James.galbraith

Greg Glassman, the CEO of CrossFit, apologized Sunday night after Reebok and other affiliated companies including gyms, cut ties with the fitness brand after Glassman made insensitive remarks involving murdered unarmed black man George Floyd.

Glassman replied, “It’s FLOYD-19” on Saturday in response to a tweet from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that said “Racism and discrimination are critical public health issues that demand an urgent response. #BlackLivesMatter”

Followers were floored by Glassman’s response, and not in a good way.

Reebok released a statement, officially ending its affiliation with the brand: “Our partnership with CrossFit HQ comes to an end later this year. Recently, we have been in discussions regarding a new agreement, however, in light of recent events, we have made the decision to end our partnership with CrossFit HQ. We will fulfil our remaining contractual obligations in 2020. We owe this to the CrossFit Games competitors, fans and the community. What doesn’t change is our commitment and dedication to CrossFitters and the passionate CrossFit community. We’re so thankful for the strong bonds we’ve created with coaches, box owners and athletes around the world over the past 10 years.”

Some of the other brands and celebrities cutting ties include Rogue Fitness and Noah Olsen, second place finisher in the 2019 CrossFit Games:

View this post on Instagram

My participation in the 2020 @crossfitgames will be contingent upon major changes being made. ⁣ ⁣ I LOVE competing, I LOVE training, I LOVE being able to challenge myself and become better from it. ⁣ ⁣ I also LOVE people.⁣ ⁣ This is probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. It’s been weighing on me for days. I’ve consulted many of my closest supporters. All of that said, I’ve decided that I cannot, in good conscience, compete during this time for a company that hasn’t shown themselves to have values that I align with. ⁣ ⁣ I’ve been talking a lot about this movement and my strong desire to stand up and fight for equality. Right now, I’m taking action. The repercussions of this could be huge. I’ve weighed them and my belief in this is stronger than their potential outcomes.

A post shared by Noah Ohlsen (@nohlsen) on Jun 7, 2020 at 4:56pm PDT

FLASHBACK: CrossFit Corporate Employee Fired for Tweets Opposing ‘Sinful’ LGBTQ People as Indy Gym Shuts Down: WATCH

Wrote Glassman in an apology shared by CrossFit: “I, CrossFit HQ, and the CrossFit community will not stand for racism. I made a mistake by the words I chose yesterday. My heart is deeply saddened by the pain it has caused. It was a mistake, not racist but a mistake. Floyd is a hero in the black community and not just a victim. I should have been sensitive to that and wasn’t. I apologize for that. I was trying to stick it to the @IHME_UW for their invalidated models resulting in needless, economy-wrecking, life-wrecking lockdown, and when I saw they were announcing modeling a solution to our racial crisis, I was incredulous, angry, and overly emotional. Involving George Floyd’s name in that effort was wrong. It’s our hope that his murder catalyzes real change resulting in a level playing field for our black brothers and sisters. Please hear me when I say, we stand by our community to fight for justice. I care about you, our community, and I am here for you.”

The post CrossFit CEO Apologizes After Reebok, Gyms Cut Ties Over Insensitive George Floyd Remarks appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The federal coronavirus response shows a president dead set on avoiding responsibility for the pandemic.

A week and a half ago, the US coronavirus death toll surpassed 100,000 — the most in the world, and more than the next three countries combined.

That number has only grown in the days since. And in the face of that crisis, President Donald Trump has a message for the American people: It was China’s fault, and the only reason the US death toll isn’t worse is because of his quick action in banning travel from China.

In fact, there are many reasons the US death toll is so high, including a national response plagued by delays at the federal level, wishful thinking by President Trump, the sidelining of experts, a pointed White House campaign to place the blame for the Trump administration’s shortcomings on others, and time wasted chasing down false hopes based on poor science.

Often as not, though, rather than argue the merits of its response at home, the Trump administration has chosen to focus on its action against China as a benchmark for success — and that’s not accidental. In fact, Trump’s quick pivot to blaming China is a deliberate strategy, supposedly backed up by internal Trump campaign polling and designed to obfuscate the details of the truly inadequate US response. But in the early days of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Trump himself took a very different line on everything from China to the severity of the virus itself and how bad things might get in the US.

Though White House Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted as early as March that the virus could kill 100,000 to 200,000 Americans, Trump has had his own ever-shifting goalposts for what counts as a successful response. On April 20, he predicted 50,000 to 60,000 dead from Covid-19. A week later, he revised his estimate to 70,000. On May 4, it was 80,000 to 100,000 people, and we now know it will continue to climb past that mark.

Throughout the pandemic, however, much of the Trump administration’s spin — regarding Trump’s own response, China’s role, and more — has been misleading, if not outright untrue. Here’s what Trump and the federal government have — and have not — done to respond to the virus.

2019

In late 2019, the coronavirus wasn’t on much of the world’s radar. President Trump was becoming the third president in US history to be impeached. We now know, however, that the first cases of the virus were cropping up as early as November. Here’s where things stood late last year:

November 17: Although it was not diagnosed as such at the time, researchers have now identified the first confirmed Covid-19 case as having been seen on November 17 in China’s Hubei province.

December 27: A man in France, who is now the first known Covid-19 patient outside of China, goes to the emergency room with a fever and difficulty breathing. At the time, Covid-19 was still unheard of outside of China.

December 31: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reports the first cluster of cases of a “pneumonia of unknown cause,” later identified as Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, now called SARS-CoV-2.

January 2020

Though new discoveries — such as the December case in France mentioned above — keep pushing the timeline of the virus back, much of the world began to take note of a mysterious pneumonia-like illness in China in January 2020, which at the time was mostly centered in the Hubei province. On January 5, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a preliminary news item about the then-unidentified disease; at the time, it was a relatively distant concern in the US, particularly given the country had yet to see any confirmed cases.

But the coronavirus’s threat was of concern to US national security officials, who, as the Washington Post reported in March, were warning Trump of the global danger posed by the virus in daily intelligence briefings as early as January.

Nonetheless, in public comments and tweets, the president consistently played down the fledgling pandemic even as the first US case was reported in Washington state. He also applauded China’s handling of the virus at several points in January, before taking action to protect the US in the form of a limited travel ban from China on January 31.

Here’s what things looked like in January.

January 11: The first death from a confirmed case of Covid-19 is reported in China.

January 16: A researcher in Germany develops the first coronavirus test.

January 19: Human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus is confirmed by the Chinese government.

January 21: The first confirmed Covid-19 case in the US is reported in Washington state.

January 22: While at Davos, Trump makes his first public comment on the coronavirus, downplaying the risk in comments to CNBC and CBS News correspondent Paula Reid.

To CNBC: We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s — going to be just fine.

To CBS: We do have a plan and we think it’s going to be handled very well. We’ve already handled it very well … We’re in very good shape and I think China’s in very good shape also.

January 24: Trump praises China’s “efforts and transparency” and thanks Chinese President Xi Jinping for his response to the virus.

January 29: Trump receives a briefing on the coronavirus, and asserts that the US is “on top of it 24/7.”

January 30: The WHO declares the coronavirus a global health emergency.

January 30: Trump suggests that the coronavirus is under control in remarks at a manufacturing plant in Michigan:

We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five [cases]. And those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us.

January 31: Trump suspends entry to the US for many — but not all — categories of people traveling from China, a move which some epidemiologists warned at the time was “more of an emotional or political reaction” than a public health decision. The Department of Health and Human Services declares the coronavirus a public health emergency.

February 2020

February started with a State of the Union address on February 4, and the first US Covid-19 death followed on February 6 in California’s Bay Area. The majority of the coronavirus messaging coming from the White House, however, continued to focus on downplaying the virus rather than bracing for the now-realized possibility that it could become a full-blown pandemic and a global public health crisis.

The Trump administration did take a few steps toward crafting a federal response, requesting emergency funding from Congress and setting up a task force with Vice President Mike Pence at its head. Meanwhile, Trump — and Fox News — leaned hard into portraying the coronavirus as under control, and even as a Democratic hoax.

As a result, February was by and large a lost month: Delays in developing a test kit were followed by testing shortages, and both issues meant the coronavirus was able to spread undetected and unabated in many parts of the country.

Here’s what things looked like in February.

February 4: Trump gives the annual State of the Union address and briefly mentions the US response to the coronavirus in his speech.

We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak in China. My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.

February 5: The Food and Drug Administration issues an emergency use authorization for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) coronavirus test, clearing the way for it to be used in state labs.

February 6: The first death in the US from a confirmed case of Covid-19 is retroactively confirmed to have occurred in early February by the Santa Clara County medical examiner following an autopsy of the victim.

February 7: Trump again praises Xi’s response to the coronavirus.

February 15: The first death in Europe from a confirmed case of Covid-19 is reported in France.

February 23: Trump again claims that the coronavirus is “under control” in an impromptu South Lawn press conference with Marine One waiting to depart to Andrews Air Force Base ahead of a trip to India.

We’re very much involved. We’re very — very cognizant of everything going on. We have it very much under control in this country.

February 24: In a tweet, Trump reiterates his claim that the virus is “very much under control in the USA.”

February 25: Trump requests $2.5 billion in coronavirus response funding from Congress for vaccine development, testing, PPE, and more.

February 26: The first instance of community spread in the US is confirmed by the CDC.

February 26: Trump appoints Pence to lead the coronavirus task force; during the same press conference, he again downplays the virus.

And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.

February 27: Trump predicts that the coronavirus will disappear “like a miracle.”

It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.

February 28: Trump refers to the coronavirus as the Democrats’ “new hoax” at a rally in South Carolina.

The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus… One of my people came up to me and said “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia, that didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax that was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in… And this is their new hoax.”

March 2020

In March, the coronavirus for the first time began to intrude on daily life in a major way. The NBA shut down on March 11, the same night Trump addressed the nation in primetime from the Oval Office, announcing a European travel ban and promising economic relief efforts.

Not long after that speech, California became the first state to implement a general stay-at-home order on March 19.

By the end of the month, more than 30 states had done the same, and those shutdowns — a public health necessity, in the opinion of most experts — brought the US economy to a screeching halt. As a result, it’s maybe not surprising that Trump, who has previously tied his reelection pitch directly to the economy, spent much of the month broadcasting an unwarranted optimism about the trajectory of the virus and promoting potential treatments like hydroxychloroquine — which the FDA has since warned against using for Covid-19 treatment or prevention, noting it can cause heart problems.

The growing severity of the pandemic, however, also led to a mid-March social distancing push from the White House. Shortly after his primetime address, Trump announced a new slate of guidelines advising against discretionary travel and against congregating in groups of more than 10 people.

And toward the end of the month, the growing death toll from the coronavirus — centered on New York, Trump’s longtime home — appeared to have an impact on the president. In a press conference, he acknowledged that the first half of April was “going to be a rough two-week period” and walked back previous statements downplaying the coronavirus by comparing it to the seasonal flu.

Here’s what things looked like in March.

March 5: Trump suggests that closing the US to travel from China helped to keep the number of Covid-19 cases low.

March 6: At the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, Trump says falsely that “anybody that wants a test can get a test”; he also comments that he would rather have infected people who were trapped on a cruise ship stay there to keep the number of confirmed US cases low.

Anybody that wants a test can get a test ... they’re making millions of more as we speak. But as of right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test — that’s the important thing — and the tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect, right? This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good.

...

I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.

March 9: Trump compares the coronavirus to the common flu, a comparison which at that time had already been debunked by experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci.

March 11: The WHO officially labels the coronavirus a pandemic.

March 11: Trump makes an error-ridden primetime address from the Oval Office that coincides with Tom Hanks announcing his coronavirus diagnosis and the NBA suspending its season.

Testing and testing capabilities are expanding rapidly, day by day, we’re moving very quickly ... The vast majority of Americans, the risk is very, very low.

March 13: Trump declares a national emergency in response to the coronavirus, freeing up billions in federal funding for the virus response.

March 16: Trump announces “15 Days to Stop the Spread” CDC guidelines, encouraging social distancing.

March 18: Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mutually close the US-Canada border; Trump officially invokes the Defense Production Act (DPA) in order to push domestic manufacturing industries to produce badly needed medical supplies.

March 19: Trump incorrectly claims that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine for treating Covid-19.

The nice part is, it’s been around for a long time, so we know that if things don’t go as planned it’s not going to kill anybody. When you go with a brand new drug, you don’t know that that’s going to happen. It’s shown very very encouraging early results.

March 19: Trump labels the coronavirus the “Chinese Virus” in a press conference; photos show that he revised prepared remarks to add the xenophobic term.

March 20: Trump closes the US-Mexico border, saying:

[Unauthorized entries] threaten to create a perfect storm that would spread the infection to our border agents, migrants, and to the public at large. Left unchecked, this would cripple our immigration system, overwhelm our healthcare system, and severely damage our national security. We’re not going to let that happen.

March 20: Trump touts hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug unproven as a Covid-19 treatment, at the White House Coronavirus Task Force daily briefing; in the same exchange, he attacks NBC News correspondent Peter Alexander as a “terrible reporter.”

Let’s see if it works. It might and it might not. I happen to feel good about it, but who knows, I’ve been right a lot. Let’s see what happens.

March 22: As the economic impact of coronavirus lockdowns becomes more apparent, Trump shies away from a prolonged shutdown following a historically bad day for the Dow Jones stock index the previous week.

March 24: Trump floats Easter Sunday, April 12, as a potential reopening date.

I would love to have it open by Easter. I will — I will tell you that right now. I would love to have that — it’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’ll make it an important day for this too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.

March 26: The US hits 1,000 reported Covid-19 deaths.

March 27: Trump attacks General Motors CEO Mary Barra on Twitter over ventilator manufacturing amid a desperate shortage of the machines, and threatens to “invoke ‘P’” — the Defense Production Act — to compel the company to make more, the first of many such threats made against companies producing essential materials.

March 27: Trump signs a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package that includes direct cash payments to Americans, additional funding for hospitals, and some $500 billion in loans for companies.

March 29: Trump extends CDC social distancing guidance through April 30; in the Rose Garden, he also says he believes his administration will have “done a very good job” if the US avoids the worst-case 2.2 million deaths predicted by London’s Imperial College.

March 31: Trump drops his comparison to the flu, saying the coronavirus is “vicious”:

It’s not the flu. It’s vicious. When you send a friend to the hospital, and you call up to find out how is he doing — it happened to me, where he goes to the hospital, he says goodbye. He’s sort of a tough guy. A little older, a little heavier than he’d like to be, frankly. And you call up the next day: “How’s he doing?” And he’s in a coma? This is not the flu.

April 2020

For all that Trump spent January and February praising China’s response to the coronavirus, April saw his White House execute an about-face as the human and economic toll of the pandemic in the US mounted. The president began to blame China, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, and the WHO for problems with America’s Covid-19 response. And Democratic governors, like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who maintained lockdown orders and criticized the Trump administration’s response to the crisis, became targets of his ire.

Here’s what things looked like in April.

April 2: Trump employs the DPA to direct 3M and other companies to manufacture masks and ventilators:

Moments ago, I directed Secretary Azar and Acting Secretary Wolf to use any and all available authority under the Defense Production Act to ensure that domestic manufacturers have the supplies they need to produce ventilators for patients with severe cases of C-O-V-I-D 19. You know what that is, right? Become a very famous term: C-O-V-I-D — COVID.

April 4: Trump again invokes the DPA to combat the hoarding of medical supplies by “wartime profiteers.”

April 6: The US hits 10,000 reported Covid-19 deaths.

April 9: The Trump campaign releases a misleading ad attacking Biden’s record on China.

April 13: Trump claims to have the legal right to overrule governors’ shelter-in-place orders, asserting at a press conference that the president’s “authority is total.”

April 14: Trump announces plans to halt funding to the WHO, accusing the organization of “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.”

April 15: The US hits 25,000 reported Covid-19 deaths.

April 16: The Trump administration releases its reopening guidelines:

Every state is very different. They’re all beautiful. We love them all. But they’re very, very different. If they need to remain closed, we will allow them to do that. And if they believe it is time to reopen, we will provide them the freedom and guidance to accomplish that task — and very, very quickly — depending on what they want to do.

April 17: As small groups of — sometimes armed — protesters demonstrating against shelter-in-place orders begin to receive media coverage, Trump calls on his supporters, including those who attended these protests, to “liberate” Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, all of which have Democratic governors.

April 17: Trump attacks Biden and the Obama administration’s handling of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

April 22: Trump, who has spent the last few days promoting reopening, announces that he opposes Georgia reopening.

I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities which are in violation of the phase one guidelines for the incredible people of Georgia ... I think it’s too soon.

April 23: Trump signs an executive order blocking green cards for most categories of prospective immigrants; at a daily press briefing, he also floats bleach as a potential coronavirus treatment:

And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.

April 24: The US hits 50,000 reported Covid-19 deaths.

April 28: The US hits 1 million confirmed Covid-19 cases.

April 30: The Trump administration allows federal “Stay at Home” guidelines to expire, ceding the field to state efforts.

May 2020

If April was focused on shifting the blame, May was the month the president pivoted to denying there was anything to be blamed for. Although the US death toll passed 100,000 on May 27, Trump nonetheless insisted that the US response had “met the moment.” The US began to lead the world in Covid-19 cases and deaths.

And the president continued his efforts to reframe recent events to cast himself in a favorable light. For instance, in May, Trump attributed his decision to limit travel from China as the major factor in avoiding a death toll numbering in the millions, though most of the coronavirus cases at the epicenter of the US outbreak — New York City — have been shown to originate from Europe.

And as states began to reopen nonessential businesses — despite experts warning premature reopening could lead to a second wave of infections — Trump also looked to put the crisis behind him. The president made multiple trips to battleground states in May, and his campaign is reportedly examining plans to resume holding Trump’s signature rallies.

Here’s how things looked in May.

May 3: Trump again revises his estimate on the number of Covid-19 deaths the US will suffer and predicts 85,000 to 100,000 fatalities during a Fox News virtual town hall.

Look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100 thousand people. That’s a horrible thing. We shouldn’t lose one person over this. This should have been stopped in China. It should have been stopped. But if we didn’t do it, the minimum we would have lost is a million-two, a million-four, a million-five. That’s the minimum. We would have lost probably higher than — it’s possible higher than 2.2.

May 7: The US hits 75,000 reported Covid-19 deaths; the New York Times reports that the Trump administration elected to shelve detailed reopening guidelines from the CDC.

May 8: Trump claims that the US is “the world leader” in responding to the coronavirus.

May 9: Although many states have yet to meet the minimum requirements for reopening based on the White House’s guidelines, Trump continues to push for the reopening of nonessential businesses, using the slogan “TRANSITION TO GREATNESS!”

May 10: Trump again goes after the Obama administration’s response to the 2009 swine flu pandemic, falsely calling it a “disaster.” As the Washington Post has explained, “some flaws in the system were discovered” in the Obama administration’s handling of the H1N1 pandemic, “but overall the government was praised for its response.”

May 11: Trump says that the US has “met the moment and we have prevailed” in responding to the coronavirus.

May 18: Trump tells reporters that he is taking hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that has been linked to an increased risk of death when used to treat coronavirus patients.

May 21: Trump claims falsely that he was “so early. I was earlier than anybody thought” in response to a Columbia University study suggesting that 36,000 lives could have been saved in the US alone by implementing social distancing measures just a week earlier. As noted above, the president reportedly ignored security briefings on the coronavirus for weeks and did not roll out a social distancing campaign until mid-March.

May 22: Trump at a press conference announces he is labeling churches as “essential” and calls for governors to allow their reopening, as well as threatening — without authority — to “override” any governors who fail to do so.

May 23: For the first time since March, Trump hits the links at his own golf course in Sterling, Virginia, as the US death toll edges toward 100,000.

May 24: Trump bans non-US citizens traveling from Brazil from entering the country.

May 26: Trump again favorably compares the death toll to an Imperial College projection that estimated the death toll had the US taken no steps to stop the spread of Covid-19, tweeting that “if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People.”

May 27: The US hits 100,000 reported Covid-19 deaths.

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Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week

Anne Applebaum has written a lengthy piece at The Atlantic titled History Will Judge the Complicit. Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president? No four-paragraph excerpt can do it justice, but perhaps it will whet your appetite for the rest:

[...]To the American reader, references to Vichy France, East Germany, fascists, and Communists may seem over-the-top, even ludicrous. But dig a little deeper, and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947. These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.

Not even Trump’s supporters can contest this analogy, because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along. Trump’s first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values. Remember: He described America’s capital city, America’s government, America’s congressmen and senators—all democratically elected and chosen by Americans, according to America’s 227-year-old Constitution—as an “establishment” that had profited at the expense of “the people.” “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.” Trump was stating, as clearly as he possibly could, that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though of course the nature of those new values was not yet clear.

Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, Trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality, a long-undervalued component of the American political system. We are not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems, and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules. Trump’s insistence—against the evidence of photographs, television footage, and the lived experience of thousands of people—that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than at Barack Obama’s first inauguration represented a sharp break with that American political tradition. Like the authoritarian leaders of other times and places,

Trump effectively ordered not just his supporters but also apolitical members of the government bureaucracy to adhere to a blatantly false, manipulated reality. American politicians, like politicians everywhere, have always covered up mistakes, held back information, and made promises they could not keep. But until Trump was president, none of them induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs or compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd—or encouraged him to do so in front of a press corps that knew he knew he was lying. [...]

QUOTATION

“Like the story of the steam drill against John Henry, the machine will be victorious because it doesn’t get tired and keeps on going long after a human worker will have dropped dead from exhaustion. The modern-day steam drill is likely to be an AI system, and John Henry is played by the planner, doctor, analyst, stockbroker or accountant who believes that they can process more data and crunch more numbers than the new machine overlords. They can’t.”           ~~Sean A. Culey, Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity (2019)

TWEET(s) OF THE DAY

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2018—Grieving mom wants answers regarding the 'agonizingly slow' death of her son in ICE custody:

When it’s a fact that medical and mental health care in immigration detention is “dangerously inadequate” and grievances commonly get ignored, the circumstances around every death must be investigated. There’s perhaps no more tragic example right now than an immigrant from Honduras who, according to former Georgia chief medical examiner Dr. Kris Sperry, “most likely died an agonizingly slow and excruciatingly painful death” while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention last month:

According to previously unreported court documents reviewed by The Daily Beast, the mother of an undocumented immigrant who died of bacterial meningitis is preparing for civil action related to his death. On June 4, Honduran native Martina Blasina Romero petitioned a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas to authorize depositions of the people who were held with her son, Ronal Francisco Romero, and know about the health collapse he experienced in his last days.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has decided not to press for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to testify for a routine annual budget hearing, according to a top committee aide.

In a conference call with aides for Republican committee members on Friday morning, the staff director for the chairman, Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), said he was dropping his monthslong push for Pompeo to appear before senators for a hearing on the State Department’s budget.

That staffer, Chris Socha, said Risch had made the decision to preserve “political capital,” according to two sources who were on the call.

According to an aide, the committee began seeking Pompeo’s testimony for the routine hearing at least four months ago, but the State Department has largely stiff-armed the request.

“Department officials communicated with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier in the year and offered to have the Secretary testify in March regarding the Fiscal Year 2021 budget request for the Department of State,” a State Department spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “The Committee deferred on the timing of this hearing due to COVID-19.”

Under Mark Meadows’ direction as chief of staff to the president, the White House has reportedly implemented a rule that administration officials cannot testify to Congress without Meadows’ permission. But committee chairs have several recourses to pressure officials to testify: They can refuse to confirm executive branch nominees, threaten to slash department budgets or issue subpoenas. The Friday-morning conference call indicates that Risch has no plans to deploy any of these tactics.

A spokeswoman for Risch did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

News of Risch’s acquiescence to the Trump administration comes as Pompeo has faced scorching criticism for urging President Donald Trump to fire the department’s top internal watchdog.

Steve Linick, the former State Department inspector general, was looking into allegations that Pompeo had directed political appointees to run personal errands for him. He had also completed an investigation into the Trump administration’s decision to sidestep Congress in selling billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia — a move that senior officials warned against.

Cabinet secretaries are expected to appear before the Senate and House committees that have jurisdiction over their departments or agencies to field lawmakers’ questions about their proposed budget for the next fiscal year. The hearings also allow lawmakers to press top administration officials on issues unrelated to the budget — for example, Pompeo would probably face questions about the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic and the firing of Linick, among other pressing foreign-policy matters.

Pompeo last appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee more than a year ago, in April 2019.

The committee’s refusal to press for Pompeo’s testimony fits a recent pattern when it comes to Risch’s posture toward an administration that has snubbed congressional oversight at every turn. Risch has often shied away from open conflict with the Trump administration — a marked departure from his predecessor, former Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who routinely spoke out against the administration and the president personally.

For example, the end of Corker’s tenure as chairman featured a bipartisan effort to push Trump to come clean about the Saudi crown prince’s involvement in the killing of a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. Upon assuming the chairmanship of the panel, Risch, meanwhile, sought to placate his Republican colleagues’ anger over the Trump administration’s failure to comply with that effort — even telling senators that the executive branch had been “very forthcoming” on the subject.

Pompeo maintains a positive working relationship with Risch, but he often clashes with Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the committee’s top Democrat. Menendez’s letters to Pompeo seeking information or documents routinely go unanswered, and Risch has largely declined to press the State Department for such information when Menendez asks for it.

Just this past week, Menendez raised those concerns with Pompeo directly, saying his requests for substantive exchanges on foreign-policy issues had “gone largely ignored or woefully unaddressed.” Menendez’s letter also seemed to suggest that he was under the impression that Risch was actively pressing for Pompeo’s appearance before the panel.

“I understand that Chairman Risch, with my full support, has been trying to get you to testify in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since February, including by appearing remotely, on the budget request for the State Department,” Menendez wrote.

But Risch appears to be dropping that bid.

Attorney General William Barr says President Donald Trump never demanded that 10,000 active-duty troops be ordered to help crack down on protests in D.C. and across the country.

"The president never asked or suggested that we needed to deploy regular troops at that point," Barr said in an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation” on Sunday. "It's been done from time to time in our history. We try to avoid it, and I'm happy that we were able to avoid it on this occasion."

Barr did note, however, that some members of the 82nd Airborne Division military police were brought into the area and were on standby "in case they were needed," rather than actually deployed to the streets of Washington.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley opposed the use of active-duty troops to help manage the protests. Former government officials and military leaders have also opposed it. “I would absolutely advise against it, particularly at this time,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Barr said the administration did not overstep.

"I think our position was common, which was that they should only be deployed as a last resort and that we didn't think we would need them," Barr said. "I think everyone was on the same page."

There have also been questions as to whether a presidential order to send in active-duty troops would even be legal.

When asked if he thought the president has authority to send in active-duty troops amid opposition from governors, Barr noted that "under the Insurrection Act, the president can use regular troops to suppress rioting.” The Insurrection Act, which dates to 1807 and the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, was last used by President George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Earlier Sunday morning, Trump tweeted that the National Guard would begin withdrawing from D.C.

"I have just given an order for our National Guard to start the process of withdrawing from Washington, D.C., now that everything is under perfect control," Trump wrote. "They will be going home, but can quickly return, if needed. Far fewer protesters showed up last night than anticipated!"

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and Attorney General William Barr argued Sunday that the U.S. doesn't have a "systemic racism problem" with its police.

"I do not think that we have a systemic racism problem with law enforcement officers across this country," Wolf told ABC's Martha Raddatz on “This Week,“ less than two weeks after George Floyd was killed by police and in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests across the country. Police have been criticized for their conduct during some of those protests.

"Do I acknowledge that there are some law enforcement officers that abuse their job? Yes, and again, we need to hold those accountable. And I would say that there are individuals in every profession across this country that probably abuse their authority and their power, and we need to hold them accountable."

Wolf added that, while there is "absolutely" room for improvement in law enforcement and community outreach, "painting law enforcement with a broad push of systemic racism is really a disservice to the men and women who put on the badge, the uniform every day and risk their lives every day to protect the American people."

In cases where law enforcement officers are not doing their jobs correctly, Wolf said individuals need to be held accountable — adding "that's what we're doing in the George Floyd case." Floyd died in police custody May 25 in Minneapolis; four police officers have been charged in the case.

Barr echoed Wolf's sentiments in an interview with CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

"I think there's racism in the United States still, but I don't think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist," Barr said.

"I understand the distrust, however, of the African American community, given the history in this country. I think we have to recognize that for most of our history, our institutions were explicitly racist. Since the 1960s, I think we've been in a phase of reforming our institutions and making sure that they're in sync with our laws and aren't fighting a rearguard action to impose inequities."

Barr added that, while he thinks this level of reform is difficult, he thinks "it is working and progress has been made."

Wolf also mentioned some of the acts committed during protests across the country, including vandalism and looting.

"While we're focusing on some of the police, we also need to focus on what has occurred over the last week in cities across America," he said. "Burning churches, defacing monuments. We cannot let that go on, and I think as we talk about what the police is doing, we also need to talk about what they're up against every day, as well."

Fox News believes in one thing: the current white supremacist status quo in our country. That stance, inherently racist, is also tied to a faux free market capitalism rooted in anti-democratic and pro-autocratic beliefs in how the world best works. The never-ending parade of doughy white male and (predominantly) blond female faces one sees on the network is a testament to that sensibility.

In the midst of our current economic crisis, the pandemic, and widespread protests against racial injustice, continuing law enforcement violence, and civil rights abuses, Fox News decided to throw up (and I do mean vomit) an “infographic” with the S&P 500 as its metric, that tracked something called “Percentage Change One Week After Event.” In addition to there being zero context for this infographic, which was wildly unscientific and statistically idiotic, the “events” that were placed in correlation to stock market surges were some of the worst in recent history: the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers in the Rodney King police brutality case, the shooting death of Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, and the recent murder of George Floyd by four (now-former) Minneapolis police officers.

Yes, you read that right.

Here’s the truly abhorrent “infographic.”

I guess the network’s point was that murdering unarmed Black people tends to be financially beneficial for the richest in our country. That might be the truest statement Fox News has ever accidentally made. What it may speak to is how civil unrest, coupled with fascistic law enforcement response is somehow tied to the confidence game that is the stock market. According to Business Insider, the Special Report “journalist” referenced the graphic by saying, "Historically, there has been a disconnect between what investors focus on and what happens across the rest of the country." That’s when the producers opted to display a graphic meant to point to positive economic gains directly connected to the deaths of Black men. Think about that.

Initially, Business Insider reports Donald Trump’s favorite channel defended their bad choice, citing similar reports in other business media. Fox News released a second statement, not exactly apologizing, for being so monumentally racist, “The infographic used on FOX News Channel’s Special Report to illustrate market reactions to historic periods of civil unrest should have never aired on television without full context. We apologize for the insensitivity of the image and take this issue seriously.”

It’s no surprise that Fox News continues to find new depths to dig into. It’s just depressing that there seems to be no rock bottom.

It’s a question as obvious as it is critical: How will the trio of crises—the pandemic, the economy, the demands for racial justice—affect the 2020 race for the White House. But in Washington, there are other implications that could matter almost as much to the direction of national policy, chief among them the Senate.

In many ways this is a question equal in importance to the outcome of the presidential race. Just picture Trump without a GOP Senate to rubber-stamp his Supreme Court picks—or a President Biden forced to fight Mitch McConnell for every inch of ground.

What do these varied ills bode for the Senate? As it turns out, history has some powerful answers to this question—and they leave Republican partisans with a strong case of agita.

As a general proposition, when the nation is in a state of crisis, things do not go well for the President’s party. When a war becomes a quagmire (Korea in 1952, Vietnam in ’68), when the economy craters (1980, 2008), voters look for a different leader. Far from a “retreat to safety” or a “rally round the flag” sentiment, there is an instinct to show the people in charge the way to the exit. (George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 may be a counterexample, but it took place in the broad wake of anxiety over the attacks of September 11—three years before the election—and before the baleful consequences of the Iraq War were fully clear.)

This trend also has clear consequences for the Senate. When things are going reasonably well, and voters reelect a president, senators from the other party often feel no impact at all. In 1972, Richard Nixon was returned to office in a historic landslide, winning 49 states and 60 per cent of the popular vote. But there wasn’t a corresponding Republican sweep of Congress; in fact, Democrats picked up two Senate seats. In 1988, in a country buoyed by the flush economy of the Reagan years, George H.W. Bush won with an electoral landslide of 442 votes—but again, Democrats gained a Senate seat. In 1996, Bill Clinton glided to an easy reelection, but it was Republicans who picked up two Senate seats.

Those were essentially “feel-good” elections, where the nation was more or less comfortable with things as they were, and that comfort extended to whichever party held a congressional majority. In contrast, look at what happened to the Senate the last two times voters were buffeted by economic woes. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by 10 points, Democrats lost a remarkable 12 Senate seats—and with them, control of the chamber. In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected in the midst of a financial meltdown, Republicans lost eight Senate seats, greatly strengthening the Democratic majority. (In the 2012 Obama reelection, only two Senate seats changed, and in the 1984 Reagan reelection 49-state landslide, Democrats picked up two.)

This year, the Senate Republicans hold a majority, again making them vulnerable to any vote to toss out the status quo. But don’t voters make different choices when they vote for a president and then a senator? Once upon a time, yes.

The potentially awful news for Republican Senate candidates is another historical trend: the increasing link between votes cast for a presidential contender and votes cast for senators, which makes it harder to create distance from an unpopular incumbent.

It wasn’t that long ago that ticket-splitting was commonplace. In 1992, 10 Senate candidates were elected from states that had given their electoral votes to the other party. But as party identification became more and more the key indicator of how votes were cast, this impulse all but disappeared. In 2016, every victorious Senate candidate came from a state whose presidential votes had gone to the same party. The days when Republican Al D’Amato could retain his New York Senate seat in the wake of a million-vote plurality for Bill Clinton in 1992 seem a distant memory.

Now turn to the Senate map, and it’s clear how these factors combine to produce a migraine for any strategist looking to hold the Senate for the Republicans. Not that long ago, Republicans were a good bet to hold the Senate even though they held 23 of the 35 contested seats. Only two—Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine—were in states that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016. Even with Arizona and North Carolina as potential presidential battlegrounds, that left at most four vulnerable Republicans. And with Alabama Democrat Doug Jones a very likely loser, there was little breathing room for Democrats to pick up the three net seats they’d need to capture the Senate, assuming Biden wins in November.

Now—at least measured by polls—a passel of states now seem within Biden’s reach, many of them with incumbent Republican senators up for reelection. He’s even in Georgia, where both incumbent Republican senators will be on the ballot; he’s even in Iowa, where Joni Ernst is up for reelection. And if Biden is going to make a real fight in Georgia and Iowa, that means a get-out-the-vote effort that will bring a lot of Democrats to the polls there.

Nor is it necessary for Biden to actually win a state to provide aid to a Senate candidate: In Montana, Democratic Governor Steve Bullock won reelection in 2016 while Trump was winning the state by 20 points. The most recent presidential poll shows Trump leading in Montana by only 5 points; a margin that would give Bullock, now the Democrats’ Senate candidate, a real shot at unseating Steve Daines and flipping that seat to the Dems. A close race in North Carolina—which Trump carried by 3½ points four years ago, and where he trails by 4 in the most recent survey—is a clear and present danger to Senator Thom Tillis. (Most recent surveys show Trump falling further behind Biden in the wake of his disastrous leadership in the George Floyd slaying—although if job numbers continue this week’s apparent turnaround, Trump’s fortunes could improve.)

Now put yourself in the position of one of these endangered incumbents, especially in states where Trump is particularly unpopular, like Colorado or Maine. If you’re tempted to create some distance from Trump, to assert your independence, you’re facing one pesky obstacle: The Republican Party is effectively now a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump world, and independence from the president is a trait that all but guarantees instant and massive pushback from your own party.

You have only to gaze around the Senate chamber, where former Senator Dean Heller, former Senator Jeff Flake, and former Senator Bob Corker sat, to see what happened to colleagues who did not tug the forelock with sufficient enthusiasm. If you’re Gardner or Collins, the temptation to confront the president’s behavior has to be weighed against the likely outrage from the party apparatus whose help you need in an election, to say nothing of the populist media that animates your rank-and-file voters.

This election, of course, is taking place with even fewer “known knowns” than usual. Before the pandemic, before the killing of George Floyd, we’d gone from “Biden is toast” to “can Sanders be stopped?” to “contested convention!” to “Biden’s the nominee” in roughly 10 days. Since Trump has broken pretty much every rule about presidential politics so far, he may well be able to defy history and turn the current crises to his advantage. (It’s also possible that if Trump drops further in the polls, GOP incumbents might conclude that their chances for survival are better if they leave the burning ship of state—and discover some safety in numbers.)

But if you are playing the percentages, the odds say that if the president cannot persuade a rattled, fretful electorate to stay with him, he will take the Republican Senate down, too.

As with much else in American life, there’s a stark partisan divide.

It’s not just the people protesting in the streets — most Americans are concerned about police violence, and specifically the killing of George Floyd, new polls show.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Sunday found that a majority of Americans are more troubled with the actions of the Minneapolis police that led to Floyd’s death, rather than by violence at some protests. The poll was conducted among 1,000 people from May 28 to June 2, just days after Floyd was killed on May 25 by a police officer who pinned him down by the neck with his knee, and early on in the (largely peaceful) protests.

Despite some criticism surrounding images of looting and arson, the poll found that only 27 percent of voters thought the violence of protesters was more concerning than the actions of the police and Floyd’s death — a contrast to the 59 percent that found the latter far more troubling. A big caveat: As with much else in American life, there’s a stark partisan divide. Nearly half of Republicans (48 percent) said they were more concerned about the protests, while 81 percent of Democrats found the police killing of Floyd a bigger issue.

Opinions differed by race as well. 78 percent of African Americans were more concerned with the police’s actions in contrast to the 15 percent that were troubled by the protesters’ violence. The gap between the two opinions dwindled among white Americans: 54 percent found the police violence that led to Floyd’s death more troubling, while 30 percent were more concerned with violent protests.

Regardless of politics or race, a majority of Americans are more bothered by police brutality — which could explain the strong support for police reform measures revealed in another recent survey. The poll, conducted by YouGov from May 29 to 30 among 1,060 people, showed that 67 percent of Americans supported banning any type of neck restraints, which was a police tactic used when Floyd died. Implementing an early warning system to identify problematic officers was also popular among 80 percent of Americans. The most supported reform measure was training officers on deescalation tactics, which was approved by 88 percent of Americans.

And while police may have historically been popular among Americans, these polls could indicate that their popularity might be faltering due to the recent waves of protest. A survey of over 6,000 people from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape found that the favorability figures for the police plunged 10 percent in one week — 66 percent to 56 percent — just days after Floyd’s death.

“This is a unique moment in American history,” Robert Griffin, research director for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, told the New York Daily News. “To see shifts like this really speaks to what a monumental event these protests have been.”

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

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

“That kind of thing is very uncommon now,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said of systemic racism Sunday.

Top Trump administration officials rejected the idea of systemic racism influencing law enforcement Sunday amid nationwide protests against police brutality, disproportionate police violence against people of color, and racial inequities.

The comments come as President Donald Trump has repeatedly broadcast his support for law enforcement, even as police have been documented attacking journalists, protesters who have mostly remained peaceful, and bystanders at demonstrations.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told ABC’s Martha Raddatz Sunday morning that protesters’ anger over George Floyd — an unarmed black man who was killed by a former Minneapolis police officer on May 25 — is “very real, very legitimate.” But, he claimed, “What we see across the board, by and large, is law enforcement doing their job.”

Wolf added the US does not “have a systemic racism problem with law enforcement officers,” and said, “Painting law enforcement with a broad brush of systemic racism is really a disservice to the men and women who put on the badge, the uniform every day.”

Attorney General William Barr echoed Wolf’s sentiments in an interview with CBS News’s Margaret Brennan, saying, “there’s racism in the United States still, but I don’t think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist.” Barr went on to say he thinks law enforcement reforms put in place following the civil rights era are working, and that the majority of police officers are “civic minded people who believe in serving the public.”

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson went a step further, suggesting that not only does systemic racism not exist in the law enforcement field, but that it no longer exists in any meaningful way in American life in general.

Carson told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he “grew up in a time when there was real systemic racism,” telling a story about a time when he was the only black student in his class, got the best grades, and had to listen to his teacher berate the white students for not trying hard enough.

“That kind of thing is very uncommon now,” Carson said. “Are there still racists around? Absolutely. There were yesterday, there are today and there will be tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t fight it.”

Despite the assertions of the Trump administration, systemic racism does affect policing

As Vox’s Sean Collins has reported, massive inequities do remain in the way law enforcement treats Americans of different races. For instance, a recent analysis by advocacy group Mapping Police Violence found black Americans are twice as likely to be killed by police as Latinx people, and three times more likely than white people. The same study also found that black people are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed when they’re killed by police than white people are.

Data also shows little accountability for this disparity. An analysis of law enforcement records and public databases by Mapping Police Violence found that 99 percent of police killings from 2013 to 2019 didn’t result in charges for the officers involved.

Those trends are borne out in the way Americans of different races feel about the police. According to an Axios-Ipsos poll of 1,033 US adults taken from May 29 to June 1 (with a 3.1 percentage point margin of error), 77 percent of white Americans polled said they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in local police, while only 36 percent of African American respondents did.

Still, Trump and top officials are making clear they support state and local police, even as disturbing images and videos of law enforcement officers retaliating against mostly peaceful protesters circulate.

The president himself has tweeted “LAW & ORDER” four times in the last week alone, called upon the police to “get tough,” and retweeted multiple tweets from Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, whose advocacy for sending US troops into American cities to quash protests caused a staff revolt inside the New York Times.

Trump also reportedly demanded that the US military send 10,000 active duty troops into cities on Monday, despite opposition from Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley. Barr called that report “completely false” on Sunday morning, saying instead they were put “on standby in case they were needed.”

Trump’s hardline approach has not, however, engendered goodwill among some of those who traditionally support him. Several top military leaders have spoken out in recent days against the president’s support for police retaliation, and conservative televangelist Pat Robertson said his plan to send in troops “isn’t cool.”

He added: “You just don’t do that, Mr. President.”

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

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

The New York Times' Editorial Page Editor James Bennet has resigned after the publication of an editorial by Sen. Tom Cotton advocating that the military be deployed to end racial injustice protests throughout the United States. Bennet had been the head of the Times' editorial pages since 2016.

The Times faced immediate and furious backlash for publishing the op-ed, including from within the Times itself. After repeatedly defending the decision to run Cotton's anti-American screed, it came out that the Times' editors had themselves solicited for Cotton to make his case—and that Bennet had not even read the piece before publishing it.

The Times has long ignored critics of their editorial policies, but the internal fury over Cotton's call for "no quarter" against fellow Americans proved too much for Bennet to weather. He is expected to remain with the paper, but in a "new role in the newsroom."

Trump's loyalist attorney general, William Barr, was on Face the Nation this morning to do what he does: betray his oath of office and the nation while lying to the American public to protect Donald Trump from consequences. Barr's own story on his involvement with the attack on Lafayette Park and St. John's Church protesters continues to shift with the winds; in a Saturday interview, Barr backed away from reports he ordered the attack with the rock-solid defense "My attitude was get it done, but I didn’t say, ‘Go do it.’"

One of today's new Barr claims was that Trump "never asked or suggested that we needed to deploy regular troops" to put down the protests. This flies in the face of reports by multiple reports of Trump furiously demanding that exact thing, on that exact afternoon, in a meeting William Barr was in.

Barr is demonstrably lying, which is yet another reason he and everyone else in the administration has refused to testify to Congress about any of their acts. Trump insisted "We need 10,000 troops up here. I want it right now," The Washington Post relays from a senior Pentagon official; Trump was only talked out of it by the combined efforts of the now-lying Barr, Joint Chiefs chair Gen. Mark Milley, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Even then, Esper moved 82nd Airborne units into position nearby to keep Trump "at bay," Trump was so insistent.

Asked to follow up, Barr had to admit that those troops were indeed called up, and tried to bullshit and bluster his way through:

"Well, your question to me just a moment ago was did he demand them on the streets, did he demand them in D.C.. No, we had them on standby in case they were needed."

Mmm-hmm.

Barr also continued to insist the protesters attacked at Lafayette Park were "not peaceful," ignoring Brennan's reminders that numerous of the network's own reporters were there and contradict his account. He insisted "There were not chemical irritants. Pepper spray is not a chemical irritant. It's not chemical." And "there was no gas."

Again, each of these statements was contradicted by reporters on the ground, and the Park Police itself had to withdraw its earlier claim that tear gas was not used in the park. He's lying. He's simply lying about all of it, via the time-warn practice of redefining questions and words themselves so that they mean whatever he prefers them to mean. He is not just lying, he is brazenly trolling his questioner.

The big lie, however, was that the attack on Lafayette Park and Trump’s walk to the church mere minutes later were “not connected.” The Park Police had been preparing to clear the park since that morning, said Barr, but it was complete coincident that the operation began, and the use of flashbang grenades, at precisely the moment networks began broadcasting an expected Trump speech that ended with Donald Trump announcing that he would now be taking a walk through the very grounds just cleared. Barr, in fact, says he “didn’t know” even that Trump would be speaking, when he “gave the green light” (which was not an order, but which was an order?) to clear the park.

Mmm-hmm.

It is evident that we will not see William Barr testify under oath—about this or anything else—until the Trump administration has ended and he has lost all power to refuse such testimony. At this point he is involved in perhaps a dozen scandals, all revolving around his attempts to block public knowledge of Trump’s various corrupt or Constitution-breaking acts. His Justice Department has become a tool only for exonerating Trump’s allies and punishing Trump’s opponents.

The one true thing we can take from all of this is that even William Barr, a devoted fascist, is aware that last Monday's attack crossed a line that not even a president is allowed to cross. Donald Trump is not allowed to beat, gas and drive out clergy on private church property or an adjacent park for the sole purpose of commandeering church property for a photo shoot. Both Trump and Barr believed he was, when the order was given; only days later did Barr realize that the country was not following him into his new definition of our laws.

House Democrat reluctance to insist on Barr's immediate testimony, as well as the testimony of all others involved in the militarization of Washington, the mobilization of unidentified paramilitary-outfitted groups, and the attacks on protesters, remains baffling. Barr and the others will of course refuse; Congress then must act to compel their cooperation in investigating these brazen violations of the Constitution and civil rights even if it means dragging each official to a hearing room in handcuffs and under guard.

As Barr has once again shown, nothing in the Constitution applies if there is no consequence for violating it; there is no such thing as consent of the governed if those that govern lie, egregiously, even about provable facts. Barr must be removed for his actions; Esper, Milley and others in the vague, seemingly invented-on-the-fly chain of command that led to these events must be expelled from public service.

A retired U.S. Navy captain let his racist ideology show on Facebook Live when he apparently didn't know he was going live in a conversation with his wife Friday night in Florida. Capt. Scott Bethmann could be heard in an Atlantic Beach community group spewing the n-word in complaints about his position as a white man in American society, according to First Coast News.

"So all the white people have to say something nice to the black b--ch that works in the office. But the black b--ch don't get fired. It's bulls--t," Bethmann said, reportedly giving his thoughts on companies that support the Black Lives Matter movement. "Management's going to fire the white people."

In response to his wife's warning that he "better watch" himself on the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association board, Bethmann can also be heard telling her: "I don't say anything, that's my point. The white m-----f-----s can't say anything, that's the point we're making here, Nancy."

His wife also reportedly broadcasted her ignorance when the couple started talking about admissions to the U.S. Naval Academy. "You can bend over and kiss the U.S. Naval Academy goodbye," she said. "They're gonna get the blacks, and the females, and the f-----g Asians from China, and let them steal all of our intellectual properties."

It’s unclear if she has faced any professional repercussions as a result of the conversation, but Bethmann later retired both as a trustee on the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association board and treasurer of Jacksonville's local USNAAA chapter, First Coast News reported.

WARNING: This video contains profanity and offensive language.

The conversation lasted 33 minutes before Bethmann realized he had went live with his remarks on Facebook, First Coast News reported. “I clicked onto some live event. What are they talking about," he asked. His apology soon followed.

Samuel Locklear III, chairman of the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association Board of Trustees, said in a statement Saturday that he accepted Bethmann’s resignation. “These attributed statements do not represent the mission and values of the Alumni Association, the Naval Academy or the U.S. Navy,” Locklear said.  

Read Locklear’s complete statement:

Today I was made aware of statements posted to a public forum attributed to an alumni volunteer of the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association Board of Trustees representing the Jacksonville, FL, chapter. These attributed statements do not represent the mission and values of the Alumni Association, the Naval Academy or the U.S. Navy.  

As volunteer leaders in our communities, we must be inspirations and examples for all citizens. As Chairman of our Alumni Association, I have accepted the resignation of this alumnus effective today, and asked the Jacksonville, FL, chapter to take appropriate action to appoint a new Chapter Trustee.  

The Naval Academy Alumni Association represents more than 65,000 individuals from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. We support the Naval Academy mission. As alumni, we seek to uphold the Naval Academy core leadership values of honor, courage and commitment. As an alumni organization, we seek to be an inspiration for all young people who want to become future Navy and Marine Corps officers. We will continue to honor that inspirational role. We are all in this together. We must face the challenges of today and all future challenges of tomorrow...together.

The violence and the mayhem of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and attendant protests isn't coming from the protesters—it’s not from BLM or antifa. It's coming from the cops. They are deliberately targeting journalists. They're even beating up old white men. They are out of control.

But, as the Center for Public Integrity reports, the major labor unions in the U.S. continue to support police unions. As the Center writes: "Labor unions exist to protect workers, but most workers aren't authorized to use deadly force as part of their jobs." Cops are, and they are protected by their labor contracts from being immediately disciplined even after blatant and egregious misconduct. Labor leaders, while expressing solidarity with the protesters and standing against systemic racism, aren't tackling the big problem here: collective bargaining agreements that shield cops from accountability.

"Public Integrity reached out to leaders of 10 major unions and labor groups," reporter Alexia Fernández Campbell writes. "None were willing to talk about police unions. Trumka, of the AFL-CIO, was too busy to chat. The president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union couldn't fit a call into his schedule. Teamsters President James Hoffa declined to comment." She says that the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, United Auto Workers, Communication Workers of America, Unite Here, and the American Federation of Teachers have not responded.

The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, did respond to say that the issue of union contracts and collective bargaining in police misconduct is a "false choice." Instead, she said, "I think we have to do something nationally about the demilitarization of policing." That is absolutely true. It must be addressed. So must the issue that officers—public servants whose salaries are paid by taxpayers— feel immune from accountability for their actions because of the protections they've negotiated in these agreements. Unless their actions end up going viral in cellphone videos.

Citizens should not have to arm themselves with cell phones to insure against being brutalized by the police force they're funding, and labor unions have to finally address this. "It's a very delicate subject, it's rarely discussed openly and out loud," Joshua Freeman, a labor historian at City University of New York, said. It's time to break that silence. Derek Chauvin, the officer who pinned George Floyd to the ground by the neck for eight minutes and 42 seconds, had at least 17 complaints filed against him for which he had received nothing more than written reprimands. He felt untouchable. He felt he could treat George Floyd any way he wanted with impunity.

The way the cops have rampaged through our streets shows that too many of them feel the same. It's time for that to end. The nation not only has to strip them of the weapons of war they all now have, it has to make them answerable to the people they are sworn to protect and serve. Big labor has a responsibility to make that happen. "Public Integrity reached out to the IUPA and other major police unions, such as the Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Benevolent Association," Campbell reports. "None of them responded."

The impeached, popular vote-losing U.S. president stomped around one of just two manufacturers of the nasal swabs required to test patients for the novel coronavirus on Friday, predictably refusing to wear a mask. Shortly after he left, all of the swabs produced during Donald Trump’s factory photo op were destroyed, according to a company spokesperson. 

In the latest of his minutes-long tours of American factories for the cameras, this time at Puritan Medical Products in Guilford, Maine, the likely single-term president, clad in one of his signature ill-fitting suits, lumbered around the normally sterile facility, accosting “(w)orkers in white lab coats, hair nets and plastic booties” with bellows of “Made in the USA!”

Trump added that he’d been saying “Made in the USA” for “a long time,” USA TODAY reported Saturday. The failed steak vendor and necktie seller has previously come under fire for manufacturing much of his branded merchandise overseas; in 2016 he first defended that choice by falsely claiming that “They don’t even make this stuff here.”

Virginia Templet, marketing manager for Puritan, tells USA TODAY that production on the much-needed testing swabs screeched to a halt to accommodate Trump, who has been widely condemned for his response to the pandemic that has gripped the nation and the world for most of the year. "The running of the factory machines is very limited today and will only occur when the president is touring the facility floor," Templet told USA TODAY, adding that "swabs produced during that time will be discarded."

Trump’s visit had been discouraged by Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who declined to meet with the former reality TV star. Mills, a Democrat, was concerned that the extremely unpopular chief executive would spark further unrest as Mainers continue to protest racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others. The entire Pine Tree State congressional delegation, including perpetually useless and soon to be ousted Republican Sen. Susan Collins, also declined to meet with Trump.  In April, Puritan Medical Products was awarded over $75 million from the federal government to produce the much-needed testing swabs.

President Donald Trump and his allies for years have amplified racist messages on Twitter while simultaneously reaching out to black and Hispanic voters, a dissonant balancing act that’s now rocking the GOP amid nationwide racial justice protests.

The two competing forces collided Saturday on the Twitter feed of Trump campaign senior adviser Mercedes Schlapp, when she boosted a tweet that lauded a man in Texas in a viral video as he yelled a racial slur and wielded a chainsaw to chase away anti-racism demonstrators.

After POLITICO reached out to her and the campaign Saturday morning, Schlapp then retweeted another account that posted a version of the video that muted the slur. After this story published, she removed both her retweets and issued a written apology Saturday evening.

“I deeply apologize and I retweeted without watching the full video. I deleted the tweet,” Schlapp wrote. “I would never knowingly promote the use of that word. This is time for healing the nation and not division.”

Beyond Trump’s inner circle, Republicans have been under fire over racist social media posts in Texas, where the chainsaw incident happened, triggering strife within GOP circles.

A dozen GOP county chairs in the state are under scrutiny for sharing racist social media posts commenting on the unrest and uprisings across the nation in response to the killing of a black man, George Floyd, by a white Minnesota police officer. One county chair juxtaposed a Martin Luther King Jr. quote next to an image of a banana, and another commented that “pandemic isn’t working. Start the racial wars.”

Against this backdrop, Schlapp‘s Saturday retweets highlighted how the Trump campaign operates in contradictory worlds of its own making. On one hand, Schlapp favorably promoted a man spewing anti-black racism and on the other she urged black people to vote for Trump just three days prior in an online campaign discussion on race. In that setting, she attacked Joe Biden’s tough-on-crime past while eliding Trump’s past record and rhetoric.

“Joe Biden supported the mass incarceration of black and Hispanic communities and has failed to lift them out of poverty,” Schlapp said. “In stark contrast, President Trump has delivered unprecedented opportunity for black Americans.”

The Twitter activity from Schlapp was part of a longstanding practice by Trump and his backers who occasionally use Twitter to amplify inflammatory messages that are at odds with the campaign’s appeals to black and other minority voters. Trump, who has fought accusations of racism for years, was in the midst of a black-voter outreach effort when Floyd’s killing changed the political dynamics.

The night before Schlapp’s retweet of the video to her 140,000 followers, the president retweeted a clip of conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s interview with a conservative black commentator, Candace Owens, who has taken a lead role in bashing Floyd.

“@RealCandaceO gave her thoughts: ‘The fact that he has been held up as a martyr sickens me,’” Beck tweeted on Wednesday. Trump boosted the post Friday with a retweet.

Trump has not personally criticized Floyd, called on the federal government to investigate his killing by Minneapolis police and has also used his Twitter feed to praise supporters who are black.

But after the looting erupted amid some protests over Floyd’s killing, Trump was criticized for denouncing “THUGS” in a Twitter post that warned “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase traced back to a segregation-era Miami police chief. Twitter flagged the tweet for violating its rules against inciting violence. The White House then posted the message, getting flagged as well. Trump later claimed he didn’t know where the phrase originated.

Retweeting used to occupy a type of gray area on Twitter. The phrase “retweets are not an endorsement” was long a mantra of those who wanted to essentially repost content from another account on their own for a variety of purposes, from an interest in engaging in honest discussion to plausible deniability. But Twitter behavior evolved with new functionality to allow a person to comment on a retweeted post through “quote tweeting.” Now when campaign staff retweet messages, they generally lose the ability to credibly argue they weren’t reinforcing and broadcasting a message that aligns with their viewpoints.

The controversy with Trump surged again in April when the president was criticized for retweeting a message that said “fire Fauci,” concerning one of his top advisers on the coronavirus pandemic.

Before he became president, Trump came under fire for a wide variety of Twitter activity — from promoting the false “birther” conspiracy about President Barack Obama to retweeting a false message about “black on black” crime. The next year, he tweeted an image of a Star of David set on a field of cash, which many viewed as anti-Semitic. The latter tweet has been deleted.

The president’s son and namesake last year questioned the race of Sen. Kamala Harris (D.-Calif.), at the time a candidate for president who’s now on Joe Biden’s running-mate shortlist. He deleted the tweet after outcry.

In Schlapp’s case, she retweeted a quoted tweet of the viral video that had been viewed about 7.5 million times on Twitter as of Saturday afternoon. The video originated in McAllen, Texas, where demonstrators had gathered downtown, only to be confronted by a man with a chainsaw that he revved at them as they fled.

“Go home!” yells the man, who was arrested Friday. “Don’t let those f------ n------ out there fool you!”

The man’s use of racist language and violent threats were roundly condemned on social media, with some sarcastically referring to the cult classic movie “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” A pro-Trump account from Texas, though, lauded the assailant on Twitter and said he is “a Mexican business owner.” Another pro-Trump account, called Latino Townhall, approvingly quote-tweeted the post Friday night and exclaimed: “That’s how to do it.”

Hours later, Schlapp retweeted that post. Schlapp, who is married to the prominent head of the American Conservative Union that hosts the popular CPAC conference, later retweeted it from another account that censored the racist comment but wrote the protesters had said “f--- the police.” There is no evidence the demonstrators said that.

The man in Texas, identified as Daniel Peña by local press, exposed a little-discussed issue among Latinos: anti-black racism. The McAllen police department on Saturday confirmed Pena’s ethnicity as “White/Hispanic.”

The issue of anti-black sentiment among Latinos has surfaced as an issue in Schlapp’s original hometown of Miami, where Democrats and progressives fretted that support for demonstrations over Floyd has been lacking among Hispanics in the community.

Juan Peñalosa, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party, said his organization is trying to address the issue of racism among Hispanics while Trump’s is helping to fuel it.

“The Trump campaign strategy has always been to win through division. But Mercedes’ tweet shows they are taking it to the next level,” said Peñalosa.

“While most of us are having honest discussions on how to expose racism and eliminate it — the Trump campaign has moved beyond their 2016 dog whistles and passive nods to fringe racist groups,” he said. “Now they are giving racists a platform, retweeting them and actively amplifying their message. It makes my skin crawl.”

Laura Barrón-López contributed to this report.

Participants in Black Lives Matter protests are recording police brutality to keep officers accountable.

Police officers across the country are now under investigation or facing disciplinary action, after viral videos captured their violence against participants in peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.

Countless videos uploaded on social media have documented officers using excessive force against the protesters, who have been marching since last week, following the police killing of George Floyd on May 25. As these videos have spread online, they have further incensed citizens advocating for stricter police regulations, while others are having even more tangible impacts. Some city officials have responded to the videos by opening investigations into the depicted incidents, putting the offending officers on administrative leave, or even terminating them from their positions.

In Buffalo, New York, two officers were suspended without pay on Thursday night after they pushed a 75-year-old man to the ground, an incident which was filmed by a local NPR reporter and subsequently went viral on Twitter. The police initially reported that the man had tripped and fallen on his own, but the video evidence shows otherwise — which sparked immediate outrage. (The man is now in stable but serious condition, according to the city’s mayor.)

Some officers in New York City have also been disciplined for their violence against protesters. One officer was suspended with pay on Friday following an Internal Affairs Bureau investigation, after he was caught pushing a woman to the ground on May 29 in Brooklyn. The officer’s supervisor, who was on the scene but did not intervene, was also “transferred,” according to NYPD Police Commissioner Dermot Shea.

Another NYPD officer stationed in Brooklyn was also suspended without pay after pulling down a protester’s mask and pepper spraying him in the face on May 30. The incident was captured on video and shared to Twitter, where it’s received more than 3 million views so far.

In Atlanta, six police officers were arrested for illegally tasing two college students on May 30. The students were driving when the police stopped them for violating the city’s curfew and repeatedly asked what was going on as the officers opened the car door. The officers then aggressively dragged the students out of the car after tasing them, then slashed their tires and broke the driver’s side window — all of which was captured on air by a local CBS affiliate. Two of the six officers were fired and three were placed on desk duty before prosecutors issued arrest warrants for charges of aggravated assault, illegally pointing a taser, and criminal damage to property against all six officers.

And in Chicago, two officers were relieved of their duties pending an investigation into a violent arrest they made on May 31. A video shared on social media showed police, including the two officers who were disciplined, swarming a car in a mall parking lot and breaking the car windows while dragging people out. One woman was thrown to the ground, and an officer put his knee to her neck — the same restraining method that killed George Floyd. The officers said they had pulled over the car because the passengers had “assembled with three or more persons for the purpose of using force or violence to disturb the peace.” The passengers deny any wrongdoing, NBC Chicago reported.

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office has now opened an investigation into potential criminal charges, and the FBI is investigating the incident as well, according to State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.

Viral videos have been crucial in keeping the police accountable

Viral videos have been essential in capturing police brutality, particularly as the current wave of Black Lives Matter protests takes hold. One Twitter thread alone, posted by lawyer T. Greg Doucette, shares over 300 examples of police brutality — many of which depict cars running into protesters, the police firing an excessive amount of tear gas, and groups of officers assaulting individuals. The thread has been shared widely, with more than 58,000 retweets.

In recent years, technology has become more essential and accessible to protesters, and almost everyone carries a high-quality camera, thanks to their smartphones. This has made it easier for anyone to capture police brutality, often in real time, since they can easily upload the videos to social media on the spot. Incidents that might have been erased in the past are now recorded for the entire world to see.

“The ability for the public to document what is going on is an important tool for holding powerful people and institutions accountable, including the police,” Evan Greer, deputy director of the digital advocacy group Fight for the Future, told the Washington Post earlier this week regarding the use of cameras by protesters. “The availability of, particularly, smartphone cameras has dramatically increased the number of instances that we see.”

The officers who faced disciplinary action in Chicago, Atlanta, and New York would likely not have been reprimanded if not for the viral videos that captured their misconduct. That’s why so many protesters are filming and uploading scenes from the demonstrations to keep the police accountable.

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On Friday, in the same speech where he declared his intention to drive Melania cross-country in an RV and talked about how the job report figures made it a great day it was for George Floyd, Trump also let everyone know that he had defeated the coronavirus. The pandemic was over, said Trump, or “largely over.” In an astounding rewrite of history that’s too fresh to even be history, Trump explained how he moved quickly to shut down the nation, saved millions, and “made every decision correctly.” Trump has made it clear that the pandemic is done … except for the part where a thousand people a day are dying from COVID-19, tens of thousands more are coming down with the disease, and several states are now reporting cases at their highest rates ever. It’s over, dammit. Because he says so. 

But … one thing definitely is not over. That’s how Trump ripped away environmental regulations using COVID-19 as an excuse. That “emergency” is still fully in place.

Back in April, Trump began using the COVID-19 crisis as an excuse to roll back regulations of all kinds. That included eliminating enforcement of safety standards on job sites. It meant allowing coal mines to operate without effective supervision. It meant suspending regulations on business that were “an absolute invitation to wage theft.” 

It also meant simply telling companies to pollute away, as the EPA would be taking something of a holiday on environmental regulations. Because nothing says taking a public health crisis seriously like letting companies know they can dump anything they like into the air and water.

Oddly enough, now that Trump has declared the pandemic largely over, announced that the economy is a “rocketship,” and stated that things will only get better from here, he is … using the pandemic as an excuse for still more regulatory slashing. As The Washington Post reports, this includes telling power plants that no one is going to monitor their pollution, but it also includes some other changes that are sure to make American life more … interesting.

For example, Trump has determined that the COVID-19 pandemic means that its time to relax regulations that help consumers correct inaccurate information on credit reports. At a time when everyone is making more use of online and over-the-phone purchases from everything from food to, well, vital paper products, there has also been a record amount of fraud, phishing, and plain old theft. And, of course, people are simply out of work, or temporarily laid off, and unsure of how to deal with expenses from mortgages and rent, to medical expenses directly connected to the pandemic. All of which makes this a very puzzling time to decide that this is a great time to make it harder for people to protect themselves from identity theft and fraudulence charges.

This is also apparently the right time to take away regulations that truckers can only go so far in a day and must take regular rest breaks. It’s understandable that there are concerns about the distribution system, and there have been multiple stories about farms dumping produce on the ground. But the first thing that leaps to mind when it comes to finding solutions should probably not be “let’s allow guys driving a 40-ton vehicle at high speed blast down the road no matter how tired they are.” At least, not if those guys are expected to share the highways with anyone else.

And, of course, Trump issued a special executive order on Thursday to wipe away five decades of environmental laws. Coal-fired power plants informed that no one will be checking to see how much mercury, uranium, sulfur, or other pollutants they’re producing. Oil pipelines—pipelines that absolutely no one needs in the midst of a oil glut and a collapse of Canadian tar sands mining—can go ahead without having to fret about impact statements. 

Lindsey Graham’s sexual orientation and hypocrisy became a trending topic on social media this week after gay adult performer and escort Sean Harding threatened to out a “homophobic Republican Senator who is no better than Trump who keeps passing legislation that is damaging to the lgbt and minority communities.”

Harding claimed that “every sex worker [he] know[s] has been hired by this man,” whom he named only as “LG”. Followers of Harding and other Twitter users quickly pointed their fingers at the senator from South Carolina.

Tweeted Harding: “There is a homophobic republican senator who is no better than Trump who keeps passing legislation that is damaging to the lgbt and minority communities. Every sex worker I know has been hired by this man. Wondering if enough of us spoke out if that could get him out of office? Fellow sex workers I invite you to stand with me during this crucial time. EVERY major news network is in my inbox including high profile lawyers willing to take this case. There’s strength in numbers – I KNOW you’re out there because EVERYONE has a story about LG when we talk.”

Harding added: “I cannot do this alone. If you’d be willing to stand with me against LG please let me know. …. So far I have two individuals who would be willing to go public and support my claims. Anyone else?”

Harding’s claim led to a slew of similar reports, and “Lady G”, the name by which Graham is allegedly discussed among escorts, began trending on Twitter.

This story on Medium was published and deleted.

The flurry of accusations caught the eye of well-known PR and crisis expert Howard Bragman, who wrote on Facebook, “This could get really interesting really quickly for a certain incumbent Senator from South Carolina who’s up for re-election. Stay tuned to this one.”

Sex columnist and LGBTQ activist Dan Savage approved, tweeting: “Outing is a brutal tactic that should be reserved for brutes. Lady G more than qualifies.”

And SiriusXM host, author, and activist Michelangelo Signorile weighed in on the politics of outing, tweeting: “There’s chatter out there so let me clarify something. There is really no such thing as ‘outing’ — this term was coined in 1990 by a closeted Time mag reporter who had his own self-interest in labeling some of my and other reporters’ work There is only reporting….…Sometime reporting focuses on issues public figures would rather not see made public, and is gratuitous and often unnecessary to report. But other reporting is quite relevant to a story and important for the public to know whether the public figure wants it known or not. “

“Since being gay is not a bad thing — even now according to the courts in a defamation suit — reporting it about a public figure who hasn’t hidden it from people in his/her life, but just wants it censored from the public for business or whatever reasons, isn’t wrong per se,” Signorile added. “If this characteristic, like other characteristics about public figures, is relevant to a larger story encompassing their work, their role, their power, their influence, and is something the public should know — then it should be reported.”

“Some say, well why should the public know? Well, it’s interesting for the public to know if the person is engaging in work that is influenced by their queerness, for example. But more so if the person is working against LGBTQ people it’s relevant. And……If this person is going to come under the microscope when seeking very high public office, certainly this is something that will/should become known. Deception, at that level, isn’t good. An old debate, but remember some of this, as it will keep coming up in the future.”

Graham has a long history of votes and rhetoric against LGBTQ people, with a rating from the Human Rights Campaign of just 12 percent. He was also a vocal Trump critic until Trump became president, when Graham became vocally pro-Trump and one of his most fervent allies in the Senate. Some suggest it was because he discovered Trump had dirt on him.

FITSNews reports: “Graham is facing a tougher-than-expected fight this fall from Democrat Jaime Harrison, who has attracted significant national support (and raised some serious cash) in his bid to oust the third-term lawmaker. Harrison, incidentally, has been the focus of similar rumors over the years … which we care as much about as the rumors surrounding Graham. Still, something about this particular installment of the ‘Lindsey Graham is about to be outed’ rumor that seems … different. Lots of national reporters are clearly chasing it (including several who have called our news desk), and the chatter about numerous male escorts contemplating the consequences of violating alleged nondisclosure agreements seems curiously (disturbingly) specific.”

Of course, Graham has been the subject of gay rumors for years, and we’ve been covering the topic since at least 2009. 

In 2009, Graham (R-SC) was asked about rumors he is gay by Mike Stark of The Crooked Dope.

Wrote Stark: “At Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, Senator Lindsey Graham asked her about anonymous comments offered by a range of lawyers. These comments were negative, mostly having to do with the Justice’s temperament. Leaving aside the fact that Justice Scalia’s acidic demeanor never seemed to bother any of the white male Senators called upon to confirm him, I did think it was notable to ask a nominated Justice to comment on accusations made by anonymous accusers. I especially found it interesting because there is no shortage of rumors regarding Senator Graham’s sexual orientation. That puts Graham in almost the same position Justice Sotomayor except nobody that I know of has asked Senator Graham to respond to the rumors. What’s more, if Graham did have gay relations while a member of the military, he broke the law.”

After his question was brushed off, Stark said to Graham, “I’m guessing that after a long career in the military, you’re not going to dignify any of these rumors with any kind of comment.”

Replied Graham, “Right, right.”

Asked about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Graham replied, “I want to see what the military says.”

In 2010, the New York Times brought up the gay rumors in a profile of the senator, but of course Graham denied:

“For his sins, Glenn Beck termed the senator Obama Lite, while Rush Limbaugh labeled him Lindsey Grahamnesty. Less tame are the blogosphere monikers, like ‘Miss Lindsey,’ that play off of Graham’s never-married status. During a South Carolina Tea Party rally this spring, one speaker created an uproar by postulating that Graham supported a guest-worker program out of fear that the Democrats might otherwise expose his homosexuality. (Graham smirked when I brought this up. ‘Like maybe I’m having a clandestine affair with Ricky Martin,’ he said. ‘I know it’s really gonna upset a lot of gay men — I’m sure hundreds of ’em are gonna be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge — but I ain’t available. I ain’t gay. Sorry.’)”

Graham’s opponent in a 2014 Senate race called him “ambiguously gay.”

Even fellow Republican Mike Huckabee has taken jabs at Graham’s life in the closet. Said Huckabee in 2017 to Laura Ingraham, after Graham made some unfavorable remarks about Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA): “I’m very disappointed in Lindsey. I sometimes wonder what uniform he puts on each morning when goes out to the field to play, and I’m not just talking about the partisan uniform.”

Graham commented on the rumors most recently after National Coming Out Day in 2018, when Chelsea Handler tweeted, “If you’re wondering why Republicans took a sick day today, it’s probably because it’s #NationalComingOutDay. Looking at you @LindseyGrahamSC”

Graham responded: “It’s a free country, you can say what you want to say, I don’t care. I don’t think much about what she says at all. If she wants to live her life that way. It’s up to her. To the extent that it matters, I’m not gay….Belittling people is not as funny as it used to be, and that’s a good thing.”

RELATED: Watch: GOP Senator Lindsey Graham Asked About Gay Rumors

And in 2019, Patti LuPone offered this blunt assessment, tweeting, “Lindsey Graham you are a disgrace. On a personal note, why don’t you just bite the bullet and come out. You might just come to your senses.”

And then there was SNL.

In November 2019, Bill Maher went after Graham’s “hypocrisy on steroids” on Real Time with a list less about the Republican South Carolina senator’s heinous, turn-about political allegiance to Trump and more about the rumors of his sexuality, using gay-coded tropes.

“LadyG” and “LadyGraham” were still trending on Twitter Saturday morning. Harding has not posted any updates to his efforts, though they clearly seem to be retaining steam. Graham has not yet commented.

The post Lindsey Graham Gay Rumors Erupt Again as Escort Threatens to Out ‘Homophobic Republican Senator’ — Here’s the Latest, and the History appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Remember all the way back to Friday morning when Donald Trump strolled out to bask in the warm glow of an unexpected drop in the May unemployment rate? According to the jobs report issued on Friday morning, unemployment across the nation fell from 14.7% in April, to 13.3% in May. That makes unemployment merely a third higher than it was at the peak of the Great Recession. Trump was so excited by this outcome that he declared he wanted to buy “one of those trailers, what are they called?” and drive around the country with Melania. It was “the greatest comeback in American history.” In fact, it was so good that “George is looking down right now and saying: 'This is a great thing that's happening for our country.' This is a great day for him." Yes, Trump really said that.

So … funny thing. The actual jobs report appeared later in the day and it did say that the unemployment rate was 13.3%. But it also said that the BLS and the Census Bureau were investigating a “misclassification error” around workers sidelined by the coronavirus pandemic. The truth is that the actual unemployment rate was around 16.3%.

The problem was that the the surveys used for the jobs reports polled employers about jobs and put a large number of people into the category of being absent from work for “other reasons.” In this case, the reason was that companies had shut down or cut back because of the pandemic and related impacts. However, that category of “other reasons” is normally used for workers who are essentially taking some uncategorized form of leave. It’s used for people who are on jury duty or taking personal time off to deal with a family crisis. These people are still counted as being employed.

But in this case, that same category was used for people who had genuinely been let go due to the downturn caused by the COVID-19 crisis.

“If the workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work due to "other reasons" (over and above the number absent for other reasons in a typical May) had been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported.”

Oh, and he should just keep George Floyd’s name out of his mouth.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly indicated that the 16.3% value represented a substantial increase when compared to Aprils reported 14.7% rate. However, April’s report also contained this error, as did the report for March, so while the 16.3% rate is terrible, it still appears to be a decrease when compared to the previous month. The Washington Post indicates that the error was 5% in April, meaning that the true unemployment rate for that month was almost 20%.

Buy the books on this reading list at black-owned stores.

Over the past few weeks, police brutality has raged across America in response to nationwide protests against police brutality. Some people have been left searching for answers. Were the police always this bad? How can so many violent events possibly have happened? Should we just get rid of the police altogether? What would that even look like?

I’ve compiled a reading list of nonfiction books that can help you understand where we are right now, how we got here, and where we can go next. But I want to be clear: Reading the books below is not enough. We’re in a moment of national crisis, and reading is only helpful insofar as it informs your actions. Let these books be a starting point, not the only thing you do. Take action.

Also, please buy these books from black-owned bookstores. All the links I’ve provided below will take you to a black-owned bookstore whenever possible, and here’s a list of other black-owned bookstores where you can shop.

Books on the current state of America, racism, and the police

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

In one of the most influential books of the past 20 years, Alexander shows how the criminal justice system works to replicate the effects of Jim Crow laws and create a new racial caste system. This book laid the intellectual basis for the revitalized critique of America’s criminal justice system over the past decade and is essential reading.

When Police Kill by Franklin Zimring

Law professor Franklin Zimring goes deep into the numbers to figure out how often the police kill civilians, why, and who they are killing. This book is a data-driven snapshot of the situation on the ground circa 2018.

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea J. Ritchie

While sexual violence committed by police is the second-most frequently reported form of police misconduct, it is not the second-most talked about. Police misconduct attorney Andrea J. Ritchie aims to change that in this book, which looks at the often-ignored ways in which police can prey on women from vulnerable communities.

The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America’s Law Enforcement by Matthew Horace and Ron Harris

Matthew Horace, a black man who spent 28 years in law enforcement, explains the culture of racism deeply embedded in America’s police departments. Horace’s first-person account is supplemented with reporting by journalist Ron Harris, but what’s most indelible in this book is Horace’s account of finding himself with a gun to his head and pinned to the ground by a white officer.

A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, edited by Sun Yung Shin

In this provocative anthology, 16 writers explain what it’s like to live as a person of color in Minnesota, the state where George Floyd was killed by police.

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

Robin DiAngelo is a sociologist, and she also leads workshops in diversity training. In White Fragility, she examines the enormous defensiveness white people exhibit when talking about race, why it exists, and how to dismantle it.

Books on how we got here

Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi

In this National Book Award winner, Kendi traces the development of racist ideas in American thought from the colonial era through to the present. He convincingly argues that American racism was developed in order to justify structural inequalities that were already in place, and that they were most often not the result of ignorance or thoughtlessness from the uneducated, but the product of deep thought from some of America’s most beloved intellectuals.

The Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne

Historian Gerald Horne argues that the American revolution was prompted less by grand ideals about liberty and equality and universal truths than it was by fears that the elite of the colony might face a slave revolt like those sweeping the Caribbean and that the central freedom for which our Founding Fathers fought was the freedom to own other people. Horne is writing more for fellow historians than for lay readers, but the force and clarity of his argument come through regardless.

Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton

This landmark book from 1967 features the first known use of the phrase “institutional racism.” Civil rights organizer Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton examine the roots of racism in America and why reform is so difficult. Coming in for particular criticism are the black civil rights movement’s ostensible allies among liberal groups, whom Carmichael and Hamilton argue are complacent and invested in the status quo.

Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity by Ersula J. Ore

Ersula J. Ore, a professor of ethics, African American studies, and rhetoric, traces the history of lynching as a means of civic engagement for white people. She argues that for white people, lynching is a way of declaring what they believe America to be: a nation of white people, from whom black people are to be excluded by any means necessary.

Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City by Clarence Taylor

Historian Clarence Taylor traces the history of police brutality in New York City, from the so-called Harlem Riots of the 1930s through to the de Blasio administration of the present day. He also chronicles the stories of those who tried to fight back against police violence toward communities of color, including both their defeats and their victories.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Academic Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor places the #BlackLivesMatter movement in its historical context, tracing the lines from early American racism to contemporary mass incarceration and police violence. Cornel West called this book “the best analysis we have of the #BlackLivesMatter moment of the long struggle for freedom in America.”

Books on where we can go from here

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Kendi’s memoir asks us not to stay trapped by the system in which we currently live, but to imagine what an equitable anti-racist society would actually look like. Most importantly, he asks us to actively work toward building it.

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

“The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods,” writes sociologist Alex S. Vitale. “The problem is policing itself.” Vitale argues that the best way to reduce crime, spending, and injustice and to increase public safety is to abolish the police and create new alternatives.

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Survival from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepezna-Samarasinha

Our current criminal justice system and its focus on the police is not the only system societies have ever used to fight against violence and injustice. This anthology by social activists lays out strategies from the transformative justice movement to resolve violence on a community-based level and to prevent it before it ever begins.

Additional resources:

• JStor Daily has a reading list of accessible scholarly articles on institutional racism in America.
• The Association of University Presses has set up a storefront on Bookshop.org featuring books on equity, justice, and inclusion.
• Haymarket Books has a list of books on mass incarceration and policing.
• Electric Literature has a reading list on the police abolition movement.
• This Google Drive is a list of anti-racist resources for white people.
• Noteworthy: The Journal Blog has a list of children’s books that can help you talk to kids about racism.

Now act

Now that you know the background, it’s time to take action. To get you started, here are articles at The Cut and Lifehacker that will outline ways to donate your time, skills, or money to support the protesters and fight against police brutality and systemic racism.

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

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

“The problem is the way policing was built,” historian Khalil Muhammad tells Vox.

Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old black boy, was stoned to death by white people in 1919 after he swam into what they deemed the wrong part of Lake Michigan.

In response, black people in Chicago rose up in protest, and white people attacked them. More than 500 people were injured and 38 were killed. Afterward, the city convened a commission to study the causes of the violence.

The commission found “systemic participation in mob violence by the police,” Khalil Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and author of the book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, told Vox. “When police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them.”

In the process of compiling the report, white experts also testified that “the police are systematically engaging in racial bias when they’re targeting black suspects,” Muhammad said. The report “should have been the death of systemic police racism and discrimination in America.”

That was in 1922.

It’s almost 100 years later, and thousands of Americans are in the streets daily, protesting the same violence and racism that the Chicago commission documented. It may seem like nothing can change, but Muhammad said the last several weeks could be a wake-up call for some Americans to what policing in this country really means.

Part of that awakening, though, also involves understanding the history of police violence. Muhammad’s work focuses on systemic racism and criminal justice; The Condemnation of Blackness deals with the idea of black criminality, which he defines as the process by which “people are assigned the label of criminal, whether they are guilty or not.” That process has been a vicious cycle in American history, Muhammad explains, wherein black people were arrested to prevent them from exercising their rights, then deemed dangerous because of their high arrest rates, which deprived them of their rights even further.

I spoke with Muhammad by phone to better understand this history, what it means today, and what it would take to make 2020 and beyond different from 1922. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Anna North

Can you trace how the idea of black criminality appeared in America, starting with slavery?

Khalil Muhammad

The notion of criminality in the broadest sense has to do with slave rebellions and uprisings, the effort of black people to challenge their oppression in the context of slavery. Slave patrols were established to maintain, through violence and the threat of violence, the submission of enslaved people. But we really don’t get notions of black criminality in the way that we think of them today until after slavery in 1865.

The deliberate choice to abolish slavery, [except as] punishment for crime, leaves a gigantic loophole that the South attempts to leverage in the earliest days of freedom. What that amounts to is that all expressions of black freedom, political rights, economic rights, and social rights were then subject to criminal sanction. Whites could accuse black people who wanted to vote of being criminals. People who wanted to negotiate fair labor contracts could be defined as criminals. And the only thing that wasn’t criminalized was the submission to a white landowner to work on their land.

Shortly afterwards, a lot of the South builds up a pretty robust carceral machinery and begins to sell black labor to private contractors to help pay for all of this. And for the next 70 years, the system is pretty much a criminal justice system that runs alongside a political economy that is thoroughly racist and white supremacist. And so we don’t get the era of mass incarceration in the South, what we get is the era of mass criminalization. Because the point is not to put people in prison, the point is to keep them working in a subordinate way, so that they can be exploited.

Anna North

What was happening in the North while this mass criminalization was happening in the South?

Khalil Muhammad

There had already been African Americans [in the North] before the end of slavery, and they were subjected to forms of segregation. But it wasn’t really until the beginning of the 20th century, when streams of black migrants began to move to northern cities, and particularly during World War I and what became known as the Great Migration, that we began to see the increased ascription of black people as prone to criminality, as a dangerous race, as a way of essentially limiting their access to the full fruits of their freedom in the North.

Social science played a huge role. What we’d call today “academic experts” of one kind or another, were part of the effort to define black people as a particular criminal class in the American population. And what they essentially did was they used the evidence coming out of the South, beginning in the first decades after slavery. They used the census data to point to the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. They were almost three times overrepresented in the 1890 census in southern prisons.

So that evidence became part of a national discussion that essentially said, “Well, now that black people have their freedom, what are they doing with it? They’re committing crimes. In the South and in the North, and the census data is the proof.”

And so people began to build on that data and add to it. Police statistics began to become more important in determining how black people were doing, whether they were behaving or not. We quickly moved from census data to local data, from South to North, and we begin to see the consolidation of a set of facts that black people have a crime problem.

Anna North

So it’s a cycle: Black people were incarcerated in the South, and because they were incarcerated, this whole theory that black people were criminal was built on top of that?

Khalil Muhammad

That’s exactly what I’m saying. Of course, there’s no footnotes or asterisks to what was happening in the South. People just take the data at face value, kind of like people take the data at face value today. They just look at the data and say, “Oh, well of course, look what’s happening in these communities.”

Anna North

How do we see these attitudes about black criminality play out in policing around the country, leading up through the 20th century to the present?

Khalil Muhammad

Once we have the consolidation of the fact that crime statistics prove nationally, everywhere, that black people have a crime problem, the arguments for diminishing their equal citizenship rights are national. They’re not just southern any longer. And they’re at every level of society — local, state, federal.

They are existing in cultural products like The Birth of a Nation, the first truly major Hollywood film release. Black criminality becomes the most dominant basis for justifying segregation, whether legal or by custom, everywhere in America.

It had already defined the heart of the Jim Crow form of segregation, but it really begins in the Great Migration period to shape the maldistribution of public goods for black people — access to neighborhoods, access to schools, access to hospitals, access to forms of leisure. And, of course, all of these restrictions are enforced by white citizens but most especially by local law enforcement, by police officers.

In the South, police were less on the front lines because there were fewer of them. There was more vigilante enforcement of white supremacy: A white man really could shoot a black man or woman down in the middle of the street and get away with it. That was less likely to happen in the North — what was more likely to happen was for a white resident to simply call the police.

The same basic idea that in white spaces, black people are presumptively suspect, is still playing out in America today. The idea that police officers should prevent crime in black communities, rather than simply policing the borders of black communities, is what gave us stop and frisk, which actually is not just from the 1990s or inspired by “broken windows” policing, but versions of it were playing out very officially in the 1960s. And by looking at the archives, which I’ve done in my book, unofficially and unnamed, going back to the 1910s and ‘20s.

So this idea that you can prevent crime in a community where the crime statistics say a lot of crime happens, and presume that a certain demographic of black men — especially in that community — are likely criminals, that logic begins as early as the 1960s. And it’s still playing out.

While that pattern played out, one of the things that happens during Prohibition is that the manufacturing and distribution of alcohol creates this massive underground economy, which is now being regulated by white ethnic men who don’t sue each other in civil court, but actually shoot at each other when they’re competing over the spoils of bootlegging. And a lot of that action is deliberately put in black communities.

The speakeasies, the corruption is hidden within black communities. Everyone is complicit in this: The bootleggers are complicit, the police are complicit. The only people who aren’t complicit are everyday working-class black people who don’t want what’s happening in their communities to be happening.

The effect of that is to produce yet another battery of crime statistics coming out of northern cities that shows high rates of arrest of black people during the Prohibition period, when in fact, they’re being targeted for political clampdowns of overwhelmingly white underground activity. It’s just remarkable.

And yet again, the white public doesn’t read any footnotes or get any asterisks to it. What they get is evidence of disproportionate numbers of arrests in the black community during a time where just about everybody knew who was behind bootlegging.

[But] black people — black reformers, black activists, black scholars, black journalists — were always documenting what was happening to them. They were always resisting and they made some headway, beginning in the 1920s, around calling attention to systemic police racism and discrimination.

Anna North

That’s the next thing I wanted to ask about. I know that you wrote about this a little bit in your Washington Post op-ed last year — talk to me a little bit about the history of protests against racist policing.

Khalil Muhammad

The earliest days of the civil rights movement were focused on the problem of lynching. The NAACP literally begins because of lynching. And [one] reason was because of the threat of lynching in the North. It’s not to say that the progressives who founded the organization in 1910 didn’t care about lynching that had been going on in the South. But it was kind of like a George Floyd moment. It was like, “Holy smokes, if this can happen in Springfield, Illinois, where a lynching had occurred in 1909, then we’ve got to draw a line in the sand.”

Alongside their focus on racial violence in the earliest days, they also began to pay attention to police violence, particularly in the North, because the NAACP leadership was in northern cities. It was headquartered in New York. And so what was happening in their own backyards was more like systemic police violence than lynch mobs. And that began the process, particularly for W.E.B. Du Bois, who establishes kind of a police blotter, or let’s call it a police-brutality blotter, and the primary magazine for the organization.

Ida B. Wells, who was also another founder of the NAACP, begins to organize around police violence and other forms of racial violence in those cities. African Americans themselves start to resist policing and call attention. Ministers, teachers, bricklayers — essentially what was the working and professional class of black America at the turn of the 20th century are very vocal, and they demand police reform. They demand accountability for criminal activity amongst the police and they don’t get any of it.

By the 1920s, the first of a series of race riots erupts in East St. Louis, spreads to Philadelphia. Another one occurs in Chicago. The Chicago one is sparked by the death of a [17-year-old] swimming in Lake Michigan who crosses an aqueous color line. Black people are outraged. They want justice. White people take offense and begin to attack them in their communities.

And what comes out of that is the first blue-ribbon commission to study the causes of riots. In that report, the Chicago commission [concludes] that there was systemic participation in mob violence by the police, and that when police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them. And a number of people testify, all of whom are white criminal justice officials, that the police are systematically engaging in racial bias when they’re targeting black suspects, and more likely to arrest them and to book them on charges that they wouldn’t do for a white man.

This report in 1922 should have been the death of systemic police racism and discrimination in America. It wasn’t. Its recommendations were largely ignored.

And a decade later, Harlem breaks out into what is considered the first police riot, where African Americans believe that an Afro-Puerto Rican youth has been killed by the police. Turns out he hadn’t been, but the rumor that he had leads to a series of attacks directed towards white businesses in Harlem and against the police. And eventually, that uprising leads to the Harlem riot report in 1935.

That report comes to the same conclusion, notes there needs to be accountability for police that need to be charged and booked as criminals when they engage in criminal activity. They call for citizen review boards and an end to stop and frisk, which they name in the report. And Mayor [Fiorello] La Guardia, the mayor of New York, shelves it, doesn’t do anything with it, doesn’t even share [it] with the public. The only reason it ever saw the light of day was because the black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, published it in serial form.

And a similar report is produced in 1943, and another report in 1968. They essentially all keep repeating the same problem.

Anna North

Given the history of clear identification of this problem, is now any different? Are we seeing any shift in attitudes of white Americans toward the idea of black criminality? Will we see any changes come out of this moment?

Khalil Muhammad

If we count the last two weeks as evidence of some outward show of consciousness and commitment to something different, I would say this: This moment is very helpful when it comes to taking on this question. The problem is that none of us can know how long this will last. None of us can know whether the simple charging of three other men and eventual conviction for all involved in the killing of George Floyd will be the answer people were looking for who are newcomers to this.

But I can tell you that a lot of the activists and movement leaders, the organizers, academics like myself, know that this has never been a problem about one, two, three, or four officers who unjustly kill an unarmed, innocent black person — and I say innocent because George Floyd had not been convicted of anything. We know that this has never been about that.

The problem is the way policing was built and what it’s empowered to do, which is — to put it in terms that are resonant in this moment — they’ve been policing the essential workers of America. And the fact that black people over index as the essential workers of America, when in fact, that was what their presence here was meant to be about: to provide the labor to build wealth in America, and then the only form of freedom that they really ever had, which was the freedom to work for mostly white people.

In this pandemic moment, I think we’re able to see more clearly that the very people we’re willing to sacrifice the civil rights and civil liberties of are the very people we also depend upon to keep our utilities running and our groceries coming into our homes.

What this moment leads us to is a crossroads for most newcomers to define justice beyond an individual case or even cases, but to define justice as a form of limiting what police officers have been able to do, which is to protect white privileges in America. Some people call that defunding the police. Some people call it abolition. But what it all means is that there should be less policing of black America and more investment in the [socioeconomic] infrastructure of black communities. And police officers are not the people to do that work.

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

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

As the federal response to protests in Washington over the death of George Floyd have added urgency to the quest for DC statehood, we look at why achieving that status has proven so complicated.

Part of Issue #6 of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

A decade ago, Washington, DC, was on the cusp of gaining real representation in Congress. DC dwellers — who outnumber the populations of both Wyoming and Vermont — had been able to cast their votes in presidential elections since 1964, but they still lacked any voting power at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Washington has one congressional representative, currently Eleanor Holmes Norton, who can serve on committees but is not permitted to vote.

The proposal back then was this: DC’s nonvoting delegate would be replaced by a full-fledged House member. In exchange, an additional seat would be created, which initially would have gone to a safely Republican part of Utah, balancing DC’s heavily Democratic voter base. In many ways, the deal was a Band-Aid for the problem residents actually want fixed.

DC doesn’t have a vote in Congress because it isn’t a state, and becoming one is a long political ordeal: The last states joined the union 60 years ago, if that gives you an idea of how impossible adding another one seems now.

The 2009 deal, which would have circumvented the statehood process, made it through the Senate but died in the House. Democrats objected to provisions attached to the Senate bill to gut DC’s gun control laws. But Republicans weren’t too happy, either — including Jason Chaffetz, then still a representative from Utah. He didn’t like the trade-off, even though it meant more power for his state. “This whole thing strikes me as political bribery,” Chaffetz complained. “If Washington, DC, is due representation, make that case. … Don’t try and dangle a carrot out there.”

This month, the widespread protests over the death of George Floyd may have helped make that case to the entire nation. After President Trump sent federal National Guard troops to patrol DC, the District’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, seized on the moment to remind Americans of the District’s diminished position.

“We’re the capital city, we’re a federal district, we’re 700,000 taxpaying Americans, and I’m the mayor, governor and county executive all at once,” Bowser told PBS NewsHour this week. Because the long quest for statehood has yet to be fulfilled, she said, “the federal government can encroach on our autonomy” — including taking widely criticized actions this week on DC soil.

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images

The effort for DC statehood has been growing for some time: Residents drive around with license plates that complain about “taxation without representation.” DC statehood bills have been introduced in every Congress since 1965. A standalone House bill on statehood received just one Republican vote back in 1993, the only time the question has come to the floor. Late last year, Congress held its first hearing on DC statehood in more than 25 years. But Chaffetz wasn’t wrong about the state of affairs.

Political bribery is what the creation of states has been all about, with some exceptions. Whenever there’s a desire to create a new state, all Congress has to do is vote for it. But like animals on Noah’s ark, states have historically entered the union in pairs, with lawmakers using new states to maintain the balance of partisan power — or at least try to.

“It was never written down, but it’s not an accident you got states in pairs,” says Louisiana State University historian Jonathan Earle.

A majority of representatives are already co-sponsors of the bill that would make DC a state. In March 2019, the chamber passed a resolution that endorsed statehood. Still, the reality was that statehood for DC — or Puerto Rico, for that matter — didn’t stand a chance. This moment could change national public perception around that.

However, if the House passes a statehood bill, it faces certain death in the Senate, where the Republican majority is adamantly opposed to adding a state where only 4 percent of voters supported Donald Trump in 2016. Democrats view DC statehood as a way to rebalance a Senate and Electoral College that have stymied progressive priorities, and Republicans oppose the idea for that very reason. And public opinion is on their side. More than 60 percent of Americans oppose statehood for DC, according to a recent Gallup poll.

A similar share support statehood for Puerto Rico, according to the same poll. But history has shown that the creation of new states generally involves some form of power-sharing agreement. Right now, the GOP has no incentive to bless the creation of new states that Democrats would surely dominate. “DC and Puerto Rico are both likely to be Democratic states,” says Robert Pierce Forbes, a historian at Southern Connecticut State University. “It’s hard to see what you trade to get even one of them in.”

Insisting on tit for tat is part of a long pattern in American politics. The most recent additions to the US, Alaska and Hawaii, were brought in almost simultaneously in 1959 because one was understood to be Democratic and the other Republican.

Admitting states in ways that preserve partisan balance may sound cynical. The habit grew out of something much uglier. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, Southerners repeatedly blocked attempts to admit Northern free states unless they got a new slave state in return.

The birth of a state has frequently involved wrenching compromise, with the debate turning directly on the question of extending slavery or battles over race. The preservation of power has always been central to the equation.

Making new states wasn’t supposed to be complicated

The Constitution was written to make it easy to achieve America’s deeply rooted ambition to expand. But shortly after the founding, statehood fights devolved into a struggle involving the nation’s original sin of slavery.

What’s known as the new states clause (Article IV, Section III of the Constitution) gives Congress the power to create states with few restrictions. Delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 rejected the idea of imposing a voting requirement beyond the simple majority typically required to pass the House and Senate. Whenever there’s political will to create a state, Congress has free rein to do so.

Typically, Congress first passes an enabling act to allow residents to form a territorial government and propose a constitution. It later passes a law or resolution to admit a territory as a state — nearly always imposing conditions that have involved everything from voting rights, the state’s political rules, language requirements, and, in the case of Utah, a ban on polygamy.

This system worked for the first few decades of the new United States — for settlers, if not the Native Americans they forced out nor enslaved people across the country. Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, and Mississippi were all admitted shortly after the War of 1812, which, “by removing the threat of the woodland Indians and the Creeks in the South, accelerated both the white settlement of these areas and the alacrity with which Congress acted to incorporate them as states,” writes historian Sean Wilentz.

The nation expanded rapidly, thanks to passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 (which covered much of what we now call the Upper Midwest) and the Louisiana Purchase. That favorable 1803 deal with France brought in land that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rockies, more than doubling the size of the country. “If you had a bona fide amount of settlers, you could apply to Congress,” says Earle. “It worked without a hitch until Missouri applied for statehood in 1819.”

Liljenquist Family collection via Library of Congress

In 1819, the Senate was evenly divided between North and South, with senators from the 11 states that allowed slavery and an equal number from the 11 free states. Missouri threatened to extend slavery west of the Mississippi River. The following year, House Speaker Henry Clay crafted the Missouri Compromise.

Missouri would enter the union as a slave state, but its admission was coupled with that of the free state of Maine, which until then had been part of Massachusetts. In addition, slavery was banned from any new states north of 36°30’ latitude, a line stretching out from Missouri’s border with the South.

“When that was proposed, it was considered shockingly transactional,” says Forbes, author of The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America. “There was a huge backlash in Maine. There was a famous comment by one legislator that his constituents would rather wait a thousand years for statehood than to take it on condition of bringing in a slave state.”

Southerners weren’t happy about the arrangement, either. Until that time, they had successfully blocked any attempt by Congress to regulate slavery in the states. They recognized that any limits meant its potential abolition. An elderly Thomas Jefferson saw that a “geographic line, coinciding with a marked principle” would forever be a source of irritation. “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” Jefferson wrote. “I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”

Statehood was a central front in the battle over slavery

If the idea of coupling free states with slave states was initially shocking, it soon became the norm. Due to Southern fears of being outvoted in the Senate, during the 1830s Michigan had to wait on Arkansas being admitted first. In its 1844 platform, the Democratic Party linked the entry of the vast slaveholding republic of Texas to the organization of the Oregon territory.

“Since control of the Senate, and more broadly the federal government, was vital to preserving the slave system, any change in the balance of free and slave states presented an existential threat to one side or the other,” says Queens College historian Joshua B. Freeman.

The issue remained a tinderbox. After the Gold Rush, California was flooded with settlers and quickly admitted to the union, without having first spent time as a territory. Admitting California required the Compromise of 1850, a “comprehensive scheme” that was again cobbled together by Henry Clay.

The slave trade was abolished in DC, but to appease those who favored slavery, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah officially became territories without reference to it, leaving the question to settlers. In addition, the brutal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it clear that African Americans were still legally considered property even after escaping to free states. Presciently, Free Soil Party co-founder and future Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase said, “The question of slavery in the territories has been avoided. It has not been settled.”

In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a final attempt to maintain sectional balance by organizing two new territories split between the North and South. But its passage only fueled discord and prompted the formation of the anti-slavery Republican Party, with Abraham Lincoln declaring, “The spirit of ’76 and the spirit of Nebraska are utter antagonisms.” The “Bleeding Kansas” border war over whether the territory would become a slave state became an immediate precursor to the Civil War.

Corbis via Getty Images

Southern secession meant, among other things, that the region was no longer represented in Congress. The party of Lincoln took full advantage, admitting Nevada as a state in 1864 and approving new territories in the North: Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas.

In 1889 and 1890, Republicans solidified their power, admitting as states Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming, while splitting the Dakota Territory into two states. Territories with substantial populations that were perceived as less of a lock for the GOP — Arizona, New Mexico, Utah — had to wait.

“State admission was explicitly used as a partisan tool by Republicans who dominated Congress and wanted to maintain their position,” says Eric Biber, a Berkeley law professor. “Republicans pushed through a number of states to improve their position in the Senate and the Electoral College.”

The remainder of the continental US was admitted as states by the early 20th century — except DC. Long debate over the district’s unique constitutional status — and Southern opposition to enfranchising black voters — kept residents waiting. And admitting the 49th and 50th states required making a new deal to keep both parties on board.

Alaska stops being ignored, while some considered Hawaii a threat

When Trump floated the idea of buying Greenland this summer, part of his motivation was to secure a legacy akin to the one Dwight D. Eisenhower cemented with his admission of Alaska as a state, according to the Wall Street Journal. The problem with that idea — okay, one of the problems with that idea — is that Eisenhower never wanted to admit Alaska.

The Democratic Party started promoting the idea of statehood for Alaska and Hawaii as early as 1916. By the 1950s, polls showed overwhelming approval, leading the GOP to endorse statehood as part of the party’s 1952 platform.

Eisenhower, elected president as a Republican that year, wasn’t convinced. He worried that Alaska would be a “tin cup state,” forever dependent on the federal government for support. “The area was so vast, so uninhabited, so removed from the rest of the nation that it hardly seemed to warrant consideration in his view,” according to Eisenhower biographer Jim Newton.

Dmitri Kessel/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Conservatives were worried that Hawaii would be dominated by the West Coast longshoreman’s union, which they viewed as Communist. (A loyalty oath for public officials was a condition of Hawaii’s enabling act.) Southern Democrats disapproved of the nonwhite population of the islands, worrying that Hawaii would send senators of Asian descent who would represent two more votes against filibuster rules that helped them kill civil rights legislation.

“If Hawaii had been settled and primarily populated by Americans from the mainland, there might be no great problem admitting it as a state,” Nebraska Republican Sen. Hugh Butler said at the time. “Unfortunately, that is not the case.” (More bluntly displaying his racist beliefs, Butler also said he didn’t want two lawmakers of Japanese descent in the Senate.)

Given overwhelming public support for admission, Eisenhower decided in the end that a promise was a promise. Lyndon B. Johnson, then the Senate Democratic leader, dropped his opposition to admitting Hawaii as part of his broader switch in favor of civil rights legislation.

Leaders in both parties came to believe it was a fair deal all around, largely because Alaska at that time was Democratic and Hawaii was Republican. “The expectation that Alaska would be a Democratic state forever — how foolish we all are when we make these projections,” says Gerald McBeath, an emeritus political scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Without something for the GOP, Puerto Rico and DC are left to wait

In recent decades, statehood has largely been a backburner issue. Most of the current territories are too small in population to generate serious consideration.

For DC and Puerto Rico, as has been the case with statehood arguments for 200 years now, the question remains what’s in it for the other side. And race remains a factor, if less overtly than in the past: During the 1960s, the chair of the House committee that controlled DC’s purse strings responded to a budget from the city’s first black mayor by sending a truck filled with watermelons. Amid the George Floyd protests this month, the current mayor, Bowser, unveiled a message for President Trump on the city’s streets: She renamed the plaza in front of the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and emblazoned a thoroughfare visible from the executive mansion with a massive, bright yellow mural reading “Black Lives Matter.”

Puerto Rico has held several referendums on statehood, with public opinion split. Statehood might help with the territory’s financial problems, while presumably making it harder to neglect in the wake of natural disasters (or for FEMA officials to commit fraud). Still, there are concerns that statehood would increase the tax bill for residents and corporations and make it harder to maintain Spanish as the dominant language.

In 2017, 97 percent of those participating in a Puerto Rico referendum favored statehood. Turnout was less than 25 percent, however, with the pro-territorial status quo Popular Democratic Party boycotting the vote.

In DC, opinion about statehood is less mixed. A statehood referendum in 2016 drew support from 78 percent of voters. Bowser sees the lack of representation as nothing less than the “denial of our fundamental rights as American citizens” of residents, a majority of whom are people of color, in the “capital of the free world.”

The main hurdle then, as now, is the fact that DC is overwhelmingly Democratic.

In March 2019, the House passed HR 1, a broad election reform bill that included an endorsement of DC statehood. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has called the package “a terrible proposal” that “will not get any floor time in the Senate.”

If the question of DC or Puerto Rican statehood were ever resolved politically in Congress, it would be a straightforward matter to admit them both, says Biber, the Berkeley law professor. For that to happen without sweeping Democratic majorities, however, something big has to be on the table for Republicans, and after all these years, it’s still not clear what that could be.

Alan Greenblatt is a writer covering politics and policy issues. He has been a reporter for Governing, NPR, and CQ.

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Residents in the District of Columbia have been living with “taxation without representation” from Day 1. In September 2019, they took their call for statehood to Congress.

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Bleach (credit: Adina Firestone)

Americans are doing more housecleaning and disinfecting amid the COVID-19 pandemic and many are turning to wild and dangerous tactics—like drinking and gargling bleach solutions.

Back in April, the agency noted an unusual spike in poison control center calls over harmful exposures to household cleaning products, such as bleach. The timing linked it to the spread of the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 (not statements by President Trump). But to get a clearer idea of what was behind the rise, CDC researchers set up an online survey of household cleaning and disinfection knowledge and practices.

In all, they surveyed 502 US adults and used statistical weighting to make it representative of the country’s population. The findings—published Friday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report—are stunning.

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The NFL just issued a statement saying it was wrong to censure players who protested police violence.

NFL players have protested police brutality and racism — the same problems now being demonstrated against across the country — for seasons beginning in 2014, and the NFL pushed back against these players, saying that they “created a false perception among many that thousands of NFL players were unpatriotic.” Now that has changed, with the league advocating for anti-racism activism in a Friday statement.

“We, the NFL, admit we were wrong.” That’s what the NFL tweeted in an official statement on Friday night, in which the organization apologized for not listening earlier to the black NFL players who have protested against the police shootings of unarmed black people by kneeling during the national anthem at football games. The statement goes on to add that the NFL “encourage[s] all to speak out and peacefully protest,” and concludes, “We, the NFL, believe Black Lives Matter.”

The tweet was accompanied by a video from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. In the video, Goodell reiterates the statement in the tweet. “Without black players, there would be no National Football League,” he adds. “And the protests around the country are emblematic of the centuries of silence, inequality and oppression of black players, coaches, fans and staff.”

The NFL’s statement is an explicit response to a video multiple prominent NFL players released on Thursday. In the video, a group of players that included Patrick Mahomes and Tyrann Mathieu of the Kansas City Chiefs and Michael Thomas of the New Orleans Saints demanded accountability from the NFL.

“We will not be silenced. We assert our right to peacefully protest,” the players said. “It shouldn’t take this long to admit.” They asked that the NFL deliver the very message that it tweeted out, verbatim, on Friday night.

The NFL’s new statement comes after years spent condemning players who knelt during the national anthem. When that movement was at its height in 2018, league officials threatened to fine players who “disrespected” the flag or the national anthem by kneeling. Players who wanted to kneel could do so only behind the closed doors of changing rooms.

Colin Kaepernick, who began the movement in 2014, has not played football since 2016. There is no word on whether this change in course means he will be rehired by an NFL team.

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The Reopen America movement—made up of a conservative, mostly white, and frequently heavily armed set of protests—was a sad affair. In some cases the protests were dangerous affairs as armed white guys screamed in the faces of law enforcement and threatened to take over government buildings. While obviously small, these anti-government “control” theatrical events always seemed to come up against very restrained and sober law enforcement. This has not been true for the Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice in our country. This double standard seems to be pretty easy to diagnose. There’s a certain homogeneity to it.

A video has gone viral that is purporting to show alleged Proud Boys white supremacist types who are at the very least white, well armed, non-law enforcement types being gently told by actual law enforcement how to stay off to the side and out of the way so as to not end up feeling the physical brunt of our country’s justice.

A live broadcast video on June 1 that was originally posted on Facebook by someone named Joe Smothers has gone viral. The video takes place in Salem, Oregon and follows peaceful protests going on in the name of George Floyd. Later in the video, Smothers heads back to an area of businesses that seem to be patrolled by numerous white folks with guns. Smothers can be heard talking about chatter that antifa has claimed it will be striking affluent white areas. It is at this point of the video that we get to see how white citizens with guns—also known as “conservative activists”—are treated ever so slightly differently than unarmed citizens with more diverse backgrounds. 

A law enforcement officer approaches a crew of assault rifle-snuggled white guys and soothingly explains that he and his team of law enforcement officials will be enforcing the citywide curfew and they want to be able to arrest people—but not these gun-toting white people. “My command wanted me to come talk to you to you guys and request that you guys keep yourselves inside, in your vehicles, somewhere where it’s not a violation so we don’t look like we are playing favorites, because that would be unhealthy.”

This is a different response than other protesters received.

It already “looks like” you’re playing favorites.

The Salem Reporter asked Police Chief Jerry Moore about the seeming bias here between how law enforcement deals with armed white folks protecting shampoo and a more diverse, less armed group of peaceful protesters who are calling for justice. The paper also reports that the almost 80 people who descended on those businesses to protect them from looters could have come from anywhere, and no one knew exactly who they were. There were suspicions by some on social media that some of these men were white supremacists or Proud Boys.

Moore said the officer taped, who he didn’t identify, “had not been fully briefed about enforcement of the curfew before he spoke with the group.” He said the matter had been “discussed with the officer.”

“We are lawfully bound to weigh the severity of the crime against the level of our response,” Moore said. “Lawfully armed individuals violating a curfew does differ in severity from people throwing bricks and bottles.”

While offering up little to no evidence, law enforcement, from the top down, has pretended that there is a need for curfews and military-style control over citizens due to anarchistic elements who are willing to loot and riot. As most people have seen by now, curfews are only used by law enforcement to give those around them a general sense of the timing of when our police and National Guardsmen will begin rioting against their own citizens. 

Authorities have apprehended a suspect allegedly seen in a viral video assaulting three teenagers for distributing anti-police brutality fliers in Bethesda, Maryland, on Monday.

The suspect, 60-year-old Anthony Brennan III of Kensington, Maryland, is charged with three counts of second-degree assault, according to a Friday evening news release from the Maryland-National Capital Park Police.

From the news release: On Monday, June 1, 2020 at approximately 12:45 p.m., three young adults were walking the Capital Crescent Trail near the Dalecarlia Tunnel. The young adults, one male and two females, were posting flyers reference a call for community action. The suspect described as a white male began to argue about the flyers and forcibly grabbed the flyers from one of the victims. Before leaving the scene, the suspect pushed his bicycle towards the male victim and caused him to fall to the ground. Over the past few days, community members have sent hundreds of tips to the Park Police. Detectives in the Investigative Section utilized various sources to further corroborate the information provided by the community before developing Mr. Brennan as a primary suspect. Contact was made with Mr. Brennan and his legal counsel earlier today. Consent was provided to search his home while members of the State’s Attorney’s Office and Park Police were present. Items of evidentiary value were seized. A subsequent arrest warrant was obtained and served on Mr. Brennan this evening after he voluntarily turned himself into detectives. The Maryland-National Capital Park Police appreciates the courage and civic engagement of the victims who came forward in this matter. We thank the community for the abundance of tips and information shared. In addition, we are grateful for technical assistance provided by the Montgomery County Department of Police, Criminal Investigations Division, and the legal support of the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office.

The fliers being distributed by the teens said, “A man was lynched by the police. What are you going to do about it?” according to the Washington Post. The victims were an 18-year-old man and two 19-year-old women.

The male victim, who recorded the video and asked to remain anonymous, told Patch.com: “He was just cycling down the trail. He videoed us on his first pass by, then stopped about 50 feet past us and asked to see my signs, in a friendly tone. When I went to show him the signs he ripped them out of my hands and then started to go after my friends. That’s when I started recording.”

As of Friday night, one video of the incident posted on Twitter had been viewed more than 28 million times. Watch it below.

The post Police Arrest Suspect Accused of Assaulting Teen Girls Over George Floyd Fliers in Viral Video: BREAKING appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

On June 1, 2020, a collection of peaceful protesters gathered on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia. As curfew approached, the mostly young crowd began to be corralled by bike police officers. An escalation of events took place and 21-year-old Temple University engineering student named Evan Gorski was arrested. According to Philadelphia police, Gorski allegedly “assaulted a police officer by pushing him off a bike, causing him to break a hand.”

After spending almost two days in jail, the charges against Gorski were dismissed. It turns out that two videos of the very interaction that led to Gorski’s arrest are widely available on YouTube and Twitter. It also turns out that those videos contradict the police narrative of what happened on Monday before they arrested Gorski. 

In the video, you can see Gorski on the bottom left of the screen. He has long hair in a ponytail and is wearing a football jersey. He is seemingly trying to quell the surging police forces, who have begun escalating the protest into a conflict. Gorski puts his hand over to grab at a protester who is being tugged and pulled by another police officer—possibly having a camera or something taken from him. It is at that point that one of the officers begins swinging a baton with full force. The officer—we will call him Lt. Worthless for the time being—then loses his baton as Gorski smartly grabs it away from him as he is being taken to the ground, and he throws the baton away from the officer. Lt. Worthless along with another officer then pin Gorski down with their knees.

As the video progresses, another police officer steps out in front of the men kneeling on Gorski to begin swinging his baton wildly at another protester, who apparently has become far too peaceful for the police to manage.

William Bender of The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the officer in the video—the short and overweight one who seems to only have a middling skill set that includes wildly swinging a baton at peaceful protesters—is a high-ranking officer. According to the report, his name is Staff Inspector Joseph Bologna, and he makes a base salary of $126,339 per year and who knows how much in overtime on top of that, to be this terrible at his job. Philadelphia police declined to comment on the case.

Gorski’s attorney, R. Emmett Madden, told reporters that Gorski was struck in the head by the baton-wielding police officer and required medical attention. He says that the videos of the incident shot by other protesters and journalists helped get his client out from under these trumped-up charges. District attorney spokesperson Larry Krasner told the Inquirer: “The video is concerning in more than one way. The District Attorney’s Office and District Attorney Krasner himself carefully reviewed the case presented by the police, other evidence, and then declined it.”

As with most of these incidents, law enforcement used an approaching curfew as an excuse to begin agitating and moving groups of protesters, threatening them, and then finally opening up and creating violent conflicts. What we are seeing across our country is a macro version of what many Black Americans have been experiencing for hundreds of years.

The New York Times op-ed section has taken an enormous amount of well-deserved criticism and revolt after their editorial head, James Bennet, published Sen. Tom Cotton’s fascistic screed calling for Donald Trump to use the military to squash nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. At the time, Bennet and Times chief publisher A.G. Sulzberger defended their decision with the same bogus “both sides” argument they have made for hiring people like climate change denier Bret Stephens in 2017.

Sen. Cotton had been tweeting out and pushing his fact free and fascist forward anti-Democracy opinions for a week before the opinion piece appeared in the pages of the Times. Staff at the times were furious, and the editorial staff even published an explanation on Thursday, detailing how truly awful the decision by Bennet was, how it did not meet the standards set by the Times, and how Bennett himself admitted to not having even read the fascistic rant before running it to print. Well, on Friday, even more information came out about how this kitty-litter liner of an op-ed came into existence. And that news has added to calls for Bennet to resign or be fired from his position.

On Thursday, New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy released the statement that “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

Sources inside of a town hall where the New York Times leadership is taking turns apologizing to their employees for this lapse in integrity report that Sen. Tom Cotton didn’t write up some op-ed that then the Times published. No, it was Cotton’s weeks of racist tweets and fascist tweets that moved James Bennet to ask for a print version of totalitarianism.

Let’s be clear. Tweets like this one, where Sen. Cotton literally calls for a no mercy, “no quarter,” war crime approach to domestic policy, moved James Bennet to ask Cotton to write an op-ed. 

And then Bennet didn’t even read the op-ed before publishing it? That’s the fucking job he has!!!! He should be fired!!! Here’s some clarity, so we can “embrace debate,” a term Bennet enjoys obfuscating with.

Wow. Fire him.

White House staff bunched up chairs reserved for journalists at President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden speech Friday, prompting the White House Correspondents’ Association to accuse the administration of endangering the health of reporters.

ABC News reporter Jon Karl, president of the WHCA, wrote in a statement that the White House press office said it had moved the chairs, which had been spaced out, closer together because “it looks better” — a sentiment echoed by Trump during his address.

“The chairs were initially positioned in a way that was consistent with social distancing guidelines but were moved closer together by White House staff shortly before the event started,” Karl wrote. “The health of the press corps should not be put in jeopardy because the White House wants reporters to be a prop for a ‘news conference’ where the president refused to answer any questions.”

CNN correspondent Jim Acosta tweeted pictures from photographer Khalil Abdallah that showed the seats were originally spaced a number of feet apart from one another earlier in the morning and were later rearranged closer together.

Trump addressed the new seating arrangement amid his celebration of better-than-expected economic numbers. After applauding Florida for reopening parts of its economy, Trump turned his attention to the White House press corps.

“You’ve got to open it up, and you do social distancing, and you wear masks if you want,” Trump said, before motioning at the reporters gathered at the White House. “Even you, I notice you’re starting to get much closer together — looks much better, I must say. Not all the way there yet, but you’ll be there soon.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend everyone practice social distancing and stay at least 6 feet away from one another while outside.The CDC also recommends that all Americans wear cloth face coverings while outside their homes, even if they do not have coronavirus symptoms.

While reporters wore masks at the Rose Garden on Friday, Trump and other administration officials did not and did not practice social distancing.

The debate over social distancing has evolved in recent weeks amid mass protests in response to George Floyd's death while in police custody. Now, some public health experts are encouraging Americans to leave their homes to protest racism.

Meridith McGraw contributed to this report.