President Donald Trump launched a Twitter tirade against Fox News on Thursday — the second one this week — accusing the network of “doing nothing to help Republicans” and himself get reelected in November.
The president has been quick to attack the network, especially after host Neil Cavuto criticized the president on Monday for saying he was taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive measure against the coronavirus, despite health experts’ warnings. Trump on Thursday listed Cavuto along with other hosts and contributors he is disgruntled with, calling them “garbage” and adding that Fox News used to be “great.”
“Many will disagree, but @FoxNews is doing nothing to help Republicans, and me, get re-elected on November 3rd,” the president tweeted. “Sure, there are some truly GREAT people on Fox, but you also have some real ‘garbage’ littered all over the network, people like Dummy Juan Williams, Schumerite Chris…Hahn, Richard Goodstein, Donna Brazile, Niel Cavuto, and many others.”
He continued: “They repeat the worst of the Democrat speaking points, and lies. All of the good is totally nullified, and more. Net Result = BAD! CNN & MSDNC are all in for the Do Nothing Democrats! Fox WAS Great!”
Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s remarks.
In a Fox News poll released on Thursday evening, 48 percent of voters said they would vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, if the election were held now, while 40 percent of voters said they would vote for Trump. Biden and Trump were tied at 42 percent in last month‘s Fox News poll.
Trump’s relationship with the conservative network, which has generally covered him favorably, has been rocky in recent months. The president, who frequently criticizes the media, attacked Fox News last month and said it was being fed “Democrat talking points.”
“The people who are watching @FoxNews, in record numbers (thank you President Trump), are angry. They want an alternative now. So do I!” Trumptweeted on April 26.
After lashing out at Cavuto earlier this week, calling him an “idiot,” “foolish,” “gullible” and “an asshole,” the president swung at the network, saying in a tweet that Fox News is “no longer the same.”
“We miss the great Roger Ailes,” the president wrote of the onetime head of the network who resigned in 2016 after multiple accusations of sexual assault. Ailes, who died in 2017, had advised Trump on debate preparation during the 2016 election.
“You have more anti-Trump people, by far, than ever before,” the tweet said. “Looking for a new outlet!”
Gee, you mean the GOP is primarily an astroturf endeavor? Imagine that.
According to a new study from Carnegie Mellon University, researchers have found that bots may account for between 45 and 60% of Twitter accounts discussing covid-19. The normal level of bot involvement for U.S. and foreign elections, natural disasters, and other politicized events is usually between 10 and 20%. MIT Technology Review reports: Many of those accounts were created in February and have since been spreading and amplifying misinformation, including false medical advice, conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, and pushes to end stay-at-home orders and reopen America. They follow well-worn patterns of coordinated influence campaigns, and their strategy is already working: since the beginning of the crisis, the researchers have observed a greater polarization in Twitter discourse around the topic.
A number of factors could account for this surge. The global nature of the pandemic means a larger swath of actors are motivated to capitalize on the crisis as a way to meet their political agendas. Disinformation is also now more coordinated in general, with more firms available for hire to create such influence campaigns. But it's not just the volume of accounts that worries [Kathleen M. Carley, the director of the University's Center for Informed Democracy & Social Cybersecurity]. Their patterns of behavior have grown more sophisticated, too. Bots are now often more deeply networked with other accounts, making it easier for them to disseminate their messages widely. They also engage in more strategies to target at-risk groups like immigrants and minorities and help real accounts engaged in hate speech to form online groups. "Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this problem," the report concludes. "Banning or removing accounts won't work, as more can be spun up for every one that is deleted. Banning accounts that spread inaccurate facts also won't solve anything"
"Carley says researchers, corporations, and the government need to coordinate better to come up with effective policies and practices for tamping this down."
As of Friday, the CDC reported that America has done over 13 million tests. On a per capita basis, that still puts the United States in the #39 position—behind the U.K., Italy, Germany, and most of Europe, way behind nations like Iceland and the U.A.E. who are determined that everyone is going to get tested. Still, 13 million tests is a lot of tests, even if it did take months to get there, and even if just one Chinese province intends to do 11 million in just 10 days.
Only it seems that those numbers may be a little less than they seem on the surface. Because on Thursday the CDC acknowledged that the number of tests being reported combines the PCR results looking for active cases, with antibody tests looking for people who have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. By combining those two values, the CDC is including test results from tests whose accuracy is still in doubt. And it could also be badly distorting the nation’s ability to conduct additional tests.
On the surface, the confusion of the two tests, which was first reported by NPR, may not seem like a big concern. After all, several nations are only conducting PCR tests. Others are using antibody tests. Both can be valid methods of finding cases of COVID-19.
But the CDC action comes at a time when there is high concern over the ability of the United States to conduct a large number of cases in a short period. In order to support the reopening already underway in most states, it will require a very high level of testing ability—one that can be deployed again and again to spot active cases and support isolation and case tracing. By mixing together tests of all sorts, including those that were done to determine the percentage of people exposed across broad areas with no followup on individual cases, the CDC has made it seem as if the ability to test had greatly expanded, even though the value of all these tests was far from equal. It also appears that some of these tests were conducted across an extended period before they were added to the total, inflating the apparent increase in daily tests.
The mixing up of the two types of tests almost certainly contributed to the impression that the percentage of positive tests has rapidly declined over the last few days. That apparent decrease has been used both as an indication that the epidemic was somehow being brought under control, and that testing had expanded to the extent that it was broadly available. Neither of these impressions may be accurate, thanks to the mingling of PCR and antibody tests.
The CDC also seems to have made no effort to winnow out those tests whose results are suspect. Tests such as those used in two California counties generated national stories when they indicated that the number of people who had been exposed to COVID-19 may be far higher than expected. But it’s far more probable that these tests have a level of false positives that make their use in this kind of public survey questionable. These tests have still not been approved by the FDA.
Both antibody and PCR tests have value. But they are different tests for different purposes. Determining whether or not someone has been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 has critical value, especially as it seems increasingly likely that those with significant numbers of antibodies to the virus have obtained immunity to COVID-19 for a period of months or years. But determining who currently has COVID-19 and represents a potential vector of the disease is also critical. Putting both types of tests in one hat, and including the totals of tests that have not been approved along with tests that were conducted for purposes other than determining the status of an individual patient, inflates the number of valid tests that have been conducted and misrepresents the ability of the U.S. to conduct testing going forward.
A worker at a coronavirus testing drive-through in Bern Township, Pennsylvania, holds up a swab. | Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images
America’s coronavirus testing numbers appear to be improving — but the data may be getting less reliable.
Throughout May, America has made a lot of progress in scaling up its coronavirus testing abilities. But as they dug deeper over the month, experts and journalists have increasingly questioned whether some of the testing data can really be trusted.
First, the good news: America’s testing numbers continued trending up this week. There were about 380,000 tests a day over the week of May 14, up from roughly 320,000 tests a day over the week of May 7 and around 150,000 a day during much of April, based on data from the Covid Tracking Project.
That’s still not the 500,000 a day that many experts say is necessary — much less the tens of millions a day that some have called for — but the country is making noticeable progress nonetheless.
But then there’s the bad news: Several states are inflating, deliberately or not, their testing numbers by including two different types of tests that experts say should be separated out. That includes the numbers reported by the Covid Tracking Project and subsequently used in Vox’s chart, which rely on the data that states report.
But it’s a worrying trend that presents a somewhat rosier picture of the Covid-19 testing numbers than is perhaps warranted. And that makes it hard to gauge whether these states are really ready to start reopening their economies, even as some have already begun to do so.
Some states are muddying their testing numbers
Traditionally, Covid-19 testing numbers have been measured based on the number of diagnostic tests on a daily basis. Diagnostic tests gauge whether a person has the virus in her system and is, therefore, sick right at the moment of the test.
Some states’ counts, however, now include antibody tests, which check if someone ever developed antibodies to the virus to see if she has ever been sick in the past. It’s a way for states to pad the numbers — but at the cost of accuracy, since antibody tests are generally less precise, and timeliness.
Since antibody tests can’t tell you if someone is sick at the moment of the test, they can’t tell you, like diagnostic tests can, what the current state of Covid-19 in a community is. “We need to understand that there is a new case of a new disease happening in our community,” Pia MacDonald, an epidemiologist at the research institute RTI International, told me. “There are public health interventions that need to happen around that.”
Given these different purposes, experts say that states should separate out diagnostic and antibody tests in their counts. Only then can they truly isolate their Covid-19 preparedness in the present by tallying their diagnostic tests and metrics attached to those, such as the positive rate, while separately gauging the overall impact of Covid-19 on the population via antibody tests.
“Both of [the tests] are useful, but you can’t put them together,” MacDonald said.
Yet some states are doing just that. Madrigal and Meyer reported in the Atlantic on May 14 that Virginia was “blending the results of two different types of coronavirus test in order to report a more favorable result to the public.” Then on Thursday, May 21, they reported that Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Vermont were doing the same, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the federal level. Maine was also mixing its test results, but reversed course on Wednesday, May 20. Virginia also stopped, following reporting from the Atlantic and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Apparently, not all of these states did this deliberately. At a press conference with the governor, Vermont officials claimed that “they didn’t know they were — they were just publishing numbers from testing sites that were adding em in,” VTDigger reporter Erin Petenko tweeted.
Regardless of intent, the practice muddies the waters — making it harder to know if states really are in a better place to start reopening their economies.
This makes it hard to tell if states are truly ready to reopen
Testing is a crucial component to getting control over the pandemic. When paired with contact tracing, testing lets officials track the scale of the Covid-19 outbreak, isolate the sick, quarantine those whom the sick came into contact with, and deploy community-wide efforts as necessary. Testing and tracing are how other countries, like South Korea and Germany, have managed to control their outbreaks and started to reopen their economies.
“The whole point of this social distancing is to buy us time to build up capacity to do the types of public health interventions we know work,” Natalie Dean, a biostatistics professor at the University of Florida, previously told me. “If we’re not using this time to scale up testing to the level that we need it to be … we don’t have an exit strategy. And then when we lift things, we’re no better equipped than we were before.”
Some states have explicitly built testing into their reopening plans, calling for a certain amount of tests or positive rates. But those goals were built with advice from experts that by and large assumed the metrics would be based on diagnostic tests, not antibody tests.
So we’re left with a situation in which America’s testing numbers do seem to be improving (finally), but how much of that improvement is real, and how much of it suggests that any particular state is ready to reopen, could come down to how honestly places are reporting their numbers.
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A Texas mayor is defending an email he sent this week saying only men should lead prayers before city meetings.
Eric Hogue has served as mayor of Wylie, a suburb of Dallas, for the last 12 years. He is also the pastor of Cottonwood Church of Christ, as well as a professional magician who once moonlighted as “Clinky the Clown.”
Last week, Wylie Mayor Pro Tem Jeff Forrester sent Hogue an email asking whether a Christian group, Youth With a Mission, could lead a prayer at the next city council meeting.
Hogue responded Sunday by saying he thought it was a good idea, as long as “those leading the public prayer [are] young men.” He went on to cite two Bible verses about women remaining silent in church, saying he takes them literally.
NEW: Email raising eyebrows in Wylie. Mayor agrees to let a missionary group lead prayer during council meeting as long as “…those leading the prayer be young men.” He quotes two bible verses about women staying silent at church. Story at 10p @NBCDFW. pic.twitter.com/7riYIthQUY
“So I have always requested that a man lead the invocation,” Hogue wrote. “I understand not everyone agrees with me, but I can’t go against my conscience. But I would love to have the group come and visit with them and then let a couple of guys lead a prayer.”
Hogue’s email was later posted to a Facebook page focused on Wylie politics, sparking outrage. But Hogue doubled down on his statements in interviews with local TV stations.
“I believe a lady can be president of the United States,” Hogue told WFAA-TV. “I believe a lady can be CEO of a company, the superintendent of a school district. But I believe, and this is me, when it comes to [picking] somebody to lead the invocation at a city council meeting, because of those two sets of verses, I’m going to choose a male.”
Noting that said he has been married 33 years, Hogue added, “My wife would not stick around if I was anti, you know, like that. I mean, we are equal partners in everything.”
“What I will say is a woman can do absolutely anything and everything but if we’re in a public setting, in a religious setting, the bibles teaches that she’s not to say a public prayer or to lead the singing or to deliver the sermon,” Hogue told KXAS-TV, claiming the controversy is politically motivated because people are upset that Wylie’s the election had to be pushed back from May to November because of the COVID-19 crisis. Hogue is not seeking re-election.
“I think the main thing is the budget cycle is coming up and they would like to have the new council in place. I totally get that but we are living through a pandemic,” Hogue said.
“Wylie Mayor Eric Hogue has a long history of ultra-conservative, ultra-Christian, and ultra-anti-women behavior,” the group wrote. “In his latest missive, he proves that he’s still as misguided and offensive as ever. We’re not letting this ‘public official’ get away with it any more.”
Cue the outrage from One Million Moms and other anti-LGBT hate groups.
Disney has unveiled its first animated gay main character, in the Pixar SparkShort Out, which begins streaming on Disney+ today (Friday, May 22).
On Thursday, Disney released a trailer for Out, which appears to show the protagonist, Greg, trying to find the courage to come out to his parents and tell them he is in a relationship with a man, named Manuel.
From InsideTheMagic.net: Previously, the only information we had about the film was the title, and a teaser image of a dog holding a toy of the character Wheezy from Toy Story. … While this isn’t the first instance of an LGBT character in Disney media, it would be the first time a gay person was the protagonist of an animated Disney film. This follows a trend of more LGBT representation in Disney media lately. When Disney Pixar’s Onward released this past March, it featured Pixar’s first openly gay character with cyclops cop Officer Spector, played by actress Lena Waithe. Waithe’s character mentions her girlfriend and girlfriend’s daughter in one scene, and while the police officer was only a minor character in the movie, it was an important moment in defining the first openly gay character in a Disney movie.
Look, if this Snyder Cut actually turns Justice League into a good movie, I’ll be thrilled to eat crow here. But I think the past few years of blind-faith hype over this thing has written a check that no amount of unused footage, or the man behind the camera, can possibly cash. Slice it up, rearrange it, add some new effects… I don’t think the core vision for this franchise was ever on solid footing to begin with.
NEW YORK — Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio deflected blame Thursday in the wake of a bombshell study confirming that New York’s elected leaders stalled when it was time to take action on battling the spread of the coronavirus.
An analysis by Columbia University released Wednesday night concluded that if New York acted even one week earlier in ordering people to stay home and mandating social distancing, it would have spared more than 17,000 lives in the New York metro area.
The study evaluated how the entire country would have fared had it taken faster action and determined that roughly 36,000 fewer people would have died from the fast-spreading virus had people been forced to keep their distance from one another one week earlier in March.
The findings, first reported by The New York Times, revealed what many New Yorkers have come to believe over the past two months: Cuomo and de Blasio, two Democrats who have been unable to even present the same death count amid long-standing bickering, dragged their feet during the most dire crisis either has faced in their careers and as a result, thousands of New Yorkers died.
But both leaders on Thursday insisted they didn’t know the extent or source of the spread, expressing regret for their ignorance but not the timing of their decisions.
Cuomo, who tends to dismiss retrospective analysis as “Monday morning quarterbacking,” has repeatedly referred questions about his responses to the data by which he says he makes his decisions.
No one reported that the virus was moving to Europe from China late last year, he said Thursday, and if the true extent of the spread was known, travel bans from both regions would have been appropriate as early as Dec. 31.
“Who should have known?,” he told reporters at his briefing in Manhattan. “It’s above my paygrade as the governor of one state, but what federal agency? What international health organization? I don’t know. It’s not what I do; it’s not my responsibility. But someone has to answer that question.”
De Blasio likewise placed blame on the novelty of the disease and the fact that no one had a playbook for its response.
“I wish we had known so much more in January, February, the beginning of March. I wish we had the testing that would have told us what was going on,” de Blasio told reporters Thursday. “It’s very painful to think about, if we had had the testing we needed, everything we could have done differently. Or if we had known then the things we know now, what we would have been able to do for people. It’s horrible.”
The first confirmed case of coronavirus was reported in the city on March 1, but experts now believe the virus was spreading in New York much earlier.
“As we got information, we acted on it,” de Blasio said Thursday. “But of course it’s painful, and of course I look at that and I say, I wish we had known more, because we would have been able to do more.”
The mayor said the findings would now inform a slow, cautious approach to easing restrictions in the city, which is expected to begin sometime in June.
“Our approach will be one that’s cautious and careful and health and safety focused,” he said. “And we’re going to look at everything we can in terms of new research that tells us about what happened previously. It can inform our next steps.”
But even when de Blasio and Cuomo were working off the same information, they struggled to coordinate a coherent response.
The mayor and governor delayed closing schools and nearly 80 city school employees have now died. De Blasio warned a shelter-in-place order would be needed after a lockdown was ordered in San Francisco and was derided by the governor, who said such orders cause unnecessary panic.Cuomo instituted one on March 22, albeit with a different name.
De Blasio declared schools would have to stay closed through the year — Cuomo said it was not the mayor’s decision to make before ultimately closing schools for the year.
Exactly when de Blasio learned of the potential ravages of the virus is rooted in a tale of infighting between him and his public health department that triggered a near revolution among agency staffers. As of this week, he and his chosen health commissioner, Oxiris Barbot, seemed to have settled their feud, at least for the cameras, as she rejoined his daily press briefings after being iced out.
But behind the scenes the tension between de Blasio and the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been brewing for years and helps explain why New York was so delayed in enforcing safety measures, such as school and business closures, a shelter-in-place order and social distancing.
It was a recipe for disaster: A mayor who distrusts subject matter experts, an agency he felt created more political problems than it solved and a commissioner who was competing for his ear with the head of the city’s public hospital system, Dr. Mitch Katz, who insisted in early March that closing schools was an overreaction.
New York on March 1 reported its first coronavirus case, a medical worker returning from Iran who was believed to have contracted the virus overseas. It is now widely believed that the novel virus was quietly spreading throughout the city earlier than that.
Nevertheless by March 6, the city had yet to figure out an action plan.
Cuomo had begun publicly discussing the virus’ spread in New York in February, saying a positive case was not an “if” but “when.” But when the first cases were confirmed, his ensuing actions focused on minimizing panic, and emphasizing statistics that suggested the disease would largely spare the young and healthy; that 80 percent of those infected would easily recover at home.
A stay-at-home order, he said as late as March 18, wasn’t warranted. “The fear, the panic, is a bigger problem than the virus,” he told The Daily podcast.
De Blasio first began seeking more testing capacity from the federal government as early as January, but he too downplayed the threat of the disease, encouraging New Yorkers to go to restaurants and use the subways in early March.
“From what we do understand, you cannot contract it through casual contact so the subway is not the issue,” de Blasio said at the time.
Since then, the virus has killed more than 23,000 people in New York, and the state, where more than 350,000 have tested positive, remains the national epicenter of the pandemic. On March 8, when the state had confirmed just 105 positive coronavirus cases and zero known deaths, Cuomo projected confidence in the experts tracking the virus and informing his decisions.
“There is more fear, more anxiety, than the facts would justify,” he said during his briefing then. “This is not the Ebola virus, this is not the SARS virus, this is a virus that we have a lot of information on.”
That information has changed dramatically since then.
“They keep changing the facts on us,” Cuomo said Thursday.
The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) has reportedly spent around $400,000—$394,800, to be exact—on purchasing 25,000 copies of Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s book, Fortitude. The NRCC reportedly uses them to hand off to donors in a promotional capacity. Politico writes that the NRCC claims to have raised $1.5 million on the promotion so far.
Putting money into the hands of a conservative “author” is not a new game. The Trump campaign spent a reported $55,000 on Trump’s books back in 2016 to a similar end. The move serves a couple of purposes: it puts money directly into the hands of the “author,” and it also greatly inflates sales numbers, ensuring that the book will hit the well-regarded New York Times bestseller list.
Rep. Crenshaw’s book has been on the top of the list for six weeks now, and having 25,500 copies bought sight unseen doesn’t hurt. You might remember the Texas Republican as the prick who refused to shake the hand of Rob Serra, a retired firefighter who survived 9/11, as Serra lobbied for the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund. You might also remember Crenshaw’s cowardly, slanderous attacks directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar using the 9/11 attacks of 2001 as his cover.
The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee have massively more money than the Biden campaign and Democratic National Committee, while House Democrats have been substantially outraising their Republican counterparts … but that’s not stopping the Trump campaign from pressuring House Republicans to raise money for Trump.
“This is a team fight and if our members can help the Trump campaign raise the resources necessary to defeat Joe Biden and his socialist agenda, we will do so,” a National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson said. But the team fight appears to be only on Trump’s behalf, rather than going both ways. Some Republicans aren’t so happy about that, worrying that it jeopardizes their effort to take back the House, or even that it’s an admission that won’t happen.
“While I hope to do everything possible to help re-elect the president, this effort distracts from the House GOP’s efforts to win back the majority,” an unnamed House Republican told NBC News. “I’m focused on that—not helping the best funded presidential re-election campaign in history raise even more money.”
Top House Republicans are on board, though, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, NRCC Chair Tom Emmer, and Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney.
“The NRCC and their candidates do not have a pot to p--- in, and it’s pathetic Kevin McCarthy is taking his eye off the ball,” a Republican strategist told NBC News. “It makes you wonder if McCarthy is giving up on winning the majority and hedging his bets for an appointment in the second term of the Trump presidency.”
Kevin McCarthy hedging his bets? Surely not.
Trump and the RNC had more than $175 million in the bank at the end of the first quarter of 2020, to Biden and the DNC’s $62 million. Money is not going to be Trump’s problem, but since he’s not willing to change his base-only message, maybe it’s the only thing his campaign can think of to change. And that Trump is interested only in his own political future, not that of House Republicans, cannot be a surprise.
Profiles in GOP courage. Got a hot second of press conference, but nothing substantive
It's suddenly occurring to vulnerable Senate Republicans that they're pretty much screwed after giving Donald Trump their seal of approval with an impeachment acquittal, and then watching him consign Americans to death and economic doom.
Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, who some consider the walking dead at this point electorally, made a big, headline-grabbing show of urgency earlier this week to light a fire under the butts of his colleagues.
"It’s unfathomable that the Senate is set to go on recess without considering any additional #COVID19 assistance for the American people," Gardner wrote, keenly aware that House Democrats had already passed a giant relief bill. "Anyone who thinks now is the time to go on recess hasn’t been listening," he added, noting that Coloradans and Americans alike "are hurting."
Maine Sen. Susan Collins, also facing a tough reelection, joined Gardner in expressing her, shall we say, concern. "The fallout from the coronavirus is unprecedented," she tweeted, saying Congress had a "tremendous responsibility" to help mitigate the crisis. "We must not wait," she urged.
It was a notable break from the GOP caucus given that Trump had visited Capitol Hill just a day earlier to counsel unity among Senate Republicans and tell them to hang tough. So much for that—some of them are starting to sort of/kind of act like they want to save their own behinds. Good luck with that after every single one of them cast votes to saddle America with the leadership of Donald Trump.
But Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell couldn't be moved. McConnell has repeatedly signified zero sense of urgency on bringing any more relief to struggling Americans. And Trump's right there with him. Whatever supposed unity Trump went to the Hill to pitch was really just his way of saying, Do what I need you to do—or else.
That's why Gardner folded like a house of cards on his empty threat to block the Senate from recessing before they took meaningful action on helping the nearly 40 million Americans who have now filed for unemployment in the past couple of months.
Cory Gardner�s threat to try to block next week�s recess has been resolved, per John Thune. Gardner had called on the Senate to move ahead with a recovery plan. Thune says Gardner and McConnell have talked about doing �some things down the road.� Senators leaving town for recess
Gardner told CNN's Manu Raju they were "close" on "PPP and some other things that will help Colorado," adding the he felt "good" about what they might be able to accomplish. Wow, was that ever an inspiring stand for the people.
Anyway, vulnerable Senate Republicans are clearly on their own, but it's also clearly not important enough for any of them to grow a spine—just like when they cast their acquittal votes.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has asked Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar to undergo vetting so she can be considered as a potential vice presidential running mate.
CBS News reports: The request for information from potential running mates like Klobuchar “is underway,” a senior Biden campaign aide tells CBS News. If a potential contender consents, she should be poised to undergo a rigorous multi-week review of her public and private life and work by a hand-picked group of Biden confidantes, who will review tax returns, public speeches, voting records, past personal relationships and potentially scandalous details from her past. While several are expected to consent to a vetting, at least one potential contender has bowed out. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, who is running for reelection this year, declined Biden’s invitation to be considered, according to a person familiar with her decision. But Senator Maggie Hassan, the other New Hampshire senator, has agreed to be vetted, according to local news reports.
While Kamala Harris and Stacey Abrams have dominated public speculation, one influential Democrat told Vanity Fair this week that Klobuchar remains in contention.
“The theory is she would help him in the Midwest and in swing states, because Klobuchar doesn’t scare off moderates like Liz Warren does,” the Democrat said. “Joe would also be betting that blacks are so energized to get rid of Trump that he could get through not picking Harris or Abrams, because he’ll have Barack Obama hitting the field for him. That’s one calculus. I don’t know that I agree.”
More from the Hill: If Biden were to choose Klobuchar as his running mate, he would add a fellow moderate to the Democratic ticket – a move that may help win over some independents and centrists, but one that would almost certainly anger liberals, who are pushing Biden to choose a progressive as his running mate. Norman Solomon, a longtime activist who is advising the progressive political action committee Once Again PAC, said that it would be a mistake for Biden to choose Klobuchar as his running mate, arguing that it would upend his efforts to unite the Democratic Party. “Someone like Klobuchar is anathema to broadening the ticket,” Solomon said in a recent interview. “If Biden is serious about unity then he’s got to pitch a tent big enough to include progressives.”
A few reactions below.
I literally could not imagine a less inspiring ticket than Biden/Klobuchar. Of course, the cable pundits will LOVE it. https://t.co/FfpRFrwPd8
This would be such a bad choice I don't even know where to begin. And it's not because I don't think Klobuchar isn't a decent candidate on her own. This is just… really, really not reading the entire house, let alone the room. https://t.co/B69JayqZCU
Joe Biden said there are about a dozen people on his running mate shortlist. That means they're all being vetted. So when you see a headline about Klobuchar or whoever else being vetted, it merely means they're on a shortlist of a dozen people – literally nothing more than that.
But also the one evil enough to try to pay based on location instead of the value of the services provided.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that as much as half of the company’s workforce of 45,000 people could work entirely outside the company’s offices in the next 10 years. | Johannes Simon/Getty Images
The social media giant is letting its employees request to permanently work from home.
As thousands of businesses across the United States are trying to figure out their office reopening plans, Facebook announced a drastic shift: A wide swath of its workforce can work from home forever.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a livestream on his personal page on Thursday that he guesses as much as 50 percent of the company’s 45,000-person workforce could be working entirely remotely in the next five to 10 years. While Zuckerberg cautioned that the number is not necessarily a target, it’s a tangible estimate by the leader of one of the most important companies in the world about the future of work, impacting not only his company but the norms for post-pandemic office workers as a whole. The move comes shortly after Facebook’s rival Twitter announced it will allow its entire workforce to permanently work remotely, along with other tech companies like Shopify and Coinbase.
“The reality is that I don’t think it’s going to be that we wake up one day on January first and nobody has any more concerns about this,” said Zuckerberg on the livestream about the lasting impact of Covid-19 on office employees. Zuckerberg went on to lay out immediate and gradual shifts the company will be making to how it manages and hires new workers.
In the short-term, as Facebook starts reopening its offices (right now, he said 95 percent of employees are working from home and will do so until at least January 1, 2021), the company will operate at 25 percent capacity in its buildings. Starting now, some Facebook employees can start requesting to permanently work from home. The first group of employees who will be able to do so is senior-level ones with a history of strong performance reviews. According to an internal survey the company ran, between 40 and 60 percent of employees are interested in doing so. And half the company reported being at least as productive as they were before, even when working from home.
The company is also going to “aggressively” start hiring remote employees since they won’t be as tied to physical office space — particularly for senior-level personnel who don’t need as much in-person training or career development. Instead of focusing on hiring only in tech’s de facto capital of Silicon Valley, the company will put more effort into other metro regions like Atlanta, Dallas, and Denver. And it’s rethinking how to provide new benefits to its remote employees since some of the old perks, like free gourmet cafeteria food onsite, don’t make as much sense. Instead, remote employees may need better laptops and monitors, stronger internet connections, and equipment for audio and visual livestreaming.
“I think we’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work on our scale,” said Zuckerberg.
The tech giant CEO laid out an optimistic vision of an increasingly remote work future, saying that the company will increase its workforce’s diversity by recruiting outside the usual tech hubs of San Francisco and other major cities.
“Enabling remote work is going to be very positive on that front toward creating more broad-based economic prosperity,” said Zuckerberg.
It’s unclear though, how a significant portion of Facebook’s workforce — including its third-party contractors such as content moderators, security guards, and cafeteria workers — will be impacted by this remote-work future, since many of their jobs are more physically tied to the office.
And for Facebook’s direct employees, there are some challenges as well. Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company is aware of the concern that remote work could put a disproportionate share of domestic work on women. He said that roughly the same percentage of women and men reported in an internal survey that they prefer to work from home. And he said that many employees still crave face-to-face time with their colleagues, with more than half of surveyed employees saying they want to return to working in an office full-time as soon as possible.
Facebook said many of its employees will follow a “hybrid” model of remote and in-person office work — coming in for onsite trainings, critical meetings, and culture-building onsite events.
And while many Facebook employees are motivated to move out of expensive areas like San Francisco if they’re no longer forced to work in a physical office nearby, they may end up taking a pay cut if they do so, since salaries are adjusted for local cost of living.
Zuckerberg said that cost savings aren’t what’s motivating the changes, however. He said the company may end up hiring more people to manage remote work, which could offset any savings in the costs to have more people working in fancy buildings.
“It’s really unknown what the economics of this are going to look like, or how much this is going to cost,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s possible that if this is done efficiently, it may be possible to save some capital, but I don’t think that it’s the primary reason why this should be done.”
Ultimately, no one, including Mark Zuckerberg, knows exactly what the future of the office will look like post-pandemic. But today’s announcement is another sign that our shift to working from home won’t be a temporary one for a sizable chunk of the American workforce. The tech sector is taking a lead on these changes, and it will be interesting to see how already-influential Silicon Valley helps shape the standard for a post-pandemic office future.
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Asked about his decision during the tour, Trump claimed he wore a mask in a “back area,” but took it off because he didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.
REPORTER: Can you explain why you decided not to wear a mask?
TRUMP: “Well I did wear — I had one on before. I wore one in this back area. But I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.”
“I had one on before. I wore one in this back area, but I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it. I had it in the back area. I did put a mask on,” Trump said, adding that he also wore goggles.
Asked why he took off the mask, Trump said it was “not necessary here.”
“Everybody’s been tested, and I’ve been tested. In fact I was tested this morning, so it’s not necessary,” he said.
When a reporter pointed out that all of the plant executives were wearing masks, Trump said: “Well that’s their choice. I was given a choice, and I had one on in an area where they preferred it, so I put it on, and it was very nice, it looked very nice, but they said it was not necessary here.”
Asked about setting an example for other Americans, Trump said: “I think it sets an example both ways, and as I said I did have it on. “
Trump refused to wear a mask today to tour the Ford plant in Michigan. Even though it’s required by the state. Four Ford officials meeting with him half masks on, trump out right refused. This is dangerous. End it sends a dangerous message. He’s killing people. pic.twitter.com/KZ1pC2Shba
"I think it sets an example both ways." Trump acknowledges that by not wearing a mask around other people he is setting an example for his followers. https://t.co/KvJJTFlD65
The numbers in the United States have eased somewhat over the last two weeks—only 1,400 Americans died from COVID-19 on Wednesday, which would have been an unthinkable horror had we not seen even larger numbers all the way back to the first week of April. But the good numbers of May result from the lockdowns of April. What results from the reopening of mid-May won’t be visible in most areas until sometime in June. And by then, it will likely be too late for thousands of Americans.
Social distancing works. That’s been demonstrated again and again in the United States and around the world. And the earlier social distancing rules are employed, the greater the impact. Which is why it’s no surprise at all that a new study indicates that had the United States employed social distancing just days earlier, it could have saved tens of thousands of lives.
In any contagious disease there are really only two steps that can be taken in advance of finding a vaccine or treatment: 1) slow down the spread, 2) test and trace. Both of these steps are vital. It’s impossible to determine the extent of an outbreak without testing. It’s impossible to adequately test and trace without using social distancing to slow the spread. Social distancing really is a blunt instrument, but it’s absolutely necessary in the race to save lives.
That’s why the results of a new study from Columbia University are completely unsurprising, but still absolutely shocking. That study suggests that had the United States engaged in widespread social distancing measures just one week sooner, it could have saved the lives of over half the Americans who have died so far from COVID-19. This is far from the first time that this has been pointed out. The whole reason that Americans have spent the last three months staring at exponential graphs is that small changes early in an epidemic can have big outcomes down the line. Still, the black and white numbers from Columbia serve to underline that stark truth: It’s not just that over 95,000 Americans are dead. It’s that most of them died needlessly.
A prompt, vigorous federal response to the outbreak in China, one that included preparing tests, guidelines, and a tough national response before the first death occurred in the United States, might have seen the nation through the crisis with the skill shown in nations like South Korea, Taiwan, or New Zealand. Japan has a third of the U.S. population, but it has 100 times fewer cases of COVID-19, and 125 times fewer deaths. That’s despite having more cases sooner and having greater contact with the original hot zone in China.
The tragedy in the United States wasn’t one decision made on one day—it was a rolling catastrophe. Not only did Trump fail to institute strong federal guidelines at any point, but again and again governors made the decision to wait until there were clear signals of a growing outbreak within their states before taking first steps. America never went into the kind of lockdown seen in many nations. And, of course, Trump never instituted any sort of central policy or coordinated federal testing.
Instead, even as the CDC and NIH were handing out belated guidelines, Trump was sneering at those suggestions and attacking governors who dared to actually implement what federal agencies were saying. The alternative suggested in the Columbia paper isn’t a best case scenario, it’s what should have been the worst case. It should have been the very least that could be expected.
“Specifically, nationwide, 61.6% of reported infections and 55.0% of
reported deaths as of May 3, 2020 could have been avoided if the same control
measures had been implemented just one week earlier.”
That’s over 50,000 Americans who have already died because Trump couldn’t be dragged away from the golf course just one week earlier. Unfortunately, that number will only grow.
Trump, making the world more dangerous for people with a future.
Still bent on opting out of treaties and international programs that the United States initiated or in which it has been a key participant, Donald Trump plans to withdraw from the multilateral Treaty on Open Skies, according to senior White House officials. The treaty, which allows signatory nations to overfly each other for unarmed surveillance, was first proposed 65 years ago in Geneva by President Dwight Eisenhower. It was rejected by the Russians. Nearly 35 years later, it was negotiated by President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The treaty, which now has 35 signatories, did not come into effect until 2002.
David Sanger, a veteran foreign policy reporter at The New York Times, writes that the withdrawal from Open Skies is an indication that Trump will also withdraw from NEW START, the 9-year-old treaty limiting the U.S. and Russia to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads on missiles and bombers. That’s so even though the treaty will expire nine months from now unless signatories agree to a five-year extension.
Since October, it’s been clear that the Trump regime planned to withdraw, and this was confirmed last month, with The Guardian reporting that both Defense Secretary David Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are on board.
U.S. authorities have claimed for years that Moscow has violated the treaty by forbidding surveillance flights near the city Kaliningrad where it was suspected that the Kremlin was secretly deploying nuclear weapons that could reach European targets. In classified documents, Sanger reports, intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense assert that the Russians are using surveillance flights over the U.S. to map infrastructure that could be targeted for cyberattacks. Trump also has said for more than a year that he wants China to sign the treaty, something Beijing has rejected.
The Russians have raised their own counter objections.
But while other U.S. officials have serious criticisms of Russia’s alleged behavior in the matter, Trump’s true motive may be simpler than all that. Sanger writes:
American officials also note that Mr. Trump was angered by a Russian flight directly over his Bedminster, N.J., golf estate, in 2017.
After detailing some of the complaints in an analysis at the Arms Control Association, Alexandra Bell and Anthony Wier wrote last year:
For the last 16 years, the United States made the most of the treaty, overflying Russia nearly three times as often as the Russia overflew the United States. Whatever the treaty’s shortcomings, the United States should strive to preserve a right for nations across the transatlantic region to collectively acquire images that distinguish tanks from trucks in all weather. Despite the problem areas, the overwhelming majority of Russia is available for overflights. With tensions between Russia and NATO on the rise, the treaty’s goal to provide mutual transparency is more important than ever. [...]
The treaty-mandated collaboration helps build confidence in its own right. The treaty forces countries’ military and government officials to work with one another, jointly solve air traffic or other logistical questions, inspect planes together, and confront problems in a broadly inclusive, transatlantic diplomatic framework. All these acts and the choice by the larger powers to submit themselves to them increase mutual trust and predictability.
Although they were warned months ago, the withdrawal is certain to irk America’s European allies who have become so fatigued by Trump’s incessant bluster, undiplomatic pushiness, uncooperativeness, disrespectfulness, and profound ignorance about international matters that they’ve taken to openly ridiculing him among themselves. If Washington quits the treaty, the Kremlin will certainly do so as well, reducing European signatories’ abilities to monitor Russian troop movements, a special concern of the Baltic states that were once satellites of the Soviet Union.
This will be the third major arms-related agreement Trump has chosen to abandon, the others being the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement. Trump has also announced withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, something that cannot officially be done until Nov. 4 this year, a day after the U.S. election. Trump has also withdrawn from UNESCO, the UN Human Rights Council, and three trade deals.
Trump has shown a penchant for walking away from agreements the way he walks out of press conferences when some (usually female) reporter turns up the heat a degree or two. That may have worked for him as a bullying measure when he was engaging in business negotiations. It’s a reckless, perilous approach to foreign policy.
President Trump announces that he has tested negative again for COVID-19: “I tested very positively in another sense … I tested positively toward negative.” https://t.co/rN66vZFXaspic.twitter.com/6Chrs68Rkn
“I think it’s another day. I had a two-week regiment of hydroxychloroquine. And I’ve taken it just about two weeks. I think it’s another day. And I’m still here, and I tested very positively, in another sense, this morning. I tested positively toward negative, right? No, I tested perfectly this morning, meaning I tested negative … but that’s a way of saying it, positively toward the negative.”
From the South Lawn. @realDonaldTrump "I tested very positively in another sense. I tested positively toward negative. I tested perfectly this morning, meaning I tested negative."
When are you getting your Physical and Mental check up for the love of all that is holy?
The Trump administration is not only continuing the supposedly temporary Stephen Miller-led public health order that has now resulted in the deportation of more than 900 migrant children since March—it’s extending the policy indefinitely. “The order mentions that the circumstances resulting from the coronavirus pandemic would be reviewed every 30 days, but gives no other details on what changes might result in the administration lifting the order,” Roll Call’s Tanvi Misra reports.
But as we and advocates have warned, there’s little chance of these restrictions going away because the chance to quickly deny kids a chance at asylum and then deport them back to the danger they fled from is exactly what Miller and the administration have been salivating over. As the American Civil Liberties Union’s Andrea Flores told Mother Jones: “The president is hellbent on exploiting a public health crisis to achieve his long-held goal of ending asylum at the border.”
Immigrant rights advocates and legal experts immediately condemned the indefinite extension, and called on federal legislators to take swift action to demand answers from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert R. Redfield, who is allowing his agency to prioritize the will of a racist administration over facts and reality.
In response to Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas saying he would “absolutely” seek to block the administration from continuing this radical policy, immigration attorney R. Andrew Free tweeted that he “should join forces” with Rep. Lucille Royball-Allard of California “to defund any activities ICE wants to conduct until ICE and the CDC put Dr. Redfield under oath and allow him to answer questions about about this patently absurd order, which public health officials say is bunk.”
Following Castro retweeting that message, Free asked: “Shouldn’t Dr. Redfield have to explain under oath why the government gets to invoke this authority to shut down virtually all legal immigration, at the same time as the WH is trumpeting its success in containing COVID-19?”
Other advocates agreed. “The mixed messaging is dizzying,” Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service President Krish O’Mara Vignarajah said, according to Roll Call. “In the same breath that the administration tells Americans that our country is safe enough to begin re-opening, it cuts off every conceivable path to protection for the most vulnerable asylum seekers.”
Leading health experts have continued to criticize Redfield for the order unilaterally obliterating legal protections for migrant children, writing in one recent letter: “The nation’s public health laws should not be used as a pretext for overriding humanitarian laws and treaties that provide life-saving protections to refugees seeking asylum and unaccompanied children.”
The number of children who have been quickly deported by the administration under the public health order has continued to horrifically climb. The New York Timesreports that 915 children have been kicked out since March, “including some who had asylum appeals pending in the court system. Some of the young people have been flown back to Central America, while others have been pushed back into Mexico, where thousands of migrants are living in filthy tent camps and overrun shelters.”
Some, The Time said, “have been deported within hours of setting foot on American soil. Others have been rousted from their beds in the middle of the night in U.S. government shelters and put on planes out of the country without any notification to their families.” This has nothing to do with public safety; it has everything to do with advancing the agenda of a white supremacist administration.
A large group of protesters gathered in front of New York’s Police Headquarters decrying police brutality against African Americans following the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, on May 11. | B.A. Van Sise/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Ahmaud Arbery was killed in the street by white men. That’s how lynchings work.
Ahmaud Arbery was killed on February 23 while running in the predominantly white neighborhood of Satilla Shores in Georgia’s Glynn County. He was black and 25 years old.
A video recorded his last moments. In it, two white men with guns corner him as he runs near their parked pickup truck. One shoots him three times, twice in the chest. The other man is a former officer with the local police department. Both men, a father and his son, were free until that video went viral on May 5. It took 74 days after Arbery’s death before the men were put in jail and charged with murder; they now face possible federal hate crimes charges.
The video brought a level of attention to Arbery’s killing that it had not attracted until then. It also sparked national anger: People were — and are — furious that an arrest had taken so long, that police appear to have empowered one of the suspects to act as a vigilante, that a small and interconnected local criminal justice community appeared uninterested in a full investigation, and, most of all, that another young, unarmed black man had been killed over nothing.
That anger has led to ongoing protests calling for the removal of the first two district attorneys placed on the case — in particular one who suggested Arbery was a mentally unstable criminal. And it has led to calls from Arbery’s family that a number of commentators have remarked on: While the families of some victims of similar killings have called on the public to forgive, Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, has said, “Ahmaud wasn’t given a chance, he wasn’t given a chance to live. ... So, I think that they should get what Ahmaud got.”
His father, Marcus Arbery Sr. has explained the source of this anger succinctly: “My son was lynched,” Arbery has said. “Lynched by a racist lynch mob.”
Arbery was, indeed, lynched.
It is why the video has sparked such outrage: It appears to show a particularly violent lynching — with the video itself serving as a memento or vehicle for spectacle — that encapsulates the darkest parts of the black American experience. In watching that video, we don’t just see Arbery’s final moments; we are also reminded of the ugly, racisthistory that has left the USwith a sinister legacy it has been unable to reckon with. That legacy is a matter of life or death for many — as well as a constant source of fear and pain for communities of color.
Georgia has a long history of lynchings
Lynchings in America are lawless killings generally committed by groups of white people, usually targeting their fellow Americans of different races. NAACP research has found that 4,743 lynchings occurred in the US between 1882 and 1968; the vast majority of those — 3,446 — were lynchings of black Americans. Many minority groups have faced lynchings, however; for instance, 15 Latin Americans were lynched in Texas one night in 1918, after being accused of being thieves. And a night of lynching in Los Angeles in 1871 saw 10 percent of that city’s Chinese population at the time killed. Historically, lynchings were used to reinforce a system of control, and to prevent minorities from even thinking about enjoying their rights as US citizens.
Sadly, lynchings are not a thing of the past. In fact, in recent years, there has been a push, led by black lawmakers, to make lynching a federal hate crime.
The Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018,sponsored bySens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Tim Scott (R-SC), defined lynching as “willfully [causing] bodily injury to any other person, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin of any person.” The House never approved this bill but has a more recent version of its own, Rep. Bobby Rush’s (D-IL) Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which has yet to be taken up by the Senate.
Minorities have been lynched for all sorts of reasons in American history. Charles Lewis was lynched in 1918 for refusing to empty the pockets of his Army uniform. Richard Wilkerson was lynched in 1934 for defending a black woman who had been assaulted by a white man at a dance. Sam Gates was lynched in 1917 for being “annoying.”
The terror inherent in this uncertainty was reinforced by lynching as a public spectacle; at some, white citizens were encouraged to take direct part in torture. For instance, in the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert and his wife, a crowd cut off pieces of their “quivering flesh” while they were still alive, as spectators drank lemonade and whiskey and bought snacks.
Pieces of lynched black bodies were also used souvenirs. In Arbery’s home state of Georgia, Sam Hose — who was lynched in Newnan in 1899 — had his heart, liver, and bones sold to spectators.
Overall, Georgia has had a particularly high number of lynchings — between 1880 and 1940, it came only second to Mississippi in the number of lynchings committed, according to an analysis by the Equal Justice Initiative.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
An American and Confederate flag fly at a residence of the Fancy Bluff neighborhood, where Ahmaud Arbery lived in Brunswick, Georgia, on May 7.
Three of the 589 known lynchings that occurred during that span were committed in Glynn County, a study by the University of Georgia found: In 1891, Henry Jackson and Wesley Lewis, two black men accused of killing a shopkeeper, were taken from police custody by a group of 300 men and lynched. Three years later, 100 men seized Robert Evarts, a black man accused of rape, and lynched him.
These cases reflect something that is true in many lynchings: a powerlessness, or even apathy, on the part of law enforcement — and an eagerness of individuals to carry out what they believe to be justice with their own hands.
None of these Glynn County lynchings represent the sort of terrorism inherent in the lynchings of people like the Holberts. But they took place in a time in which terror lynchings formed a constant backdrop, normalizing the persecution of black people for existingand creating an atmosphere of terror for black Americans just trying to go about their daily lives.
Arbery’s killing took place amid a similar atmosphere, as newly released details remind us. And the inaction of his local law enforcement officials is in many ways reminiscent of those Glynn County officers’ failure to control lynch mobs near the turn of the century.
What happened to Ahmaud Arbery is a repetition of the past
Arbery — known to his family and friends as a great athlete and a former high school football star — went for a run on February 23, one that took him through a predominantly white neighborhood near his home called Satilla Shores.
He reportedly stopped along the way to look at a house under construction owned by a man named Larry English, and was caught — as a number of men, women, and children had been before him — on a surveillance camera.
English has said he usually used a non-emergency number to report entrances to the police. The day Arbery was killed, however, 911 received multiple calls about a blackman near the house who was also running through the neighborhood.
As these calls were being made, the two men who have now been arrested in connection with Arbery’s killing — Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael, a former police officer and district attorney investigator who had been stripped of his law enforcement certification after repeatedly failing to complete required training — saw Arbery running down his street. Gregory McMichael later told police he believed Arbery to be the person behind a number of burglaries, and called out to his son, saying, “Travis, the guy is running down the street, let’s go.”
Glynn County Sheriff’s Office via Getty Images
Gregory McMichael, left, and Travis McMichael.
Travis McMichael says he was the victim of one of those burglaries, and Gregory McMichael reportedly had an interest in the ongoing trespassing happening on English’s property as well. So much so that, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,a member of theGlynn County Police Department told English in December to contact the elder McMichael, rather than the police, whenever his security system caught people on his property.
“Greg is retired Law Enforcement and also a Retired Investigator from the DA’s office,” Officer Robert Rash texted English, along with McMichael’s phone number. “He said please call him day or night when you get action on your camera.”
English’s attorney has said her client did not contact McMichael the day of Arbery’s death — or any other day. McMichael later told police he linked Arbery to the thefts based on a description of the person who burglarized his son.
It’s difficult to imagine that description not including ethnicity — a reality that has led many, including lawyers for Arbery’s family, to suggest a series of 911 calls give the real impetus for McMichael’s assessment. In one, the caller fails to explain why they’ve called 911 but does note, “There’s a black male running down the street.”
The McMichaels armed themselves and chased after Arbery in their truck; they were joined in this pursuit by William “Roddie” Bryant, a neighbor who’s now under investigation for his role in Arbery’s killing. It was Bryant who took the viral video of Arbery’s killing. (According to civil rights attorney S. Lee Merritt, there is another version of the video that shows the men chasing Arbery with their vehicles that is more than four minutes long.)
The shorter, publicly available version — which Atlanta station WSB-TV reports Gregory McMichaels requested be leaked, believing it to be exculpatory — shows Arbery running away from Bryant’s vehicle, toward a white truck that blocks part of the road. Travis McMichael stands by the driver’s side door with a shotgun, his father in the truck’s flatbed.
Arbery can be seen trying to escape, then struggling with Travis McMichael as two shots are fired. After a third gunshot, Arbery falls to the ground, his white shirt red with blood. When police arrived, Arbery was dead; they took a statement from Gregory McMichaels, reviewed Bryant’s video, and then everyone went home. Eventually, the video was broadcast around the world and watched millions of times online, fostering a modern-day version of those earlier lynchings in which audiences participated in the spectacle.
Until May, investigations into what happened were limited. The first district attorney assigned to the case recused herself, as Gregory McMichaels worked for her. In a letter, the second DA, George Barnhill, suggested Arbery had mental health issues, highlighted Arbery’s past interactions with law enforcement, and argued the McMichaels were in their rights to kill Arbery based on Georgia’s open carry and stand-your-ground laws. He also claimed, without evidence, that Arbery “initiated the fight” and had an “apparent aggressive nature.”
Barnhill recused himself after Arbery’s mother pointed out his son worked in the office of the first district attorney alongside Gregory McMichaels. As he withdrew, Barnhill noted that his son and Gregory had also worked on a previous prosecution of Arbery.
On the day the video of Arbery’s killing went viral, the state of Georgia took over the case, and the McMichaels were arrested two days later. The Department of Justice then began reviewing local authorities’ delay in making an arrest, and weighing hate crimes charges. A fourth district attorney was named, who has said she is is considering pushing for the death penalty. A fifth judge was put in charge of the case after four judges with ties to Glynn County recused themselves, and a bond hearing is expected soon; the newest district attorney has said she plans to push for no bond to be offered.
Amid these rapid developments, there have been a number of protests — many of which have called for the removal of the first two district attorneys, a call that has been echoed by several state lawmakers.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Demonstrators protest the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery at the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Georgia, on May 8.
How the case was originally handled reveals the limits of a justice system often willing to give some — be they members of a lynch mob, former law enforcement officials, or both — the benefit of the doubt. It seemed all but impossible for a serious and rigorous investigation into Arbery’s death to be carried out by those with ties to Gregory McMichael, particularly considering Barnhill’s attempt to cast a black man out for a jog as “aggressive.” In this sort of system, it seems inevitable that black people will be needlessly harmed and arbitrarily criminalized.
Why Ahmaud Arbery’s death was a lynching
No evidence has been reported that Arbery was burglarizing the area. The McMichaels allegedly saw Arbery, armed themselves, chased him down, trapped him, and shot him. The police — like the officers in earlier lynchings — did not arrest them. In fact, they’d empowered Gregory McMichael to take the law into his own hands, as evidenced by the text messages. The district attorneys initially assigned to the case knew the McMichaels, and were part of their circles; the first had employed Gregory, and the second defended the actions of father and son.
Lynchings do not require evidence. Guilt is presumed based on appearance. It is important to note that Gregory McMichaels has claimed he “never would have gone after someone for their color.” But he has also said Arbery matched the thief’s description; it’s not clear if Arbery was of the same height or weight as the suspected burglar, but he was very clearly a black man. There was something about his appearance — which includes the color of his skin — that led the elder McMichael to assume Arbery was the burglary suspect.
One reason evidence is unnecessary in lynchings is that they’ve historically often been carried out to speed up the course of justice. Henry Jackson and Wesley Lewis — the two black men lynched in Glynn County — had both confessed to murder. They were in police custody and presumably would have faced legal consequences if proclaimed guilty. But a lynch mob refused to wait for the criminal justice system to do its work.
In Arbery’s case, McMichael, though he was no longer a public servant, volunteered and was deputized to carry out law enforcement work by the officer who shared his contact information with English. Trespassing is meant to be a matter for the police to investigate. But the texts from the Glynn County police officer seem to tell English: The police aren’t necessary — there is someone else who can handle this for you. A concerned McMichael could have called the police on Arbery and waited for them to investigate him. Instead, McMichael allegedly did as he did with English: He interceded in police matters.
Perhaps he felt empowered to do so because he had been promoted as an alternative to actual, active law enforcement officers. Lynch mobs were treated the same way — they were often seen by authorities as not just above the law but the law itself.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Wanda Cooper-Jones, Ahmaud’s mother, left, stands with Jasmine Arbery, Ahmaud’s sister, during a gathering to honor Ahmaud on May 9.
This is why the lynching of people of color rarely bought consequences — and was sometimes even considered cause for celebration: A lynch mob’s judgment was usually considered final. Rarely were its members investigated or prosecuted. This created an assumed impunity that allowed people to lynch others with assurance. Their decision to kill a fellow citizen was as good as a court’s verdict: After they were done, a criminal was dead, and the case was closed.
And until the third district attorney joined the case, this was how Arbery’s killing seemed set to play out. After Arbery was killed, Bryan and the McMichaels went back to their families, had their actions endorsed by a criminal justice official, and that appeared to be that.
The McMichaels have now been arrested, but even if they face legal consequences, that does not change the fact that Arbery — a black man — was chased through the streets by armed white men, shot, and killed. That is, in its simplest form, a lynching.
And regardless of the final outcome of the investigation into the McMichaels, it is important to remember that lynchings were often used as a method of control and to protect a certain way of life. Looking narrowly, the killing immediately reduced the already small number of black people in Satilla Shores by one; but broadly, it also increased ambient existential fears, which have haunted black Americans since the early lynchings following emancipation.
February 23 was not even the first time Arbery was forced to face those fears.Body cam footage from 2017 recently released by the Guardian shows Arbery being questioned by police officers about why he was sitting in his car near a park. He tells them he was sitting in nature, rapping to himself, enjoying rare time off. But they tell him he is suspicious, that he is in an area known for drug activity, and the officersbecome aggressive, all while saying that they are the ones afraid of him.
As Arbery protests, an officer positions him against his car, and says, “I’m not searching you, I’m checking you for weapons,” proceeding to conduct a search. No weapons are found, but as Arbery moves his hands toward his sides, an officer rushes to Tase him.
No one wants to be treated like this. No one wants to be chased and killed. No one wants to be lynched. But all of it happened to Arbery, and all of it feels as if it could happen to any black American, at any time, for any reason. It always could.
Again, part of why lynchings were so successful as tools of control was because of their seeming randomness. So black people operated with care, lest they breach some invisible, arbitrary boundary. But no matter how hard one worked, no matter how fast one ran, there was still a chance they would be boxed in, nudged over that boundary, and killed for it. And that inevitability — that someone, perhaps you — would be lynched no matter what you did led to an atmosphere of fear, one that is echoed today.
Arbery’s fate is a reminder that black people can be killed for not just having candy or sitting or sleeping at home, but for running, too. Just as each new lynching did decades ago, Arbery’s killing adds to the feeling that no place is safe.
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Mike Schultz, the gay San Francisco nurse who recently shared shocking before-and-after photos from his battle with COVID-19, appeared on CNN on Thursday morning to discuss the ordeal.
After contracting the coronavirus at the Winter Party Festival in Miami Beach in early March, Schultz spent four-and-a-half weeks on a ventilator and lost 50-60 pounds.
“I’m doing really well,” Schultz told CNN’s John Berman. “I’m able to move around and walk and go up and down stairs, and pretty much do anything on my own. It’s just I have to take a lot of rest breaks, and I just know that my lung capacity is not totally there yet.”
Schultz explained that he fell critically ill on Tuesday, March 17, after flying to Boston to visit his boyfriend, the week after they had attended the gay circuit party in Florida. Three people have died after contracting COVID-19 at the Winter Party Festival.
Asked how he felt after finally coming off the ventilator, Schultz told CNN: “I didn’t even recognize myself. I pretty much cried when I looked in the mirror. I had no idea how long I had been there, so it was kind of a shock taking all this in at once.”
“I’m slowly gaining weight,” Schultz added. “My face is starting to fill out more and I’m getting stronger. I know it’s going to be a long road.”
Schultz had no underlying medical conditions and worked out almost every day. He told BuzzFeed News he shared the before-and-after photos with his 30,000 Instagram followers as a warning.
“I knew what I thought going in [about the coronavirus],” he said. “I didn’t think it was as serious as it was until after things started happening. I thought I was young enough for it not to affect me, and I know a lot of people think that. I wanted to show it can happen to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, have preexisting conditions or not. It can affect you.”
After CNN first aired the shocking photos of Schultz on Wednsesday, medical analyst Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips weighed in.
A nurse recovering from coronavirus posted stunning pictures of the impact the virus and hospital stay had on his body. “It’s not just the virus, it’s actually staying in an ICU, it's really hard on the body,” says Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, a CNN medical analyst. pic.twitter.com/rOByHqi4X1
“It’s not just the virus but actually staying in an ICU is really hard on the body and we’ve known for a long time that there is a condition called ICU Associated Weakness that happens when people are prolonged on a ventilator,” Compton-Phillips said. “Usually, by the way, they’re put into a medically-induced coma on the ventilator because it’s not a pleasant sensation to have to live through, so two big things happen. One is that you get something called a catabolic state where your body starts actually turning to muscle for fuel, so you start breaking down your own muscles, and the second is deconditioning. You are at complete rest, you’re not moving around, so your muscles get super, super weak, and at the end of that what happens is what my Kentucky father-in-law would describe as you end up weak as a kitten.”
The picture on the left was taken about a month before he first got sick. He took the photo on the right in a recovery ward.
Direct interference and using federal threats to coerce GOP support. Fuck off.
In the hours after Donald Trump threatened federal funding for Michigan and Nevada over their secretaries of states’ plans to make voting by mail easier in upcoming elections, he didn’t let up the attack—and he also didn’t expand his attack to Republican states. No, Trump’s attempt to prevent states from adopting pandemic-safe voting practices applies only to battleground states, apparently.
Trump hasn’t attacked Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, and West Virginia, for instance, even though their secretaries of state have already announced they’ll be sending out absentee ballot applications to all voters, just as Trump attacked Michigan’s Jocelyn Benson for planning, and Republican officeholders in another dozen states have urged their own voters to vote absentee during the coronavirus crisis. For that matter, Trump's own campaign is urging supporters to request absentee ballots and vote by mail in states like Pennsylvania.
Trump’s attack on Michigan was reportedly more impulse than calculated campaign strategy: “The tweet caught several campaign advisers by surprise,” The Washington Post reports, “including Republican National Committee chair and former Michigan state party chair Ronna McDaniel, as well as campaign manager Brad Parscale, according to people familiar with their reactions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.”
With Trump trailing in polls of Michigan—a state that was critical to his 2016 electoral college victory—his original tweet falsely claiming that Benson would be sending ballots to every voter, rather than absentee ballot applications, got more serious debate among his advisers than a lying Trump tweet would usually get. It was “deleted after hours of internal conversations with Trump and others concluded that it was not a good idea,” information The Washington Post attributes to “a Republican with knowledge of the discussions.”
But, never one to let the facts or his own hypocrisy get in the way, Trump expanded his attack on mail voting later Wednesday, ranting to reporters about “forgeries” and “thousands and thousands of fake ballots.” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, too, not only claimed “We want a free and fair election, and that’s a fair concern,” but lashed out at reporters who pressed her on how it is that Trump himself voted by mail in the Florida primary but opposes it for other people during a pandemic.
So this is where it is now: mail-in voting for Republicans is responsible and reasonable, and mail-in voting for Democrats is a crime. This is where a nation’s politics end up when one of its major parties dedicates itself to power at all costs and its media always seeks to create equivalence between the parties regardless of the facts.
Because one of the defining features of conservatism is the inability to empathize with anyone other than themselves. Conservatives are fine if other people are dying, because that's not real to them. Only their own difficulties are real.
President Donald Trump tours a Honeywell International Inc. factory producing N95 masks in Phoenix, Arizona. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Covid-19 and the complex politics of fear.
In recent years, there’s been an explosion of academic work on the psychological foundations of our politics. The basic theory goes like this: Some people are innately more suspicious of change, of outsiders, of novelty. That base orientation will nudge them toward living in the town where they grew up, eating the foods they know and love, worshipping in the church their parents attended. It will also nudge them toward political conservatism.
The reverse is true, too. Some people are naturally more oriented toward newness, toward diversity, toward disruption. That base orientation will push them to live in big cities, try exotic foods, travel widely, appreciate weird art, sample different spiritualities. It will also nudge them toward political liberalism.
In Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, John Alford, John Hibbing, and Kevin Smith summarize the evidence:
Numerous studies have linked these personality dimensions to differences in the mix of tastes and preferences that seem to reliably separate liberals and conservatives. People who score high on openness, for example, tend to like envelope-pushing music and abstract art. People who score high on conscientiousness are more likely to be organized, faithful, and loyal. One review of this large research literature finds these sorts of differences consistently cropping up across nearly 70 years of studies on personality research. The punch line, of course, is that this same literature also reports a consistent relationship between these dimensions of personality and political temperament. Those open to new experiences are not just hanging Jackson Pollock prints in disorganized bedrooms while listening to techno-pop reinterpretations of Bach by experimental jazz bands. They are also more likely to identify themselves as liberals.
Researchers have sliced, measured, and analyzed these psychologies through dozens of schemas. NYU’s Jon Haidt is known for moral foundations theory, which emphasizes the value structures underpinning our political beliefs. Political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler study “fixed” and “fluid” personalities. Michele Gelfand tracks “tight” and “loose” societies. Some scales measure “openness.” Others measure “authoritarianism.”
But all of them converge on the same psychosocial cleavage. Put simply, conservatives are psychologically tuned to see threat, and so they fear change. Liberals are tuned to prize change, and so they downplay threat.
“Liberalism and conservatism are rooted in stable individual differences in the ways people perceive, interpret, and cope with threat and uncertainty, write Christopher Johnston, Howard Lavine, and Christopher Federico in Open versus Closed.
“Of the many factors that make up your worldview, one is more fundamental than any other in determining which side of the divide you gravitate toward: your perception of how dangerous the world is,” write Hetherington and Weiler in Prius or Pickup.
“Conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including the threat of germs and contamination, and even low-level threats such as sudden blasts of white noise,” writes Haidt in The Righteous Mind.
If that’s true, though, why is it conservatives who are downplaying the coronavirus, and liberals who are sheltering in fear of it?
How infectious disease shaped human psychology, politics, and culture
A virus isn’t just any threat, some researchers say. It is the threat at the root of these psychological cleavages.
Infectious disease has, historically, been humanity’s most lethal foe. Our immune systems have evolved to protect us, but so, too, have our cultures, societies, and psychologies. As Haidt writes, “It’s a lot more effective to prevent infection by washing your food, casting out lepers, or simply avoiding dirty people than it is to let the microbes into your body and then hope that your biological immune system can kill every last one of them.”
To some researchers, much of human civilization is a lightly disguised effort at pathogen-avoidance: The purity laws of the Old Testament are, from this perspective, a spiritually-branded public health campaign. Spicy foods are more common in pathogen-rich areas because they kill bacteria.
How a society treats strangers is of particular importance. Strangers carry novel pathogens, diseases to which you and your community have amassed no immunity. A mix of psychologies helps strike the right balance between being overrun by outsiders spreading infection and reaping the benefits of trade and cooperation.
Dozens of studies have confirmed the relationship between the rate of disease and political attitudes. For example, in a 2008 paper entitled Pathogens, Personality, and Culture, Mark Schaller and Damian Murray showed that worldwide people were less open, less extraverted, and more sexually conservative in regions rich with disease. In another study, Randy Thornhill, Cory Fincher, and Devaraj Aran found that a “high prevalence of infectious disease” regionally predicted more conservative political values. Gelfand has looked at US states and found the “tightest” political cultures are in the states “with the most disasters and pathogen prevalence.”
But here we are, in the midst of a pandemic, and it’s conservatives seemingly dismissing the danger, opening states and counties prematurely, refusing to wear masks, waving off the deaths of older people as a small price to pay. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” said President Trump.
And it’s liberals who’re locked in their homes, who’re warning the worst is yet to come, who’re shaming anyone who dares step foot on a beach or forgets to don PPE. A recent Pew poll showed 61 percent of conservatives fear that state restrictions won’t be lifted quickly enough, while 91 percent of liberals worry they’ll be lifted too quickly.
This is the opposite of what a straightforward read of decades of political psychology research would predict. Early in the pandemic, it was plausible to argue that the divide reflected the virus hitting blue cities first, and sparing red counties its punishments. But Covid-19 has made its way into Trump country, and at any rate, studies show that political beliefs are a more powerful driver of views on the virus than personal experience.
So I asked political psychology researchers: Why are liberals more afraid of the coronavirus than conservatives? And what does that say about political psychology more broadly?
Why aren’t conservatives more afraid of the coronavirus?
In conversations with more than a half-dozen political psychologists, three theories dominated.
One is that we aren’t seeing anything unexpected at all. John Jost, at New York University, suggested that my reading of the reaction was mistaking its psychological foundations. Liberals were acting out of care, not fear. And conservatives are panicked, he suggested, but showing it in odd ways.
“The fact that liberals are taking the scientific evidence and medical recommendations seriously does not, in itself, mean that they are more threat sensitive than conservatives,” he wrote over email. “All of the liberals I know have been self-sequestering to ‘flatten the curve’ — to save other people’s lives.”
As for the right, “some conservatives are denying and repressing fear, but that doesn’t mean they are cool cucumbers. Fears of economic devastation (and the anger by conservative activists in Michigan and elsewhere) may even reflect displacement of the fear. For all we know, Americans who are explicitly denying the problem are experiencing (even) more stress and anxiety than those who are not.”
A second camp argued that the tension is real, but it was being swamped by partisanship. Perhaps, in laboratory conditions, conservatives would be more afraid of the virus. But politics doesn’t play out in laboratory conditions. Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, and his decision to downplay the threat, his dismissal of masks, and clear desire to reopen, is the stronger signal.
Now that our Country is “Transitioning back to Greatness”, I am considering rescheduling the G-7, on the same or similar date, in Washington, D.C., at the legendary Camp David. The other members are also beginning their COMEBACK. It would be a great sign to all - normalization!
“Yes, I would expect conservatives to be more worried about virus X coming in from abroad,” said Haidt. “When Obama was president and America was threatened by Ebola, it was conservatives freaking out, demanding a more vigorous government response to protect us, while Obama kept steady on following scientific advice.”
Trump, it’s worth noting, was at the forefront of the Ebola panic. “Ebola is much easier to transmit than the CDC and government representatives are admitting,” he tweeted in October 2014. “Spreading all over Africa — and fast. Stop flights.”
Here, though, it’s been the opposite. “Trump laid out his view of reality very early: This is nothing to worry about, it’s a plot to discredit me, and it will magically go away,” Haidt continued. Trump’s leadership “overwhelms the small average difference in disgust sensitivity which would, ceteris paribus, have Republicans more concerned about contagion.”
Federico made a similar point. “Chronic sensitivity to threat, disgust, and disease is one factor that should influence concern about Covid-19, [but] it is not the only one. Partisanship itself is perhaps the most important factor in shaping how people respond to issues or public concerns.”
Gelfand said much the same. “Even though groups tighten up under threat, that signal can be weakened. Groups follow their leaders.”
This would confirm what we’ve seen throughout the Trump presidency. A 2018 paper by Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope showed that the more conservative someone believed themselves to be, the more likely they were to follow Trump when he took an unexpectedly liberal position on an issue. Trump’s connection with his base has often, well, trumped his heterodoxies.
A third argument, which acts in some ways as a bridge for the first two, is that everyone was scared, but for conservatives, fear was coming out more through acts of xenophobia than epidemiology — in part because that’s where fear of the virus and Trump’s natural politics find harmony.
“I can’t resist noting that current events are perfectly consistent with my claim that those on the right, and especially the Trumpian right, are not generically more threatened but rather only more attentive to those threats they believe to be emanating from human outsiders (defined broadly to include welfare cheats, unpatriotic athletes, norm violators, non-English speakers, religious and racial minorities, and certainly people from other countries),” wrote Hibbing. “Thus, disembodied threats such as climate change, Covid-19, and economic inequality are not primary sources of concern for them.”
That would explain why Trump oscillates between downplaying the treat of the coronavirus and escalating tensions with China over their response to it. When Trump wants to bludgeon the Chinese, he plays up the threat of the virus; when it comes to domestic governance, he plays it down. More than 70 percent of Republicans now hold an “unfavorable” view of China, a doubling of anti-Chinese sentiment since George W. Bush’s presidency.
“In some ways, this pandemic was tailor-built for right-wing xenophobia, and we are fortunate (thus far, at least) that Trump’s response was to downplay it solely to keep the stock market from tanking completely,” said Jost.
And that “thus far” is ending quickly. “The National Republican Senatorial Committee has sent campaigns a detailed, 57-page memo authored by a top Republican strategist advising GOP candidates to address the coronavirus crisis by aggressively attacking China,” reported Politico, and Stephen Miller is using the coronavirus to push a broader anti-immigration agenda.
What political psychology can, and can’t, do
Here’s my view: Political psychology is like the soil in politics. There are differences in the liberal and conservative soil — particularly in how they view threat, change, tradition, outsiders, and diversity — and so different kinds of politicians, tactics, and movements take root on the two sides.
Trump is, at his core, a suspicious, threat-oriented, traditionalist figure — he’s nostalgic for the way things were, hostile to outsiders, angry over demographic change (he’s even, in normal times, a germaphobe). There’s a reason he took root in conservative soil.
By contrast, former President Barack Obama is optimistic, cosmopolitan, and temperamentally progressive — he looks at change and sees hope, he looks at other countries and sees allies, he sees diversity as a strength. There’s a reason he took root in liberal soil.
But once a politician captures a party, other dynamics take over. For one thing, partisans trust their leaders and allied institutions. Very few of us have personally run experiments on the coronavirus, or gone around the world gathering surface temperature readings over the course of decades. We have to choose whom to believe, and once we do, we’re inclined to take their word when describing contested or faraway events.
For another, we all fall prey to motivated reasoning, in which we shape evidence, arguments, and values to align with our incentives. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Many Republican officeholders, led by Trump, think the coronavirus threatens their reelection because the lockdown threatens the economy. As such, they’re motivated to believe that reopening the economy sooner is better, and attracted to evidence and arguments that support that position. Sometimes that means downplaying the coronavirus. Sometimes that means accepting its risk but suggesting the costs of reopening are worth it. In both cases, the argument is working backward from the desired conclusion.
The political tragedy for the Republican Party, and the actual tragedy for America, is that the politics and the substance here should’ve been aligned. If Trump had taken the disease seriously from the outset and mounted a competent and consistent response, his approval ratings would be higher today, and the country would be in a better position to reopen safely, and sooner. As it is, Trump has been denied the polling bounce other governors and world leaders have seen, and he’s split his own coalition, forcing them to choose between their fear of the disease and their trust in him.
“The thing people often miss about moral foundations theory is that the foundations are just foundations,” says Haidt. “People don’t live in the foundation of their house. A house must be built upon those foundations. Moral and political entrepreneurs build structures, over time, and invite people to live in them.”
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.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivers a speech in Budapest in February. | Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images
Viktor Orbán dismantled Hungary’s democracy. Conservatives love him.
At dawn on a Tuesday in May, the police took a man named András from his home in northeastern Hungary. His alleged crime? Writing a Facebook post that called the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a “dictator.”
András has a point. After winning Hungary’s 2010 election, the prime minister systematically dismantled the country’s democracy — undermining the basic fairness of elections, packing the courts with cronies, and taking control of more than 90 percent of the country’s media outlets. He has openly described his form of government as “illiberal democracy,” half of which is accurate.
Since the coronavirus, Orbán’s authoritarian tendencies have only grown more pronounced. His allies in parliament passed a new law giving him the power to rule by decree and creating a new crime, “spreading a falsehood,” punishable by up to five years in prison. The Hungarian government recently seized public funding that opposing political parties depend on; through an ally, they took financial control of one of the few remaining anti-Orbán media outlets. In May, the pro-democracy group Freedom House officially announced that it no longer considered Hungary a democracy.
András was detained for hours for daring to criticize this authoritarian drift. The 64-year-old was ultimately released, but the police’s official statement on the arrest noted that “a malicious or ill-considered share on the internet could constitute a crime.” András, for one, got the message.
“I told [the cops] their task had achieved its result and would probably shut me up,” he told the news site 444.
András’s arrest is an unusually naked display of what Hungary has become — a cautionary tale for what a certain kind of right-wing populist will do when given unchecked political power. Yet among a certain segment of American conservatives, Orbán is not viewed as a warning.
He’s viewed as a role model.
Orbán’s fans in the West include notable writers at major conservative and right-leaning publications like National Review, the American Conservative, and the New York Post. Christopher Caldwell, a journalist widely respected on the right, wrote a lengthy feature praising the strongman as a leader “blessed with almost every political gift.”
Patrick Deneen, perhaps the most prominent conservative political theorist in America, met with Orbán in his office during a trip to Budapest. He has described the Hungarian government as a “model” for some American conservatives. (Responding to a request for comment after this piece was published, Deneen clarified: “I have not endorsed the Orbán government ... mainly because I do not know Hungarian politics well enough to praise or condemn.”)
Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and right-wing cultural icon, made a pilgrimage to the prime minister’s office. Chris DeMuth, the former head of the American Enterprise Institute, interviewed Orbán onstage at a conference, praising the prime minister in opening remarks as “not only a political but an intellectual leader.” The event was organized by Yoram Hazony, an Israeli intellectual widely influential on the American right and another vocal Orbán fan.
The Hungarian government has actively cultivated support from such international conservatives. John O’Sullivan, an Anglo-American contributor to National Review, is currently based at the Danube Institute — a think tank in Budapest that O’Sullivan admits receives funding from the Hungarian government.
Pro-Orbán Westerners tend to come from one of two overlapping camps in modern conservatism: religiously minded social conservatives and conservative nationalists.
Valery Sharifulin/TASS/Getty Images
The Hungarian parliament building in Budapest.
Conservative nationalists focus on the Hungarian approach to immigration and the European Union. During the 2015 migrant crisis, Orbán was the most prominent opponent of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open borders approach; he built a wall on Hungary’s southern border with Serbia to keep refugees from entering. He has repeatedly denounced the influence the EU has on its member states, describing one of his governing aims as preserving Hungary’s national character in the face of a globalist onslaught led by Brussels and philanthropist George Soros.
For Western conservatives of a religious and/or nationalist bent, Orbán is the leader they wish Donald Trump could be — smart, politically savvy, and genuinely devoted to their ideals. Hungary is, for them, the equivalent of what Nordic countries are for the American left: proof of concept that their ideas could make the United States a better place.
Yet while the Nordic countries are among the world’s freest democracies, Hungary has fallen into a form of autocracy. This presents a problem for Hungary’s Western apostles, as they do not see themselves as advocates of American authoritarianism. Their encomia to Orbán tend to either overlook his authoritarian tendencies or deny them altogether, claiming that biased Western reporters and NGOs are unfairly demonizing Budapest for its cultural and nationalist beliefs.
“Hungary’s leadership ... is more democratic than most of the countries that lecture Budapest about democracy,” Catholic conservative Sohrab Ahmari writes in the New York Post. “Hungary’s leaders have had it with Western liberal condescension and tutelage.”
In reality, it’s not the Orbán regime that’s being persecuted: It’s ordinary Hungarian citizens like András. The Western defenders of Orbán are so preoccupied by the culture wars over gender and immigration that they’re overlooking who, exactly, they’ve gotten in bed with.
Understanding the conservative case for Orbán
Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative, is one of a handful of influential Western writers courted by the Hungarian government. He’s met with Orbán and even had plans to take up a fellowship in Budapest before the coronavirus scrambled everyone’s lives.
While Dreher has a number of views that liberals find either kooky or reprehensible, he’s a talented writer who’s hugely influential on the religious and nationalist right. When I asked Dreher for the strongest possible version of the conservative case for Orbán, he sent me a series of lengthy and reflective notes on the subject.
“I want to be clear that I don’t want to be understood as approving of everything Orbán does,” he told me. “My approval of Orbán is general, not specific, in the same way that there are people who don’t agree with everything Trump does, but who generally endorse him.”
This “general endorsement” is rooted in a sense that the Hungarian leader challenges the liberal elite in a way few others do. In Dreher’s analysis, the dominant mode of thinking in the West is secular and liberal — a political style that suffocates traditional religious observance and crushes specific national identities in favor of a homogenizing, cosmopolitan ideal.
“He [Orbán] knew that in 2015, to allow all the Middle Eastern immigrants to settle in Hungary would have been surrendering a Hungarian future for the Hungarian people...and all the traditions and cultural memories they carry with them,” Dreher told me. “Broadly speaking, the ideology of globalism presumes that those traditions and those memories are obstacles to creating an ideal world. That they are problems to be solved rather than a heritage to be cherished.”
Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images
Orban giving a speech during an ecumenical service in August 2019.
This sense of persecution at the hands of secular globalist elites is at the center of the mindset held by Dreher and much of the modern intellectual right. The contemporary fusion of religious and nationalist ideas has created a unified field theory of global cultural politics, defined by a sense that cosmopolitan liberal forces are threatening the very survival of traditional Christian communities. This line of thinking animates many prominent Trump supporters and allies who are Christian conservatives, including Attorney General Bill Barr.
For people like Dreher, who has written that “my politics are driven entirely by fear [of] the woke left,” Orbán is Trump’s more admirable twin. The American president is, as Dreher once argued, “a small, ugly, godless and graceless man” — though one he’d rather have in office than a progressive Democrat. The Hungarian leader, by contrast, is in his view both a true believer and a much more effective head of state.
“What I see in Orbán is one of the few major politicians in the West who seems to understand the importance of Christianity, and the importance of culture, and who is willing to defend these things against a very rich and powerful international establishment,” he tells me. “I find myself saying of Orbán what I hear conservatives say when they explain why they instinctively love Trump: because he fights. The thing about Orbán is that unlike Trump, he fights, and he wins, and his victories are substantive.”
What I find fascinating about Dreher’s take — which largely typifies the pro-Orbán arguments among both religious conservatives and conservative nationalists — is that the issue of democracy plays a secondary role in the conversation.
Dreher doesn’t admire Orbán’s more authoritarian tendencies; indeed, he admits that the man has made mistakes, including in András’s case. “I have no doubt that Viktor Orban is not the philosopher-king of my Christian conservative dreams,” he tells me.
But whatever his concerns about threats to basic democratic principles like freedom of the press and fair elections, they don’t play a primary role in his thinking. His evaluation of Orbán centers culture war issues like immigration and religion in public life, an ideologically driven view that obscures the damning democratic deficit in Hungary.
In our exchange, Dreher compared his admiration for Orbán to the way Hungarian conservatives he’s met admired Trump. When he told his Hungarian acquaintances that he liked what Trump stood for in theory, but had serious issues with the man himself and the way he governs, they were incredulous: What’s not to like about someone who’s so willing to stick it to the globalist liberal elites?
They read Trump through Hungarian ideological categories, not American reality — and it showed.
“Maybe I’m seeing Orbán in the same way my Hungarian interlocutors see Trump. ... If I lived in Hungary, perhaps I would find a lot to dislike in his everyday governance,” Dreher told me. “But he and other European politicians like him are speaking to needs, desires, and beliefs about religion, tradition, and national identity, that the center-right politicians have ignored.”
Yet when it comes to modern Hungary, the authoritarian devil is truly in the everyday details.
The authoritarian strategy of plausible deniability
Orbán’s effort to cultivate Western intellectuals — funding their work, inviting them to meet with him as honored guests in Budapest, speaking at their glitzy conferences — is part of a much more ambitious ideological campaign. He describes himself as the avatar of a new political model spreading across the West, which he terms “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.”
Advocates of illiberal democracy, like Trump and European far-right parties, aim to protect and deepen the specificity of each European country’s religious and ethnic makeup — Hungary for the Hungarians, France for the French, and Germany for the Germans. Orbán frames this goal in precisely the culture war terms people like Dreher find so appealing.
“Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture,” he said in a 2018 speech. “Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration.”
This language is at once incendiary and misleading. The rejection of “liberalism” infuriates mainstream European and Western intellectuals, thus further convincing the right that Orbán is the enemy of their primary enemy. But by framing his struggle as a conflict between two subspecies of democracy — between “liberal” and “Christian” democracy — Orbán obscures the fact that his regime is not any kind of democracy at all.
This insistence on falsely referring to his authoritarian regime as a democracy is vital to both its domestic and international project.
Orbán and much of his inner circle are lawyers by training; they have used this expertise to set up a political system that looks very much like a democracy, with elections and a theoretically free press, but isn’t one. This gives intellectually sympathetic Westerners some room for self-delusion. They can examine Hungary, a country whose cultural politics they admire, and see a place that looks on the surface like a functioning democracy.
When such observers travel to Budapest and see what looks like a democracy in action, it becomes easier to dismiss concerns about authoritarian drift from journalists, pro-democracy NGOs, and academic experts as mere cultural prejudice: the liberal elite smearing a right-leaning elected leader as an authoritarian because they don’t like his cultural politics. Orbán isn’t an authoritarian, in this view, but the avatar of what the silent majority of Americans and Europeans really want.
Ferenc Isza/AFP/Getty Images
Orbán voting in a 2019 local election in Budapest.
A staple of these arguments is to make the point that Orbán’s Fidesz party has won three consecutive elections.
“One of the strange things about modern political rhetoric is that Viktor Orbán should so often be described as a threat to ‘democracy,’ although his power had been won in free elections,” Caldwell, the eminent conservative Europe reporter, writes in the Claremont Review of Books.
But after coming to power in 2010, Orbán rewrote Hungary’s constitution and electoral rules to make it nigh impossible for the opposition to win power through elections. Tactics including extreme gerrymandering, rewriting campaign finance rules to give Fidesz a major leg up, appointing cronies to the country’s constitutional court and election bureaucracy, and seizing control of nearly all media outlets have combined to render elections functionally non-competitive.
The mechanisms of control here are so subtle (who outside of Hungary cares about staffing choices at its electoral administration?) that it’s easy for an intellectually sympathetic observer to dismiss them as overblown. In Caldwell’s Claremont piece, for example, he challenges concerns about press freedom by pointing to Lajos Simicska — a media magnate and former Orbán right-hand man who turned on him in 2015 and campaigned against him in the 2018 election.
“When Orbán’s friend Simicska broke with him, he used his newspaper Magyar Nemzet to attack Orbán in the most vulgar terms, comparing him to an ejaculation,” Caldwell writes. “Orbán’s powerful mandate, his two-thirds majority, gave him power to amend the country’s constitution at will. This was not the same thing as authoritarianism — there aren’t a lot of reporters in Beijing likening Xi Jinping to an ejaculation.”
There aren’t that many left in Hungary, either. After 2015, Orbán used his unfettered powers to demolish Simicska’s business empire, cutting off government contracts not only for his old friend’s media holdings but also for his construction and advertising firms. Simicska’s businesses shrank and his personal fortune declined; the 2018 electioneering was a last-ditch effort to challenge a system that he himself described as a “dictatorship.”
After Orbán’s unfairly won 2018 victory, Simicska told allies that “it is clear that they [Fidesz] cannot be defeated through democratic elections.” He shut down Magyar Nemzet; a government mouthpiece currently publishes under its name. Simicska eventually sold his entire media empire to a Fidesz ally, including the popular television station Hír TV — which, after the sale, openly proclaimed it would adopting a pro-government line.
Today, Simicska lives in an isolated village in western Hungary. His only remaining business interest is an agricultural firm owned by his wife.
This is obviously not a story about democratic resilience in Hungary: It’s an instructive tale in the precise and subtle ways Orbán uses political patronage and the powers of the state to maintain political control. The Hungarian government is a species of authoritarianism — just a less coercive and more elusive version of its Chinese cousin.
“Clearly, Hungary is not a democracy. But understanding why requires a nuanced understanding of the line between democracy and autocracy,” Lucan Ahmad Way and Steven Levitsky, two leading academic experts on democracy, write in the Washington Post.
This subtlety is what allows his conservative fan club in the West to operate with a clean conscience. It’s also what makes it so disturbing.
The Hungary model for America
There are examples throughout history of people on both left and right blinding themselves to the faults of their ideological allies. The great British playwright George Bernard Shaw saw Josef Stalin as a shining example of Shaw’s own egalitarian values. Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the defining libertarian economist, defended Augusto Pinochet’s murderous dictatorship in Chile on grounds that the dictator was friendly to the free market.
Orbán’s crimes, of course, pale in comparison to Stalin’s or Pinochet’s. If such great thinkers in history can trick themselves into forgiving much more egregious assaults on human rights and democracy, it’s understandable that modern conservatives might fall prey to the same tendency to see the best in ideologically simpatico authoritarians.
But the fact that this tendency is understandable doesn’t mean it’s excusable — or without its own set of dangers.
In the United States, the Republican Party has shown a disturbing willingness to engage in Fidesz-like tactics to undermine the fairness of the political process. The two parties evolved independently, for their own domestic reasons, but seem to have converged on a similar willingness to undermine the fairness of elections behind the scenes.
Daniel Mihaelescu/Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Orbán and Trump.
In this respect, Hungary really is a model for America. It’s not a blueprint anyone is consciously aping, but proof that a ruthless party with less-than-majority support in the public can take durable control of political institutions while still successfully maintaining a democratic veneer.
Conservative intellectuals bear a special obligation to call attention to this dangerous process. It’s always easier for writers and intellectuals to criticize the opposing side precisely because it’s less effectual: Your targets already don’t pay attention to you, and your audience already agrees with your critique. When your “team” is crossing lines, criticizing it is much more likely to ruffle feathers — but also more likely to change minds.
The Hungary situation has been a trial in this regard, a way of assessing conservative intellectuals’ ability to perform this vital form of self-policing.
I find Orban’s attack on trans rights and treatment of migrants reprehensible, but I don’t expect those on the broader right to agree with me. I do, however, believe they ought to have a baseline commitment to democratic norms: a sense that disagreement itself is not illegitimate, and that governments that use their powers to crush their opponents can never be fundamentally admirable.
Yet that’s not what has happened. Much of the conservative leadership cannot break out of their sense of victimhood; the world is a struggle between righteous conservatives and oppressive secular progressives. It does not compute, to them, that a traditionalist regime might actually be the one mistreating its opponents and attacking democracy; they come up with excuses for whatever Orbán is doing, offering misleading half-truths that at times literally echo government propaganda.
If these thinkers continue to insist that Hungary is just another democracy — despite copious evidence to the contrary — how can we expect them to call out the same, more embryonic process of authoritarianism happening at home? If American conservatives won’t turn on a foreign country’s leadership after it crosses the line, what reason would we have to believe that they’d be capable of doing the same thing when the stakes for them are higher and the enemies more deeply hated?
The admiration for Orbán has convinced me that, no matter how far down the Fidesz path the GOP goes, many conservative intellectuals will use the same culture war uber alles logic to justify its trampling over American democracy.
Hungary is a test for these American thinkers. And they flunked it.
Clarification, August 10: An earlier version of this article reported political theorist Patrick Deneen as saying that the Orban government was a “‘model’ for American conservatives.” After publication, Deneen responded to Vox’s request for comment to explain that he was referring to the views of “some conservatives who view the Orbán regime as a model,” but did not see himself as part of that group.
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Lying bigoted sack of shit tries to hide behind "I was hacked" while ignoring all the contemporaneous family pictures, etc. He wasn't hacked, he was caught. There's a difference.
House GOP leaders distranced themselves Wednesday night from the Republican nominee for a hotly contested California congressional district,after POLITICO's reporting revealed dozens of social media posts on his accounts that demeaned Muslims and immigrants.
The National Republican Congressional Committee abruptlyyanked Ted Howze, the party’s nominee against vulnerable freshman Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif.), from its Young Guns program for top recruits. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy issued a stern warning to Howze, whom he endorsed personally before the primary election in March.
In a statement, McCarthy said he and NRCC Chairman Tom Emmer of Minnesota “will take immediate action” if Howze “is found to be the originator of these posts.” Howze’s campaign has told POLITICO that he denies writing them personally, suggesting other, unidentified individuals had access to his accounts.
“The content in question on Mr. Howze’s social media channels is disappointing and disturbing. Bigotry and hateful rhetoric — in any form — have no place in the Republican Party,” McCarthy said in the statement. “These posts are unacceptable and do not reflect the Ted Howze that I have briefly interacted with.”
Emmer, the NRCC chair, also rebuked Howze.
“These statements are unacceptable and not indicative of the Republican Party and what we are building here at the NRCC with our diverse slate of candidates,” Emmer said in a statement to POLITICO.
McCarthy and Emmer spoke on Wednesday night via phone and agreed to remove Howze from the NRCC's Young Guns program while they look into the origin of the posts. Membership in the program gives candidates greater visibility and is often a signal to GOP donors to direct their contributions.
A formal break from Howze would mean cutting loose the GOP nominee in a competitive Central Valley congressional district, one of seven in California that Democrats wrested away from the GOP in the 2018 midterms en route to capturing the House majority. Republicans flipped one of the seven seats back in a special election last week — and Harder’s seat is, at least on paper, even more favorable to the GOP.
The statements came less than a day after a second POLITICO story about Howze’s past social media activity. McCarthy and the NRCC did not comment after the initial story, on May 6, which detailed posts in which Howze called the Islamic prophet Muhammad a rapist and a pedophile, suggested prominent Democrats were responsible for murder and accused Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) of “hitting the crack pipe too hard.”
Howze has claimed that he did not author these posts and that unnamed individuals accessed his Facebook and Twitter accounts. But he would not elaborate on who these individuals were, how and when he discovered the posts, which occurred over a period of several years, and why they remained publicly accessible until shortly before he launched an unsuccessful 2018 campaign for the seat.
"I made the mistake of allowing others access to these accounts unknowingly — and I am angered, horrified and extremely offended that these ugly ideas were shared or posted by those individuals several years ago,” he said in a statement in early May.
When approached again this week with additional posts from his account, his campaign issued a statement referring to the matter as “fake news or redundant stories by the same insider online blog.”
A review of his personal Facebook indicates Howze is an avid user of the account. He frequently posts pictures of himself and his family on vacations and at sporting events.
In the new posts uncovered this week, Howze accused the Clintons of having “a trail of bodies as long as the Mississippi River behind them.” He told members of the Black Lives Matter movement in a post, that as “a culture 95% percent of you vote in lock step for the same political party who held you as physical slaves and now wish to keep you as political slaves unable to effect any real change for the better.” He also wrote that Muslims could not be good American citizens.
And he compared recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigrationprogram to pedophiles. California's 10th Congressional District, located in the state’s northern Central Valley, is heavily Latino and majority nonwhite.
GOP back at their favorite thing: fuck over working class to save money to shovel back to billionaire backers.
Mitch McConnell promised House Republicans on Wednesday that the beefed up unemployment benefits enacted earlier this spring "will not be in the next bill."
The Senate majority leader told the House GOP minority in an afternoon phone call that he is comfortable waiting to see how the nearly $3 trillion in coronavirus spending previously approved plays out before moving forward on the next relief legislation. And he told them the ultimate end-product won't look anything like House Democrats' $3 trillion package passed last week, according to a person briefed on the call.
While McConnell conceded more aid may be necessary in the coming weeks, he also repeated his insistence that liability reform be included in the next round of legislation to minimize lawsuits. And he said the $600 weekly boost in unemployment benefits won't continue — a vow he hadn't previously made.
McConnell warned against trial lawyer "vultures" ready to file lawsuits and said Republicans are "going to have to clean up the Democrats’ crazy policy that is paying people more to remain unemployed than they would earn if they went back to work," McConnell said.
The remarks amount to a hardening of McConnell's position and a dismissal of House Democrats' priorities before talks even begin. But as McConnell praised House Republicans for holding firm against Speaker Nancy Pelosi's legislation and mocked her proxy voting plan, Senate Democrats were getting opposite instructions during a midday telephone conference call.
Economist Mark Zandi told Senate Democratic committee leaders that Congress needs to extend the beefed-up unemployment insurance and move "quickly" to send more aid to states and cities. Zandi said those governments are "teetering on the financial edge," according to a person on the call, and predicted many more jobs could be lost without quicker action.
McConnell seemed unmoved a few hours later and said Congress needed to proceed deliberately on the next package.
It's difficult to know which Trump team actions are incompetence and which are intended to be malicious, simply because everyone Donald Trump has hired, and that his underlings have under-hired, have managed to be both, aggressively and incessantly.
In the middle of a pandemic, with a crashing economy, Trump's Interior Department has suddenly decided that it is time that solar and wind projects on federal land pay up on rent fees that were put on hiatus by that same Trump administration two years ago. As in, retroactively. As in now.
Reuters brings us the details on this one, and it's ... strange, as usual. Two years ago the administration put solar and wind industry rent payments on hold after companies complained that rents set in the last administration were unfairly high. The Interior Department was to look into the complaints.
Apparently that review is now done, though Reuters was unable to get anyone from the department to acknowledge or comment on it, because now wind and solar companies are getting bills for two years of back rent. Surprise!
All right, so this is probably not what any solar or wind company really wanted to deal with, right about now. On the other hand, no company should expect to be able to use federal land for free—that has been a point of much contention, in recent decades.
On the third hand, though, you can't help compare it to Team Trump's measures to make sure the oil and gas companies are very, very well taken care of during the pandemic. As Reuters notes, the Trump administration at the same time is offering royalty relief to drillers to help them weather the economic downturn.
So then are the new demands to pay two years in back rent right square in the middle of an economic collapse a result of administration indifference and incompetence, or an effort to screw two industries that Trump's team personally hate with a passion? We don't know. We may never know. It's always something, with this crowd, and usually more than one something at once.
At the end of March, Donald Trump announced that the FDA approved a machine that disinfected N95 respirator masks, allowing up to 20 uses of a single mask. This sounded great, as the Trump administration’s criminally negligent handling of the country’s stockpile of protective equipment had left thousands of frontline workers pleading for help. The Ohio-based Battelle, the company that made the machines, claimed that this process would not degrade the mask’s “performance.”
At the time, reports claimed the machine would cost the government $60 million for 60 machines. But as NBC News reports, that number somehow ballooned to $413 million over the next few days. By the beginning of May, the cost of these machines was capped at $600 million. And guess what? Yes, like everything else Donald Trump has ever promised anyone, what these machines can do was also grossly exaggerated.
According to NBC, “scientists and nurses say the recycled masks treated by these machines begin to degrade after two or three treatments, not 20, and the company says its own recent field testing has only confirmed the integrity of the masks for four cycles of use and decontamination.”
The Trump administration’s criminally slow response to contain the COVID-19 virus domestically, followed by the equally criminally slow response to getting frontline health workers the proper protective gear needed has meant the White House continues to just throw money at any person willing to pretend they have a solution. This has included tens of millions of dollars spent on things like ventilators that have never materialized.
NBC News spoke with nurses and others who have said the machines are a joke and the costs would be exorbitant even if the machines worked as advertised—which they don’t. A source close to the Mike Pence-led task force told NBC that the Trump administration takes big wild swings and doesn’t care whether or not anything works. They are just looking for a win here or there, a big headline for Trump to peacock behind: “They’re gambling that they’ll win one time, and if they don’t they’ll just deflect, which is what we see inside all the time.”
Democratic Rep. Katie Porter of California has presented the American public with receipts showing that the Trump administration allowed companies to export tons of protective equipment and machines during the early months of the spreading pandemic. The flip side of this transaction is that while companies made money selling off equipment that Americans would soon desperately need, they got huge markups to begin bringing back equipment once the coronavirus pandemic hit America hard.
The Defense Logistics Agency, the arm of the Pentagon working with Trump’s coronavirus task force, told NBC that the $600 million figure is just a cap, depending on what demands come up. As of right now, U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for at least $413 million.
A worker at a coronavirus testing drive-through in Bern Township, Pennsylvania, holds up a swab. | Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that as much as half of the company’s workforce of 45,000 people could work entirely outside the company’s offices in the next 10 years. | Johannes Simon/Getty Images
(@aravosis) 
(@MollyJongFast) 
A large group of protesters gathered in front of New York’s Police Headquarters decrying police brutality against African Americans following the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, on May 11. | B.A. Van Sise/NurPhoto via Getty Images
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President Donald Trump tours a Honeywell International Inc. factory producing N95 masks in Phoenix, Arizona. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivers a speech in Budapest in February. | Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images
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