses. Let’s see what changes this fall. Especially if players are conscripted into playing games while their campuses remain closed because of Covid-19.”
But Staples told me that, in his view, the Overton window on the Black Lives Matter movement and social protest had shifted considerably. Some fans will, of course, pledge to refuse to watch games if players kneel during the Anthem or speak out on social media, but he said, “That’s the same person who says, ‘I’m never going to [root for] my school again because they lost this game.’” He added, “I think that the fans will come back around, especially with college football, because so many people tie a piece of their identity to their fandom about their school. They’re not going to be that willing to part with that piece of their identity.”
And that’s more power in the hands of players who have sometimes been treated as replaceable cogs in a machine far bigger than they are. As sportswriter Nicole Auerbach said on Twitter, “It’s pretty amazing to watch these college athletes realize how much power they have — and to watch them wield it.”
It's pretty amazing to watch these college athletes realize how much power they have — and to watch them wield it.
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.
Meidas Touch, the activist filmmaking group that dropped the re-edited version of Ivanka Trump’s commencement speech earlier this month, just released this searing clip urging voters to get rid of Republican cowards Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, Martha McSally, Cory Gardner, John Cornyn, David Perdue, Steve Daines, Thom Tillis, and Cindy Hyde-Smith.
In a few hours, a Republican staffer on the Hill will wake up and will have to explain to his bosses why #GOPCowards is trending.
Democrats and Republicans have very different views about how much discrimination various demographic groups face in American society. That disagreement underlies virtually everything happening in American politics today, from the discussions about race and policing in the wake of George’s Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police to the 2020 presidential election.
We wrote about these differing perceptions near the start of President Trump’s term in 2017. Those perceptions have not changed that much, but we felt like these questions of discrimination are more relevant than ever, with Trump running for a second term and the country rethinking its racial policies in the wake of Floyd’s death.
Here are some recent findings about perceptions of discrimination and perceptions of various groups in American society, based on recent polling from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project.32 The survey we relied on was administered after Floyd’s death, from May 28 to June 3, but previous sets of polls from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape had similar results — except for shifts in responses to questions about black people and policing, as we explain below.
Perceptions of discrimination differ across party
An overwhelming majority of Democrats thought black and Muslim Americans face “a great deal” or “a lot” of discrimination in America today, as opposed to “a moderate amount,” “little” or “none at all.” Perceptions of discrimination against black people have surged among all groups, including Republicans, in the wake of Floyd’s death. But the vast majority of Democrats thought that black people in America faced high levels of discrimination even before Floyd’s death.33 About half of Democrats also thought women face a lot of discrimination.34
Very few Democrats thought that Christians, men or white people face high levels of discrimination in America.
In contrast, only about half of Republicans thought that black people and Muslims face high levels of discrimination, and only about a quarter thought that women do. The majority of Republicans thought those groups face “a moderate amount,” “little” or “no” discrimination at all.
Who faces discrimination?
Percentage of respondents who said each group experiences “a great deal” or “a lot” of discrimination, by party identification
Group
All
Democrats
Republicans
Gap
Blacks
61.2%
77.5%
45.4%
D+32.1
Muslims
57.5
70.0
48.2
D+21.8
Women
37.8
47.8
27.7
D+20.1
Jews
34.4
36.1
34.7
D+1.4
Men
15.8
12.9
18.5
R+5.6
Whites
18.0
11.8
25.3
R+13.5
Christians
22.7
15.9
32.5
R+16.6
Survey conducted from May 28 to June 3. “Democrats” and “Republicans” refer to self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans.
Source: Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape
Generally, Republicans were less inclined to say that any group in America faces high levels of discrimination, at least according to this polling. But significantly more Republicans than Democrats thought there is discrimination against Christians and white people.
These views of discrimination line up closely with partisanship, among both voters and elected officials. Among voters, black Americans, Muslims and women are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates; Christians, men and white Americans are more likely to vote for Republicans.
There are similar numbers of people in both parties who thought that Jewish Americans face high levels of discrimination. What explains that? Well, Jewish Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. But Trump has cast himself as a defender of Jewish people in America and particularly in Israel, which may explain why a lot of Republicans also viewed Jewish Americans as facing high levels of discrimination.
In other words, it’s likely that voters would see discrimination through partisan lenses anyway, but decisions by leading politicians are probably reinforcing those dynamics. In fact, partisans shift their support on policies to align with their party’s leaders, and not the other way around.
There are partisan gaps in favorability
To get another assessment of feelings about different groups and how partisanship might shape those feelings, we looked at measures of favorability, where people are asked, “Do you have a very or somewhat favorable or very or somewhat unfavorable view of group X?”35 Although questions about group favorability are fraught because of “social desirability bias” — basically, even if someone feels intensely negative feelings towards, say, black or white people, they might not admit it to a pollster — we can still learn something by analyzing responses. We focused here on “very” and “somewhat” unfavorable views because we are assuming you must really dislike a group to admit this on a survey.
Nearly half of Democrats expressed unfavorable views about police and evangelicals. Unfavorable views of the police have substantially increased from polling before Floyd’s death,36 but Democrats’ unfavorable views of evangelicals were already very high and remain so. About a quarter of Democrats said they had unfavorable views of white Americans; a quarter said the same of undocumented immigrants,37 even though the Democratic Party is increasingly supportive of immigration and immigrants.
(Un)favorability is partisan
Percentage of respondents who have a unfavorable impression of each group, by party identification
Group
All
Democrats
Republicans
Gap
Evangelicals
31.1%
43.1%
19.9%
D+23.1
The police
35.7
45.8
25.2
D+20.6
Whites
18.2
22.5
13.1
D+9.5
Jews
12.2
11.6
12.4
R+0.8
Asians
13.4
12.1
16.7
R+4.6
Latinos
13.7
10.5
17.9
R+7.4
Blacks
16.8
12.6
22.2
R+9.6
LGBT
23.5
15.5
33.7
R+18.1
Muslims
26.8
17.1
41.9
R+24.8
Undocumented immigrants
42.4
27.8
64.6
R+36.8
Survey conducted from May 28 to June 3. “Democrats” and “Republicans” refer to self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans.
Source: Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape
In contrast, large shares of Republicans expressed unfavorable views of undocumented immigrants, LGBT Americans and Muslims. More than 20 percent of Republicans said that they had unfavorable views of black Americans and police, with the latter group having increased in unfavorability substantially since Floyd’s death.38
Younger and older Republicans diverge
On both perceptions of discrimination and favorability measures, Americans’ views seem to be shaped more by partisanship than age, race or gender. So, Republicans — men and women — generally see discrimination in similar ways and view the same groups favorably or unfavorably. So do black and white Democrats. A helpful illustration of the partisan dynamics is that a greater share of Democratic men (44 percent) than Republican women (28 percent) thought that women in the U.S. face high levels of discrimination.
But there is a big GOP split on age. Republicans under the age of 45 were more likely to say that they saw high levels of discrimination than those over 45. And that cuts across the traditional divisions — younger Republicans saw more discrimination than older Republicans against blacks (a more Democratic group) and against whites (a more Republican group). In the wake of Floyd’s death, a clear majority of Republicans under 45 thought there was a lot of discrimination in America against black people. The over-45 GOP cohort did not share that view.39
Older Republicans were much more likely than younger Republicans to say that they had negative views of undocumented immigrants and Muslims.40
More of the younger Republicans see discrimination
Percentage of respondents who said each group experiences “a great deal” or “a lot” of discrimination, by age category
Group
All Republicans
Under 45
45 and older
Diff
Blacks
45.4%
56.2%
37.8%
-18.4
Women
27.7
35.8
22.0
-13.8
Men
18.5
26.3
12.8
-13.5
Whites
25.3
32.8
19.9
-13.0
Muslims
48.2
55.8
42.8
-13.0
Christians
32.5
37.7
28.7
-9.0
Jews
34.7
36.7
33.3
-3.5
Survey conducted from May 28 to June 3.
Source: Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape
There were also some notable differences among Democrats. For example, Democrats under 45 were significantly more likely than those over 45 to say they had an unfavorable view of the police (54 percent compared to 38 percent). Black Democrats were more likely than white Democrats to have unfavorable views of the police (58 percent to 41 percent). Black and Hispanic Democrats were about twice as likely as white Democrats to view LGBT Americans unfavorably, and about 30 percent of both groups expressed unfavorable views of white Americans. And white Democrats, in particular, viewed evangelicals unfavorably (50 percent).
We should be careful not to overstate these identity-based divides. There are plenty of women in the Republican Party. There are plenty of non-religious Republicans. There are plenty of Christian Democrats. Also, it’s not that the two parties are on different planets in terms of perceptions of discrimination — Republicans and Democrats agree that Muslims face more discrimination than Christians, and that black people face more discrimination than white people. Most Republicans and Democrats view Asian, black, Latino41 and white people favorably. (Or at least feel compelled to say so in a survey.)
But this also isn’t a “both sides” situation — Democratic perceptions of discrimination line up more with the evidence than Republican perceptions. No candidate has recently run for president with a plan for banning Christians from entering the U.S. And by most measures, whatever discrimination they might face, Christians, men and white people remain fairly powerful in American society today, certainly more so than black people, Muslims and women.
This data is important because it illustrates a serious identity-based disconnect at the heart of American politics. When social identities are threatened (real or imagined threats, often made salient by group leaders), individuals retreat to the safety of their in-groups, and react defensively with more negative feelingstoward outside groups. And given the effectiveness of in-group retreating for political outcomes, there is little chance of this changing anytime soon, at least from political leaders who stand to gain the most from these identity-based fights.
The activation of social identities can have positive democratic outcomes, too. For instance, Trump’s anti-Latino rhetoric led to increased political activity from Latinos with a stronger racial identity. And as we wrote about last week, strong racial identity among black Americans leads to collective voting to defend group interests. Moreover, if a sense of shared identity can be triggered, partisans can come together to prioritize national interests.
But so long as the parties remain largely distinct in terms of the group identities of their members — and how those members feel about other groups — ingroup and outgroup conflict is easily activated.
CORRECTION (June 17, 2020, 3:52 p.m.): An earlier version of a footnote in this article incorrectly said that the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape survey did not ask respondents whether Asians faced discrimination. Respondents were, in fact, asked whether Asians faced discrimination.
Public opinion is now in favor of the protesters who have spent the last three weeks advocating for police reform in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a police officer in Minneapolis.
In fact, the protests are so popular that they’re now supported by majorities of DemocratsandRepublicans. But this bipartisan support masks some of the enormous differences that still exist between the two parties on issues of race and discrimination.
For starters, there’s a pretty big gap in just how strongly Democrats and Republicans back the protests. In last week’s Economist/YouGov poll, for instance, 73 percent of Democrats said they strongly approve of the nonviolent protests, compared with just 27 percent of Republicans. And according to the most recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll, Democrats and Republicans are also fairly split on how peaceful the protests have been, how long they should last and what’s driving them. In that poll, Democrats were 40 points more likely than Republicans to say that the protests have been mostly peaceful and three-quarters of Republicans said they wanted the protests to stop now, compared to less than one-quarter of Democrats. Republicans were also 44 points more likely than Democrats to say the protests were primarily motivated by long-standing biases against the police, whereas most Democrats said the protests were motivated by a genuine desire to hold police accountable.
The fact that Democrats and Republicans are so polarized when it comes to the motives driving the protests is important because it conveys just how differently Republicans and Democrats view racism in America.
In its polling, YouGov asked respondents a number of questions on whether systemic racism was a problem or whether police killings signaled a bigger issue within American life. As you can see in the chart below, Democrats and Republicans are divided, with as much as a 60-point gap separating them on some of these issues. Recent surveys by CBS, CNN and Monmouth University have found equally large partisan divides on race and policing as well.
The thing is, public opinion about race hasn’t always been this polarized.
In fact, some attitudes about race were entirely unrelated to partisanship before Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. But after he was elected, racial attitudes and party identification became increasingly intertwined to the extent that by 2012, opposition to interracial relationships or overtly negative views of African Americans predicted whether someone identified as Republican for the first time in decades.
Of course, Donald Trump’s political rise took this growing partisan polarization over race to new heights. Democrats, in particular, quickly consolidated their views in reaction to Trump’s offensive statements about racial and ethnic minorities.
CBS News polls from the last 10 years underscore just how much Democrats have changed their opinion of systemic racism in a relatively short period of time. As you can see in the chart below, it wasn’t that long ago when Democrats and Republicans responded pretty similarly to the question of whether white Americans had an easier time of getting ahead.
Democrats, however, are now much more likely to agree that societal advantages exist for white Americans than they were five years ago. A similar shift has happened on questions of police brutality and institutional racism within the criminal justice system. For instance, the percentage of Democrats who think that the police disproportionately use deadly force against black Americans increased by more than 30 points since CBS News first asked the question in August 2014. Meanwhile, Republicans’ views have remained steady — just 24 percent think the police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans.
The current partisan divide over race may be predictable, but it’s still incredibly important — especially considering this is a presidential election year. Race has long been an effective wedge issue for the Republican Party, as demonstrated by the 2016 election, when Republicans split up the Democrats’ diverse coalition of nonwhite voters, white racially liberal voters and racially conservative white voters. But after 12 years of Obama and Trump, racially conservative Democrats have mostly defected or converted. That means Democrats are now united about many of the racial issues that once splintered the party.
Take the Black Lives Matter movement, for example. In a June 2016 Pew Research Center poll, only 64 percent of white Democrats and 20 percent of white Republicans supported the Black Lives Matter movement. Those numbers are now up to 92 percent among white Democrats and 37 percent among white Republicans in the latest Pew survey.
The fact that Republicans experienced a nearly 20-point increase in support since 2014 doesn’t bode well for them either, considering polls at this point indicate that it is Democrats — and not Republicans — who are now more unified on many issues of race. In fact, congressional Democrats’ efforts to pass sweeping legislation to help remedy some of the racial biases in the criminal justice system could even be an effective racial wedge issue for the Democratic Party heading into November.
Anti-police brutality demonstrators lie on the pavement near the White House with the names of people killed by police written on their shirts on June 6. | Jose Luis Magana/AFP via Getty Images
What if nonviolence wasn’t an inhuman standard demanded of the powerless, but an ethic upon which we reimagined the state?
Officers of the state conduct a public lynching. Cities erupt in protest, then in riots. And then the state demands of its critics what it refuses to ask of itself — nonviolence. This serves a dual purpose: It sets a bar for legitimate protest that few human beings can clear. And it discredits the revolutionary teachings of nonviolence by coating them in hypocrisy and cynicism.
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls that the school year “could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera.” But the stories rang hollow, because the teachings were hollow. “How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned?” he asks.
Lodged within that question is the seed of a better world. What if our society did not scorn those values? What if nonviolence wasn’t an inhuman standard demanded of the powerless, but an ethic upon which we reimagined the state?
To conceive of that world requires a fuller appreciation of nonviolence than most of us have been given. Nonviolence is not simply the absence of violence. It is not a preference for order or lawfulness. It is, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, a bid to “develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.”
This is the often neglected heart of nonviolence: It is a strategic confrontation with other human beings. It takes as self-evident that we must continue to live in fellowship with one another. As such, it puts changing each other’s hearts at the center of political action, and then asks what kind of action is likeliest to bring about that transformation. That its answers are radical and demanding does not make them untrue.
“King thinks human beings are sacred,” says Brandon Terry, a Harvard sociologist and co-author of a volume on King’s political philosophy. “We need, above all else, to avoid preventing them from changing for the better. That’s what the whole ethos is about: trying to see in other people what we see in ourselves — the capacity for growth, self-correction, and change.”
Nonviolence was, in King’s time, and in Gandhi’s time, a weapon deployed against the state. That anyone, anywhere, was willing to offer their broken body as the crucible for their oppressor’s change of heart borders on the mythic. It is easy to speak of nonviolence. It is annihilating to imagine it, to absorb what it asks of its practitioners, what it inflicts upon those they cherish.
There is a passage in King’s memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom, in which he recalls that his father “had reached the point where he could scarcely mention the protest without tears.” His mother “had taken to bed under doctor’s orders, and she was often ill after.” King goes on to write, in a passage that cuts deeper as you sit with it longer, that “no one can understand my conflict who has not looked into the eyes of those he loves, knowing that he has no alternative but to take a dangerous stand that leaves them tormented.”
Donald Uhrbrock/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holding his son Martin III as his daughter Yolanda and wife Coretta greet him at the airport upon his release from Georgia state prison after incarceration for leading boycotts in 1960.
Donald Uhrbrock/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. escorted by police officers as he is taken into a hearing on a charge of probation violation following his arrest for assisting a student sit-in demonstration in 1960.
That is what nonviolence demands. That you torment not just yourself but those you love, in the hope that your antagonists will rediscover their humanity within your suffering. That in order to change them, you risk yourself, your future, your family. Nothing in modern life, with the possible exception of parenthood, is built atop such self-annihilating logic. It is the truest radicalism, destabilizing to societies built on transaction and domination because it inverts their workings, lays bare their weaknesses, dissolves their core ethic.
In response, the state has done to nonviolence what it does to all dangerous ideologies: domesticated it. Nonviolence has been sanitized, shrunken to fit children’s books and national holidays. Worse than that, it has been booby-trapped. It is a demand the powerful make of the powerless, a taunt oppressors fling at the oppressed.
“The people who are called on to be nonviolent are the people with the ability to do the least amount of damage,” Coates told me, “whereas, we don’t call upon those who have the most power and actually can do the most damage.”
Perhaps we should. We are living amid a profound failure of governance. America accounts for about 5 percent of global population but 25 percent of the global imprisoned population. We cage more of our own than any other nation on earth. But mass incarceration has not brought security. There are more than 120 civilian-owned guns for every 100 American residents — guns we keep, in many cases, because we fear our government, our neighbors, or both. A 2010 study found that Americans were seven times likelier than residents of other high-income countries to be murdered, and 25 times likelier to be killed in a shooting. Black communities face the heaviest toll from violent crime, yet the police are often seen as contributors to violence, disorder, and oppression: An ABC/Ipsos poll found 57 percent of black Americans supported the movement to defund the police.
“Gandhi and King believed the state’s use of violence would be self-defeating,” says Columbia University political scientist Karuna Mantena, who is writing a book on Gandhi and the politics of nonviolence. “All it does is demoralize a population and lose support. If you have a state with large numbers of people in jail, that has to constantly resort to violence, that isn’t a functional state or society.”
Bradley Smith/Corbis via Getty Images
Mohandas K. Gandhi walks with several pilgrims in 1930.
We are taught to think of King and Gandhi as carrying lessons for those protesting the state. But the most profound — and usable — lessons of their philosophy are for those controlling the state.
A monopoly on violence
In Politics as a Vocation, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote that the definitional feature of the state is its “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” — often shorthanded to schoolchildren, including me, as the monopoly on violence. It is profound to put violence at the core of the successful state. Institutions built on the control and use of violence will, themselves, be violent. They will rely on their monopoly. And so the American government does. So state governments do.
Violence is not, to be clear, the only thing the government does. The US spends more on health care and education, at both the national and state levels, than on the military and police. But the enforcement of law and the imposition of order are the bedrock of the state. They predate the other functions and create the conditions for their emergence. The federal income tax, for instance, was first levied to pay the costs of the Civil War.
We speak of the state as a singular entity, but it is not a singular experience. Some Americans deal routinely with the clenched fist of the state. Others experience the state’s kinetic powers as an abstraction, or a protection. Being a young black man living in Queens during the stop-and-frisk years bore functionally no relationship to being a young white man living in Laguna Beach during the same period. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes argues in his book A Colony in a Nation, American policing is built atop “two distinct regimes. One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democracy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land.” He goes on to write:
If you live in the Nation, the criminal justice system functions like your laptop’s operating system, quietly humming in the background, doing what it needs to do to allow you to be your most efficient, functional self. In the Colony, the system functions like a computer virus: it intrudes constantly, it interrupts your life at the most inconvenient times, and it does this as a matter of course. The disruption itself is normal.
In the Nation, there is law; in the Colony, there is only a concern with order. In the Nation, you have rights; in the Colony, you have commands. In the Nation, you are innocent until proven guilty; in the Colony, you are born guilty. Police officers tasked with keeping these two realms separate intuitively grasp of the contours of this divide: as one Baltimore police sergeant instructed his officers, “Do not treat criminals like citizens.”
The idea behind the state’s monopoly on legitimate force is that it keeps citizens safe: If the state uses legitimate force to suppress illegitimate violence, the result, in theory, is security and order. The clarity of this theory often dissolves amid the racism, rage, and terrors that have shaped aspects of the state across much of America’s history. Too often, legitimate force is whatever the state says it is, even when any child could recognize it as illegitimate violence. Eric Garner was choked to death for the crime of selling loose cigarettes, extinguished while his killers were surrounded by cameras, and a grand jury chose not to charge the officer responsible.
Orlando Camargo/Third Eye Corporation/Getty Images
An analysis by the ACLU of New York revealed that at the height of stop-and-frisk in 2011, under the Bloomberg administration, more than 685,000 people were stopped. Nearly 9 in 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers — mostly black and Latinx — were innocent.
But the argument of nonviolent theorists goes further than condemning the most horrific acts of brutality: To them, the state’s reliance on force is built upon a mistake; its banal and even compassionate application is often a tragic error. You cannot change the hearts of human beings through violence or imprisonment, you can only subdue or cage their bodies, incurring a bill of shame and resentment that will come due later. It is a view worth taking seriously. And it is a challenge to representatives of a violent state who invoke King’s words against protesters.
“Most of [the people rioting] are young, and I just wonder who were their parents?” asked Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). “What did they teach them? How did they get educated to believe this an appropriate response? Contrast that to what Martin Luther King Jr. did.”
Even putting aside debates over whether violence and rioting is a legitimate political tactic in the face of state oppression, King’s actual views indict state officials like Massie. We are all educated by the state and society in which we live, which is itself suffused with violence, where the strong dominate the weak and name their dominance order. The government teaches lessons, and those lessons are learned. As King put it:
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
That violence begets violence is more than a dorm room slogan: It is a much-replicated research finding. A study by the US Justice Department of 11- to 17-year-olds, for instance, found that being the victim of violence was an extraordinarily powerful predictor of subsequently being the perpetrator of violence. “Violent victimization,” they concluded, “is an important risk factor for subsequent violent offending.”
There is much the state does that is meant to protect citizens from violence, including policing, which really does work to reduce crime. But there’s also much the state does that inflicts violence — and that is nowhere more true than in the state’s cramped, self-defeating definition of justice. As Danielle Sered writes in Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, decades of studies find four key predictors of violence in individuals: “shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and a diminished ability to meet one’s economic needs.” Those are also, as it happens, the definitional features of prison. “As a nation, we have developed a response to violence that is characterized by precisely what we know to be the main drivers of violence,” she writes. “We should not be surprised, then, when the system produces exactly the results we would expect.”
Most studies show higher rates of recidivism among those sent to prison — prison, in this telling, is “criminogenic.” There is debate over whether these studies truly control for all variables, and a continuous hope for randomized experiments that would settle the question more conclusively, but even in the most conservative read of the evidence, there is simply no reason to believe prison reduces the likelihood of committing future crimes when compared to more compassionate, rehabilitative alternatives.
But there is all the reason in the world to believe prison does terrible harm to those who are imprisoned, as well as to their families. Reams of research show parental incarceration is an independent risk factor for children, leading to higher rates of poverty, homelessness, psychological problems, and criminal activity. Mass incarceration represents an extraordinary, unnecessary, and deeply harmful level of violence that the state inflicts on its own citizens, and their families and communities. And America relies more heavily upon imprisonment than any other country on earth.
America has a particularly violent state, and it has a particularly violent society. The one is often used to justify the other: The state must be violent — the police armed, the prison sentences long — because the society is violent. But the nonviolent perspective would say the reverse: The society is violent partly because the state is violent.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
State troopers attack civil rights protesters with tear gas when the protesters set up camp at an elementary school after city officials denied them the right to use the school grounds.
Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images
Police fire tear gas outside the White House at peaceful anti-racism protesters to accommodate a photo op for President Trump on June 1.
If Massie reveres King so deeply, he should read his words more closely: “Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate.” Why shouldn’t that role fall to the state, with its superior resources, organization, training, and capacity to absorb harm?
It is not, however, as easy as saying that if the state simply receded, leaving a vacuum where law enforcement currently sits, that society would become less violent in turn. Nonviolence demands more than that.
Nonviolence is not simply the absence of violence
Nonviolence is a strange word: It describes itself as the absence of its opposite. It thus presents as a void where violence should be, a narcotized forgiveness that is fine for saints to practice but irresponsible for policymakers to attempt. It is too easy to imagine disorder, crime, and anarchy stepping into that void. That is what we are taught to imagine.
“Nonviolence is very often associated with passivity and failing to respond in an effective way to aggression or violence,” says Judith Butler, the Berkeley social theorist and author of The Force of Nonviolence. “It’s understood in the popular imagination to be a place of internal equanimity or harmony.”
But that is not what nonviolence is, nor what its theorists and practitioners teach. Gandhi was startlingly clear on this, in passages that defy our flattened excerpts of his teachings. He loathed passivity and thought violence preferable. “If an individual or group of people are unable or unwilling to follow” nonviolence, he wrote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence worse than violence.”
In the face of injustice, the absence of violence is not preferable to violence. It is only nonviolence that is preferable to violence. And it is only preferable because it is likelier to work. But like anything worth doing, it is hard — arguably much harder than violence.
Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
A group of demonstrators lie across a parking entrance of a federal building in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Demonstrators lie on the pavement in Washington, DC, on June 6.
The soldier and the police officer accept a measure of daily risk — the threat of being wounded, killed, or captured — but face it with the tools of violence: guns, batons, bombs, combat training. Those tools work to subdue bodies, but they harden hearts. The cry of police abolition is testament to that: it is a statement from the very people the police are meant to serve that they refuse to go on in community with the police as an institution.
Nonviolence accepts the same risks — being beaten, killed, or captured — but deploys different tools in response: suffering, forgiveness, boycotts, dialogue, social services, spectacles that embarrass the violent by clarifying their cruelty. It is, like violence, a path of confrontation and engagement, not passivity. But unlike violence, its goal is community, not submission. “One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves,” King said. “We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”
Both King and Gandhi believed the proper application of nonviolence required vast levels of trainings and self-discipline. It is an incredibly demanding strategy, and one made harder if you add in the demands of politics, where voters often want to see those they loathe punished, those they fear dominated, those who’ve harmed them paid back double. Nonviolence requires a restraint few individuals can muster and few societies have demonstrated. And yet we have examples all around us. This is frequently the path we walk with our children, with our parents, with our friends, even with our coworkers. And we do so because, in those relationships, we know we must keep walking the path together. We do so because, in those relationships, we aim to change hearts and transform lives.
“For King, the fundamental question of politics is how you go on in community with each other,” says Harvard’s Terry. “Destroying your enemy makes it impossible to go on in community together. But so does fear. You need forms of politics that allow you to avoid the emotions that make it impossible to go on together.”
The state puts tremendous resources and effort into developing the technologies of violence and training its agents in their use. It puts tremendous resources — both legal and political — into reducing the risk of violence to its own agents, even as it increases the risk of violence to those they meet. The tragic shooting of Rayshard Brooks is testament to the costs of this strategy: If the agents of the state who’d been called to respond to a man sleeping in a Wendy’s drive-through hadn’t been carrying tasers and guns, Brooks would be alive today.
The question nonviolence asks is what if the state put, at the least, equal energy and effort into developing tools of nonviolence and training agents in their use? What if it was more willing to absorb harm to itself than to inflict harm on others, precisely because that strategy would lead to more security, safety, and harmony for all? And what if it replaced its emphasis on punishment and reprisal with a courageous pursuit of forgiveness and change?
This question does not need to start with the hardest cases — say, when the police are called to intervene in a live shootout. The vast majority of police calls are to nonviolent incidents. What if the agents who responded to those calls were, themselves, trained in the tools of nonviolence: mediators, crisis counselors, accident report writers, or even police without guns, batons, or tear gas? We have successful pilots, like the Cahoots program in Eugene, Oregon, and other cities are beginning to follow suit. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, for instance, has announced a police reform road map in which police will no longer respond to non-criminal complaints.
And even in the cases where violence is ongoing, there may be space for nonviolent approaches. What if cities convened respected elders in the community who were prepared to answers calls for intervention — is it possible that deploying a beloved local priest, or teacher, might calm a violent situation that badges, guns, and shouted demands for compliance would escalate?
Patrick Skinner, a police officer in Savannah, Georgia, told me that he always asks trainees: “If you didn’t have a badge and a gun, how would you handle that situation? Because I guarantee you, if you walk into that situation with your gun and badge out, you’ll use them.”
Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images
Livia Rose Johnson, an organizer with Warriors in the Garden, leads a protest in New York City on June 14.
I am enough of a pessimist to believe there will always be some instances where armed agents of the state are needed to deploy force. But we are nowhere near discovering that final boundary. Today, there is a vast field where nonviolent approaches could replace violent ones, and do so more effectively.
This approach could carry after the arrest, or conviction, too. Our legal system is focused on punishment, mostly applied through incarceration. What if, following the remarkable and potent work done in the restorative justice community, it was focused on the repair of harm?
In restorative justice, the focus is not on what perpetrators have done but on what victims need. In some cases, that is imprisonment. But far more often, it is answers, amends, the kind of visible transformation in a perpetrator that leads to a continued feeling of safety. Sered, who directs the remarkable nonprofit Common Justice, tells the story of a man robbed at gunpoint. Asked if he preferred imprisonment or a restorative justice program, he asked whether the perpetrator could get life without parole for the crime. Told that he couldn’t, the man chose restorative justice. “If he can’t be gone forever, then I’d rather he be changed,” he said.
A meta-analysis of 84 evaluations of restorative justice programs focused on juveniles found better outcomes for both offenders and victims. Another analysis of 22 studies examining particularly rigorous restorative justice programs concluded, “restorative justice programs are a more effective method of improving victim and/or offender satisfaction, increasing offender compliance with restitution, and decreasing the recidivism of offenders when compared to more traditional criminal justice responses.”
The moral crisis neither begins nor ends within the criminal legal system. King always saw crime and violence as intertwined with poverty and economic despair. “In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income,” he wrote. “You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society.” And that violence is inflicted daily, and broadly.
Many of the communities targeted by “law and order” policies are the communities that have borne the brunt of America’s history of economic violence, too. The history of housing discrimination and credit availability — still ongoing today — speak to this reality. As does our sparse social safety net.
The truth is that our system fails even those it claims to help
Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, who died just a few weeks ago, was a central figure in the study of political economy, and one of his key findings was that America lacked a European-style social safety net because racism had rendered the politics of building one toxic. In a paper co-authored with Ed Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, Alesina concluded that “racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters.” America is the richest nation in the world but has some of the highest poverty and inequality rates among rich nations. That is a policy choice, made for the cruelest of reasons.
America’s approach to economic support has been unusually intent on separating the “deserving poor” from the “undeserving poor,” and the category of undeserving poor has been deeply racialized. And so top political leaders, even today, worry that social services will become “a hammock,” as if being poor is ever easy, and theorize new and more baroque ways to test whether food stamps are used for the right foods, and make applying for benefits brutally difficult under the guise of rooting out fraud. It was revealing, as the coronavirus began to shutter the economy, that so many had so much trouble accessing unemployment insurance. That reflected those systems working as designed, but as soon as those working began to imperil the livelihoods of a broader swath of Americans, state governments rushed to repair them.
King understood this as both a form of violence unto itself and a spur to violence for those who are crushed beneath it. And he was right. We know, for instance, that Medicaid expansion leads to significant reductions in crime. We know that SNAP benefits reduce crime. We know that education reduces crime. There is evidence that restricting welfare benefits increased crime. A more compassionate state will create a less violent society. There is a reason King saw the struggle for racial equity as intimately intertwined with the struggle for economic equity. A state that sought to help its citizens flourish, to forgive and uplift them when they faltered, would build structures of economic support that were kindest to those who needed the most help, rather than treating them with suspicion, anger, and contempt, and looking for reasons to abandon them to hopelessness.
I will not pretend, in this piece, to be able to fully imagine the workings of a state that truly seeks to follow the ethos of nonviolence wherever it can. A state that practices forgiveness, that seeks change, that pursues the harmony of community rather than the false peace of incarceration. It is easy, of course, to imagine the difficulties and dangers of that path. But let us not sugarcoat the harms of the path we have chosen instead: We are a violent society surrounded by a violent state, a country that locks up more of its own than any country on earth, in which agents of the government slowly choke citizens to death while bystanders beg them to stop, leading to riots that the state then uses as an excuse to deploy yet more violence in the name of order. It is time to ask a different question, find different answers, pursue better goals.
Bradley Smith/Corbis via Getty Images
Thousands of mourners follow a decorated truck carrying the body of Mohandas Gandhi during the funeral procession after his assassination.
AP
The mahogany casket bearing the body of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is interred in a marble tomb in South View Cemetery in Atlanta on April 9, 1968.
King, Gandhi, and others in their lineage are often seen as something between dreamers and martyrs. Perhaps those descriptions are apt, but they were more than that, too: They were realists. They were clear about their ends, and the methods they embraced followed from the world they sought to build. A world we should still seek to build.
“The end is redemption and reconciliation,” King wrote. “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”
It is time for the lesson they taught to be learned. Not by protesters, furious at the violence inflicted upon their own by the state, but by the state itself, which should aspire to more than controlling the violence that can be inflicted upon its citizens.
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[Is the Trump Administration trying to get a precedent on classified information that would benefit incumbent Presidents at the expense of voters?]
On June 10, John Bolton's lawyer (Chuck Cooper) wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal laying out the course of dealing with the Trump Administration regarding Bolton's book The Room Where it Happened. As Cooper noted, these reviews are handled by NSC staff, and there was a four-month review of his book by the NSC's Senior Director for Records Access and Information Security Management (Ellen Knight). On April 27 she indicated that she had given Bolton all her edits, but Bolton never received a letter confirming clearance. On June 8 John Eisenberg from the White House sent Bolton a letter saying that the book still contained classified information. And today the Trump Administration filed a complaint against Bolton to prevent the publication of his book, stating that it contains classified information.
One notable aspect of the complaint is how much it agrees with the course of dealing that Cooper recounted. The government's complaint does say that the government hadn't completed its review, but it doesn't dispute that the NSC staff review was complete. Rather, it says that Michael Ellis, a Trump appointee at the NSC (who, coincidentally, has been accused of manipulating the classification system to benefit Trump) "commenced an additional review" and raised new objections. The complaint says that Ellis has access to a greater range of information than Knight did. But there is more: the key paragraph (paragraph 51) states
[Ellis] commenced this review at the request of the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, who, upon review of the version of the manuscript reflecting Ms. Knight's latest guidance, was concerned that the manuscript still appeared to contain classified information, in part because the same Administration that [Bolton] served is still in office and that the manuscript described sensitive information about ongoing foreign policy issues. (Emphasis added.)
The italicized statement is notable for two reasons. The first is the term "sensitive." All sorts of information is sensitive (politically sensitive, personally sensitive, etc.), but that doesn't make it classified. There is a ton of sensitive information in every Administration, but much of it isn't classified. The second is the emphasis on the same Administration being in office. A given piece of information either is or is not classified. And if it is classified, it remains classified until it is declassified. The passage of time (usually decades) is relevant to decisions to declassify. But there is no legal significance to the fact that a piece of information was generated in the current Administration. In the next Administration, classified materials won't magically become unclassified or less classified – they will remain classified unless and until they are declassified. It is true that this Administration is currently dealing with sensitive matters that Bolton likely dealt with, but the same will be true of future Administrations (tensions with China over bases in the South China Sea won't go away on January 21, 2021). It is probably the case that, as a practical matter, some information is likely to leak over time (as it already has, of course), but the legal obligation not to reveal a given piece of classified information will remain in future Administrations. (I learned classified information when I was in the Office of Legal Counsel in the early 1990s, and I have never revealed it to anyone, as I am under a legal obligation not to do so.) Simply stated, the fact that Bolton served in the current Administration is legally irrelevant.
So why make this statement in a legal complaint? My guess is because the Trump Administration knows that the post-Knight process might be seen as an ad hoc and unprincipled way of engaging in a review that is supposed to be highly structured and principled, and they want to have some justification for adding a layer of review after the ordinary review was apparently completed. But this reasoning embodies a very expansionist approach. The argument in the complaint seems to be that even if information ordinarily wouldn't be classified, an Administration should have additional leeway to classify information during that Administration. But information created during a given Administration is always what it most wants to keep secret. It is already the case that a given Administration has a huge incentive to classify materials that it finds embarrassing but that don't contain classified information: they can at least prevent the publication of those embarrassing facts while the President is in office. That incentive is troubling enough. The argument in the complaint would add to that incentive a greater legal ability for this and future Administrations to hide their own embarrassing actions until after the Administration left office and could no longer be punished by the voters. A legal rule that says "You can't publish while the President is in office" is in the President's interest. But I don't see why it's in the national interest.
Most Americans don't trust social media companies to police the content on their platforms, according to a poll published Tuesday from Gallup and the Knight Foundation. CNET reports: The poll found that 80% of Americans don't trust big tech companies to make the right decisions about what content appears on their sites and what should be removed. People, especially conservatives, trust the government even less than social media companies to make these decisions, according to the report. The poll explored several topics around free speech online and the threat of misinformation.
Most Americans also support, in principle, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects Facebook, Twitter and other online companies from liability for content posted by their users. Although President Donald Trump and some in Congress are pushing to reform the law, the poll found almost two-thirds of Americans support keeping the existing regulation. People and groups who favor the rule say Section 230 protects free speech and allows for an open marketplace of ideas.
The Senate will consider legislation next week to reform policing practices in the U.S., Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced.
The decision comes amid a pressure campaign from lawmakers in both parties who are pushing for sweeping criminal justice reforms in the aftermath of a string of police killings of unarmed African-Americans and subsequent nationwide demonstrations.
The Senate will hold a procedural vote on Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) bill, but it’s unclear if Democrats will join Republicans to meet the 60-vote threshold and begin floor debate on possible amendments. Democrats have panned Scott’s bill as a watered-down version of their own plan, which the House Judiciary Committee is expected to advance later Wednesday.
ORIGINAL STORY:
The Senate GOP police reform bill will require more disclosure about the use of force, require reporting on no-knock warrants and provide incentives for chokehold bans, according to two sources and a copy of the bill text obtained by POLITICO.
The bill, set to be introduced Wednesday by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), comes as the country faces a reckoning over police brutality in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that he plans to hold an initial procedural vote on the measure, but timing remains uncertain.
The proposal is likely to draw criticism from Democrats for not going far enough.The House is expected to vote as soon as next week on a sweeping Democratic police reform bill. Members of both parties are hoping to get a bill to the president's desk before the July 4 recess, but so far Democrats and Republicans are giving little indication of being close to a deal.
The GOP bill would create new reporting requirements on the use of deadly force by officers and reduce federal funding for state and local departments that fail to comply. In addition, the legislation requires that state and local governments with certain funding submit reports on no knock-warrants to the Justice Department. It would also limit eligibility for funding if a law enforcement agency does not have a policy that prohibits the use of chokeholds "except when deadly force is authorized."
The measure also provides grants for the purchase of body cameras and development of policies and procedures related to their use. In addition, it increases penalties for false police reports and creates a Commission on the Social Status of Black Men and Boys. That bipartisan measure would provide a report on conditions that affect African American men, such as education, health care and the criminal justice system. Another commission would review the criminal justice system entirely.
The GOP bill also makes lynching a federal crime. While the House passed a widely backed anti-lynching bill in February, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently called for changes to the legislation to ensure that lynching charges don't cover minor injuries. Paul's objections resulted in a heated exchange on the Senate floor earlier this month with Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.).
In addition, the bill would include another bipartisan proposal that would make it a crime for a federal law enforcement official to engage in a sexual act with an individual in his or her custody or “while acting under color of law.”
The GOP bill comes after Democrats unveiled their own sweeping measure that would ban chokeholds, limit qualified immunity for police officers and stop no-knock warrants in federal drug cases.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) declined to comment earlier Tuesday on the forthcoming bill, saying he had not yet seen its language.
A House Democratic chairman in charge of national security oversight is seeking answers from the CIA about whether Mike Pompeo used an outside advisory board to “curry favor for his political ambitions” while leading the agency.
Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), who heads the House Oversight Committee’s national security subpanel, sent a letter, obtained by POLITICO, to the CIA requesting information about the advisory board. In the letter, dated Tuesday, Lynch cites a previous POLITICO report that detailed Pompeo’s undisclosed board of external advisers, as well as concerns in the agency that the board was inappropriately weighted toward wealthy individuals and well-connected political figures.
“To date, the CIA has refused to identify the individuals selected by Mr. Pompeo to serve on the External Advisory Board during his tenure, as well as the role of his wife, Susan Pompeo, a private citizen, in organizing these events,” Lynch wrote to CIA Director Gina Haspel. “It is imperative that the CIA remains independent of undue influence from partisan political interests.”
Pompeo ran the CIA from early 2017 until April 2018, when he moved over to run the State Department.
As part of his request to the CIA, Lynch asked for “a complete and unredacted list” of Pompeo’s external advisory board members, which the agency has declined to divulge publicly.
Former officials told POLITICO last month that members included the billionaire entrepreneur Marc Andreessen; a top executive at the global advertising agency McCann Worldgroup; former Republican House leader Eric Cantor, who is now vice chairman of the investment bank Moelis & Company; and William Barr, who at the time served on the board of directors of Time Warner and is now the attorney general.
Lynch also requested, by June 30, a list of the events the board held, and the total cost of the meetings and events, including lodging, transportation and food. Former CIA officials who worked under Pompeo told POLITICO that his external advisers were often treated to elaborate multiday experiences that included “lavish” dinners and classified briefings. Lynch has also asked for a list of those briefings and the board members’ level of security clearances.
The CIA declined to comment on the letter. But the agency‘s press secretary, Timothy Barrett, said in a statement that “CIA’s External Advisory Board is always a cross-section of industry experts and former senior government leaders who provide counsel on a wide variety of issues. In addition to the countless hours members regularly volunteer to share their expertise, the formal meetings provide a forum for in-depth conversations and lively debate on solutions. To suggest those meetings are some lavish vacation would be a misrepresentation.”
A State Department spokeswoman, Morgan Ortagus, said in a statement that “while Secretary Pompeo was Director of the CIA, he followed all agency protocols related to the External Advisory Board. Far from being lavish events, meetings were grueling and focused on critical challenges for the Agency and held in the director’s conference room. Meeting agendas and logistics were solely prepared by Agency leadership. Director Hayden established the board and it was a practice of CIA Directors from both political parties to continue the board. For Congressman Lynch to insinuate wrongdoing five months before an election is purely partisan politics on full display.” (She was referring to Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director from 2006 to 2009.)
Ortagus added that “whether it was with the families of CIA officers, or now, with families at embassies across the world, Mrs. Pompeo’s presence has been a huge value add to the CIA and to the State Department. Mrs. Pompeo has never set schedules, planned menus, or charted the general agenda for the External Policy Board. In fact, she never participated in any way in the regular board meetings, period.”
The request to the CIA comes amid heightened scrutiny of Pompeo’s use of taxpayer money to hold events and dinners for business and political influencers while as both head of the CIA and State Department. Pompeo last month urged President Donald Trump to fire the State Department inspector general, who had been investigating whether Pompeo had used a political appointee to carry out personal errands such as walking his dog and picking up dry cleaning.
Well of course the DOJ is acting as Trump's personal law firm. Thanks Barr
The latest White House staffing drama is now playing out over the pages of a book.
With ex-national security adviser John Bolton’s tell-all tentatively set for release next week, White House aides are anxiously waiting to see what, if any, damning information is contained between the covers. In the meantime, they’ve activated the typical Trump team playbook for ex-staffers who decide to spill the administration’s innerworkings in print: lawsuits, character assassination on Twitter and presidential haranguing.
On Tuesday night, the Justice Department sued Bolton to delay the publication of his memoirs, claiming the 592-page tome contains classified information, a charge Bolton’s lawyer has denied. It’s a suit that seems unlikely to actually block the book from coming out — early copies have already been distributed, and the publisher, Simon & Schuster, was not named in the suit. But the move escalates the monthslong cat-and-mouse game between Bolton and the White House, with each side accusing the other of not acting in good faith.
The question now becomes when — and whether — Bolton’s book will come out, and if it will include any revelations that stick, fueling President Donald Trump’s critics who are already going after him for his coronavirus response and reaction to the police brutality protests. Previous memoirs have sparked raging fires only to burn out quickly, dominating the news cycle for several days before receding into the Trump presidency dustbin. In the end, the fight between the two sides lingers more in the public conscience than the content of the book itself. And Trump relishes a fight.
“Because of the detail and Bolton’s seriousness, if this is a hit job everyone should be concerned,” said one senior administration official, who requested anonymity to talk about speculation surrounding the book. “But if it’s a more balanced, honest discussion about policy there could be an upside to it.”
Realistically, though, the official added, “In terms of it being a game changer, I feel like people’s minds are made up. You agree with the policies the president has implemented or not.”
The lawsuit, a civil action filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Bolton risks “compromising national security by publishing a book containing classified information — in clear breach of agreements he signed as a condition of his employment.”
The lawsuit asks the court to order Bolton to both complete a prepublication review process that has stalled, while stopping the publication and dissemination of his book “as currently drafted.”
It also seeks an order “establishing a constructive trust on any profits obtained from the disclosure or dissemination” of the book, effectively tying up any proceeds Bolton would obtain from its release.
“We are reviewing the government’s complaint, and will respond in due course,” Charles Cooper, Bolton’s attorney said on Tuesday night. Bolton’s attorney has disputed that the manuscript contains classified material.
Legal experts pointed out that there is significant risk for Bolton, although it was notable the publisher, Simon & Schuster, was not named in the lawsuit.
“The government will now almost certainly get all of the money from sales of the book, but if Bolton isn’t also criminally charged you have to believe he is taking a victory lap in the end,” said national security lawyer Bradley Moss. “The book will have been published and the embarrassing details will be everywhere in the lead up to Election Day.”
One former administration official noted that unlike some of the other current White House memoir writers, Bolton had more access to the president and had a front-row seat for some of the more controversial moments of his presidency, like a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Bolton was known to take copious notes during his meetings on a legal pad, and officials have noted his strong memory.
For a president who demands loyalty, many of his former advisers and officials have come out with critical books about their time at the White House.
Reality television star-turned senior aide Omarosa Maningault Newman infuriated the president when she wrote an account of her time in the West Wing, “Unhinged,” that alleged Trump is a “racist, misogynist and bigot” who had used the “n-word” repeatedly. Another memoir by a Trump aide, Cliff Sims, revealed some embarrassing anecdotes about the president. The Trump campaign took legal action against Newman and Sims for violating non-disclosure agreements, and both were subjected to a flurry of angry Trump tweets. Trump called Newman a “dog” and said Sims was “nothing more than a gofer.”
It’s expected Bolton will face a similar response from the president. Already, he sought to discredit his former national security adviser, questioning his honesty.
“Maybe he’s not telling the truth,” Trump said Monday when asked about the book. “He’s been known not to tell the truth, a lot.”
Trump allies have also taken to Twitter to attack Bolton. Campaign adviser Jason Miller started using the hashtag #BookDealBolton on Twitter to paint the conservative foreign policy firebrand as an opportunist who cashed in on his access. Others have asked why Bolton purports to reveal about Trump’s foreign policy dealings yet chose not to testify during impeachment hearings.
“Bolton’s going to be in for a real rude awakening next week. He’s not going to get any love from the right, but also I think he’s going to get a lot of really rude awakening from the left who are asking why he saved all of this for a book?” said one Trump adviser. “I don’t know where he’s going to find any audience who’s going to want to run to embrace the guy.”
Just one month after Bolton’s acrimonious departure from the administration, the ex-adviser announced his plans to write a book about his experience in the White House. According to the publisher, the book will reveal “chaos in the White House, sure, but also assessments of major players, the president’s inconsistent, scattershot decision-making process, and his dealings with allies and enemies alike.”
“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations,” a press release said Bolton writes in the book.
Bolton also writes that House Democrats “committed impeachment malpractice” by only focusing on the president’s phone call with the president of Ukraine when there were "Ukraine-like transgressions ... across the full range of his foreign policy.”
Despite the bombshell allegations Bolton reportedly made in a draft of his manuscript, he did not cooperate with impeachment proceedings and Senate Republicans failed to subpoena him or other key witnesses.
For months, the 592-page memoir has been the subject of a public spat between the White House and the publisher, Simon & Schuster, as the National Security Council reviewed the manuscript for classified information. Bolton’s attorney was informed that the review process was completed in late April, but last week, the NSC informed Bolton that further review was needed.
“In the months leading up to the publication of ‘The Room Where It Happened,’ Bolton worked in cooperation with the National Security Council to incorporate changes to the text that addressed NSC concerns,” wrote Julia Prosser, the publicity director for the publishing house. “The final, published version of this book reflects those changes.”
The NSC’s pre-publication review process is normally fairly straightforward, but Bolton’s case has been complicated by its potentially politically explosive allegations — including details about Trump’s alleged Ukraine-style blackmail threats to other countries that were not documented during Trump’s impeachment trial.
Bolton’s book also alleges that the president told him last August he wanted to keep withholding military aid from Ukraine until officials there pledged to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden — making Bolton the only first-hand witness to that request, according to a New York Times account of the chapter. The story, published in The New York Times, raised the pressure on the White House and the GOP to clear Bolton’s book and allow him to testify in the impeachment trial. Bolton ultimately refused to testify.
The suit comes after Trump hinted earlier this week that the administration would be taking Bolton to court, saying he would “consider every conversation with me as president highly classified. So that would mean that if he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he’s broken the law.”
A Simon & Schuster spokesman called the lawsuit “nothing more than the latest in a long running series of efforts by the administration to quash publication of a book it deems unflattering to the president.”
Upon submitting the book for review in December, Cooper, Bolton’s attorney argued that his client “carefully sought to avoid any discussion in the manuscript of sensitive compartmentalized information ("SCI") or other classified information.”
And Cooper argued in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that the White House was merely trying to suppress Bolton’s book “to prevent embarrassment” rather than to protect national security secrets, pointing to “perhaps the most extensive and intensive prepublication review in NSC history” in which Bolton and the NSC spent almost four months, beginning in late January, “going through the nearly 500-page manuscript four times, often line by line.”
The House is poised to pass a D.C. statehood bill next week — the first time in U.S. history either chamber will approve legislation granting the District full representation and voting rights in Congress.
In announcing the historic vote Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer cheered the move as a victory for black residents in particular, as the nation undergoes a racial justice reckoning following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police on May 25.
“This is not just an issue of local governance and fairness, it is a major civil rights issue as well,” Hoyer (D-Md.) said. “This was an appropriate time to bring a bill forward to show respect for the citizens of the District of Columbia of whatever color, but also to show respect to a city that has a very large African American population.”
The District has long been predominantly black, although the demographics have shifted significantly in recent years due to rapid gentrification and white residents moving into the city.
The House will vote on the legislation June 26, one day after it considers a sweeping police reform bill that Democrats’ put together in the wake of Floyd’s death and the nationwide unrest that followed.
While the bill already has enough Democratic cosponsors to pass the House, it is expected to go nowhere in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has expressed staunch opposition to D.C. statehood and even compared it to “full bore socialism” in an interview last year.
President Donald Trump has also dismissed the idea, saying Republicans would be “very, very stupid” to grant D.C. statehood because of the District’s overwhelmingly Democratic leanings.
“So we can have two more Democratic — Democrat senators and five more congressmen? No thank you. That’ll never happen,” Trump told the New York Post last month.
The House has considered D.C. statehood before, with a failed floor vote in 1993. Since then, there have been occasional rumblings about making the District the 51st state but no concrete action until Democrats took back the House and held the chamber’s first hearing on the issue in more than 25 years in September.
But Democratic leaders said it’s even more important to put the bill on the floor now, especially after peaceful protesters were violently cleared from LaFayette Square by National Guard troops for a presidential photo op earlier this month.
"For more than two centuries, the residents of Washington D.C., the District of Columbia, have been denied their right to fully participate in their democracy," Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday. "And in recent days, we have seen a disturbing physical manifestation of that injustice when federal agents and out of state National Guard troops were deployed against peaceful protesters in the District without residents' approval."
Trump attacked D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Twitter after the incident and threatened to deploy more federal troops in the nation's capital.
“Statehood fixes it all. And now, the American people have a clear idea of what can happen without it,” Bowser said at the news conference on Tuesday.
Eleanor Holmes Norton currently represents the District as a nonvoting delegate. But if it were granted statehood, its citizens would be represented by two senators and one representative in the House, not five as Trump incorrectly speculated.
“For the first time, statehood will put an end to our oldest slogan — ‘taxation without representation,'” Holmes Norton said Tuesday, noting the city's residents pay the highest federal taxes per capita and yet don’t have voting representatives in Congress.
“Statehood ensures that living in the nation’s capital is about pride, not prejudice,” she added.
"Everybody is sick," ICU nurse Stefanie Davis told local outlet CBS 12. "We don't have enough people to take care of the patients and we're concerned about patient safety. And yet when we voiced those concerns, it's like nothing ... like you're silenced."
Davis, who left her job at Bayfront Health in St. Petersburg, Florida, told the outlet that many fellow nurses are out sick with the virus. She claims there are more than 14 ICU nurses out sick alone, while CBS says that, according to an internal memo, there are actually 21 staff members who have tested positive for the virus since the middle of May.
Davis reportedly sent a letter to the hospital asking for additional personal protective equipment (PPE), claiming that nurses use N-95 masks until they’re “soiled,” broken, or five shifts are up. She tells the outlet that nurses are also taking on three patients unlike the usual two, and that, “It makes you feel like a nonperson like disposable, just like the mask.”
Davis is far from alone in her concerns about health care workers not getting adequate PPE while facing COVID-19. In fact, she isn’t even the only person to quit her job over it. For example, Kelly Stanton, a nurse in the Washington, D.C., area, told NBC News that she ended up quitting after 28 years as a nurse. Why? “In the end,” she told the news outlet. “I could not accept that I could be responsible for causing one of my family members to become severely ill or possibly die." She added to the outlet that nurses were being asked to reuse masks. By late March, the changes in safety regulations were too much to bear, and she resigned.
One Missouri nurse resigned after reportedly being told she couldn’t use an N-95 mask she purchased herself while working with patients. The nurse, who asked to remain anonymous, told local outlet KMOV 4: "I walked into work with my mask on and my boss said I had to take it off. I told her I would not take it off or I would quit.”
Lily Hay Newman writes via Wired: Security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar were scanning the open internet on May 24 when they stumbled upon a collection of publicly accessible Amazon Web Services "buckets." Each contained a trove of data from a different specialized dating app, including 3somes, Cougary, Gay Daddy Bear, Xpal, BBW Dating, Casualx, SugarD, Herpes Dating, and GHunt. In all, the researchers found 845 gigabytes and close to 2.5 million records, likely representing data from hundreds of thousands of users. They are publishing their findings today with vpnMentor.
The information was particularly sensitive and included sexually explicit photos and audio recordings. The researchers also found screenshots of private chats from other platforms and receipts for payments, sent between users within the app as part of the relationships they were building. And though the exposed data included limited "personally identifying information," like real names, birthdays, or email addresses, the researchers warn that a motivated hacker could have used the photos and other miscellaneous information available to identify many users. The data may not have actually been breached, but the potential was there. "The researchers don't know whether anyone else discovered the exposed trove before they did," the report adds. "If you use one of the affected apps there's not a lot you can do to protect against the possibility that the data was stolen before the researchers found it. There wasn't a specific trove of passwords in the exposed data, so changing your password likely won't do much."
All you can really do is hope the developer locks down the cloud infrastructure before anyone grabs the information.
Back in February, the U.S. surgeon general sent out a tweet telling Americans to “STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” This flies in the face of the CDC’s insistence, less than two months later that Americans should consider wearing, at the very least, cloth masks when interacting out in public.
Top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down for an interview with The Street on Friday to explain what was going on in those early months, when government professionals, under the White House direction, began to give out what is clearly incorrect medical information about masks and their function to the general public. It turns out, our country’s lack of preparation for this pandemic, mixed in with our country’s completely incompetent and narcissistic leadership, meant that officials like Fauci felt compelled to tell half truths as damage control.
First, Dr. Fauci was asked the burning question that anyone reading this site has known the answer to for about four months now: are masks important to wear when you leave your home? "Masks are not 100% protective. However, they certainly are better than not wearing a mask. Both to prevent you, if you happen to be a person who may feel well, but has an asymptomatic infection that you don't even know about, to prevent you from infecting someone else. But also, it can protect you a certain degree, not a hundred percent, in protecting you from getting infected from someone who, either is breathing, or coughing, or sneezing, or singing or whatever it is in which the droplets or the aerosols go out. So masks work."
But why oh why did government health officials say it wasn’t important in February? Dr. Fauci, a considerably more diplomatic person than myself gives this explanation: "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers who were brave enough to put themselves in harm’s way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected." Fauci has consistently been honest, while at the same time not just come out and said that the Trump administration’s handling of our public health was, is, and continues to be, a disaster.
Democratic Rep. Katie Porter of California has pointed out that the U.S. government allowed our stocks of personal protective equipment (i.e. N95 masks) and medical equipment like ventilators get shipped out for profit from December through until March. This was a critical time, when health experts were warning our government to get off of their asses and begin preparing for the soon-to-be pandemic to reach our shores. This meant that officials like Fauci and others were forced to make the hard decision to hope that saving the meager reserves of PPE for frontline first responders would be more beneficial in the long run than telling the entire country to buy up nonexistent N95 masks.
Sen. Tim Scott, the South Carolinian who bears the tremendous burden of being the only Black Republican in the Senate, is urging his colleagues to take swift action on police reform legislation. His urgency is falling on deaf ears with his leadership. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is in no hurry.
"Without the bill becoming law—whether it's my bill or some other version of some other bill—then we've kind of failed the moment," Scott told Politico. "Us waiting a month before we vote is a bad decision. So I hope we are willing to take up legislation and just get on the record. If it fails, it fails." Scott is leading a group of other Republican senators who are preparing legislation to introduce this week, and says he had a "positive" call with Donald Trump about it. In addition to his legislation, there's already legislation from House and Senate Democrats, the Justice in Policing Act.
But it appears that McConnell isn't willing to do anything substantive before the July recess, which is going to last until the week of July 20. Pressed Tuesday by reporters on when the Senate would vote on the bill, McConnell just said "We'll let you know." Asked again if supported the bill and would schedule a floor vote, he repeated "We'll let you know." He is supposedly "pushing for as broad support within the Senate GOP conference as possible," according to CNN. Given the timidity of Scott's bill, that shouldn't be an issue, though it is an excuse for McConnell to delay the bill.
There doesn't seem to be much urgency among those Republicans who are working with Scott on the bill. Politico talked to Oklahoma Republican James Lankford, who says they'll just be really busy until August with, checks notes, an annual defense policy bill. "It's hard to determine in a presidential election year because all the politics get pretty noisy as everyone tries to dig in," he said. Whatever that means for doing the public's business.
McConnell's deputy, John Thune of South Dakota, is similarly unhurried. "I think it has enough support if we can get a process to move it, possibly," he told Politico. "But I would say at this moment probably unlikely in this work period—July, more likely." Another member of McConnell's leadership team, Missouri's Roy Blunt, is similarly unhurried. "I'd be surprised if it happens before the July recess," he offered.
Here's the business that McConnell finds urgent: confirming his former intern, the wholly unqualified Justin Walker to the second highest court in the country, the D.C. Circuit. That's what McConnell spent Tuesday morning talking about on the Senate floor. "As my fellow Kentuckians and I can attest, Judge Walker is exactly the kind of individual our country deserves to have in such a role." We deserve an appeals court judge who has had half a second of courtroom experience, just the few months in which he's been in the seat McConnell got him on to a district court in Kentucky. That's what McConnell is going to be consumed with for the week, he promised. "I look forward to continuing to detail our Kentucky pride for Judge Walker as the week unfolds. And I'll take great pride in voting to advance his nomination and to confirm him."
Because sure, that's what matters most right now, right this minute when the streets are filled with people demanding justice and accountability from the police. Maybe Sen. Scott should think about using some of his leverage here, and block the Walker nomination from moving until he gets his vote.
Mike Pence wants you to clap. Clap! Don’t stop clapping. Because if you stop clapping, the fairy tale that he and Donald Trump are telling about the COVID-19 pandemic is definitely going to die.
Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Pence denies that there is such a thing as a “second wave” to the pandemic, and he doesn’t mean because we haven’t exited the first wave. According to Pence, the American healthcare system is “far stronger” than it was four months ago, because there’s nothing like endless overtime, constantly full hospital beds, and 600 dead doctors and nurses to make the system so much better. Pence thinks that it’s a great thing that the rate of positive tests is down to under 10% … in most states. And that deaths didn’t reach a number that he says some people were predicting. And of course, Pence promises a “viable vaccine by the fall.” Because this is a fairy tale that calls for an October surprise!
On Monday, Mike Pence outright lied to reporters when explaining why it was just dandy for Trump to hold a rally in Tulsa on Saturday over the objection of local officials. “In a very real sense, they’ve flattened the curve,” said Pence. “And today their hospital capacity is abundant, the number of cases in Oklahoma has declined precipitously and we feel very confident going forward with the rally this coming weekend.”
None of that—none of that—is true. Oklahoma has racked up its highest number of new cases ever during the last week. So did the county where Tulsa is located. And then Oklahoma beat its old record today. There is no sense in which the curve is flattened, or cases are declining. Tulsa’s mayor went on Facebook to say: “The key threat as we reopen is hospital capacity.” He notes that while the hospitalization rate in Tulsa is down from an earlier peak in April, “it has started to rise.”
Compared to neighboring states like Texas, Oklahoma has gotten off relatively lightly—so far. But an event like the one Trump intends to hold is tailor-made for disaster. Something that the Trump campaign definitely recognizes by requiring those signing up for tickets to also complete a disclaimer holding Trump harmless if they catch COVID-19 at the ill-advised event.
Pence scoffs that “the media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way,” because sure … 120,000 dead Americans is a walk in the park. Nothing to be concerned about. It’s not like any of them were killed by Muslims or immigrants. Because then every life is definitely sacred. But 120,000 people dead from a virus … that’s what winning looks like.
According to Pence, it’s time for “celebration,” not “fearmongering.” Because as we know, this is definitely all behind us. All behind us. And all so, so goodly.
Pence provides no details about the supposed vaccine coming for the fall (it’s not a “surprise” if you announce it too many times in advance), but he does spend a good deal of time bragging about how testing is now so good that “today less than 6% of Americans tested each week are found to have the virus.” “Today” clearly not being today, where Florida’s rate of positives was an amazing 23%.
Even if the U.S. was turning up positives at the rate Pence suggests, that would still be a horrible signal of an outbreak in progress. In Italy, once the world’s biggest hot spot, daily positives are down to 300 with a rate of positives below 0.5%. Germany is at 0.8%. Australia is currently conducting over 3,400 tests for every positive case found, for a rate of 0.03%. That is what adequate testing looks like. Not only is a 6% positive rate nothing to brag about, it’s an absolute sign of a broken system where in many locations people still aren’t being tested until they are displaying obvious symptoms.
It’s true that overall numbers in the United States have fallen, but that’s because the huge fire burning through New York City and the surrounding areas has been successfully fought and reduced to a series of hot spots. But what’s happening now is a more general rise that affects numerous states.
Florida had its worst day today. Arizona had its worst day today. Oklahoma had its worst day today. Texas had its worst day last week, but then Texas hasn’t yet reported its tallies for Tuesday. Ten states are at new highs for hospitalization. And the states with Republican governors who listened to Trump and Pence are heading for catastrophe.
No matter what Pence says, the United States is definitely not in better shape than it was four months ago. It’s exhausted physically and economically, buffeted by conflicting information—with Pence himself being a primary source of pure lies.
And why in holy hell won’t Mike Pence put on a mask?
It's an interesting experiment, and it's amazing how conservatives freak the fuck out when people actually make their own decisions.
People gather around the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct inside the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest,” also known as the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” in Seattle, Washington, on June 14. | Noah Riffe/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Best known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, the neighborhood has flourished since police left the area to protesters last week.
After eight days of continuing clashes with protesters, staff at the East Precinct police headquarters in Seattle suddenly vacated the building on Monday, June 8, shredding documents and leaving it empty.
Among protesters, there was initial confusion over why police would outright leave, but organizers suspected a trap.
“The SPD seem like what they wanted to do is abandon the East Precinct and then wait on the borders, just like a few blocks away, for somebody to try to set a fire to repeat what was going on in Minneapolis,” Carla, a protester who is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy, told Vox. “Then they can rush in and say, ‘Now our use of military force against unarmed civilians is justified.’”
But that’s not what happened. Instead, protesters set about creating a peaceful — and safe — police-free neighborhood. And the officerslargelyhaven’t bothered to come back.
David Ryder/Getty Images
People paint an acronym for “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” on June 10. After Seattle police abandoned the East Precinct headquarters, residents turned the area into a safe and police-free neighborhood.
David Ryder/Getty Images
People draw messages with chalk in an intersection that saw clashes between police and protesters just days before in the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” also known as the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest,” on June 10.
The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ as it was referred to early on, started as a meme, said Carla. “I was there the morning after the East Precinct was abandoned, and CHAZ was sort of just a joke that people were sharing, like, ‘Oh, this is an autonomous zone,’” she told Vox, referring to an area that is free from the local government structure and control.
But the idea soon took off among the protesters. City personnel showed up the day after the precinct was abandoned to remove the barricades that police had set up to control the protests, but protesters convinced the workers to let them set up roadblocks to keep city traffic out of the area. They ended up sequestering an approximately six-block area in the central Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill.
“This is the urban core of the city,” Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, whose district encompasses the protest area, told Vox. “It’s dense and it has a long history, including of LGBTQ rights activism in the ’80s.”
CHAZ has since evolved further into a center of peaceful protest, free political speech, co-ops, and community gardens. Protesters have invited the city’s houseless population, who had been subject to a mass “clearing” of tent communities throughout the city, to come stay in the neighborhood. Movie nights have been held, including Mississippi Burning, about two FBI agents investigating lynchings of black people and activists in Mississippi during the civil rights era.
“There was an impromptu dodgeball game,” said Carla. “There are people smoking weed in circles ... and just having normal conversations, and then 20 feet away, you have this large group of people standing around somebody with a megaphone talking about Marxism.”
The zone, where hundreds of people can be found on any given day, is largely leaderless, with decisions often being made by vote. But volunteers have stepped in anyway, doing everything from distributing food to cleaning up garbage in the area. The vibe there is pretty relaxed, said Carla.
“It’s really hard to pin this place down,” she said. “This is a place that is built and maintained by marginalized people, and they’re the voices that are driving this.”
Yet right-wing media has painted CHAZ as some kind of war zone, portraying the tiny neighborhood as if it were forcibly seceding from the US. While protest organizers in the area are understandably reticent to speak with reporters — several protest leaders did not respond to interview requests from Vox — there is no hint of the violence suggested by the likes of Fox News.
There are also goals to the protests. Organizers put out an extensive list of demands in a Medium post on June 9, broken into four categories: the justice system, health and human services, economics, and education. They include defunding and abolishing the SPD, an end to the school-to-prison pipeline, and the de-gentrification of Seattle, among many other demands.
Nine days into the zone’s creation, its name has also evolved, as it’s now known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP. But regardless of what it’s called, the run of events that brought the zone into existence was an extraordinary demonstration of protester organizing — and police incompetence.
The protests that gave birth to CHOP
Sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, mass protests have broken out all over the country over the past several weeks, and Seattle saw some of the most intense demonstrations.
“There’ve been multiple protests throughout the city on a daily basis,” Sawant told Vox. “One of the key sort of battlegrounds happened to develop at the 11th and Pine intersection on Capitol Hill.”
According to Sawant, who was at the Capitol Hill protest the evening of June 7, which saw the most intense police crackdown of the week, it was police who first turned violent against otherwise peaceful protesters in the area. “One moment I was having political conversations with a group of young people about how do we fight police violence and racism and how that connects to capitalism itself,” she said. “And the next moment, I felt mace in my eyes. And then a few moments later, there was tear gas and flash-bang grenades going off. Somebody counted hundreds of them the next morning.”
David Ryder/Getty Images
“We Can’t Breathe” is projected on a wall near the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct on June 9.
The violence of police crackdowns on otherwise peaceful protesters sent shock waves throughout the liberal city. During the preceding week, calls for Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan to step down began to grow louder.
“That violence lies at the doorstep of Democratic establishment and Mayor Durkan,” said Sawant. “There started to be calls for Durkan to resign because people were correctly horrified at this violence. People were just stunned that this is Seattle in 2020.”
The day after the protest, police vacated the precinct building, and even now, more than a week later, no one knows who ordered it. Neither Durkan nor Police Chief Carmen Best has taken responsibility. “We were asked to do an operational plan in case we needed to leave,” Best said at a press conference Thursday. “The decision was made. We’re still evaluating about how that change came about but it didn’t come from me.”
However, Best disputed the characterization that it was abandoned in the first place. “We did not abandon the precinct, but we had to remove personnel for a short period of time,” Best told Good Morning America on Friday.
While police haven’t yet moved directly against protesters, officers have been seen in and around the precinct building over the past several days, according to social media reports.
cop hanging out in the corner of the second floor of the east precinct in the CHAZ pic.twitter.com/l9FSSwUmXh
Initial media reports about the zone, especially at Fox News and throughout the conservative mediasphere, portrayed the autonomous zone as a kind of anarchist threat to society. One notorious Fox News live hit included a graphic indicating that the network was reporting from the US-CHAZ border, as if the zone were no longer part of the United States.
Further, several right-leaning media outlets reported that local business owners had been approached by armed anarchists who demanded mob-like protection payments. That has since been debunked by business owners who explained that it was false and that the local businesses were racking up much-needed sales after being hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.
Then, on June 12, Fox News was busted by the Seattle Times for photoshopping an image of a gunman with a green mask into images of protesters in the area.
But the initial reports were enough to catch the attention of President Donald Trump. On June 11, Trump tweeted at Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Durkan to “take back” the city by force before he was compelled to intervene.
Radical Left Governor @JayInslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before. Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stopped IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!
People on the ground inside the protest zone have been encouraging one another not to believe media reports or rumors over what’s happening in the zone unless they see it themselves.
“It’s a game of telephone,” Carla said. “I’ve gotten into the habit of just saying if you don’t know the person that you’re talking to, and if you don’t have the full context of a video clip or an audio clip, then just assume that it’s deliberate misinformation. Ask yourself who stands to gain from that kind of misinformation.”
Life inside the CHOP
One of the reasons for all the conservative media hoopla is that autonomous zones like this don’t happen all that frequently. Like CHOP, Camp Maroon in Philadelphia is a recently created autonomous zone of houseless people with their own list of demands for city and state officials.
#CampMaroon is an Autonomous Zone in Philadelphia, started by mostly houseless POC. Their demands are housing, and an end to police harassment. This should be getting the same attention #CHAZ is getting. People are taking care of each other without police. https://t.co/iarkMslEAC
Even with the inaccurate reporting, that isn’t to say there isn’t some discord at CHOP. According to Carla, the name change and subsequent confusion came from an internal struggle between two groups of protesters with differing visions for the area. For days, Carla said, there has been a power struggle between organizers who envisioned the zone as a peaceful, organized protest against police violence, and another group who wanted to see CHOP become more of an anarchist space where marginalized people could obtain mutual aid when needed.
Scenes from the #SeattleAutonomousZone or #CHAZ. Beautiful murals. A lot of community. A boarded up Seattle Police East Precinct.
But also - some protestors tell me they feel this detracts from the goal of making strides towards police accountability & ending systemic racism. pic.twitter.com/t2yWPTfYbX
While the protest does have some loose leadership, there are few formal structures. Sawant compares the space to the “Night of 500 tents” during the Occupy Wall Street movement in Seattle in October 2011, of which she was a part. Back then, Occupy protesters were able to drive police from their space before police returned and cleared out the area where the protests took place.
Already, said Sawant, CHOP has outlasted what they were able to achieve with that Occupy action, which only lasted three days. But she said she expects police to clear the area sometime in the near future. “I don’t think that we can in any way assume that the police will not come back and specifically attack this space,” she said. “I think we should expect that that could happen at any moment, because that’s exactly what happened in Occupy.”
In the meantime, protesters have managed to create a police-free space in which black people, indigenous people, people of color, queer people, and houseless people feel especially safe. It’s even become somewhat of a tourist attraction for more affluent white, liberal families.
“Talking with my friends and talking with a couple of people on the ground, I keep hearing people say, ‘I never felt this safe walking in the city,’” said Carla, noting that the anti-homeless architecture and corporate feel of the neighborhood has largely given over to graffiti and friendly faces. “The knowledge that the police aren’t there [has created] this feeling that this is a space that belongs to everybody.”
Noah Riffe/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The absence of police in the area near the East Precinct has created a sense that the neighborhood “belongs to everybody,” according to one Seattle protester.
Sawant has a more complex explanation. “We have an interest in having safe neighborhoods, but what makes neighborhoods unsafe is not the absence of police,” she said. “What makes neighborhoods [and] neighbors unsafe, and what generates the conditions for crime, predominantly is economic inequality and injustice.”
For her part, Sawant is introducing several measures at the city council level to address the demands of protesters, including turning the East Precinct building into a community center, cutting the city’s police budget, and permanently banning the use of less lethal force against protesters by police.
Both Carla and Sawant hope the space persists into the future as a place for protesting and political organizing. But Sawant also notes what an achievement it’s been to show the world that these protests don’t need harsh crackdowns in the first place.
“Only days ago, that same space on Capitol Hill was a war-like scenario with the police inflicting 100 percent of violence and brutality against peaceful protesters,” said Sawant. “Since the young people were able to win this political battleground victory, they have been able to demonstrate [they can create a space] which is welcoming, peaceful, and multiracial.”
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Florida is, as has become tradition, a focal point of Republican misinformation and bad policy. Over the past week, the Sunshine state saw a surge in new confirmed cases of COVID-19. These numbers, based on the recent history of the DeSantis-led government, are likely grossly low. This comes about one week after all Florida counties began a transition into phase 2 of the state’s reopening plan. Now, news outlets are reporting that newly reopened bars are having to newly re-close, as new cases of either patrons or staff testing positive for the virus have come to light.
Kiwi's Pub & Grill in Florida's Altamonte Springs posted on their Facebook page that the bar had temporarily closed again because “We have been informed by 6 different people today that they have been infected with the Coronavirus and they have been inside Kiwi’s within the last week.” The owner of Kiwi’s posted the following day that he had spoken to someone at the Seminole County health department who said they did not believe the bar had “been tagged by any infected people,” but that they were “getting hammered with new infections all around Altamonte Springs.”
This weekend, Florida saw new cases top 2,000 two days in a row which has prompted more closures. NBC Miami reports that most of the bars promised to be reopened after a cleaning and staff had been tested and cleared of having the virus. According to News 4 Jacksonville, 15 patrons of the newly reopened Lynch’s Irish Pub in Jacksonville Beach tested positive after a post-quarantine celebration. Erika Crisp, a 40-year-old healthcare worker who tested positive after visiting Lynch said that her experience makes it clear that DeSantis and company are not being prudent when it comes to reopening the state. “We should be wearing masks. We should be social distancing. It was too soon to open everything back up.”
There are, of course, major issues with dining out and drinking at bars during a pandemic. Being able to effectively social distance from other patrons is one issue. The fact that wearing a mask and eating or drinking is impossible without removing said mask, is also an issue. There is also the very real social experience of being at a bar, potentially being slightly inebriated, making bad or looser choices about the way you are composing yourself, in tandem with the reality that people talk louder and at one another when in a pub.
Gov. Ron DeSantis made a big to-do about welcoming the Republican National Convention to Jacksonville this past week. DeSantis didn’t speak to the new rise in coronavirus cases, instead he focused on how a convention would help boost the economy, “You're talking about a massive economic impact. I think you're gonna have folks that are going to be able to spend a lot of money.”
The number of cases being reported by Florida’s government is already suspect. Recently fired data scientist Dr. Rebekah Jones has started a new website called FloridaCovidAction.com. It is here that she continues with her analysis of cases in the Sunshine state, and her numbers are considerably less rosy than the already bad numbers being put out there by the Florida health department.
Donald Trump gave a speech in the Rose Garden on Tuesday during which he praised scientists for an AIDS vaccine that does not exist.
Said Trump: “They’ve come up with the AIDS vaccine.”
“Or the AIDS — and as you know, there are various things, and now various companies are involved — but the therapeutic for AIDS,” he rambled on in a rare correction. “AIDS was a death sentence, and now people live a life with a pill.”
There is no vaccine for AIDS though we have advancements in treatment where PLHIV can have achieve an undetectable viral load and not transmit (“U=U”). Our battle continues with pharma holding monopolies on these lifesaving drugs.
But that was hardly his most egregious lie. The speech was about police reform, and Trump of course attacked the Obama/Biden administration with a whopper.
Trump says “President Obama and Vice President Biden never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period.”
Obama‘s task force set 59 proposals for police reform and appointed attorneys general who set up consent decrees with police departments, then undermined by Trump. pic.twitter.com/iS407eRlxf
President Trump just said President Obama and Vice President Biden "never even tried" to address issues of policing and race during their administration.
Earlier this week, Michael Henkel, a family court supervisor in Philadelphia, was filmed ripping down Black Lives Matter signs made by children at a neighborhood community center.
When the person who was filming him told him “black lives matter,” Henkel replied, “not to me, they don’t.”
Plenty to sort through from Marconi coming soon, but first:
Today on E Passyunk, a man was ripping down #blacklivesmatter signs made by local children outside a community center.
Filmed here, someone yells "Black lives matter" to which this guy responds, "Not to me, they don't" pic.twitter.com/LcD9K1207f
— Expose. Confront. Act. (@lin_newborn_) June 15, 2020
Henkel has now been fired, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports: “Michael Henkel, 61, of South Philadelphia, had worked as a writ-server supervisor. After video was shared widely on social media of him taking down the signs at Columbus Square, at 12th and Reed Streets, the First Judicial District terminated his job. … In a statement Monday, Marty O’Rourke, a Family Court spokesperson, said Henkel ‘is no longer an employee.’ … ‘His termination was based on multiple violations’ of the state court system’s Code of Conduct and its Non-Discrimination and Equal Employment Policy, O’Rourke said.”
PacifiCorp’s Hunter coal fired power plant outside of Castle Dale, Utah on November 14, 2019. Coal power generation is one main source of particulate pollution in the US. | AFP via Getty Images
Soot sickens and kills people of color disproportionately. The EPA has decided to not tighten standards that would protect them and others.
Decades of research paint a clear picture: The No. 1 environmental health risk in the US is soot. Also known as particulate pollution, it is made up of extremely small particles spewed into the air by power generation, industrial processes, and cars and trucks.
There are “coarse particles,” between 2.5 and 10 micrometers in diameter, and “fine particles,” at 2.5 micrometers and smaller. By way of comparison, the average human hair has a diameter of about 70 micrometers.
Research has consistently found that inhaling these particles is incredibly harmful to human physiology, at high concentrations over short periods or low concentrations over extended periods. Particulate pollution is linked to increased asthma, especially among children, along with lung irritation and inflammation, blood clots, heart attacks, weakened immune systems, and, according to a wave of recent research, long-term cognitive impacts (reduced productivity, inability to concentrate, and dementia).
Research is equally consistent on another point: the harms of particulate pollution are not equitably distributed. They fall most heavily on vulnerable populations like children, the elderly, people with preexisting health conditions, low-income people, and, above all, people of color.
A groundbreaking 2019 study from researchers at the Universities of Minnesota and Washington attempted to quantify both sides of particulate pollution, who produces it and who suffers from it. They found that the consumption producing the pollution was concentrated in majority white communities, while exposure to the pollution was concentrated in minority communities.
“On average, non-Hispanic whites experience a ‘pollution advantage’: They experience ∼17% less air pollution exposure than is caused by their consumption,” the study concluded. “Blacks and Hispanics on average bear a ‘pollution burden’ of 56% and 63% excess exposure, respectively, relative to the exposure caused by their consumption.”
To put it more bluntly: People of color are choking on white people’s pollution.
The current regulatory limits on particulate pollution under the Clean Air Act were set in 2012, based on scientific review concluded in 2010. As subsequent science has revealed, they are inadequate to protect public health. That was the strong and unanimous conclusion of the panel of 19 scientists assembled in 2015 to assess the evidence.
Nonetheless, EPA claims the science is not settled and is refusing to tighten the standards, which will mean, on an ongoing basis, well over 10,000 unnecessary deaths in the US every year.
The purported rationale, of this and all the administration’s deregulatory efforts, is to reduce costs to industry. But the costs of pollution don’t disappear when they are removed from industry’s books. They are simply shifted onto the public ledger, in the form of health care costs and lost work days. Lax pollution standards represent an ongoing transfer of costs from industry to the public.
In the case of particulate pollution, the costs are disproportionately borne by black people — who, in part because of the air pollution in their communities, also suffer disproportionately from Covid-19.
Lax particulate pollution standards are, in short, yet another way of devaluing black bodies and black lives, yet another expression of the structural racism that Trump has so effectively flushed to the surface.
Getty Images
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler testifies before the Senate on May 20, 2020 in Washington, DC. Wheeler disbanded the 19-member Particulate Matter Review Panel and left the review of particulate pollution standards to a committee made up of Trump appointees.
How EPA stacked the deck to ignore the science
Particulate pollution is regulated under the Clean Air Act’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) program. The Act mandates that scientists periodically review the latest evidence on air pollution and recommend updates to NAAQS standards as necessary, so that the program stays abreast of the latest science.
The EPA’s seven-member Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) reviews the standards, but because it does not have depth of expertise in all the various subject matters, it typically consults with a panel of outside scientists.
When the latest review of particulate standards began in 2015, such a panel was assembled: the 19-member Particulate Matter Review Panel, made up of experts in epidemiology, physiology, and other relevant disciplines. The review was delayed in getting underway, and Trump’s EPA initially talked about moving the deadline for completion to 2022. But in early 2018, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt abruptly announced that the agency would rush to be done by December 2020, the tail end of Trump’s first term.
Later in 2018, to “streamline” the review process, newly appointed EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler unceremoniously disbanded the PM Review Panel and left the review in the hands of CASAC — which had, over the previous year, been entirely reconstituted with Trump appointees. It was chaired by an industry consultant; just one of the seven members was a scientist.
The disbanded scientific panel later reconvened and rebranded as the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel,under the aegis of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and went on to issue the same assessments and recommendations it would have offered CASAC.
For fine particles (PM2.5), it recommended reducing the annual average concentration limit from 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air to between 10 and 8, though it noted that “even at the lower end of the range, risk is not reduced to zero.” It recommended reducing the daily exposure limit from 35 to between 30 and 25.
Now, the Independent PM Review Panel has penned an extraordinary piece in The New England Journal of Medicine, excoriating the EPA.
“We unequivocally and unanimously concluded that the current PM2.5 standards do not adequately protect public health,” they write. Ignoring that clear conclusion required serial abuses of the review process, as outlined in this somewhat mind-boggling paragraph:
The dismissal of our review panel is just one of numerous recent ad hoc changes to scientific review of the NAAQS since 2017 that undermine the quality, credibility, and integrity of the review process and its outcome. Other changes include imposing nonscientific criteria for appointing the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee members related to geographic diversity and affiliation with governments, replacing the entire membership of the chartered committee over a period of 1 year, banning nongovernmental recipients of EPA scientific research grants from committee membership while allowing membership for persons affiliated with regulated industries, ignoring statutory requirements for the need for a thorough and accurate scientific review of the NAAQS in setting a review schedule, disregarding key elements of the committee-approved Integrated Review Plan, reducing the number of drafts of a document for committee review irrespective of whether substantial revision of scientific content is needed, commingling science and policy issues, and creating an ad hoc “pool” of consultants that fails to address the deficiencies caused by dismissing the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee PM Review Panel.
That is ... a lot. “It’s not surprising [CASAC]would retain the standards,” Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Washington Post, “because they broke the process.”
The chair of CASAC, Tony Cox — who has worked as a consultant for energy and chemical industry trade groups — contends that the particulate science doesn’t hold up. In the end, CASAC ignored the panel’s work and recommended that the standards be kept where they are.
Once the rule is put into effect, it will immediately face lawsuits. Given how shoddy the process has been and how clearly the results fly in the face of consensus science, it is unlikely to hold up in court. Like many of the Trump administration’s hastily executed regulatory rollbacks, it will likely end up quietly rejected — in the end, less an enduring victory than a flashy nationalist pageant that merely delays inevitable changes.
If it is rejected, it will go back to EPA for another rulemaking process that will take years. In the meantime, tens of thousands of people, disproportionately people of color, will needlessly get sick and die.
John Moore/Getty Images
Covid-19 patients arrive at the Wakefield Campus of the Montefiore Medical Center on April 6 in the Bronx borough of New York City after being transferred from the center’s Einstein Campus. The Bronx has 21 times more asthma hospitalizations than other New York boroughs, and over five times the national average.
Black people are most likely to suffer the effects of soot
It is well known that the harms of pollution are inequitably distributed. Like so many social harms, they fall hardest on the most vulnerable.
That means people with weak or compromised immune systems, like children, the elderly, or people with preexisting respiratory or circulatory problems. And it also means people who happen to live close to the industrial facilities and highways that produce the pollution, typically low-income communities and communities of color. Black people fall disproportionately into both those categories, with high rates of preexisting conditions and high likelihood of living proximate to pollution sources.
A 2018 study by EPA scientists, published in the American Journal of Public Health, attempted to quantify the disparities in pollution exposure down to the county level. It found that, for PM2.5 pollution, “those in poverty had 1.35 times higher burden than did the overall population, and non-Whites had 1.28 times higher burden. Blacks, specifically, had 1.54 times higher burden than did the overall population.” These results held steady across the country.
This illustrates that the impact of pollution on the black population can not be reduced to geography or economic status. It “should be considered in conjunction with existing health disparities,” the study says. “Access to health care has well-documented disparities by race/ethnicity, and the prevalence of certain diseases is notably higher in non-White populations.” In other words, the pollution burden should be considered in the context of systemic racism.
Another recent study, focused on Texas, found that “the percentage of Black population and median household income are positively associated with excess emissions; percentage of college graduate, population density, median housing value, and percentage of owner-occupied housing unit are negatively associated with excess emissions.”
These studies are consonant with a long history of research — see here, here, here, and here — showing that air pollution reflects and reproduces wider income and racial disparities. The poor suffer; minorities suffer; black people suffer most of all.
Inequitable distribution of pollution is as old as industrial society. The Clean Air Act was meant, in part, to address that injustice, to secure healthy air for every American. And despite its flaws and failings, it has been, among other things, one of the most effective environmental justice policies in US history. Just as pollution hurts people of color most, reducing it helps them most.
Emission of the six big pollutants — particles, ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide — declined an average of 73 percent between 1970 and 2017. Fine particle concentrations fell by 43 percent between 2000 and 2019.
The Clean Air Act has accomplished this much because it is not a static law but a living, evolving set of policy tools. It has scientific reviews built in every few years, so that the level of public protection keeps up with the latest evidence. Scholars call this “green drift,” as the landmark environmental laws of the 1970s continue updating, even in the face of some hostile administrations.
Trump’s is the most hostile yet, working overtime to gum up the Clean Air Act and blunt its effectiveness. It goes beyond weakened standards for particulates, mercury, methane, and fuel economy.
There’s the “Transparency in Regulatory Science” (or “secret science”) rule, which would prohibit EPA from considering a broad swathe of the epidemiological research that supports particulate rules. There’s the effort to alter EPA cost-benefit analysis to exclude consideration of “cobenefits.” Many rules reducing other pollutants — mercury and CO2, for example — are justified in part by the fact that they also reduce particulates, which substantially adds to their health benefits. Excluding cobenefits is a way to justify weakening a whole range of other air-quality standards.
EPA is doing as much as it can to dismantle, weaken, or delay Clean Air Act protections before the end of Trump’s first term. The typical framing of these moves is that Trump is doing them on behalf of industry and that they are hurting “the environment,” or, worse, “the planet” (ugh).
There’s another way to frame them: They are expressions of structural racism, America’s long history of exploiting people of color for their labor while rewarding them with deprivation, marginalization, and ill health. Just as black people are often denied police protection while subjected to police violence, they are often denied the wealth and consumption that produce pollution while subjected to the health ravages of inhaling it.
Science-based air quality standards are one way to ease the burdens imposed on black bodies. The Trump administration’s staunch opposition to those standards, its attempts to undermine the bureaucratic machinery that produces them, is just one more expression of its disregard for black lives.
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"the blessing of slavery"? You mean the upside of captive labor? Jesus fucking christ. Quite the Christian indeed
Atlanta megachurch pastor Louie Giglio had a conversation with Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy and rapper Lecrae in which he suggested rebranding “white privilege” as “white blessing.”
If you’ve been a longtime reader of this site, you may remember that Giglio is the anti-gay pastor who was originally signed up to give the benediction at Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony but removed himself after a sermon was unearthed in which he said gay people were going to Hell and could be ‘cured’ through Christianity and conversion therapy. Giglio also urged Christians to prevent the “homosexual lifestyle” from becoming accepted in society.
But here’s Giglio’s take on “white privilege.”
Atlanta megachurch pastor Louie Giglio wants to use the phrase "white blessing" instead of "white privilege."
"We understand the curse that was slavery … but we miss the blessing of slavery that it actually built up the framework for the world that white people live in." https://t.co/eZ49N85Ae6
Said Giglio: “I feel like on the inside of the church we’re fighting this historical context you talk about. In other words, we love the blessing of the cross but we don’t love to sit in it and realize this is what God’s asking me to do, to die to myself, and live for him, whatever context that’s going to look like for me. But I want to flip that upside down because I think the other side of it is true with our nation’s history. We understand the curse that was slavery, white people do, and we say ‘that was bad,’ but we miss the blessing of slavery that it actually built up the framework for the world that white people live in and lived in.”
“And so a lot of people call this ‘white privilege’ and when you say those two words it’s like a fuse goes off for a lot of white people because they don’t want somebody telling them to check their privilege,” Giglio continued. “I know that you and I both have struggled in these days with ‘hey if the phrase is the trip up, let’s get over the phrase and let’s get down to the heart, let’s get down to what then do you want to call it,’ and I think maybe a great thing for me is to call it ‘white blessing.’ That I’m living in the blessing of the curse that happened generationally that allowed me to grow up in Atlanta.”
Giglio’s idea isn’t going over so well on Twitter.
That man fixed his mouth to call the economic and social impact of slavery relative to white people “white blessing” because white privilege sounds to icky. That’s the white privilegest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. His feelings are hurt so he can change an entire construct?
Since "White Blessing" is trending, let me just say that the only "White Blessing" is the stuff in the middle of an Oreo.
(and, uhh, sometimes … uhh … never mind.)
— Purple #DefundPolice Tinker (@prpltnkr) June 16, 2020
"White Blessing" is the "blessing from the curse of the original sin of slavery"? Daffy white privilege is still trying to dictate terms, because some white folks can't bear the word "privilege". This is also racism.
— Justice Dems Are Used Colostomy Bags (@icyjuicy) June 16, 2020
White Blessing sounds like a racist Billy Idol cover band
White blessing? Blessing implies it’s something sent to people from God. So God fucked over generations of Black people for hundreds of years to help Whites be blessed? Sounds a lot like a White supremacist perspective to me
@spulliam not seeking to refer to slavery as blessing-but that we are privileged because of the curse of slavery. In calling it a privilege/benefit/blessing— word choice wasn’t great. Trying to help us see society is built on the dehumanization of others. My apology, I failed.
At least four members of Congress have reaped benefits in some way from the half-trillion-dollar small-business loan program they helped create.
And no one knows how many more there could be.
It’s a bipartisan group of lawmakers who have acknowledged close ties to companies that have received loans from the program — businesses that are either run by their families or employ their spouse as a senior executive.
Republicans on the list include Rep. Roger Williams of Texas, a wealthy businessman who owns auto dealerships, body shops and car washes, and Rep. Vicky Hartzler of Missouri, whose family owns multiple farms and equipment suppliers across the Midwest. The Democrats count Rep. Susie Lee of Nevada, whose husband is CEO of a regional casino developer, and Rep. Debbie Mucarsel Powell of Florida, whose husband is an executiveat a restaurant chain that has since returned the loan.
And there are almost certainly more, according to aides and lawmakers. But only the Small Business Administration and Treasury Department have that information, and the Trump administration is refusing to provide any details. That leaves it entirely up to business owners — including elected officials — to decide whether to come forward about a loan, which can be as large as $10 million.
Democrats have tried to pry free the list of recipients. But their push in the House to require disclosure of at least some companies was blocked on the floor late last month by Republicans — including Williams and Hartzler, who voted against the bill. Lee and Powell joined all Democrats in supporting it. All four lawmakers have previously voted in favor of the small-business program.
“This is the largest distributor of taxpayer money in human history, and we need to ensure taxpayers know where it’s going,” the author of that bill, Rep. Dean Phillips, said in an interview. The Minnesota Democrat added that his bill “was not written to expose members of Congress, because frankly I expected members of Congress to be forthright and transparent to begin with.”
Each of the lawmakers who received PPP loans, either directly for their business or indirectly through a spouse, say the loans were acquired through proper channels and part of a desire to help keep Americans employed.
Spokespeople for Williams and Hartzler declined to say how much money was provided under the loans to the privately held companies lawmakers own. Full House Resorts, of which Lee's husband is the president and CEO, received $5.6 million, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Fiesta Restaurant Group, which employs Mucarsel Powell's husband as an executive,received $15 million before returning it in full.
A spokesperson for Mucarsel Powell said her husband played no role in applying for the PPP loan and did not financially benefit from the aid; amid the recession, he took a pay cut from his employer.
While it is not illegal for lawmakers to apply for or accept the money, it has raised new questions about lawmakers’ potential conflicts of interest as they craft the next coronavirus rescue package as well as the administration’s fierce secrecy of the $670 billion program. The program already faced intense scrutiny over charges it was helping the well-connected after reports revealed that large corporations were among the first to be awarded loans, while the smallest businesses were stuck in line.
Now it’s being dogged by growing transparency complaints, with Treasury and SBA refusing to disclose recipients after officials initially said data would become public through Freedom of Information Act requests. POLITICO has sought the information under FOIA.
Both Democrats and Republicans have vowed there will be robust oversight of Congress’ spending on coronavirus relief, including its signature loan program. But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has so far refused to disclose the recipients of those loans, though he indicated Monday he was planning talks with lawmakers seeking details on the loans.
“Among other steps, the Administration should release the names of all PPP borrowers,” a group of senior Democrats wrote in a letter to Mnuchin on Monday.
Much of the scrutiny surrounding lawmakers taking PPP loans has centered on Williams, one of the wealthiest members of Congress with a net worth of over $27 million in 2018. He received a PPP loan for an undisclosed amount for his Roger Williams Chrysler Dodge Jeep dealership in Weatherford, Texas. The same dealership employs his wife, according to his most recent financial disclosure form.
“If you’re a multimillionaire taking taxpayer money in the middle of the biggest unemployment since the Great Depression, get ready to explain that decision to the American people,” said Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) as she introduced new transparency legislation last month and called out Williams by name in a news release.
Williams was one of 146 Republicans to oppose Phillips’ bill to require the SBA to disclose loans over $2 million. Another one of those Republicans was Hartzler, whose family also received PPP loans for multiple businesses.
Aides to both Republicans said their respective loans were under the $2 million threshold that would have required disclosure under the bill but would not provide more details. A spokesman for Hartzler also declined to say which of her businesses had received the loans.
"The public statement from April is the only information we have at the moment surrounding PPP,” Hartzler spokesman Danny Jativa said.
Phillips’ transparency legislation initially would have published the names of all businesses that received a loan, though he agreed to create a $2 million threshold for disclosure as part of an agreement with some of his GOP colleagues. But the bill, which won the support of 38 Republicans, fell just a handful of votes short on the floor, stunning Phillips and other Democrats who had expected it to pass under a fast-track procedure reserved for popular bills.
“To this very day, I do not quite understand what happened,” Phillips said.
Conservative opposition to the bill, however, had been mounting in the week leading up to the floor vote, with Republicans increasingly worried that the measure would essentially “name and shame” businesses who receive PPP loans.
Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) — who serves on the Congressional Oversight Commission established by the coronavirus relief law and says PPP loans should be disclosed under existing SBA policy — said in an interview that he believed the bill was “redundant” and that “this whole PPP program is already burdened with tremendous paperwork” requirements.
Meanwhile, Mnuchin and some businesses have expressed concern that disclosing the borrowers could reveal confidential information about their payroll.
Phillips said he has begun talks with top Democrats to bring the bill to the floor again — this time, under a simple majority where it would easily pass. The freshman Democrat said he is also open to changes to safeguard payroll data in order to win over more Republicans, as long as it still requires disclosure.
“My simple, but very strong belief is that taxpayer dollars — when distributed by Congress and the executive branch of our government — should be transparent and subject to accountability,” Phillips said. “Plain and simple.”
Nevada Rep. Lee has also faced scrutiny for her personal connections to the program.
The freshman Democrat was hit with an ethics complaint from a right-leaning watchdog group on Friday after reports that she personally lobbied SBA to help casinos — like Full House Resorts, which her husband runs — access PPP loans. SBA eventually did make the change, and the business that employs Dan Lee received millions of dollars through the program, as first reported by the Daily Beast, as did many other struggling Nevada casinos.
Lee’s office said she had no knowledge of the loans and had no influence over the application. And her spokesman noted that her advocacy for the PPP gaming fix was part of a bipartisan push by the Nevada delegation.
“In terms of transparency, the Congresswoman does believe that loan recipients should be publicly disclosed, which is why she voted in favor of the TRUTH Act," a Lee spokesman said in a statement, referring to the Phillips bill.
Mucarsel Powell, the fourth lawmaker known to have ties to the program, also faced criticism after a publicly traded company that employs her husband as an executive received $15 million in PPP loans. But the company, Fiesta Restaurant Group, later returned the money after public outcry nationwide over large companies accessing aid intended for small businesses.
"Congresswoman Mucarsel-Powell has called for full transparency of which corporations have gotten PPP loans," a spokesperson said, singling out Republicans for "blocking our calls for transparency.”
It’s not illegal, or even uncommon, for members of Congress to be involved in policy decisions that sometimes overlap with their own financial interests. But it becomes a conflict of interest if members use their position of influence to enhance their own standing.
And mixing the two is politically perilous. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) faces a tough campaign because of stock trades she made during the pandemic even though the FBI has since dropped its probe. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) was forced to step down, at least temporarily, from his chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee for stock trades.
Some transparency groups, as well as some lawmakers, have pointed out that Congress created no disclosure rules for its own members when it comes to the sprawling PPP program, unlike some other sections of the $2 trillion relief bill.
For example, the House’s Office of General Counsel sent a letter to all members in May asking them to self-identify if they or close family members have financial ties to companies that might benefit from a separate Federal Reserve liquidity program.
The same does not exist for PPP.
The push for greater disclosures has been bipartisan in the Senate: Small Business Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the lead architect of the PPP, earlier this month asked the administration in a joint letter with Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) to adhere to SBA disclosure practices and release the names and other details of PPP borrowers. In April, Rubio said Congress was prepared to force the administration to disclose loan recipients and “the bottom line is we're going to know one way or the other who got this money.”
Williams did write a lengthy statement on May 5, announcing that one of his companies received a loan, but it was published four days after it was first reported by the Dallas Morning News. Hartzler released her statement on April 29, one day after it was reported by the Columbia (Mo.) Tribune.
“Like every other company who accepted a small-business loan, our business qualified under law and regulation, and today over 100 of our employees are grateful that we did,” Williams wrote in a note to constituents published on his website.
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