I was happy to recently find the Community Universalist Church at universalist.church. Memorable, no? They are an entirely online church, but are friendly and substantially organized (that is, it's not the exclusive work of one person.) It's a member of the Christian Universalist Association and not the Unitarian Universalist Association (which I see as a plus) and it's worth noting that it makes good use of "off the shelf" ministry and social media services. Smart.

Were it's live services not exactly at the same time as my home church, I'd have more reason to participate, but it may suit your needs. That time being 1500 UTC Sunday. Subtract 4 hours (11 o'clock a.m.) for Eastern Daylight Time or 7 hours (8 o'clock a.m.) for Pacific Daylight Time. They are a global church and timing is a known problem.

Maybe I'll visit when the clocks change…

After moving my main site to RevScottWells.com I just about stopped writing here. Which seems like a waste, and worse makes this seem like an abandoned site.

So I’ve decided to make this blog a weblog again and log helpful or interesting things I find in daily life.

Here. Due to a technical glitch, WordPress thinks I published it two days ago.

The GOP’s “freedom” rhetoric yields to its authoritarian agenda.

Standard conservative rhetoric treats the word freedom like partisan property: Republicans defend freedom, while Democrats are all Stalin-wannabees.

Usually, pro-gun rallies are where you see this trope in its purest form, but during the pandemic it has shown up in anti-public-health protests as well. Two weeks ago, we saw it in Congress, when Jim Jordan assailed Dr. Fauci with “When do Americans get their freedom back?” Occasionally, the two issues combine, as when armed protesters stormed the Oregon Capitol while the legislature debated anti-Covid measures.

Lately, though, we’ve been seeing how hollow the Right’s commitment to “freedom” is, at least when people use their freedom to support liberal causes. In previous weeks, I’ve talked at length about the anti-voting laws red-state legislatures have been passing in response to their dark-but-baseless fantasies about election fraud. But lately their focus has turned towards punishing liberal protest.

The latest push in red-state legislatures — Florida, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Iowa so far — is for laws that criminalize protest and encourage vigilante action against protesters.

[Oklahoma] HB 1674, which Republican legislators passed earlier this week, grants civil and criminal immunity for drivers who “unintentionally” harm or kill protesters while “fleeing from a riot,” as long as there is a “reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary.”

Running over protesters is a long-standing conservative fantasy, which James Alex Fields Jr. carried out when he killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017. If I were a Democrat in one of these legislatures, I think I’d submit a motion to rename the bill “The Heather Heyer Had It Coming Act of 2021”.

At the end of last summer, USA Today reported:

There have been at least 104 incidents of people driving vehicles into protests from May 27 through Sept. 5, including 96 by civilians and eight by police, according to Ari Weil, a terrorism researcher at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats who spoke with USA TODAY this summer.

I have some sympathy for people who unexpectedly find themselves surrounded by protesters doing threatening things, like rocking the car or pounding on its roof. But I’m not sure how many cases, if any, fit that description. In this video, for example, the driver comes back for a second pass through the crowd.

“Unintentionally” sounds like it mitigates the harm, but it actually doesn’t, because intentionality is so hard to prove in court. And the “reasonable belief” standard in the Oklahoma law creates an opening for the same kind of racial bias we see in police-shooting and stand-your-ground cases: What if the driver’s impression of danger is based on the race of the protesters, rather than any threatening actions? Might a few white jurors sympathize with a driver who got scared simply because his car was surrounded by Black people?

These laws also give the government more power to clamp down on dissent. Florida’s law, which has already been signed by Gov. DeSantis, creates new crimes that you might commit just by showing up for what you believe to be a peaceful protest.

But opponents say it would make it easier for law enforcement to charge organizers and anyone involved in a protest, even if they had not engaged in any violence.

“The problem with this bill is that the language is so overbroad and vague … that it captures anybody who is peacefully protesting at a protest that turns violent through no fault of their own,” said Kara Gross, the legislative director at ACLU Florida. “Those individuals who do not engage in any violent conduct under this bill can be arrested and charged with a third-degree felony and face up to five years in prison and loss of voting rights. The whole point of this is to instill fear in Floridians.”

In addition:

If a local government chooses to decrease its law enforcement budget — to “defund the police,” as Mr. DeSantis put it — the measure provides a new mechanism for a prosecutor or a city or county commissioner to appeal the reduction to the state.

The law also increases penalties for taking down monuments, including Confederate ones, making the offense a second-degree felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

As with the anti-voting laws, the justification for the Florida law is largely imaginary.

Speakers including the governor said the law would protect law enforcement and private property against rioters, despite acknowledging there was little violent unrest in Florida during last year’s protests over Floyd’s death.

… Echoing DeSantis, Republican state House Speaker Chris Sprowls and Attorney General Ashley Moody vilified other states and cities for their handling of the protests last year, some of which did turn violent.

State CFO Jimmy Patronis claimed that Portland, New York and Seattle “burned to the ground” last summer.

I’m sure that’s news to the residents of those cities. If there were vast refugee camps in New Jersey, across the Hudson from burned-out New York, I’m sure I’d have heard about them. The main studios of Fox News are on Sixth Avenue, so they would just have to point a camera out the window to show us the devastation.

An interesting question is how this law interacts with Florida’s Stand Your Ground law.

In general, Floridians can defend themselves with deadly force if they believe they are in imminent danger or death — and not only when they are inside their homes. The person being threatened is not required to try to flee.

If I’m protesting peacefully, and a car is bearing down on me in a threatening way, can I just shoot the driver? If his fear justifies running over me, shouldn’t my fear justify shooting him?

Conservatives don’t ask these questions, because they know they are the ones who threaten deadly violence. In a relatively small number of cases, last summer’s George Floyd protests devolved into property damage and looting. But liberals didn’t get in their cars to mow down anti-lockdown protesters, and George Floyd marchers didn’t bring their AR-15s.

Another question conservatives like to avoid is: What if D.C. had such a law on January 6? Right now, the Justice Department expects to charge about 500 Trump cultists who trespassed into the Capitol after the crowd broke windows and pushed back police (injuring over 100 of them). But a law like Florida’s would justify felony charges against the many thousands of people from Trump’s rally who walked in the direction of the Capitol, not to mention Trump himself. By the new Florida standards, anyone who stood outside the Capitol with a Trump sign is a rioter, because they participated in a protest that had turned violent.

But for some reason, conservatives never imagine that the laws they support will ever aimed at them. Consider Thomas Webster, a retired NYPD cop who has been charged for his participation in the January 6 riot.

Prosecutors say that he “attacked a police officer with an aluminum pole and ripped off his protective gear and gas mask, causing the officer to choke.”

According to WaPo reporter Rachel Weiner:

Lawyer for Tommy Webster, retired NYPD cop accused of beating an MPD officer with flagpole on #J6, says his client is in a “dormitory setting” with people serving time for “inner-city crimes” – “for a middle aged guy whose never been arrested before this has been a shock for him”

Who could have guessed? You beat one cop with a flagpole, and suddenly people are treating you like you’re Black or something.

The day after last week’s Sift, the jury convicted Derek Chauvin on all charges. This was both expected and surprising: People who watched the video of the murder couldn’t imagine how the jury could do anything else, but those who know the history of police acquittals had just as much difficulty picturing a conviction.

So the top of the weekly summary will discuss reactions to the verdict, which ranged from “See, I told you the system works” to “This changes nothing.” I come down somewhere in between, and link to discussions of police reforms that are still needed.

I’m sure Chauvin himself was disappointed, but probably not as much as Fox News, which clearly hoped to spend the next month focusing on whatever violent reactions a not-guilty or hung-jury verdict might lead to. Instead, their cameras saw Black people celebrating, which is a real downer for their ratings. But rather than return to the Mr. Potato Head crisis, Tucker Carlson et al have been pushing a conspiracy theory in which threats of Black violence intimidated the Chauvin jury, who otherwise would surely have ruled that kneeling on somebody’s neck for nearly ten minutes is normal police behavior.

Red-state legislatures anticipated the same (non-existent) wave of post-verdict violence by passing “anti-riot” laws that could put liberals at risk of committing a felony (or getting run over by right-wing vigilantes) any time they attend a protest. Those laws will stay on the books at least until a court can look at them, so they’re worth paying attention to. That’s why this week’s featured post is “Red States Crack Down on Protests”. I focus on the enormous gap between these laws and the conservative rhetoric about “freedom”, or right-wingers’ howls of rage when social media companies deny a platform to some fascist provocateur (like Trump). What is “freedom of speech” for conservatives becomes “rioting” when liberals do it.

That should come out shortly.

The rest of the summary will include Biden’s climate proposals, Republicans’ insubstantial counterproposal to Biden’s infrastructure plan (and why I don’t feel embarrassed about predicting they wouldn’t have a counterproposal), Biden’s popularity at the 100-day mark, why you should never brag about your crimes to women you want to date, a case that combines two of my very dissimilar fascinations (the Supreme Court and cheerleaders), and a few other things, before closing with an unusual approach to bird photography.

Let’s say that appears before noon.

The countries that take decisive action now to create the industries of the future will be the ones that reap the economic benefits of the clean energy boom that’s coming.

– President Biden,
opening remarks at the Virtual Leaders Summit on Climate

This week’s featured post is “Red States Crack Down on Protests“.

This week everybody was talking about the Chauvin verdict

Unless you spent the week completely off the grid, you already know that Derek Chauvin was found guilty of all charges. He’s due to be sentenced in June, and probably he will appeal on a number of grounds that seem unlikely to succeed (but you never know). So it will still be a while before we can definitely attach a number of years to his name — between 12 1/2 and 40 years, if his conviction stands — but at the moment he is a convicted murderer. It was the best result the trial could have produced.

Opinions about the larger meaning of this verdict varied widely, from “See, I told you the system works” to “This one result doesn’t really change anything.”

I come down somewhere in the middle: The Chauvin verdict establishes a floor. It shows that the well of injustice is not bottomless. Police officers cannot kill Black people with complete impunity, in broad daylight, on a city street, in front of multiple witnesses who are recording video. If Chauvin had been acquitted, or if just one juror had held out to force a retrial, we still wouldn’t know where the floor is, or even if there is one.

But the Chauvin verdict doesn’t mean that the system works, or works as well for Black people as for White people. We can’t forget what the original police report said about George Floyd: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” If the video hadn’t gone viral, that most likely would have stood as the official word. You would not know the names of Derek Chauvin or George Floyd, and Chauvin would still be abusing Black people on the streets of Minneapolis.

Most of all: The killings haven’t stopped, or even slowed down. It’s hard to give ourselves credit for progress until they do.

As for the larger struggle for justice, I think this widely viewed trial begins to establish a consensus that police mistreatment of Black people really is a thing. We didn’t all imagine this murder, and it’s not a he-said/she-said situation. It’s now public knowledge that Chauvin murdered Floyd. We all saw it happen, and we can’t unsee it.

But knowing that doesn’t mean that we know what to do about it. Many people, particularly many white men, still believe the Bad Apple theory: Chauvin was a bad cop, and he’s off the force now, so the problem has been handled. Maybe there are other bad apples, but the system can deal with them too.

The problem with the Bad Apple theory is the way other cops usually rally around a cop who kills someone or otherwise abuses authority. (Hence: “Man Dies After Medical Incident”.) In case after case, we see police investigating the victim rather than the death, while official police spokespeople and the local police union president act as PR flacks for the bad-apple cop. In other words, the whole department joins Team Bad Apple.

To a large extent, that didn’t happen this time. One reason Chauvin was convicted, I believe, was that cops testified against him. They blew up his lawyer’s claims that Chauvin acted according to his training, and that his use of force was appropriate. Maybe that signals some larger change in police culture, or maybe not; we’ll see in future cases.

Pity poor Fox News, which was all geared up to cover the post-verdict violence. You know: Dangerous Black people run wild, cheered on by Democrats. Ratings gold.

Instead, they’re left with no burning buildings to televise, and a conspiracy theory about why that is: The jury might have acquitted Chauvin, but for the threat of violence that intimidated them.

I last looked at police reform in June, and the defund-police slogan a week later.

At the federal level, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act has passed the House, but is pending in the Senate, where Democrats once again lack the votes to overcome a Republican filibuster. Unlike other issues, though, this one could result in a bipartisan compromise.

Still, there are new signs of optimism that Republican and Democratic lawmakers are serious about trying to make a deal. [Democratic Rep. Karen] Bass says she hopes the two sides can put together a framework by late May, which would be the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s murder. [Republican Senator Tim] Scott floated a potential compromise last week on reforming qualified immunity, arguing that police departments could be held accountable even if individual officers are still shielded. The South Carolina Republican has said some Democrats he has spoken with are open to his compromise and he doesn’t believe Republicans are far apart on the issues.

Additionally, Attorney General Merrick Garland has restarted the Obama-administration policy of federal oversight of local police departments, which may result in lawsuits and enforceable consent decrees.

I can’t remember who first called my attention to Beau of the Fifth Column, but I’ve become a fan. He combines working-class common sense with deep insight into what’s going on under the surface of the public conversation. I envy the way he can communicate complex ideas in five or six minutes without using polysyllabic buzzwords. Here’s what he had to say about the questions people raise to justify police killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo.

and climate change

Thursday, President Biden set a goal:

to cut greenhouse gases in half by the end of this decade. That’s where we’re headed as a nation, and that’s what we can do if we take action to build an economy that’s not only more prosperous, but healthier, fairer, and cleaner for the entire planet. These steps will set America on a path of net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.

Setting goals is the easy part, though. The question is whether he can get the country committed to achieving them, and in particular whether that commitment can endure even after he leaves office.

One encouraging thing about this speech is that he’s not even nodding at people who make the Environment vs. Economy argument. In the same way that we can’t reopen the economy without dealing with the virus, we can’t have a healthy economy for the future if we ignore climate change.

I see an opportunity to create millions of good-paying, middle-class, union jobs.

I see line workers laying thousands of miles of transmission lines for a clean, modern, resilient grid.

I see workers capping hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells that need to be cleaned up, and abandoned coalmines that need to be reclaimed, putting a stop to the methane leaks and protecting the health of our communities.

I see autoworkers building the next generation of electric vehicles, and electricians installing nationwide for 500,000 charging stations along our highways.

I see the engineers and the construction workers building new carbon capture and green hydrogen plants to forge cleaner steel and cement and produce clean power.

I see farmers deploying cutting-edge tools to make [the] soil of our Heartland the next frontier in carbon innovation.

and infrastructure

Last week, I predicted that the GOP would not come up with a counterproposal to President Biden’s infrastructure plan. Thursday, they seemed to prove me wrong, announcing what The Hill described as “a $568 billion infrastructure proposal”.

I mean, their two-page big-print document has a specific number attached to it, and even breaks it down: $299 billion for roads and bridges, $61 billion for public transit, $65 billion for broadband, and so on. That’s a proposal, right?

Not exactly. A lot of key questions remain unanswered, and I suspect it’s because the GOP Senate caucus doesn’t have any answers they agree on. The big one is: Where does this $568 billion come from? Their pamphlet rejects how Biden funds his much larger proposal: no new debt, no changes to the Trump tax cut, and no “corporate or international tax increases”. It vaguely offers to “repurpose unused federal spending”, and proposes taxing electric vehicles, which Biden wants to subsidize.

It also wants to “partner with spending from state and local governments” and “encourage private sector investment and the utilization of financing tools”, whatever that means. Which raises this question: Are the anticipated state, local, and private-sector investments included in the $568 billion? How much federal money are we really talking about here? (Trump’s ill-fated 2018 proposal claimed to be a $1.5 trillion plan, but only contained $200 billion of federal money spread over 10 years. An analysis by the Wharton Business School predicted that most of the other $1.3 trillion would never appear.)

The Washington Post notes that while the GOP “plan” appears to be about a quarter the size of Biden’s $2.3 trillion plan, it’s actually not even that big.

Congress typically passes long-term transportation funding bills, currently worth about $300 billion over five years. For example, between 2016 and 2020, Congress provided the $300 billion for roads, transit and rail, with a separate measure funding airports. The Biden plan expects that Congress will continue to provide at least that much money in the coming years. But the Republican proposal includes that $300 billion as part of its total.

So if you’re talking about new money, Republicans are offering about 1/9th what Biden is asking for — and committing themselves to oppose the most obvious ways to finance even that much, without specifying an alternative.

If the GOP pamphlet were a serious proposal, they would be on their way to writing an actual piece of legislation, which some large percentage of their senators and representatives would commit to vote for.

That’s not going to happen.

and the virus

Thanks largely to India, new-case totals are soaring worldwide. In the US, they have renewed a downward track, with daily new cases averaging around 56K. Maybe the vaccinations are getting ahead of the new variants and relaxed standards of behavior. Daily US death totals are currently just above 700.

The number of vaccinations per day in the US has peaked, and is now around 2.75 million, down from around 3.3 million. 94.8 million people have been fully vaccinated.

We seem to be hitting the point where the problem is demand, not supply, particularly in Trump country. Basically, everybody who listens to President Biden or Dr. Fauci already is either vaccinated or has shots scheduled. To get the rest of the way, we all need to start exercising our personal influence. Does somebody you know need a nudge?

Botswana native Siyanda Mohutsiwa unleashed a massive tweetstorm about media coverage of Covid in Africa.

The @nytimes, like countless others in Western media, has a tradition of “journalism” which takes place in an Africa without leaders, without public health officials or activists. It takes place in a vacuum of knowledge and strategy. Africa has no thinkers or planners. In Western Media, Africa has no epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists, no academics, no local journalists or medical associations are quoted. Just a vast maw of African horror witnessed only by the brave souls at the UN and the Africa bureaus of western papers.

… COVID coverage in Africa ignores reality to instead reach for any other explanation that squares with a continent devoid of brains. Most writers lean on vague ideas about “genetics” and “immunity.” It smacks of “the tenacious physical traits of the negroid race” style thinking. I cannot think of any other way to explain a decided refusal to acknowledge the actions of nations like my native Botswana which, through strict lockdown measures instituted as early as February 2020, managed to keep COVID deaths to 45 by January 2021.

It appears even as its own healthcare system is brought to its knees & exposed as a hollowed out shell of its former self, America’s media need a world where Africa can produce no solutions, can give no knowledge and is devoid of the power to positively influence the world.

and you also might be interested in …

I gotta love this story: A January 6 insurrectionist bragged about storming the Capitol to a woman the Bumble app had matched him with. “We are not a match,” she replied, and reported him to the FBI. He was arrested Thursday.

It’s hard to decide whether the Arizona election audit is a tragedy or a farce.

The audit grew out of Arizona Republican lawmakers’ effort late last year to toss out Joe Biden’s victory in the state. The audit won’t change the certified election results.

The audit is being led, funded and supported by people with documented records of promoting the falsehood that the Arizona vote was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

Senate Republicans are spending at least $150,000 in taxpayer money for the audit, according to audit documents. 

A private fund-raiser reports bringing in another $150,000 in donations from undisclosed sources. That fund raising continues.

Democrats have been suing to stop the audit, and a hearing was scheduled for today. But yesterday the judge overseeing the case withdrew. Meanwhile, Trumpist yahoos have custody of the ballots. Nothing that we hear from this point on can be trusted or checked.

At the 100-day mark, Biden’s popularity is holding up pretty well.

In the long-but-worth-it department: Wil Wilkerson’s “The Anti-Majoritarian Mistake“. It’s a direct answer to the idea currently popular in conservative circles that we can maintain a liberal society without majority support.

The conservative theory — which is the substantive content behind the republic-not-a-democracy slogan, to the extent there is any substantive content — is that constitutional restrictions have to protect basic liberties against a tyranny of the majority. So far, so good. But they jump ahead to the conclusion that majority rule is actually not necessary.

Wilkerson’s point is that society never comes to a complete-and-permanent agreement about what “basic liberties” are. In the long term, they can’t be defined by a minority, no matter how convinced that majority is of its own righteousness.

When minorities strip majorities of their power to successfully seek redress and assert their will within the system — which is what a stacked 6-3 Republican court majority veto over Democratic unified government could amount to — sooner or later, stymied majorities will seek to protect their rights and interests outside the system. This is what it means for a political system to lose legitimacy — in the grubby, practical, nuts-and-bolts stabilizing sense of “legitimacy.” …

There’s a sense in which basic rights, whatever those turn out to be, are non-negotiable. But what they turn out to be is the product of negotiation. … Political deliberation and negotiation can be a process of discovery, but what’s discovered depends on who’s allowed in the room. Rights don’t come to us on tablets etched by the divine. They come from people who know where the shoe pinches demanding more comfortable shoes. …

[T]he peaceful management of pluralistic disagreement is perhaps the most basic problem we need our political institutions to solve.

As with so many Facebook memes, I don’t know who should get credit. But it’s too good not to share.

Speaking of Fox, I have a theory: Tucker Carlson already has the next phase of his career planned, and Step 1 is getting Fox to fire him. That’s why he keeps ramping up his white-supremacist rhetoric. Fox wants to dog-whistle to those people, not appeal to them openly. But Tucker is going to find out exactly where their line is, then go out as a martyr to the Liberal Cancel Culture that even Fox is part of.

Unlike Tucker, I try to be open about when I’m speculating beyond the evidence, and that’s what I’m doing here. I don’t know whether Step 2 is entering politics or starting some more lucrative media gig that milks subscribers (like Glenn Beck does; just because you don’t notice him any more doesn’t mean that he’s not raking in the bucks) or launching some more extreme network to out-Fox Fox. But I think there’s a method in Tucker’s increasing madness.

Fascinating set of issues in a Supreme Court case about whether a school can punish a cheerleader for something she put on Snapchat. Her personal issues are all moot — a lower court restored her to the cheerleading squad and she has graduated — but the case is still alive because of the broader implications about student speech. I’m going to have to read the appellate-court ruling before I even know which side I’m on.

Matt Yglesias called attention to a fact I hadn’t noticed: Gallup reported already in 2017 that the number of Americans who described the Bible as “fables, history, moral precepts recorded by men” exceeded the number who think of the Bible as “actual word of God to be taken literally”. Both views significantly trail the fairly stable 47% who chose “inspired by God, not to be taken literally”.

and let’s close with something both airy and timely

Xavi Bou practices an unusual form of bird photography, using time studies of individual birds and flocks of birds to create arresting patterns.

someone encountering his work for the first time could be excused for having no idea what his subject is. In a project called Ornithographies, he creates mesmerizing images by taking many photographs per second and stitching up to 3,500 or more of them together. The results are beautifully abstract, capturing the energy of flight, whether in the chaotic squiggles that result when Alpine Swifts dive and swoop for insects, or the smooth, even undulations of a gull flying over the water.

The result is a still image like this:

Or a video like this:

So when will it be the right moment to leave? One more year, two more years, ten more years? Ten, twenty, thirty billion dollars more above the trillion we’ve already spent?

– President Biden
“Remarks on the Way Forward in Afghanistan“

This week’s featured posts are “Finally, some honesty about Afghanistan“, “The GOP: Still not a governing party“, and “The anti-trans distraction“.

This week everybody was talking about Afghanistan

President Biden says our troops will be out by September 11. This is discussed one of the featured posts.

and shootings

Between the police shootings and the mass shootings, it’s been hard to keep up.

Closing arguments in the Chauvin trial are happening today, and the case should go to the jury this week. By next Monday, we might have a verdict.

The nearby Daunte Wright shooting, and claim that the police officer mistook her gun for a taser, provoked a great deal of protest and skepticism. The officer has been charged with second-degree manslaughter. Chicago police released video of the shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, who appeared to be unarmed and have his hands up. The NYT reports:

Since testimony [in the Chauvin trial] began on March 29, at least 64 people have died at the hands of law enforcement nationwide, with Black and Latino people representing more than half of the dead. As of Saturday, the average was more than three killings a day.

And CNN:

Three people are dead after someone opened fire inside a tavern in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Another three people were killed in a shooting that police said appeared to be related to a domestic incident in Texas. Authorities said a potential mass shooting was averted at San Antonio airport when a parks officer stopped a man with a box full of ammunition and a .45 caliber handgun.

Such events underscore the easy availability of deadly weapons. The 19-year-old who killed eight people in a massacre at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis late on Thursday bought his two assault rifles legally, police said over the weekend.

According to a CNN analysis, the United States has suffered at least 50 mass shootings since March 16, when eight people were killed at three Atlanta-area spas. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent.

and the virus

We’re starting to hit the vaccine-resistance wall, particularly in areas with a lot of Trump voters. The 7-day average on vaccinations peaked at 3.3 million per day a few days ago, and has dropped slightly to 3.2 million since. 131 million Americans (including me, as of Tuesday) have gotten at least one shot, and 84.3 are fully vaccinated.

The number of new cases might be starting to head back down, after briefly going about 70K per day, but it’s too soon to declare a new trend. Deaths are down to about 750 per day.

and Russia

The Treasury Department announced sanctions against a list of Russian individuals and organizations Thursday. Well down the list was Paul Manafort’s associate Konstantin Kilimnik. The write-up revealed more about Kilimnik than had been previously known to the public:

Konstantin Kilimnik (Kilimnik) is a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant and known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy. Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

He got that “sensitive information” from Rick Gates, working under the instructions of Manafort. This completes the collusion cycle: Russia launched a social media campaign to help Trump beat Clinton in 2016, and the Trump campaign made sure they had good data to target their efforts.

BTW, “the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election” wasn’t just Russian propaganda, it was a main feature of the Trump defense in his first impeachment trial.

Ben Rhodes:

The US and EU have the means to do what Navalny has done so well: relentlessly detail and publicize the breadth and depths of the corruption of Putin and his people.

I am puzzled why we don’t do this. I think the Russian people deserve to know just how many billions Putin has stolen and where it all is.

and infrastructure

To the surprise of few, it looks like there isn’t going to be a Republican alternative to Biden’s infrastructure proposal. They’re just going to say no. More about this in one of the featured posts.

and you also might be interested in …

Who could have imagined that Roger Stone would cheat on his taxes?

Senator Ed Markey and Rep. Jerry Nadler have introduced a bill to expand the Supreme Court, but Nancy Pelosi says she’s not going to bring it up for a vote.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series on Disney Plus is examining race in a way I didn’t expect from the Marvel Universe, even after Black Panther.

At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Steve Rogers returned to the 1940s and left the shield of Captain America to Sam Wilson, the Falcon. What to do with that shield, and with the Captain America identity it represents, is the central issue of F&WS. And that issue ends up hinging on the question: What can or should American patriotism mean to a Black man? In this week’s episode (#5) a bitter Black super-soldier from the 1950s (Isaiah Bradley) tells Sam: “They will never let a Black man be Captain America, and no self-respecting Black man would want to be.”

Sam is becoming the Barack Obama to Bradley’s Jeremiah Wright. (“For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. … That anger is not always productive … but the anger is real; it is powerful. And to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”) He’s looking for a way forward that acknowledges and respects the experience of the people who came before him.

After decades of TV series that either made Black people invisible, stereotyped them, or cast them in roles where their race really didn’t matter, lately we’ve gotten a bumper crop of high-quality race-examining major-studio TV: Lovecraft Country, Watchmen, and many others.

Paul Krugman did a responsible thing Friday: He committed his thoughts about inflation to print before actual inflation heats up.

There are indeed reasons to be worried about inflationary overheating. In fact, even those of us who think it will be OK expect to see above-normal inflation this year. We just think it will be a blip. … [I]t seems to me that we should make that argument now, so as not to be accused of making excuses after the fact. This is a good time to identify which aspects of inflation might worry us, and which shouldn’t.

In short: He expects the economy to boom in the coming year, for two reasons:

• vaccinated people who have been working from home and saving their money start to get out and spend that money
• the government’s emergency anti-Covid spending.

Inflation will be part of that boom, as oil prices go back up and some parts of the economy grow faster than others, creating bottlenecks.

But history shows us two very different kinds of inflation: temporary blips, like during wars, and “embedded” inflation, like in the 1970s. The first kind of inflation goes away on its own as soon as the situation that caused it abates. The second won’t end without some kind of drastic intervention, like when the Fed shut down the 1970s inflation by raising interest rates over 20% and causing a major recession.

So the tricky thing going forward will be how to interpret inflation numbers: There’s nothing to worry about when depressed prices return to normal, or when a bottleneck sends prices of some particular commodity soaring temporarily. But a general inflation, where prices go up because prices are going up, is more serious.

and let’s close with an overdose of cuteness

A boy romps with golden retriever puppies, and is mobbed by them when he falls down. One of the commenters says: “This should be prescribed as a cure for depression.”

When a political party has no solutions to real problems, it has to make up fake problems.

As I discussed in the previous post, and have covered in more detail before, the GOP is not a governing party any more. If you are concerned with any real problem facing America today, they have no plan for dealing with it.

When a party is in that situation, it needs to distract the public with phony issues and phony solutions. And so, Republican majorities in legislatures around the country are passing voter-suppression laws under the guise of solving an “election integrity” problem that doesn’t exist, and is based on the Big Lie that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him.

Those laws are a serious threat to our democracy, but at least the threat is obvious to the general public, which can then organize against it. You don’t need any special experiences or insight to understand that Georgia Republicans did something underhanded when they made it illegal to give water to people waiting in line to vote.

But the second distraction is easier for most of the electorate to overlook, because it only affects a minority that is reviled by the conservative base and misunderstood by much of the rest of the public: transgender people.

Gender-affirming care. Two kinds of anti-trans bills are working their way through red-state legislatures, and some have already become law. One bans what is called “gender-affirming care”: medical interventions (like puberty-blocking drugs) that suppress the development of characteristics related to the gender the child wants to transition from or (like estrogen or testosterone) encourage the development of characteristics related to the gender the child wants to transition to. So even if a child, the child’s parents, and their doctors all agree on a course of treatment, the state makes it illegal.

To justify such laws, Republicans have spread a lot of lies and misinformation about what gender-affirming care really is, when it is recommended, and how it is carried out. Good sources of accurate information on these topics are this Harvard Review article and this resolution from the American Psychological Association.

As the HR article points out, anti-trans activists have changed their tactics, but not their goals. A few years ago, anti-trans “bathroom bills” were justified by painting trans youth as predators: They would invade your child’s gender-appropriate bathroom for nefarious purposes. The current wave of anti-trans bills paints them as victims: They need “protection” from the gender-transition “fad” sweeping their generation, and the predatory doctors who profit from it. But these contradictory messages are being pushed by exactly the same people.

Trans athletes. The second kind of bill bans trans girls from sports. The Guardian summarizes:

The youth sports bills, which claim to “promote fairness in women’s sports”, are based on a simple claim: that boys will be allowed to compete against girls and have an unfair advantage.

“They’re telling parents of cisgender children that you’re losing something by allowing transgender youth to play in sports,” said Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBTQ+ rights group. “We’ve seen this playbook before – you’re losing something if you allow same-sex couples to marry, if you protect racial minorities in the workplace, if immigration laws are respected. It’s us v them.”

In the same way that the bills to “protect” gender dysphoric youth are promoted by groups that were never interested in them before, these bills to protect girls sports are championed mostly by legislators who have shown little interest in girls sports until now. (Like the bathroom bills and the bills banning gender-affirming care, many of the girls-sports bills have been written by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a group motivated by conservative Christian religious views.)

The expressed motivation for such bills can be found in Florida’s “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act“:

It is the intent of the Legislature to maintain opportunities for female athletes to demonstrate their skill, strength, and athletic abilities while also providing them with opportunities to obtain recognition and accolades, college scholarships, and the numerous other long-term benefits that result from success in athletic endeavors and to promote sex equality by requiring the designation of separate sex-specific athletic teams or sports.

And that sounds marvelous, but for one fact: There’s no reason to believe that any of those opportunities for female athletes are at risk. As an ACLU report observes “transgender women and girls have been competing in sports at all levels for years”. In no state are girls sports events or teams dominated by trans athletes. Similarly, the WNBA, LPGA, and other professional women’s sports leagues have not been not overrun with trans women.

Across the country, girls participate in sports if they want to. They are not running into problems that a trans-ban will solve.

Occasionally, but not that often, some trans athlete is really good.

Running on the boys’ team as a ninth-grader in suburban Hartford, Terry Miller was an average track athlete, online records show, failing to qualify for any postseason events. But in 2018, Miller came out as a transgender girl. In her first season running against other girls, as a sophomore, Miller dominated. She won five state championships and two titles at the New England championships, beating the fastest girls from six states.

The next fall, as a junior, Miller won another four state titles and two more all-New England titles. In several races, she was followed closely by Andraya Yearwood, another transgender girl who had also won three state titles. … Girls who lost to [Miller] and their coaches complained that she had an unfair advantage. Parents of other girls started online petitions demanding state high school officials add a testosterone suppression requirement for transgender girls.

One measure of how rare such a situation is, though, is the number of articles that use this same example. (Anybody got a second one?) Retired high school coach Larry Strauss called competition from trans athletes a “non-controversy”.

Competitive equity is a beautiful and elusive objective for those of us who coach or oversee high school athletics. It is why we have junior varsity teams and freshmen and sophomore teams and why we try to match up teams that won’t slaughter one another. It often does not work out that way and we have all seen and heard about lopsided scores in high school football and basketball and pretty much every other sport. 

There are athletes whose physical gifts and athletic talent make them so dominant that it really doesn’t seem fair (I know firsthand, having coached against some of them). And does anyone believe there is any justice in the so-called “genetic lottery”? 

Scientifically, the jury is still out on when or whether trans girl athletes — particularly the ones who transitioned without going through puberty, or have received hormone treatments — have an advantage over cis girl athletes, and if so, how big that advantage is.

But what we do know is that girls sports are doing fine. To me, the right question isn’t whether trans athletes occasionally win, or even whether those victories violate some abstract ideal of fairness. The right question is whether including trans athletes ruins female sports programs for everybody else. That seems not to be happening.

In the absence of an identifiable problem, the point of these bills seems to be to harm and stigmatize transgender folk, not to protect impressionable teens or girls sports programs.

They’re united against Biden’s infrastructure plan. But they “haven’t made consensus” on what they’re for.

The most predictable headline of the week was NBC News’ “GOP unites against Biden’s $2 trillion jobs plan. It’s the counteroffer they can’t agree on.” A Republican counteroffer would mean that Republicans, as a party, were for something. But they’re not; Republicans are only against things. That’s why Steve Benen spent an entire book arguing that the GOP is not a governing party any more. The NBC article explains:

Republicans agree on one thing: They don’t like Biden’s proposal. But that’s about all.

[WV Senator Shelley Moore] Capito, who, as the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, is stuck in the middle of the struggle, said she’s crafting a “conceptual Republican bill” that includes investments in roads and bridges.

“We’re working on that right now. We haven’t made consensus on it,” she said.

Good luck with that, because Republicans still haven’t produced an alternative to ObamaCare, after more than a decade of railing against it. They have hated it to the point of shutting down the government, but an alternative? That’s too much to ask. Formal announcement of the “terrific” plan that Trump claimed to have in 2015 was always just two weeks away, but we still haven’t seen it. In 2017, he let the GOP majorities in Congress create their own “repeal and replace” bill, but the “replace” part remained empty until John McCain’s famous thumbs-down put the kibosh on the whole effort.

Similarly, when Trump really needed a Covid relief bill for his re-election campaign, Republicans couldn’t unite on one. There is no GOP plan for climate change or entitlement reform or competing with China or preventing mass shootings or solving any other American problem. They hate what Democrats want to do, and that’s as far as they go.

If the GOP was going to have a policy on anything, though, you would think it would be infrastructure. From the early Trump campaign to the American First Caucus platform that leaked this week (the one that honors America’s “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions”), infrastructure has been a key pillar:

Infrastructure is one of the few areas where the federal government should exercise its constitutional authority. For decades, America has been sending trillions of dollars out the door to support the infrastructure of other nations — even to countries that hate the United [States] — with nothing to show for it. Simultaneously, our domestic infrastructure is failing, crumbling and decaying from within. This Caucus will work to direct as much money as possible to our domestic infrastructure needs.

OK, maybe we shouldn’t expect “direct as much money as possible” to include voting for a Biden proposal. But if something is that important, you’d think there would be a plan for doing it.

There isn’t. There never was. Like the terrific health care plan, Trump campaigned in 2016 on a massive infrastructure plan that never emerged.

When I see the crumbling roads and bridges, or the dilapidated airports or the factories moving overseas to Mexico, or to other countries for that matter, I know these problems can all be fixed, but not by Hillary Clinton. Only by me.

But for before long, “infrastructure week” became a running joke. The “framework” Trump presented in 2018 never drew backing from the Republican majorities in Congress, and after the GOP lost the House, Trump walked away from negotiating with Nancy Pelosi about infrastructure until Democrats “get these phony investigations over with”. As re-election loomed, he floated price tags of $1 trillion or $2 trillion for unspecified infrastructure, but Congressional Republicans once again refused to line up behind it.

So if you ask leading Republicans whether they want to rebuild American roads and bridges, they’ll say they do. But they don’t want to raise taxes for it, and they don’t want to borrow money either. Some may talk vaguely about cutting other spending to compensate, but the those specifics also never appear. (Ten years ago, Paul Krugman was already making fun of Speaker Paul Ryan’s “magic asterisk” of unspecified spending cuts.)

That’s why this week’s headline was so predictable: Republicans are unanimously against Biden’s proposal to do what Trump said he wanted to do but never got done. It’s too big, it’s not really infrastructure, and so on. So what’s their alternative plan for solving this problem?

Crickets.

NBC News goes on to state the obvious:

A counteroffer is key to beginning any process that might resemble negotiations.

One lesson President Biden seems to have learned from his Obama-administration experience is not to make concessions in exchange for nothing. If there is nothing that Republicans support, then their votes aren’t winnable. End of story.

The obstacle is that he can’t offer them what they really want: roads and bridges that appear by magic, without anyone needing to pay taxes or take on debt, and without Biden getting credit for them.

In January, after Biden announced his Covid relief proposal, Republicans pretended to make a counteroffer. Of course, it didn’t come from Mitch McConnell or anyone else authorized to speak for the whole caucus. It came from ten “moderate” GOP senators — coincidentally, the exact number needed to overcome a filibuster. That meant that if Biden gave up on the filibuster-avoiding reconciliation process, each of the ten Republicans would have veto power over the final bill. And their offer was a $600 billion package that was not even one-third of Biden’s $1.9 trillion proposal, which the American people supported.

So: give up the great majority of what you think is needed, trust that McConnell won’t turn any of us, give all ten of us the power to scupper the whole deal if any of the final details aren’t to our liking, and then maybe we’ll vote with you and with the American people.

Such a deal. Biden ignored them, got the package he wanted through reconciliation (with zero Republican votes in either house), and did something popular besides.

This time, even a phony counteroffer doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Senator Manchin may pine for the days of bipartisanship and lament the resort to reconciliation. But he does want an infrastructure bill to get done, and even he has to realize that you can’t work out a compromise with people who can’t say yes.

So that’s the choice: Vice President Harris breaking the tie on an all-Democratic reconciliation bill, or nothing.

Biden’s announcement ends not just to our war in Afghanistan, but 20 years of fantasies about what “six more months” can accomplish there.

Wednesday, President Biden announced that our troops (and those of our NATO allies) will leave Afghanistan by September 11. Unlike previous dates for withdrawal, this one isn’t based on achieving some kind of stability or other goals first; we’re just getting out.

That announcement touched off a lot of comment, both pro and con. Pro: Leaving saves American lives and resources, and gives our military more flexibility to confront challenges more central to our well-being, as may come from Russia (in Ukraine) or China (in Taiwan). Con: Without us, the Afghan government will probably fall to the Taliban. That will definitely be bad for the Afghan people, and could also harm us if the Taliban starts sheltering terrorist groups like Al Qaeda again.

But one argument has been conspicuous by its absence: If we stay for six more months, or a year, or three years, Afghan democracy will stabilize, the Afghan Army will finally have enough training, and the government we leave behind in Kabul will be able to sustain itself.

The generals and their media allies have been making that argument for almost 20 years, and I was pleased to hear Biden blow it up:

So when will it be the right moment to leave? One more year, two more years, ten more years? Ten, twenty, thirty billion dollars more above the trillion we’ve already spent? …

“Not now” — that’s how we got here. And in this moment, there’s a significant downside risk to staying beyond May 1st without a clear timetable for departure.

If we instead pursue the approach where [the US] exit is tied to conditions on the ground, we have to have clear answers to the following questions: Just what conditions [will] be required to allow us to depart? By what means and how long would it take to achieve them, if they could be achieved at all? And at what additional cost in lives and treasure?

I’m not hearing any good answers to these questions. And if you can’t answer them, in my view, we should not stay.

Biden acknowledges the possibility of a terrorist resurgence in Afghanistan, but plans to deal with that if and when it happens.

We’ll not take our eye off the terrorist threat. We’ll reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent reemergence of terrorists — of the threat to our homeland from over the horizon. We’ll hold the Taliban accountable for its commitment not to allow any terrorists to threaten the United States or its allies from Afghan soil.

I think of The Washington Post as the hometown paper of the defense and foreign-policy establishment, and it has been playing that role this week. The Post’s editorial board responded to Biden’s plan by predicting that “the likely result will be disaster”. But even they acknowledged that their alternative path offers no exit.

A strategy of leaving troops in the country in an effort to force the Taliban to compromise could extend the U.S. commitment for years without achieving a durable peace.

And WaPo columnist Max Boot offered a much-scaled-down version of the usual rosy scenario:

To avert such a dire contingency, Biden would not have to wage a “forever war.” He would merely have to keep a relatively small number of U.S. forces to advise and assist the Afghans who already undertake almost all of the fighting.

So: a forever skirmish, not a forever war. We’ve recently gone a whole year without a combat death in Afghanistan. Maybe that happy circumstance will continue, and the price of freezing the status quo will be low enough to tolerate indefinitely.

Or maybe not. Maybe the Taliban will tire of trying to wait us out, and will go back to trying to drive us out. And if combat deaths go back up, that will be its own reason to stay, so that the troops we are losing will not have died in vain.

But notice: This disagreement is between two sides that each have at least one foot in reality. Maybe the cost of staying in Afghanistan forever will be tolerable, or maybe we’ll find some better way of dealing with the increased terrorism threat of a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. But nobody is counting on the Freedom Fairy to sprinkle her dust over Kandahar.

So whether you agree with Biden on this or not, you should at least thank him for bringing some honesty into the conversation.

Having written more-or-less even-handedly up to this point, I’ll take a side: I’m with Biden on this.

Way back in 2005, I expressed very similar ideas (about Iraq) in a 2005 essay I provocatively titled “Cut and Run“. At the time, “serious” foreign-policy experts were finally admitting that the 2003 Iraq invasion had been a mistake and we needed to get our troops out. But they always paired that concession with some sort of “after we fix what we’ve broken” caveat. (This became known as the Pottery Barn rule.) Typically, the sages thought our troops needed six more months to “stabilize the country” or “establish democracy” or achieve some other worthy but nebulous goal. (NYT columnist Thomas Friedman rolled his six-more-months projections forward with such regularity that six months became known as a Friedman unit.)

In “Cut and Run” I demanded a measurable answer to the question “What are we fixing?” Because in my opinion our military presence wasn’t fixing anything. After six more months, Iraq would still need “stabilizing”, and our troops would have to stay longer.

We can leave Iraq now, or we can leave after our losses have grown. That is the only choice we have.

I feel the same about Afghanistan today, after nearly 20 years of war. Whatever our original intentions might have been, by now it’s clear that we’re not building a secular, democratic, pro-Western government that will someday be strong enough to stand on its own.

There’s a lesson here, and it’s the same lesson we should have learned from Vietnam: In order to install a new form of government in a country, people on the ground have to be buying what you’re selling. As The Boston Globe’s H. D. S. Greenway puts it: In both Vietnam and Afghanistan

our clients could never shake the impression that they were puppets fighting for foreigners, while the Viet Cong and the Taliban were able to present themselves as the true patriots fighting to rid their country of colonialism.

In South Vietnam, all we had to work with was the remnant of the old French colonial administration, which local people joined for the sake of power and profit, not because they believed in the French Empire or anti-Communism or some other idealistic notion. In Afghanistan, we have a corrupt government in Kabul supported (up to a point) by a patchwork of warlords in the countryside. The Afghan people don’t believe in it, because they shouldn’t believe in it.

Over the last two decades, hundreds of thousands of American troops have served in Afghanistan — most of them honorably and some heroically. It is a shame that their effort and sacrifice has not produced a lasting result that our nation can point to with pride. But more effort and sacrifice will not redeem what bad policy has already wasted. We need to leave.

Wednesday, Rachel Maddow brought up another good point about this war, illustrated by the experience of Taliban hostage David Rhode, the Pulitzer-winning NYT journalist who was held for seven months in 2008-2009. Rhode was actually only a prisoner in Afghanistan for a week; for the half-year beyond that, the Taliban kept him in parts of Pakistan where they had free rein.

Knocking the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan was one thing. Defeating them in some kind of larger war, preventing them from ever rising again in Afghanistan, that was something that a US military conflict in Afghanistan was never going to be able to do. Not when the Taliban wasn’t confined to Afghanistan and wasn’t really based there.

Pakistan, if you remember, was where Osama bin Laden had been hiding — not far from the Pakistani version of West Point.

In August 2010, a former Pakistani intelligence officer approached the U.S. embassy station chief in Islamabad and offered to reveal bin Laden’s location, in return for the $25 million reward, according to a retired senior U.S. intelligence official. This story was corroborated by two U.S. intelligence officials speaking to NBC News, and had been previously reported by intelligence analyst Raelynn Hillhouse. The Pakistani official informed U.S. intelligence that bin Laden had been located by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI in 2006, and held under house arrest near Pakistani intelligence and military centers ever since.

According to the retired senior U.S. intelligence official speaking to [journalist Seymour] Hersh, bin Laden was ill at this point, financially supported by some within Saudi Arabia, and kept by the ISI to better manage their complex relationship with Pakistani and Afghan Islamist groups.

So a fully military solution to the Afghan problem would mean, at a minimum, expanding the war into Pakistan, and taking down factions within the Pakistani government. Pakistan, you may recall, is a nuclear power.

I don’t think anybody wants to open that can of worms.

Last week I couldn’t come up with a featured post, so this week there are three.

The first one discusses President Biden’s decision to pull our combat troops out of Afghanistan by September 11. Unlike any announcements by previous presidents, this isn’t a goal that assumes we’ll produce some good outcome by then, and that will be reversed when we don’t. We’re just leaving.

The thing I like best about this announcement is that it has finally provoked the kind of honest discussion we should have had many years ago: Our troops are not fixing Afghanistan, so there is no point in the future when they will be done fixing it. The choices are (1) stay forever, and (2) pull out and let the Taliban take over. There are arguments for and against each path, but those are the choices. I’ll discuss that in “Finally, some honesty about Afghanistan”, which should be out shortly.

The second featured post discusses what I call “the most predictable headline of the week”: Republicans haven’t been able to unite behind an alternative to Biden’s infrastructure plan. The GOP doesn’t have a healthcare plan, a climate-change plan, or a plan to address any other real American problem. Why would anyone expect them to have an infrastructure plan? That post “The GOP: Still not a governing party” should be out around 10 EST.

The third post was supposed to be a note in the weekly summary, but there was too much to cover. When you’re a political party with no solutions to real problems, but you have power, you have to talk about something. So Republican state governments are passing anti-trans laws to address problems that aren’t problems, like confused youth being talked into gender transition by the media and predatory doctors, or cis girls being chased out of girls sports programs by boys claiming to be girls. I don’t have a title for that yet, but I’ll try to get it out by 11.

Finally, the weekly summary has new shootings to discuss, both mass shootings and police shootings. The Chauvin trail is heading into closing statements. Apparently there really was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Marjorie Taylor Greene briefly tried to assemble a American First Caucus in the House to protect our “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions”. And a few other things happened. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

When I look into that officer’s eyes, they’re not looking at me like I’m another human being. At best, I’m a threat. At worst, I’m an animal. That is unacceptable.

– Delegate C.T. Wilson of the Maryland House
describing his experience dealing with police as a large Black man

There is no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about the Chauvin trial, and policing in general

The prosecution is getting close to wrapping up its case against Derek Chauvin. The defense should start this week.

I’ve found the defense attorney’s cross-examination of prosecution witnesses hard to watch, so I suspect the case they present will be even harder. In the words of The New Yorker’s Jeannie Suk Gersen, “The defense’s best hope is to instill doubt about what jurors can plainly see.”

The argument will probably be a kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand that shows up fairly often, but doesn’t get nearly enough attention: Reduce the scene to a verbal description, then weave a new scene from that description. (I first noticed this technique during the Clinton impeachment trial. The public wasn’t buying that Clinton should be removed for having an affair and covering it up. So Republicans didn’t talk about that directly. Instead, they reduced Clinton’s actions to the legal categories of perjury and obstruction, then argued that perjury and obstruction were impeachable offenses, as they might be in other circumstances.)

So this week the horrified bystanders to Chauvin’s crime will become a potentially dangerous mob. The struggles George Floyd made while he was upright will be painted as plausible threats from his prone, handcuffed, unconscious, and dying body. Floyd’s death will be attributed to drugs and pre-existing health problems, with Chauvin’s knee on his neck merely incidental.

Reassemble that, and the defense’s question becomes: If an officer under threat from a dangerous mob is using force to subdue a resisting suspect, and the suspect happens to die for other reasons, is the officer really guilty of anything? Jurors will be invited to imagine other possible scenes that fit this description, and the blameless officers who might be convicted by the standard they set here.

Such a scene isn’t at all what the videos of Floyd’s death show, but if one juror can be induced to forget or ignore what he saw, Chauvin goes free. As the prosecutor said in his opening remarks: “Trust your eyes.”

Here’s why I expect: Chauvin won’t go free, but he won’t be convicted of the highest charge, second-degree murder. (IMO, that charge is already too low.) Consequently, he’ll face a sentence that will appear to devalue George Floyd’s life. Riots will erupt in Minneapolis and possibly elsewhere. The legal decision will be a done deal at that point, so the question will be whether Black Lives Matter activists can craft some demand that can still be met.

However the trial comes out, it’s worth appreciating that Chauvin was only charged because bystander videos went viral. If not for video, police would have circled the wagons around him and nothing would have happened. I have to wonder how many murders by police haven’t been prosecuted because the only surviving witnesses were other police.

If Chauvin goes free in spite of the video, I don’t know what comes next. Any conservatives who express horror at riots should have to answer this question: What is a community’s appropriate response when police can murder its members, the murder can be posted on YouTube, and they get away with it? What should people do when this happens over and over?

Meanwhile, Sunday afternoon another Black man was killed by a police officer in a Minneapolis suburb.

Chief Tim Gannon of the Brooklyn Center Police Department said an officer had shot the man on Sunday afternoon after pulling his car over for a traffic violation and discovering that the driver had a warrant out for his arrest. As the police tried to detain the man, he stepped back into his car, at which point an officer shot him, Chief Gannon said.

To me, it matters what the warrant was for. Was 20-year-old Daunte Wright a dangerous criminal whose immediate apprehension was necessary for public safety? Or might police have simply followed until Wright realized he wasn’t going to get away? Or did the officer decide that Wright’s failure to obey carried a death sentence, independent of whatever his original crime might have been?

The shooting touched off a riot Sunday night, and the National Guard was called out.

Nobody died in this incident, but it’s still not right: Two Virginia police approached an Army lieutenant at gunpoint, then pepper-sprayed him when he refused to get out of the car until they explained why they had stopped him. The lieutenant has filed a lawsuit against the officers.

Zack Linly comments at The Root:

Why are you like this?—when someone asks a police officer why he’s being asked to exit his vehicle or why he’s being stopped in the first place, why the hell can’t cops respond by…oh, I don’t know…answering the fucking question? Instead, the officers in this instance appear to have responded by typical aggression and equally typical police brutality.

Incidents like this give me sympathy for the “Abolish the Police” movement. I understand that laws need to be enforced somehow, but are men who behave like this really making us safer? Sometimes I think we should just fire everyone and start over (like the former Soviet republic of Georgia did). Maybe we should contract our policing out to civilized countries like New Zealand or Iceland.

I’m going to keep repeating this point until it’s widely acknowledged. Whenever you compare US policing to other countries, somebody raises the point that US criminals are more dangerous, because so many of them have guns. (“I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6” police tell each other.) So: Trigger-happy police is a price we pay for not controlling guns.

In 2018, the Pittsburgh newsletter The Incline answered a reader’s question about what police can or should do when a suspect flees during a felony traffic stop. The answer seems much more reasonable than the police behaviors we’re talking about.

Tom Nolan, a 27-year veteran of the Boston Police Department who’s now an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Merrimack College, said, “Certainly it’s not in compliance with standard police training and protocol to shoot at individuals who are fleeing the police. The police are not trained to do that unless there is a threat to an officer or innocent bystander or an imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death. Absent that there’s no justification.”

A police reform bill passed in Maryland over Governor Hogan’s veto.

The changes do not go as far as some social justice advocates had hoped: Discipline will now largely be decided by civilian panels, for example, but police chiefs maintain a role. Some activists wanted the panels to act independently of police.

Still, the legislation imposes one of the strictest police use-of-force standards in the nation, according to experts; requires officers to prioritize de-escalation tactics; and imposes a criminal penalty for those found to have used excessive force.

A Democratic legislator described the danger he faces from police simply because he is a large Black man.

When I look into that officer’s eyes, they’re not looking at me like I’m another human being. At best, I’m a threat. At worst, I’m an animal. That is unacceptable.

Saturday Night Live’s opening skit featured a disagreement between White and Black Minneapolis news anchors: White anchors are confident that justice will be done in the Chauvin trial, while Black anchors say “We’ve seen this movie before.”

and the virus

Today should pass 120 million people at least partially vaccinated. (I get my first shot tomorrow.) The number of new cases continues to edge upward, running just below 70K per day. Deaths continue to slowly decline.

Anecdotally, I’ve been hearing for weeks that vaccination appointments were easier to get in red states, where more people are skeptical of the vaccines and even of the seriousness of Covid-19. Now there are numbers to back that up.

The official statistics on Covid deaths in Russia don’t look that bad: 707 deaths per million, according to Worldometer, compared to 1,732 in the US. But Saturday’s NYT reported that excess deaths in 2020 are far larger than the official Covid statistics account for. Deaths in Russia during the pandemic months of 2020 were 28% above normal, compared to 17% above normal in the US.

Russians understand that the government is lying to them about Covid deaths, and that produces a nasty result: They don’t trust the government about vaccines either. (Russia produces its own vaccine, which apparently is pretty good.)

One conclusion to draw is that of all forms of government, the one that has handled Covid the worst is authoritarian populism. Of all large countries, possibly the most inexcusably bad responses to the pandemic are the US (Trump), Russia (Trump’s role model Putin), and Brazil (led by Jair Bolsonaro, “the Tropical Trump“).

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (never heard of them before, so take this with a grain of salt) claims that most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook comes from just 12 people.

Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen.

and Republicans

I should have linked to this last week: The Trump campaign solved a cash crunch late in the 2020 campaign by scamming its own donors. Recurring donations were the default, which you had to read carefully to opt out of.

The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for politics. In the final two and a half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors.

The money was paid back using the haul from Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign, which was a different kind of scam. Most of the money collected was not spent on contesting the election results.

I keep hearing that Republicans are bound to win back the House in 2022, because midterm elections usually favor the party that’s out of power. But I think the GOP faces an unusual number of problems this cycle, like explaining why they’re voting against things their voters like, and whether or not the party should continue to be a Trump personality cult now that he’s literally one of those crazy old men ranting about socialism.

An RNC donor retreat went to Mar-a-Lago Saturday for a Trump speech. (The Great Man could not come to them.) The speech made headlines for attacking his own party’s Senate leader. (He called Mitch McConnell a “dumb son of a bitch” and a “stone cold loser”.)

As Playbook and the New York Times have reported, Trump has become a complication for donors. They don’t want their money going toward his retribution efforts. Remember: These are exorbitantly wealthy people — some with egos as big as Trump’s — and they are not interested in hearing about how another rich guy had his ego bruised.

The 2022 GOP primaries are going to be nasty affairs, and many of them will be won by QAnon crazies or outright fascists. Republicans proved in Alabama in 2017 and Missouri in 2012 that a bad enough candidate can blow a race anywhere, and 2022 will feature some historically bad GOP candidates.

Fascist/supremacist rhetoric is getting increasingly explicit in Republican circles. Last week I quoted from an article from the Claremont Institute calling for a “counter-revolution” because “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

Thursday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson explicitly endorsed the white supremacist “Great Replacement” theory:

I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term “replacement,” if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate — the voters now casting ballots — with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that’s what happening, actually. Let’s just say it. That’s true. …

It’s a voting-rights question. In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.

In the link, Jonathan Chait points out how weird this framing is: The ordinary use of “replacement” would imply that current US citizens are being kicked out as new immigrants come in, which no one thinks is happening.

My employer hires new writers pretty often. If they fired me and gave my job to a new writer, that would be replacement. If they just created a new job, and assigned the writers to work alongside me, that would not be replacement.

If we take Carlson’s “voting-rights” view seriously — which I don’t believe he does, because he only pays attention to its anti-immigrant conclusions, rather than its full implications — then when my white ancestors arrived in the 1840s, they disenfranchised the previously established Americans; every American who turns 18 disenfranchises the rest of us; and our votes gain power whenever any other American voter dies. (Go, coronavirus!)

And let’s not ignore the racism of assuming that immigrants from the largely non-white Third World are “more obedient voters”, rather than human beings who can think for themselves. Also: No one is importing “new voters”. When immigrants arrive here (by their own choice rather because some sinister cabal “imports” them) the road to citizenship is long and full of obstacles. This is especially true for those who circumvent the legal immigration process.

Replacement Theory also comes with a lot of baggage Carlson didn’t mention, but that his white-supremacist fans are well aware of. Chait summarizes:

When Nazis marched in Charlottesville in 2017, they chanted “You will not replace us!” and, somewhat more clarifying, “Jews will not replace us!” The terrorist who gunned down 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, used this slogan (“The Great Replacement”) in his manifesto. …

“Replacement theory” imagines that an elite cabal, frequently described as Jewish, is plotting to “replace” the native white population with non-white immigrants, who will pollute and destroy the white Christian culture.

George Soros is frequently identified as the Jewish mastermind of the replacement plot. That’s why the MAGA bomber mailed him a pipe bomb. Replacement Theory is also why an anti-immigrant gunman killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

So why would a TV host mangle the English language in order to get the word “replacement” into his screed? Because he wanted to invoke the baggage. Tucker was giving a shout-out to the Nazis in his audience.

John Boehner has written a book in which he breaks with the Republican Party in its current form. I feel like I ought to read it, but I don’t want to, and I certainly don’t want to pay for it. I anticipate feeling the same frustration with it as the NYT’s reviewer.

Boehner doesn’t acknowledge the role that his generation of Republicans played in building the bridge from Ronald Reagan’s era to our current times. … Boehner’s memoirs are an X-ray into the mind of Reagan-era Republicans who did whatever was necessary to win and who today are seeing the high costs of their decisions.

Boehner’s generation thought they could pander to the reality-denying right-wingers while keeping them under control — basically the same mistake German industrialists and aristocrats made with Hitler. And their heirs are still doing it: Kevin McCarthy knows that Trump is an idiot and QAnon is insane, but he won’t say so. I don’t have a lot of patience with their self-justifications.

On the other hand, the way Trumpism ends is that everybody who’s not a Trumpist leaves the Republican Party, which then goes down to historic defeats until it reorganizes, once again becoming a political party with a message for the political center, rather than an authoritarian cult that sponsors political violence. Max Boot acknowledges that necessity:

those of us on the center-right can’t afford a third-party flirtation. We need to become Biden Republicans.

So I welcome Boehner’s book as a harbinger of a GOP crash-and-burn. But I’m not looking forward to reading it.

and you also might be interested in …

Matt Gaetz’ troubles aren’t getting any better. CNN reports that Trump has refused to meet with him, and Trump certainly failed to mention Gaetz during his Saturday-night ramble in front of GOP donors. Meanwhile, the attorney of his associate Joel Greenberg is hinting at a plea deal.

As I said last week, I’m waiting for some official documentation (like an indictment) before I follow this for any reason other than entertainment. But it is entertaining. The NYT told more of the Greenberg story yesterday.

While I was looking for the SNL video above, YouTube recommended I look at this Jen Psaki press briefing from March 10, where a Fox reporter peppered her with hostile questions about the situation at the Mexican border and school reopenings. This is why I love Psaki: no insults to the reporter, no rants about his network’s obvious bias or falling ratings, no threats to have his White House pass revoked. She fields the questions calmly and answers with facts.

The new Ken Burns series has people talking about Ernest Hemingway again. I’m reminded of a pattern I usually illustrate with Don Henley’s song “The Boys of Summer” (an old-guy reference that readers can update for themselves): A 15-year-old hears it and thinks, “That’s how it feels to be in love.” Ten years later he hears it and thinks, “That’s so immature. I can’t believe I ever liked that song.” Then another ten years pass and he thinks, “That’s how it felt to be in love when I was 15.”

In other words: First you’re captured by a point of view. Then you’re trying to get distance from it. But eventually you feel secure in your distance and can look back more fondly.

I think we might be ready for that third stage of reading Hemingway. First, people read his books and thought: “That’s what it means to be a man.” Then “His books are full of toxic masculinity.” Now maybe we can read him and think: “That’s what it’s like to wrestle with toxic masculinity.”

After all, Hemingway heroes are not John Wayne or James Bond. Their masculine virtues don’t lead to triumphs that right all the wrongs and let them live happily ever after with either the girl of their dreams or an endless parade of Pussy Galores. Hemingway stories center on lonely men struggling to get by in a world that is either godless or ruled by a God who is the Father in all the wrong ways. Maybe they’re a pretty accurate picture of where excessive masculinity leads.

As a writer, I feel indebted to Hemingway as a pivotal figure in American prose. 19th century novels still reflect old-time oral story-telling, where long florid descriptions help pass the endless winter nights. Hemingway changed everything by writing novels in the style of a newspaper, where each column-inch is valuable and needs to accomplish something.

We’re still influenced by him, whether we know it or not. If you’ve ever gotten impatient with an author and thought, “Can we just get on with this?”, or if you’ve had a writing teacher tell you, “Show, don’t tell” — you’ve been influenced by Hemingway.

I haven’t watched Burns’ Hemingway series yet, but I did watch HBO’s “Q: Into the Storm“, in which filmmaker Cullen Hoback tries to identify Q, and ultimately decides it’s Ron Watkins — “CodeMonkey” of the 8kun site that hosts most QAnon discussion.

I recommend watching this as entertainment, but not taking it too seriously. It is entertaining, though, and it’s fascinating/horrifying to see the people Hoback has been following for years show up at the Capitol on January 6.

and let’s close with something musical

Lubalin is a musician who turns “random internet drama” into songs. They show up on his Twitter feed, which is strangely engaging.

The news that caught my attention this week was the Chauvin trial, and related stories of policing in America. But I don’t have much insight to add to what you can easily find elsewhere, so I’m going to let my observations remain a series of short notes rather than assemble them into a featured post.

So there won’t be a featured post this week, and correspondingly, the weekly summary will be longer than usual. I expect it to post around 11 EST.

Other stuff in the summary: the Biden administration is beginning its fight for a big infrastructure bill, which looks like it will have to pass the Senate through reconciliation, without Republican help. Joe Manchin has reiterated his opposition to reforming the filibuster, as well as his nostalgic fantasy of bipartisan cooperation. So voting-rights protection and gun control look dead, and it’s not clear how big an infrastructure package Manchin will allow.

Red states are starting to hit the wall of vaccine resistance already, while allowing large crowds for sporting events. Texas is moving forward with a Georgia-style anti-voting law. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson openly endorsed the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory, while John Boehner’s book raises the question of how many establishment Republicans will leave the Trump personality cult that the GOP has become. Ken Burns has got me thinking about Hemingway again, while HBO led me down the QAnon rabbit-hole.

I don’t know if you’ve seen anyone be killed, but it’s upsetting

– Minneapolis EMT Genevieve Hansen
under cross-examination by Derek Chauvin’s attorney

This week’s featured post is “Answering 7 Questions About the Georgia Election Law“.

This week everybody was talking about the Chauvin trial

CSPAN is carrying the trial live, and large chunks of it have been on MSNBC. The Minneapolis Star Tribune is livestreaming it. The Washington Post has put entire days of testimony on YouTube. I’ll let other sites do the legal analysis.

The thing that has struck me (and others) is the emotional tenor of the prosecution’s witnesses. Virtually all the bystanders seem traumatized by their experience. Again and again, witnesses have expressed regret or shame that they didn’t or couldn’t do more to help George Floyd, even though they knew he was being murdered right in front of them. The cashier who made the original call to the police (after Floyd passed him a counterfeit $20 bill) testified: “If I would have just not taken the bill, this could have been avoided.”

I’ve lost track of the number of witnesses who have cried on the stand. CNN’s Don Lemon broke down on his TV show just from listening to Cornell West imagine trying to save Floyd. “Some of us black men, we’re not gonna stand there. We have to intervene in some way. They ain’t gonna kill us like that, and we remain spectators.”

The only people who don’t seem to feel remorse are the cops.

I think it’s important that so much of the trial is being seen live by large numbers of people. When a trial happens far away and the verdict seems strange, it’s easy to yield to the deeper immersion of the jury: I wasn’t there. Maybe the jury came to a different understanding of the case from the one I picked up from the media. Or maybe the evidence I found so convincing wasn’t admissible for some reason.

Not this time. It’s obvious to anybody who’s watching that Chauvin murdered Floyd. If he gets off, the whole country will know that cops are above the law. Financial Times sets the legal stage:

Prosecutors have hedged their bets by pursuing three charges: second- and third-degree murder and manslaughter. The most serious, second-degree murder, requires that prosecutors prove Chauvin unintentionally killed Floyd while committing a felony. Manslaughter only requires proving Chauvin took an unreasonable risk of causing death. Manslaughter carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, compared to 40 years for second-degree murder.

The fact that he’s only charged with second-degree murder is already an injustice. Chauvin continued kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly ten minutes, while people all around told him that Floyd was dying. How is that not an intentional killing? Houston’s Channel 11 says that the recommended sentence for manslaughter with no prior convictions is four years. Actual time served might be less. Would that feel like justice?

The two most likely scenarios, in my opinion, are either a mistrial (because of one holdout juror), or a conviction resulting in a light sentence (sending the message that a cop killing a black man just isn’t that big a deal). In either case, violent protest is the likely result.

and infrastructure

President Biden came out with his infrastructure plan, the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan. The Washington Post summarizes it in this graphic.

Employing people to build or rebuild the stuff we all use is a fairly popular idea with Americans of both parties. It was implicit in both recent winning presidential slogans: Biden’s “Build Back Better” in 2020 and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” in 2016.

Unfortunately, as I keep saying, the Senate is broken. So Mitch McConnell announced of all-out GOP opposition.

He said as much as Republicans would like to address infrastructure, “I think the last thing the economy needs right now is a big, whopping tax increase,” according to Politico. The Kentucky Republican specifically criticized the plan’s proposed corporate tax rate hike, which he said would hurt America’s ability to compete in a global economy, and the subsequent increase to the national debt.

In other words, McConnell wants to address infrastructure, but without raising taxes or increasing debt. (This is like my desire to lose ten pounds without dieting or exercising.) With those principles in mind, I doubt he’ll be making a counter-proposal. Maybe Republican thoughts and prayers will build bridges the same way they prevent school shootings.

The one upside of McConnell’s position is that he won’t keep us guessing about whether a bipartisan deal is possible: It’s not. You might imagine pealing off two or three Republican senators in spite of McConnell’s opposition, but getting the 10 necessary to survive a filibuster is out of the question.

The only alternative is the same reconciliation path that Biden’s Covid relief plan took, and that depends on keeping all 50 Senate Democrats united. In particular, Joe Manchin has to stay in line. Manchin has previously stated that any infrastructure plan should be bipartisan. But he’s also said he’s for a big infrastructure plan. He’s going to have to choose which of those positions is more important to him.

The fact that they’re already pledged not to support the bill won’t keep Republicans from opining about what should be in it. CNN quotes numerous Republicans musing about what “infrastructure” is, and deciding that it’s only roads and bridges.

Some items in the Biden plan, like support for keeping elderly people in their homes (which might end up being one of the most popular parts), does stretch the traditional meaning of infrastructure. (Bernie Sanders describes them as “human infrastructure”.) But replacing all the nation’s lead water pipes (the ultimate culprits in the Flint water crisis) would be infrastructure under any reasonable definition. Rural broadband hasn’t been in previous infrastructure bills, but there was also a time when interstate highways were a new idea. Modernizing the electrical grid and public transportation systems are likewise infrastructure.

Unlike Covid Relief, this isn’t an emergency bill, so I suspect we’ll have many weeks to discuss the details.

and voting rights

The featured post examines the Georgia election law.

and Matt Gaetz

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard the gist of this story. Super-Trumper and insurrection defender Congressman Matt Gaetz is being investigated for some lurid stuff: sex with a 17-year-old, possibly involving money or interstate travel; sex in exchange for gifts with other women recruited online; and illegal drug use while on these “dates”. Reporters from The New York Times claim to have seen text messages and receipts related to these allegations. All of this is connected with Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg, a former Orlando tax collector who is himself under multiple indictments.

Those accusations have brought out other stories that are unseemly but not illegal in themselves.

Gaetz allegedly showed off to other lawmakers photos and videos of nude women he said he had slept with, the sources told CNN, including while on the House floor. [I assume CNN means the showing was on the House floor, not the sex.] The sources, including two people directly shown the material, said Gaetz displayed the images of women on his phone and talked about having sex with them. One of the videos showed a naked woman with a hula hoop, according to one source.

The fact that his colleagues are telling the press such stories rather than rushing to Gaetz’s defense demonstrates that “His antics have also aggravated a sizable number of his own GOP colleagues, leaving him now with few allies outside of the far-right faction of the party.” (One of those “antics” was going to Wyoming to speak out against Liz Cheney after she voted to impeach Trump.) As far as I know, the only Congresspeople who have defended Gaetz are Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And this:

Mr. Gaetz’s behavior also came into question during his service in Florida’s state legislature from 2010 to 2016, according to a person familiar with the matter. While in Tallahassee, he and others competed against each other in a contest over having sexual relationships with women, operating under a point system in which participants were awarded one point for sleeping with a lobbyist and two points if the lobbyist was married, this person said.

Also, photos of Gaetz with teen-age girls have been all over Twitter this week. Maybe they were harmless selfies-with-a-celebrity at the time, but events now have cast them in a much creepier light.

I’m of two minds about all this. On the one hand, I already thought Gaetz was a slimeball, so I’m not going to hide my schadenfreude. Picturing Matt Gaetz in an orange jumpsuit makes me smile.

On the other hand: We shouldn’t know any of this yet. Gaetz hasn’t been charged or convicted of anything, and it doesn’t look like The New York Times dug this up through independent reporting. Somebody in the Justice Department must have leaked the investigation (and maybe the receipts and text messages).

That’s not good. The government has enormous investigative powers, and that power should not be abused.

Remember: The heart of the first Trump impeachment was his illegal attempt to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens. The point wasn’t to expose any Biden crimes in Ukraine, since Trump probably knew that there weren’t any. But his goal was to produce a regular stream of “Biden Under Investigation for Ukraine Corruption” headlines, similar to the Hillary-email stories that worked so well for him in 2016 (“Lock her up!”), but ultimately fizzled as investigators found nothing worth prosecuting.

I’m not claiming the Gaetz story is similarly insubstantial, or that the Department of Justice investigation (which apparently began under Bill Barr) is politically motivated. But it’s a bad practice to run people out of town because they’re “being investigated” for something lurid. Anybody could be investigated for anything. And while leaks about investigations can be legitimate if those investigations are being interfered with (so that the normal course of justice is blocked), that also doesn’t seem to be happening here.

So if and when the Gaetz investigation culminates in an indictment, as I’m confident it will if everything we’re reading is true, then that information will legitimately wind up in the public domain. But until then, I’m going to treat this like a National Enquirer story: I’ll follow it for my own entertainment, but I’m not going to demand that it result in any negative consequences for Gaetz, even though I still don’t like him.

McSweeney’s explains how Gaetz fits inside the “party of family values”

We are very much still the party of family values. We’re simply redefining “family values” to reflect what the term actually meant in the first place. Would it be helpful to spell it out? Here you go:

GOP family values
noun
values that mandate that a woman should marry a man and provide him with sex and free domestic labor

And the April Fool’s issue of the Washington Free Beacon published this commiserating letter from Liz Cheney. “I am so sorry this is happening to you, Matt.”

and the new Covid surge

For weeks, new Covid cases had been stuck in a range around 55-60K per day. It seems to have broken out on the upside, and is now around 64K. Typically, this has been interpreted as a battle between vaccination pushing the numbers down and the new variants pushing them up. But I wonder if there might be a different dynamic in play: Maybe what’s been making younger, less vulnerable people take care has been the thought “I don’t want to be the one who gets Grandma killed.” But now Grandma is vaccinated, so they’re taking more risks.

Ultimately, though, the vaccines should win, if we can get enough people to take them. At last count, 106.2 million Americans had received at least one shot, with 61.4 million fully vaccinated. Saturday more than 4 million people were vaccinated. (I’m scheduled to get my first shot a week from tomorrow.)

One side effect of the battle against Covid is that colds and flu infections have been way down this year. Maybe wearing a mask should be more common, even after we “return to normal”.

and you also might be interested in …

The March jobs report was really good: The economy added 916K jobs in March, and the January and February estimates were revised upward, accounting for another 156K jobs. The unemployment rate is back down to 6%, which is still way higher than the 3.5% before the pandemic, but well below the April, 2020 peak of 14.7%.

I have no idea how to interpret any of that. I mean, we all knew that jobs would collapse during the lockdown and rebound after reopening. But lots of things are reopening that shouldn’t reopen yet, and new Covid cases are headed back up, so I wonder how sustainable this is.

The big question is where we’ll be when the jobs market starts behaving normally again, assuming that happens. And I think it’s too soon to tell.

To the surprise of nobody who’s been paying attention, Brexit is causing problems in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement that ended the “the Troubles” in 1998 led to a nearly invisible border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, which remained in the United Kingdom. But Brexit is all about putting a significant border between the UK and the EU, which Ireland still belongs to.

That contradiction was resolved by giving Northern Ireland an in-between status: It stays in the UK, but there now are trade barriers between it and the rest of the UK, so that the border with Ireland can stay open. The pro-British side in Northern Ireland doesn’t like that, and has been rioting this weekend. If they would happen to get their way, the pro-Irish side would probably start rioting.

Meanwhile, leaving the UK and rejoining the EU is a big issue in next month’s elections in Scotland.

Trump issued some kind of a statement this week that, like all his statements, was full of lies and got some people upset. But really, who cares? If you need somebody’s permission to ignore him, take mine.

A reminder that the meaning of your religious symbols might not be obvious to others.

and let’s close with something sinister

Hogwarts’ Sorting Hat may have a relative. Looking at the Classifying Khakis, I can only think of the line from Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“: “The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase”.

The new law really is bad, but not every bad thing said about it is true.

A lot of hot air about this law is being blown in both directions. There are good reasons to oppose it, and I believe Georgia Republicans had bad motives for passing it. But it’s easy (and counterproductive, I think) to overstate the case against it.

So let’s back up and start at the beginning.

After 2020, are there good reasons to pass new election laws?

Actually, yes, but not the reasons that Republicans are giving.

Around the country, states adjusted to the pandemic by improvising new practices for the 2020 elections. State after state made it easier to vote by mail, vote early, vote at the curb of a polling place, or get a ballot by mail and cast it in a drop box. Some states made those changes by an act of the legislature, some by court order, and some by executive decision at either the state or local level.

Wherever the decision was made, it was extensively litigated before the election, which is the appropriate time to do it. [1] Across the board, the two parties followed the conventional wisdom that Democrats do better when more people vote. [2]

So in jurisdictions controlled by Democrats, officials aggressively responded to the pandemic by making voting easier, and were challenged in court by Republicans (who claimed the Democrats exceeded their authority or promoted fraud). In jurisdictions controlled by Republicans, voting rules were changed reluctantly or not at all, and were challenged in court by Democrats (who argued that making people stand in line during a pandemic infringed on their right to vote). I think it’s fair to say that even before Election Day, the 2020 elections were already the most litigated elections in American history, with the possible exception of Bush v Gore in 2000.

But whoever made the pandemic election rules, they were largely made on the fly and under time pressure. So it would be entirely reasonable for a legislature to review their pandemic election procedures now, when they can do the research, look at lessons learned, and hold the extensive debate there wasn’t time for in 2020.

Of course, that’s not at all what happened in Georgia or is happening in other Republican-controlled legislatures around the country.

Republicans in Georgia sped a sweeping elections bill into law Thursday, making it the first presidential battleground to impose new voting restrictions following President Joe Biden’s victory in the state. The bill passed both chambers of the legislature in the span of a few hours before Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed it Thursday evening.

What happened in 2020?

When you sweep away the partisan noise about the 2020 elections, two facts stand out:

• The easier voting procedures led to a record turnout.
• The election results have stood up to scrutiny wherever they’ve been challenged.

The turnout is indisputable. Nationwide, around 158 million votes were cast in the presidential election, compared to 137 million in 2016 and 129 million in 2012. In Georgia, 5 million people voted for president in 2020, 4.1 millon in 2016, and 3.9 million in 2012.

In part that increase is due to population growth, and some may be evidence of highly motivated voters on both sides. But to a large extent this is an if-you-build-it-they-will-come effect: When voting gets easier, more people vote.

One thing we can be very sure of (in spite of Trump’s claims otherwise) is that the votes were counted accurately, particularly in Georgia. Because the race was so close, Georgia’s voting-machine results were re-tallied, followed by a hand recount of paper ballots. There were minor differences in the three counts (as there always are), but nothing approaching the scale of Biden’s 11K-vote victory.

A second Trump claim was that substantial numbers of mail-in ballots were fraudulent. Again, the evidence says otherwise. The Republican secretary of state conducted a review of signatures on mail-in ballots in one large county, finding that the Cobb County Elections Department had “a 99.99% accuracy rate in performing correct signature verification procedures.”

One Georgia election official — also a Republican — characterized Trump’s subsequent fraud claims as “whack-a-mole“. As soon as one was disproved, another would pop up. What Trump really had was a desired conclusion — that he really won — and his people kept manufacturing baseless arguments to reach that conclusion.

What lessons should legislators learn from the 2020 results?

If you believe in democracy, the two outcomes above — high turnout, accurate results — are entirely good. So the obvious and simple lesson of 2020 is that many of the irregular procedures motivated by the pandemic ought to be regularized.

In particular, mail-in ballots work. This should not surprise anyone, since vote-by-mail was already the default system in five states (Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Colorado, and Utah) plus the District of Columbia. Fraud has not been a major issue in any of these states. There is still no credible evidence that it was a problem in any state that expanded vote-by-mail in 2020. [3]

It would be entirely legitimate, though, for legislatures (in those extensive hearings that Georgia did not hold) to examine their systems to eliminate fraud possibilities that were not exploited in 2020. Republicans undoubtedly would do this in bad faith, but a good-faith effort would be possible.

What lessons did Republicans learn?

The lesson Republicans appear to have learned from 2020 is “We lost because too many people voted.”

The most disturbing post-election change is that many in the GOP are now openly speaking out against democracy. In Arizona, for example, a state legislator said “Everybody shouldn’t be voting. … Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.” And Utah Senator Mike Lee tweeted: “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

Some conservative intellectuals are making arguments that are simply fascist: America has been contaminated by citizens who are not “true” Americans. They should not be allowed to elect the officials that govern the country.

Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else. …

The US Constitution no longer works. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens. … Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward.

In other words, rule by the minority that remains true to “America’s ancient principles” is justified and good. That fascist viewpoint may not represent the majority of Republicans (yet). But more and more it is tolerated, and even pandered to, as a legitimate voice in the intra-party debate.

What does the Georgia law do?

Good summaries have been published by The Washington Post and The New York Times. Oversimplifying slightly the law (1) changes the rules, and (2) changes who implements the rules. The significance of (1) has been overblown somewhat, but (2) hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves.

The rule-changes almost all go in the wrong direction (making voting harder and less likely), but mostly are not out of line with what goes on in other states. For example: Absentee ballots will be harder to get, but the new standards are not draconian in themselves. Rather than being able to request an absentee ballot six months in advance of the election, you now have to do it within 78 days. Absentee ballots will be harder to fill out and probably more mistakes will be made that allow the ballots to be tossed. For example, you can’t just sign the ballot any more, you also have to copy your driver’s license number (or some other number from a list of acceptable IDs) onto the ballot. (Georgia already had a voter-ID law for in-person voting.) If you’ve ever tried to copy a long meaningless number, you can imagine that a lot of people — especially old, sick, or poorly educated people — will screw that up. So their votes won’t count.

Small counties (which mostly vote Republican) will get more ballot drop-boxes, but large counties (mostly Democratic) will get fewer. The boxes have to be taken indoors in off-hours, an inconvenience that hits people who work during the day and can’t easily take unsupervised breaks. Small counties will extend their early-voting periods, but large counties were already at the maximum. Even granting that, though, there are many parts of the country that have even less early voting and/or ballot drop-boxes.

The change that gives the game away, though, is that distributing food or water to people waiting in line to vote is now considered electioneering at a polling place and is a misdemeanor. [4] So while many of the other changes will result in more people voting on Election Day, with correspondingly longer lines in areas with large populations (i.e. Democratic Atlanta), this change will make waiting in line an endurance test.

None of that is as blatant as the cartoon below, but all of it raises the question: Why? Did something bad happen in 2020 that makes all this necessary? The only real answer to that is: Too many people voted and Republicans lost. That’s the problem this law is trying to solve.

What about the implementation changes?

To me, this is the part that is most sinister. Again and again in 2020, Trump pressured Republican officials to overturn the election results. (The best known case is the Raffensperger phone call, when he pushed the Georgia secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to win, and threatened him with prosecution if he didn’t. But Trump also pressured the US attorney in Georgia, a Georgia elections investigator, state legislators in Michigan, and probably many others we don’t know about.)

What Ted Cruz et al were hoping to accomplish on January 6 was to make an opening for Republican legislatures in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan to overrule the voters and install their own slate of pro-Trump electors. Fortunately, most Republicans in Congress did not go along with this anti-democracy scheme.

Trump failed in his attempt to hang onto power in spite of the voters, largely because Republican officials refused to commit crimes or exceed their authority to reverse the election that he lost so decisively. But many of those officials have subsequently been punished. The Michigan election-board member who noted that his board had no authority to throw out the county-level certifications — he was not renominated. Raffensperger is going to be primaried by a Trumpist, and is expected to lose.

Similarly, most of the Republicans who voted to uphold democracy by impeaching Trump for inciting a riot against Congress — they’ve been censured by their local Republican parties.

The message from the Trump base is clear: Republican officials should not have integrity. They should be partisans first, and cheat if necessary to make sure elections come out “right”. (This makes perfect sense if you believe that “Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”)

This context makes the implementation changes in the Georgia bill ominous. The Secretary of State (i.e., Raffensperger) is removed from the State Election Board, which is now more completely under the control of the legislature. And the State Election Board is given power to remove and replace county election officials. It’s easy to see the target here: Fulton County, where Atlanta is.

So the next time a Trump wants to throw out a bunch of ballots in inner-city Atlanta, the state mechanisms are in place to make that happen.

What is being done to protest this law?

One purpose of rushing the law through so quickly was to prevent an effective response, which takes time to organize. (Think about it: If there were good reasons for this law and it enjoyed wide support, Republicans should have played it for all it was worth: Hold extensive public hearings about all the election fraud it would prevent. Explain in detail the destructive effects of handing out bottles of water to people waiting in hours-long lines. Lay out the case for why Atlanta shouldn’t be allowed to manage its own elections. And so on.)

As a result, big Georgia corporations like Coke and Delta didn’t oppose the law until after it passed, and they faced the threat of boycotts. (Home Depot and Aflac still haven’t commented.) The owner of the Atlanta Falcons football franchise did not mention the law specifically, but issued a statement saying “The right to vote is simply sacred. We should be working to make voting easier, not harder for every eligible citizen.” Major League Baseball pulled the All Star Game, which had been scheduled to happen in suburban Atlanta on July 13. (In addition to its fans, MLB also needs to consider its players, particularly the big-name players whose voluntary participation makes the All Star Game worth watching.) It’s not clear how far this movement will spread.

Republicans have been striking back. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are calling for Congress to end MLB’s exemption from antitrust laws, which has been in place since 1922. The Georgia House voted to revoke a tax break for Delta. [5]

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel tweeted:

Guess what I am doing today? Not watching baseball!!!!

And the WaPo conservative columnist Hugh Hewitt proclaimed MLB “an arm of the Democratic Party … with values opposed to the Constitution and representative government.”

It’s the conservative version of cancel culture.

One thing Republicans are adamant about is that this is not racist, so all the comparisons to Jim Crow are over the top. But some of the comments they make clearly are racist, like this tweet from Mike Huckabee.

I’ve decided to “identify” as Chinese. Coke will like me, Delta will agree with my “values” and I’ll probably get shoes from Nike & tickets to @MLB games. Ain’t America great?

Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu from California decided not to take that lying down. (He usually doesn’t. If you’re not following him on Twitter, you should.)

Hey Mike Huckabee, I asked around and Coke likes me, Delta agrees with my values, I wear Nikes and my hometown Dodgers won the World Series. But it’s not because of my ethnicity. It’s because I’m not a sh*thead like you who is adding fuel to anti-Asian hate.

[1] That’s one reason why many of Trump’s post-election lawsuits were thrown out without hearing evidence: Although Trump’s lawyers were claiming fraud in the press, when they went to court they often didn’t mention fraud, but focused on voting or vote-counting procedures that should have been — and often had been — litigated before the election. American courts look skeptically at parties that participate in an election, lose, and only then complain about the rules.

Before an election, courts can remedy a situation by ordering that bad rules be changed. Afterwards, the only possible remedy is to throw out ballots that legitimate voters cast in good faith. Judges are understandably reluctant to do this.

[2] It’s not completely obvious this is in fact true, and if it is, nobody knows exactly how big that high-turnout advantage is for Democrats. But it’s fair to say that both parties have acted as if they believe high turnout favors Democrats.

A lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party admitted as much to the Supreme Court. One issue in that case concerned voters who go to a polling place in the wrong precinct. Democrats want to handle this situation by counting their votes, but only for the offices they would have been entitled to vote on had they gone to the correct precinct. Republicans want to throw their ballots out. Remember: these are legal voters casting ballots in elections they are legally entitled to vote on, but getting confused and doing it in the wrong place — and so possibly giving officials an excuse not to count their votes.

“What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?” Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, referencing legal standing.

“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said Michael Carvin, the lawyer defending the state’s restrictions. “Politics is a zero-sum game. And every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretation of Section 2 hurts us”

In theory, the extra votes the Democrats’ interpretation would allow might benefit Republicans, but the ARNC lawyer seemed to discount that possibility.

[3] Again and again, the apparently credible evidence you may have heard about in November or December collapsed under scrutiny.

[4] The only time I’ve ever seen snacks used as electioneering was in 2004, when I was given a Clark bar at a Wesley Clark rally. Doing something like that a polling place (which I don’t think Clark did) should be illegal.

[5] I’m struck by the lack of any justifying connection. Both seem to be pure power moves: We don’t like what you did, so we’re going to hurt you.

There is no legitimate tit-for-tat here. Like individuals, private-sector businesses have every right to comment on the actions of government and take whatever actions they deem appropriate. There is no comparable right in the other direction. Individual government officials are free to express their opinions, but governments are obligated to pursue the public good. Delta’s political views are not relevant to whether or not a tax break on jet fuel is in the public interest. For contrast, I don’t believe that Hobby Lobby suffered any official reprisals for challenging ObamaCare.

It’s hard to know where to start this week. President Biden began the push for an infrastructure package. It’s over $2 trillion and fits the FDR mold that progressives want the Biden presidency to fill out. To reprise Biden’s own characterization of ObamaCare, it’s a BFD.

But there’s also the Chauvin trial. It’s hard to escape the view that it’s really America and American justice that are on trial. We’ve had a week of moving testimony that communicated just how disturbing it still is, nearly a year later, to have witnessed a murder and not have been able to do anything about it, because the police are the murderers.

And then there’s Matt Gaetz. I think the world will little note nor long remember him after his political career goes down the tubes, but it’s hard to look away.

And the debate over the Georgia vote-suppression law heated up, as big corporations and institutions like Major League Baseball got involved.

And we’re still in a pandemic. The new-case numbers have turned upward, even as vaccinations set new records. Wisely or unwisely, the economy continues to open up; nearly a million new jobs were added in March.

After some internal debate, I decided I have the most to offer on the voting-rights/vote-suppression story, which has been plagued by misinformation and bogus arguments from both sides. (I am definitely opposed to the Georgia law, but I want to oppose it for the right reasons.) So that’s the featured post, which I’m guessing will be out between 10 and 11 EST. Everything else goes into the weekly summary, which includes a way-too-long Matt Gaetz note that I refuse to promote to a featured post. Let’s say that goes out between noon and 1.

Part 1 – From Trembling to Telling

Despite the bright pastels of the season, the story of Easter begins in the dark.  

In the earliest morning hours when night has not yet given up the fight, Easter is born in confusion and uncertainty and bewilderment. For the friends and followers of Jesus, the story they thought was steady and indestructible had instead been shattered, and was lying all around them in a thousand pieces.

Jesus had been for each of them, life-changing. He was, we could say, a story breaker too. Meeting him, people would leave their jobs, their families – and follow him. He taught his students and friends to be keepers of a wild imagination, a bold and beautiful vision for a transformed world – a new “kingdom,” a Kingdom of God to use the language of his time. 

When I try to imagine what Jesus was like, I think of those people in my life who have inspired me to make a big change – maybe you have a few in your life like this – people who, in encountering them – your life sets off in a whole new track.

These are people with so much charisma – but not in a superficial sense. That wouldn’t be enough. It’s more this deep, authentic integrity that exudes from them, an authentic warmth.  There’s also something there that invites you into compassion, a depth of meaning.  They are often incredible listeners – making you feel seen, and understood, and loved.

I think, Jesus must have been all of this, and so much more.

But then, suddenly, this amazing, life-changing person was just – gone. 

Over a few days, Jesus had been tortured and killed by the oppressive state that many had hoped he’d come to end. He’d been treated not just without the dignity appropriate for who he was, but executed as if his life did not matter at all.  

And so there, in the dark that was not yet day, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome came to see their way through. These women who loved him – bravely, cautiously, tenderly – collected the pieces of their shattered story, and went to his tomb.

They brought spices and oils to anoint his breathless body. They came as soon as the sabbath broke, worrying the whole way how they would move the heavy stone that would block their way in. But when they got there, the stone was already rolled back. And there was a young man sitting there – still in the dark, with the light just beginning to grow they could barely see – who was he?

Had he moved the stone? Why?

They were scared, and confused – what was happening?

But the man told them, “Don’t be afraid. You came looking for Jesus, but he is not here” – and then he showed them the empty tomb.

Their spices heavy in their hands, none of this made sense.  “He has been raised,” the man told them. 

“Go and tell his other friends, his followers – tell everyone this story.” The women were shocked, confused, and afraid. The text says they were “trembling.”

And so they told no one.  And they said nothing. 

And that is the end of the Easter story in the Gospel of Mark.

We have three other versions of Jesus’ life, and death – three other gospels.  But only Mark ends in silence and trembling. Mark was the first gospel to be written – and even that, 70 years after Jesus died. I imagine in those early days of fear and darkness, the words were slow to form, and the desire to just move on must have been strong.

It was all so confusing – his life, his death, the empty tomb- and even if they could make it make sense, who would believe them. 

It was an impossible story, and as the days went on, even they started to wonder at the truth. Maybe best to try to forget it all, get back to regular life. Swallow all the sorrow, explain away every mystery. 

As we’ve inched closer to the end of COVID’s grip, we find ourselves at a similar threshold. Still in the shadowy disorienting dark, not yet in the light, trying to make sense of death. Death from the virus, death on trial in Minneapolis, death in supermarkets and spas. Senseless, bewildering deaths.  

Still, in the not too far off distance we can see something else beginning to rise. A new beginning, an opening to imagination – as Elaine urged last week.  

I’ve heard some happy comparisons with the end of the last global pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918.  Because on the other side of that illness were the roaring 20s! I am definitely for a future that includes more flapper dresses and jazz clubs.

And, what I also know about the days following the Spanish Flu, is that for a long time it was known as “the Forgotten Pandemic.”  Even though it killed over 50 million people worldwide.  Even though it struck young people so swiftly, you could be healthy at breakfast, and dead by the end of the day.

It was forgotten because world leaders were afraid that if we spoke too much about its impact, or counted the cases too intently, it might bring down morale for the war effort, or cause a panic that reduced partnership for a lasting peace. 

And so in that threshold time, no stories of the illness were compiled, and no stories were told.  People just – moved on.  Think of how many knew grief, and loss – and yet without any collective telling, they didn’t have the strength, the space, they could only – go forward. Try to forget. Bring on the roaring 20s. 

Two thousand years ago, one hundred years ago, today. Humans are masterful amnesiacs, especially after trauma, and harm. We hide from the truth and all the too-much that comes with it.  Too much pain, or shame, or uncertainty.  The stone is too heavy to roll back and set it free – and so we push it all down, push through, move on – as if silence could ever bring salvation.

When really, the mysterious young man at the tomb was right. We need to tell the story.  

As theologian Serene Jones says: “With individual and collective trauma, the harm haunts you — haunts your dreams as an individual, haunts your collective unconscious as a society — until you tell the story; till you face the truth [of what has] happened.”

Humans need our stories in ways not too different than the ways we need food, or water, or love. Telling, and hearing each other in our stories does not induce fear or division, or cause more pain.  Failing to hear and tell our stories does that.

And so before we push on to the light of day, we need to pause here. Pause to listen, and tell, and hear – slowly sorting out together  the fullness, and the brokenness of our true stories. 

We need to tell our lessons learned through loss, and we need to hear how it felt to carry fear so close, for so long.

We need to tell the shifts we saw in our priorities, and purpose, and we need to hear from teachers, ER nurses, bartenders, and grocery workers about being so-called “essential.”  

We need to hear the trauma of white supremacy, which is not new – though some of our understanding is – and we need to hear our will to change.

We need to tell about zoom birthdays, and ICU Facetime calls, lapses in recovery and the apocalyptic ash that fell from the sky – and we need to hear our longing for touch, how deeply we miss the sounds of shared laughter, and the vibration of shared song. 

Resurrection requires remembering.  Resurrection requires telling.  

Let us tell, and hear; heal, and rise.  

Part 2 – From Grief to Morning

Instead of saying that Mary Magdalene, Mary, and Salome returned from the tomb and told no one, I might’ve instead said, they told no one else. Afterall, they had each other, and they had their own hearts.  In those early days, in those private rooms and inner contemplation, they told, and re-told.

All of the texts describe Mary Magdalene in tears– often with reprimand by a (male) stranger “Why are you crying?”

My colleague Robin Bartlett imagines they must’ve left out the part of the story where she responds, “Why aren’t you?”

Clearly Mary Magdalene was not prone to emotional repression.

So, she and the other women surely turned the story around in their minds, and told it to each other – again and again, all the while beginning to understand more fully what they had experienced – in a phenomenon known as the “Self-Explanation effect,” as we tell stories to ourselves and to each other – even when we aren’t gaining any new actual knowledge, we learn. 

In trying to explain the sequence of first this, then this, and now…we start to see the gaps in our story, the pieces that pain or trauma keep us from knowing, the parts we’ve held at bay because we just aren’t ready, and the ways pain often distorts our understanding, and causes us to create a more cohesive narrative than actually exists. 

It’s one of the dangers in the human desire for story – the more uncertainty and disorientation we experience, the more likely we are to find patterns where there are none.

It helps explain the attraction of QAnon and other popular conspiracies today – in this time of incredible uncertainty and disorientation, we long for a story that pulls everything together. Even if that story isn’t actually real.

This danger is why we always need to seek out other ways of seeing – there are always so many different ways to tell a story. As with all of our stories this morning – and still so many stories are under-represented here, stories of immigrants, stories of those in prison, stories of those without homes, stories that are contradictory and complicated, stories of messy human realities not at all easily told in three sentences on Sunday morning. 

We need to move from our individual stories into the collective story, asking what story has been suppressed, what others have been amplified, and refusing to flatten any of the diverse experiences in the ways of mono-culturalism or white supremacy.

One of my favorite things about Christian scripture is the way it refuses to resolve its own contradictions, and instead allows for the different versions to sit alongside each other. 

As the story was told, and re-told across individuals and held in community – we find ourselves now with four gospels, plus the accounts from Paul – even Mark was given an update after some time, adding in lines to explain how the story traveled over time. 

Serene Jones describes the move from individual storytelling into collective practice as the process of moving from a place of individually experiencing grief and loss, to a communal expression of mourning, where we can acknowledge the loss together. 

Jones says that it is in the collective experience of mourning where we can “make sacred the pain, so that the rest of [our lives can be] transformed by it. [Individual and internalized] grief locks you in an eternal present, but mourning [in the context of community] allows the possibility of a future.” 

In the 70 years between Jesus’ death and the first attempt to write the story down, something happened.  

As Peter Stenfels writes, somehow “after Jesus was executed, his followers were galvanized from a baffled and cowering group, into people whose message about a living Jesus and a coming kingdom, preached at the risk of their lives, eventually changed an empire.” 

No one knows exactly how this happened. But we can imagine that it has something to do with the way they kept telling the story. Turning it around, and around, turning grief into mourning – they came to understand that the most important truth was that Jesus was not gone – he was still with them. His compelling, transforming love still had a grip on them, and on their lives; he was still shaking loose their fragile stories and setting their lives on a new track –and what they came to understand was that this was the story they needed to live from, the story they needed to bring back to the very world that had tried to defeat Jesus. 

A story of his endurance, a story of love having the final word, a story of healing, and hope, and repentance. 

I’m guessing that wasn’t the word you thought I’d end with. Repentence! At its root, repentance – something Jesus calls for often in scripture – simply means – stopping in your tracks and turning in a different direction. It’s the shattered story that is rebuilt in surprising ways, held in community and in courageous love.

At this threshold moment, in the still unresolved dark – we too must tell the story – not just one time, but over, and over again – the story of our year, our country, our lives – stories of upheaval and harm and loss; stories of resilience and repair and rebirth -reckoning with truth in the greatest possible sense-  the pain we’ve experienced, and the pain we’ve caused, the culture of death we’ve learned to survive, and the vision of life that still compels us to stop in our tracks and turn in a whole new direction.  Turning grief to mourning, and turning us all towards the tough love that brings us into the light of the dawning day.

No one, no matter where he lives or what he does, knows who next will suffer from some senseless act of violence. Yet it goes on and on in this country of ours. Why?

– Senator Robert F. Kennedy

This week’s featured post is “Two Parties, Two Worlds“.

This week everybody was talking about guns

Just about every political article this week could have started with the line: “The Senate is broken.” I suspect that is going to be true every week until the filibuster is eliminated.

So we had another mass shooting. This one was in a grocery in Boulder. (I was in Boulder one summer in the late 80s. It’s an idyllic mountain college town. The week I was there it showered briefly each afternoon, so that the clouds could move on and give us a rainbow. The thought that buying groceries there is dangerous really brings home the RFK quote at the top of the page.)

The Boulder shooting kicked the Atlanta shooting off the front pages, even though we hadn’t really gotten a clear account yet of the shooter’s motive or how it all went down. (A New Yorker article contrasted how the Atlanta shootings affected a local Korean Baptist church and the mostly white Southern Baptist church that the shooter attended. As I might have predicted, the shooter’s church did zero introspection. The murders are “the result of a sinful heart and depraved mind for which Aaron is completely responsible.” The church’s repressive teachings about “sex addiction” require no rethinking.)

Two shootings so close together once again raised issues of gun control.

In the two mass shootings that unfolded over the past two weeks in the U.S., both suspected shooters purchased weapons shortly before their attacks. The suspect in the Atlanta-area spa shootings purchased a 9mm semi-automatic pistol hours before he used it to kill eight people on March 16. The suspect in the King Soopers attack in Boulder, Colorado, bought a Ruger AR-556 pistol six days before he killed 10 people on Tuesday, according to the arrest warrant affidavit. Police recovered a rifle and handgun at the scene but didn’t indicate if either was the Ruger.

Every few years, some shooting or group of shootings reminds us that this problem isn’t going away on its own. And again we wonder, “This time, will it be enough? Will we see some meaningful action?” Many thought the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 would tip the balance, because it was children. Or maybe the Parkland shooting in 2018 would, because the survivors were such articulate young people.

Neither massacre resulted in anything passing the Senate. After Sandy Hook, an assault-weapon ban failed to get a majority in the Senate, and an extremely watered-down background-check proposal — background checks regularly polling above 80% — got 54 votes but couldn’t overcome a filibuster. After Parkland, schools got more money for metal detectors, but Congress did nothing about guns.

The rhetoric has become so predictable that it virtually satirizes itself. On social media, “thoughts and prayers” has become an eye-rolling way of saying “I’m not going to lift a finger to help you.” An iconic Onion article sums up: “No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

Now, the very predictability of inaction has become a reason to attempt nothing. Tuesday Ted Cruz told the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Every time there’s a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders.

There are laws that arguably could make a difference, short of the full-scale rewriting of the Second Amendment I proposed (to a shower of hostile comments) in 2019. Enforcing a waiting period on gun purchases might have interrupted the process that led to both of the recent shootings. An assault-weapon ban decreased mass shootings during the ten years it was in effect, and could again. Shooters are most vulnerable while they reload, so limiting the size of gun magazines could at least reduce the body count.

But the Senate is broken, so we’re left with thoughts and prayers.

and voting rights

I discuss this in more detail in the featured post, but basically this is where we are: Republicans at the state level have decided that they lost the 2020 elections because they let too many people vote. So in red states across the country, bills are pending (or have passed already) to make voting harder, make it easier to stay in power with a minority of votes, or maybe just let the legislature overrule the voters completely.

Democrats are fighting back at the federal level, with the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act which would set some minimum national standards for elections and voter rights. For the People has passed the House, but will face a filibuster in the Senate. John Lewis has not been voted on in this Congress, but likely will take similar path: pass the House, filibuster in the Senate. Democrats could use this opportunity to nuke the filibuster, but West Virginia’s Joe Manchin (and maybe Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema) don’t seem to be on board with that.

Until they change their minds, the Senate is broken and nothing will happen.

The most outrageous anti-voter bill so far was signed this week in Georgia. It’s worth remembering the reason Brian Kemp is governor of Georgia in the first place: As Secretary of State, he managed to throw tens of thousands of Black voters off the rolls. Successful voter suppression leads to more voter suppression.

Steve Benen is wondering the same thing I am:

what happens after GOP senators make clear to Manchin that they will not cooperate on voting rights. The West Virginian wrote, “We can and we must reform our federal elections together.” OK, but when Republicans tell him they have no intention of reforming federal elections, or even working in good faith on the issue, Manchin will … do what exactly?

This might be a good time to remind you of “I Was Undocumented in Arizona“. Back in 2012 (so, well after the post-9/11 security regime started), I found myself in line at the airport when I remembered that I had left my driver’s license in the pocket of my jogging shorts. (If I ever have a heart attack while jogging, I want the ER to know who to contact.) I flew from Boston to Phoenix, and back a week later, with no photo ID. It turned out that TSA had work-arounds, because they were trying to identify me, not to prevent me from traveling. But Republican voter-ID laws don’t have work-arounds, and in fact are quite picky about what kinds of ID they’ll accept. (For example, student IDs often aren’t good enough. Neither are expired driver’s licenses. The poll-worker might be your next-door neighbor and have no doubt who you are, but that doesn’t matter.) That’s because they ARE trying to prevent people from voting.

and the border

Last week I said I couldn’t find an article that handled the border situation well. This week I have one: “9 questions about the humanitarian crisis on the border, answered” on Vox.

In general, I’ve been seeing a lot of irresponsibly sensational coverage of the Biden-wants-open-borders variety, partially balanced by people who try to explain the whole situation away. The Vox article presents the issues and problems in what I regard as their proper perspective. For example: the framing in the headline. The current situation on the border is a “humanitarian crisis” — people are suffering there. But it is not a security crisis — we’re not being “invaded” by “terrorists”. And it’s not a health crisis — we’re not being overrun by diseased foreigners.

and Biden’s first press conference

President Biden did not hold his first press conference until Thursday, more than two months into his administration. For me, this was a non-issue, so I wasn’t surprised that it concluded in a non-event. The press conference did not break any major news or produce any headline-grabbing gaffes.

Ideally, reporters would demonstrate the value of professional journalism by getting important information out of Biden that ordinary people wouldn’t have known how to ask for. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, the questions showed the public how poorly the White House press corps’ interests align with ours. There were no questions about the pandemic, but one reporter was already focused on 2024: Is Biden running? (He thinks so, but doesn’t seem to have any clear plans yet.) Will Harris be his VP again? (What president in his third month would ever say no to this question?) Does he expect to run against Trump again? (Who the hell cares what Biden expects Republicans to do three years from now?)

The Insight blog suggests “Ten Questions the Press Should Have Asked President Biden“, any one of which would have been better than the questions they asked.

Historical note: Obviously, George Washington gave no televised press conferences. This modern innovation is not part of the president’s constitutional duties.

The presidential press conference became a big deal because JFK was particularly good at them. He was charming and funny, and those qualities came through as he bantered with reporters. For more than half a century, the press has been wishing for another JFK and being disappointed.

Since Nixon, presidents have often cast reporters in the role of the Enemy. This tendency reached its peak during the Trump administration, when the press was openly branded “the enemy of the People“. The purpose of a Trump press conference (or of briefings by his press secretaries) was not to inform the public, but to stage a drama in which the President triumphed over his enemies in the media.

Beyond the theater of press conferences, the more important issue is whether the American People can get answers from their government, and whether those answers are true. As we saw last year when Trump was holding daily Covid briefings, it doesn’t matter how available the President is if he uses those opportunities to lie to us. (Like: “Anybody that wants a test can get a test.” or “Everything [the governors] need they get, and we are taking good care. We have tremendous supplies and a great supply chain.”)

By that standard, the Biden administration is doing quite well. The achievements that he noted in his introductory remarks Thursday (vaccinations are going faster than he promised, nearly half of K-8 classrooms are open five days a week, 100 million people have gotten payments through the American Rescue Plan, jobless claims are down) are real. The fact-checks on his news conference are fairly minor; often they depend on omitting a single word (WaPo flags Biden for a statement about corporations that pay no “taxes”, when he should have said “federal taxes”), or dueling interpretations. (AP disputed Biden’s claim that 83% of the benefits of the Trump tax cut go to the top 1%, but went on to admit that the 83% figure is true, if you measure over the plan’s full ten-year projection, and assume that the middle-class provisions that are set to expire actually will expire.)

But even without presidential press conferences, a lot of true information is coming out of this administration. Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s briefings are frequent and quite good — though, of course, she can’t announce decisions that haven’t been made yet. She fields hostile questions without creating unnecessary drama, and communicates much that is true and useful. (Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has criticized Psaki for how often she promises to get back to reporters when she doesn’t know the answer to their questions. But McEnany had the option of responding to a question immediately by attacking the reporter, making something up, or lying, all of which Psaki tries to avoid.) Plus, government experts like Dr. Fauci or the scientists at the EPA can now speak freely, without interference from political commissars.

and the stuck ship

The stuck ship is a great reminder of the physicality of the economy. It’s easy to get caught up in apps and memes and hacks and digital rights — and forget the importance of gross physical objects that have to fit in the spaces they’ve been assigned. Once you get a giant container ship wedged sideways in the Suez Canal, you’re not going to get it out without a lot of old-fashioned brute force.

Late this morning, the ship was finally freed.

Grist looks at the complex environmental tradeoffs the ship embodies. Larger container ships are supposed to use less fossil fuel than an equivalent number of smaller ships, but blocking the canal has left about 300 ships idling, and caused countless others to take the longer route around Africa. Many ports need to dredge deeper channels to accommodate such ships, and that usually involves using a substantial amount of fossil fuel, in addition to whatever environmental damage the dredging itself does.

Meanwhile, the ship has become the subject of many jokes, and a metaphor for anything that blocks a process — including why the Senate is broken.

But my favorite take on the ship comes from the Twitter account “I’m not a girl I’m a wolf“, where you can find this parody of a rhyme from The Lord of the Rings. (Hat tip to Jonathan Korman.)

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who pass here can float;
The boat that is long does not fit here,
Whose bow is dug into this moat.

From the sand a small digger is woken,
Some tugs from the shadows shall spring;
Re-float shall the boat that was stuck in,
Its cargo again shall it bring.

and you also might be interested in …

My vengeful heart is going to enjoy watching Trump’s liars squirm as they defend the defamation lawsuits filed by Dominion Voting Systems. They have a simple problem: They’re guilty. They knowingly lied about fraudulent vote-counting, and those lies injured a corporation with deep enough pockets to make them pay.

This week we saw Trump’s (sometimes) lawyer Sidney Powell’s defense: If you were fooled by all that silly stuff she was saying, it’s your own fault.

reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process

Here’s a question worth asking: How many of the participants in the Capitol Insurrection actually did “accept such statements as fact”? How do they feel now that they know Powell does not view them as “reasonable people”?

Meanwhile, Dominion filed a new lawsuit, this one seeking $1.6 billion from Fox News for its “orchestrated defamatory campaign”. It’s already having an effect: When Trump called in to Laura Ingraham’s show Thursday and started to repeat his election-fraud bullshit, Ingraham cut him off. “Speaking as a lawyer, we’re not going to relitigate the past.”

Jay Rosen points to a prime example of bad reporting at the NYT:

Democrats say that Republicans are effectively returning to one of the ugliest tactics in the state’s history — oppressive laws aimed at disenfranchising voters

And he comments:

“Democrats say…” Okay. But what do you say, @nytpolitics? Do these laws make it harder to vote? Or do they fix problems with election security? And if your answer is “depends on who you ask,” does that meet the quality bar for Times reporting?

Lazy reporting tells you what people say. Good reporting investigates until it figures out what the truth is.

QAnon isn’t catching on in Japan. “It’s too naïve for our readership,” says the editor of Mu, Japan’s top magazine for believers in Bigfoot and ancient astronauts. He urges people to “boost their ‘conspiracy theory literacy,’ by regularly reading our magazine”.

Israel has now totaled up its fourth election in two years, and this result looks just as murky as all the others. It’s hard to see how Netanyahu can pull together a governing coalition. But it’s also hard to see how anybody else can.

and let’s close with something portentous

And in the fullness of time, the vision of St. Paul became manifest.

Democrats in Washington are talking about one set of issues. Republicans in the state capitals have a different vision entirely.

Within living memory, Republicans and Democrats competed over “swing voters” who were assumed to be living in the political “center”. That meant that candidates mostly talked about the same issues, and sometimes even proposed similar solutions, or at least had similar rhetoric.

In 2000, for example, it was hard to tell at a glance which would be more right or left: George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” or Al Gore’s “New Democrat” agenda. Both seemed to be tempering their party’s typical stances, and where precisely they had wound up was not immediately clear. Ralph Nader claimed that it made no difference at all; if you wanted anything to change, you had to vote for a third party.

In 2012, Obama and Romney disagreed, but were talking about the same things: ObamaCare should either be expanded or repealed. Taxes on the rich should go up or down. There should be either more or fewer restrictions on abortion. But both wanted an all-of-the-above energy plan, and neither supported same-sex marriage. Both wanted to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in some kind of honorable way.

But right now, the difference between the two parties seems particularly stark. They aren’t just proposing to go in different directions; they’re talking about different worlds. Rather than competing solutions, they offer competing realities.

The Biden agenda. President Biden and Democrats in Congress have put forward a very clear list of what they think America needs:

• Federal leadership in fighting Covid through vaccinations, treatments, and rallying Americans to practice good public health hygiene.
• Financial help for individuals who have lost their income due to the pandemic and the lockdowns that combat the pandemic. (This was covered in the American Rescue Plan Act.)
• Financial help for state and local governments to make the necessary adjustments to open schools safely, and to maintain public services in the face of falling revenues. (Also in the American Rescue Plan Act.)
• Investments in public infrastructure, from fixing crumbling roads and bridges to building a 21st-century electrical grid. (An infrastructure bill currently being written.)
• Protecting and restoring democracy by ending gerrymandering, making it easier to vote, and lessening the influence of big donors on our political system. (The For the People Act, which has passed the House.)
• At a minimum, letting immigrant children who grew up in the US can stay and make a life for themselves. Beyond that, passing a larger immigration reform bill that would give the 11 million undocumented immigrants some kind of legal status. (The American Dream and Promise Act, passed by the House earlier this month.)

So far, this agenda has met with no cooperation from Republicans in Congress. The American Rescue Plan passed (through the filibuster-avoiding reconciliation process) with no Republican votes. The For the People Act passed the House with no Republican votes, and Mitch McConnell has predicted it will get none in the Senate. McConnell ally John Cornyn described it as “an existential threat, I think, to our election system and to our democracy”.

Already, before an official version is even announced, Republicans are staking out reasons to oppose Biden’s infrastructure plan. (Apparently, dividing the plan into two pieces, giving Republicans the opportunity to support a consensus bill and oppose a more partisan one, is a “cynical ploy”. To me, it looks like a strategy to make sure that contentious issues don’t get in the way of actions everyone agrees are needed.)

The American Dream and Promise Act got nine Republican votes in the House. It seems unlikely to get the 10 Republican senators it needs to survive a filibuster.

Meanwhile, in the states where Republicans control the governorship and the legislature, a different set of priorities are central.

• Making it harder to vote.
• Barring transgender students from school sports.
• Creating more loopholes in anti-discrimination laws.
• Preventing schools from teaching an anti-racist curriculum.
• Stopping cities from fighting Covid with business closures or mask mandates

Voting. Georgia’s new election law — the one that makes it illegal to give water or snacks to people waiting in line to vote — got all the attention this week, but it’s one of many. The Brennan Center is tracking 253 bills in 43 states that involve some form of

• restricting absentee voting, early voting, and voting by mail
• tightening voter-ID requirements
• limiting voter-registration drives
• purging voters from registration lists

A recent law in Iowa allows less time for early voting and closes the polls an hour earlier. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Georgia law is the legislature’s new control over the counties.

The law allows the State Elections Board to temporarily suspend county elections directors and boards that it deems in need of review. At the same time, the secretary of state will be removed as chair of the state board and will be made an ex-officio, nonvoting member.

Those provisions have raised particular concerns among Democrats, who say that it will give far-reaching control over state and local elections procedures to partisan legislators and allow them to determine, for example, which ballots to count.

The racial aspect here should be obvious: The white-dominated Republican legislature could take election control away from a majority-black county like Fulton, where Atlanta is.

Transgender kids in sports. Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee have passed laws banning transgirls from participating in sports in public middle schools and high schools. Similar bills are pending in many other states.

[Tennessee Governor Bill] Lee has said transgender athletes would “destroy women’s sports” and remarked that transgender athletes would put “a glass ceiling back over women that hasn’t been there in some time.”

A well-publicized track meet in Connecticut in 2019 resulted in two trans athletes winning the top two places in the girls’ 55-meter dash, but so far such results are rare. The WNBA has at least one transwoman, but seems to be in no danger of the “destruction” Governor Lee fears. The LPGA has been open to trans golfers since 2010, but they are still relatively uncommon.

None of the supporters of the Tennessee measure could cite a single instance of transgender girls or boys having caused problems. A review by The Associated Press found only a few instances in which it has been an issue among the hundreds of thousands of American teenagers who play high school sports.

Megan Rapinoe of the National Women’s Soccer League writes in today’s Washington Post:

Already this year, lawmakers in more than 25 states have introduced legislation to ban transgender young people from sports. … These bills are attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Transgender kids want the opportunity to play sports for the same reasons other kids do: to be a part of a team where they feel like they belong. Proponents of these bills argue that they are protecting women. As a woman who has played sports my whole life, I know that the threats to women’s and girls’ sports are lack of funding, resources and media coverage; sexual harassment; and unequal pay.

Anti-discrimination exemptions. Friday, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson signed a law “allowing doctors to refuse to treat someone because of religious or moral objections”.

Opponents have said types of health care that could be cut off include maintaining hormone treatments for transgender patients needing in-patient care for an infection, or grief counseling for a same-sex couple. They’ve also said it could also be used to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control, or by physicians assistants to override patient directives on end of life care.

Banning anti-racism. Jeffrey Sachs outlines the various states passing laws to limit the teaching of anti-racist ideas. A proposed New Hampshire bill has a heading “Unlawful propagation of divisive concepts”.

Similar bills are being debated in West Virginia and Oklahoma. Meanwhile in Georgia, a GOP representative has ordered every public college and university to prepare a list identifying which courses are teaching students about concepts like “privilege” and “oppression.” Faculty there say it’s already having a chilling effect.

There’s more. In Arkansas, debate has begun on a bill that would prevent public schools and universities from offering any course, class, event, or activity that “promotes division between, resentment of, or social justice for” a race, gender, political affiliation, or social class.

Banning public-health restrictions. Texas Governor Greg Abbott not only ended the state’s mask mandate, but has banned cities from having their own mandates. Austin is currently fighting in court to preserve its mandate. A bill in Idaho that forbids any government entity to require masks is working its way through the legislature. Florida’s legislature is working on a law to take away local governments’ emergency public-health powers.

So which world do you live in? The Democratic world, where you feel threatened by the spread of the virus, worry about the state of our democracy, want to rebuild our public infrastructure, and think kids who grew up in America should have a way to stay here? Or the Republican world, where too many people are voting, virus restrictions are too onerous, you feel threatened by transathletes, and you wish you could do more to express your Christian disapproval of deviant lifestyles?

If there’s a theme in recent political news, it’s that Republicans and Democrats seem to be living in different worlds.

I live in the Democratic world, so the issues Democrats talk about — Covid; the economic effect of Covid on ordinary people; protecting the right to vote; repairing crumbling 20th-century infrastructure and building for the current century; climate change; racism, sexism, and various other forms of bigotry; mass shootings; and letting DREAMers stay in the country — look real to me. Meanwhile Republican priorities — making it harder to vote; keeping transgirls out of school sports; changing discrimination laws to increase conservative Christians’ opportunities to express their disapproval of other people’s lifestyles; encouraging more people to carry guns in more situations; more tightly regulating which bathrooms people use; not letting cities require masks; and protecting Mr. Potato Head from cancel culture — are all weirdly divorced from any problems I can see.

Not too many cycles ago — say, when Bush ran against Gore or Kerry — both parties were trying to appeal to swing voters, so at times their messages could seem fairly similar. Ralph Nader’s claim that there was no real difference between Republicans and Democrats was never quite true, but was at least a defensible position. If you actually were a conscientious moderate voter, you needed to do a certain amount of research to determine which party best represented your views in any particular year.

Now I’m having a hard time picturing that moderate voter. If you listen to any politician for more than a few sentences, either they’re talking about a world that seems real to you or they aren’t. That’s the subject of this week’s featured post “Two Parties, Two Worlds”. It should be out around 10 EDT.

This week’s summary talks about the news from my Democratic world: the Boulder shooting and how little will probably be done to prevent future mass shootings, the upturn in Covid cases, voting rights, the filibuster, the border, Biden’s first presidential press conference, the stuck ship, and a few other things. It should be out around noon.

The best thing you can do today is to speak out against violence toward Asians in this country, especially if you yourself are not Asian.

– George Takei

This week’s featured post is “Race in US History: 4 Facts Every American Should Know“.

This week everybody was talking about the Atlanta shootings

Tuesday night, a gunman killed eight people at three spas or massage parlors in the Atlanta area. Six of the victims were Asian-American women. He used a gun purchased only hours before. He was apprehended on his way to Florida, where he presumably intended to kill more people.

The shootings touched off a number of discussions: First, about anti-Asian violence, which has been growing during this past year, as Asians get blamed for Covid-19’s origin in China. Rather than try to tamp this down (as President Bush sometimes tried to calm anti-Muslim sentiment after 9-11), Trump often seemed to be intentionally stoking it, going out of his way to use inflammatory phrases like “the China virus” or “Kung Flu”.

Another discussion concerned misogyny: The shooter appeared to blame women for the temptation of his “sex addiction”. Much of the media struggled with the intersectionality of racism and sexism, as if the motive had to be one or the other. AP seemed to handle it best:

While the U.S. has seen mass killings in recent years where police said gunmen had racist or misogynist motivations, advocates and scholars say the shootings this week at three Atlanta-area massage businesses targeted a group of people marginalized in more ways than one, in a crime that stitches together stigmas about race, gender, migrant work and sex work.

In short: Sexism makes women objects, and racism makes Asian women a particular kind of object.

A discussion the media generally handled even worse than intersectionality was the role of religion in this killing spree. The shooter blamed his crime on “sex addiction”. Apparently he was killing women in the sex industry (if indeed they were; that hasn’t been established) to eliminate temptation.

This is a peculiarly evangelical narrative. Repressive religion turns ordinary desires into sins, which can complicate the challenge rather than resolve it. Blaming women for the desires they raise in men also has a long history in patriarchal religion. The shooter’s church, meanwhile, seemed more interested in escaping blame than doing anything useful.

In accordance with the biblical pattern and our church bylaws, Crabapple First Baptist Church has completed the process of church discipline to remove Robert Aaron Long from membership since we can no longer affirm that he is truly a regenerate believer in Jesus Christ.

As Jesus said: “I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”

Finally, the shooting and the police response brought up issues of white privilege. Some wondered whether a non-White shooter (particularly if he had killed White women) would have been apprehended without injury. A sheriff department spokesman seemed far too sympathetic when he summed up the crime spree like this:

He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.

In general, the media assumes White murderers are anomalous in a way that Black or Muslim murderers aren’t. Coverage is far too likely to generate explanations of how a good boy went bad, rather than promote the idea that White people are dangerous. News sites seem to worry a lot less about giving people the idea that Blacks or Muslims are dangerous.

McSweeney’s, as it so often does, uses humor to say something deadly serious in “Editorial Template for Every Time a White Person Commits an Atrocious Crime“.

and the border

I’m having trouble finding a good reference that puts the border story in its proper perspective. There’s been a surge in the number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the US/Mexico border. The Trump administration had been sending them back, but the Biden administration isn’t, so it has the problem of where to put them while it determines whether someone in the US is willing and able to take care of them until their asylum status can be assessed.

People are being far too glib about comparing this situation to the one that arose from Trump’s family-separation policy. In this case, the family separated itself and sent a child here. The US government didn’t take the child away by force. Under Trump’s policy, cruelty was the point: He wanted people thinking about coming here to know that we’d take their children. That threat was supposed to keep them from coming. Under Biden, kids are showing up and we’re doing the best we can with them.

Any fair discussion of the border also needs to point out that Biden inherited an unsustainable situation: Trump’s policy of ignoring migrants’ right to claim asylum violated both our laws and our treaty obligations. Biden has to do something different.

and Russia’s support for Trump

This week gave us many opportunities to appreciate just how often and how blatantly the Trump administration lied to us. The Biden administration released a declassified version of the report “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections” that the National Intelligence Council submitted on January 7, when Trump was still president.

The upshot: No foreign actor influenced the counting of votes, as Trump lawyers often claimed. Of the nations trying to influence voters, the most egregious was Russia, who once again supported Trump. In Max Boot‘s words: “there are suspiciously strong parallels between Trump’s propaganda and Russia’s.” Such as: manufactured stories of the Biden family’s corrupt dealings with Ukraine, fearmongering about the untrustworthy nature of mailed ballots, and manufactured stories about the sinister origins of Covid-19.

One country the report says didn’t interfere in the 2020 election was China. China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts” because it “did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk blowback if caught”.

Rachel Maddow found the video of Trump, Bill Barr, and other Trump officials claiming the exact opposite: that China, not Russia, was the major power interfering. They claimed to base this opinion on intelligence that we couldn’t see. Now that we see it, we know they were lying. “None of that was true when they said it, and they knew it.”

Another claim that unraveled was that the post office in Erie, Pennsylvania backdated the postmarks on ballots so that more votes would count. More votes counting is a bad thing in Republican circles, so this was a key part of the stolen-election conspiracy theory. This week, the Post Office inspector general report came in, and found no evidence to support the claim.

Meanwhile, four Proud Boy leaders were indicted for conspiring to attack the Capitol on January 6.

and the virus

Numbers: The new-case-per-day averages have flattened out again, running in the 55K-56K range all week. Deaths continue to go down; the 7-day average is now under 1,000 per day for the first time since early November.

Michigan has the most disturbing statistics: The 7-day average of new-cases-per-day bottomed out a little over 1,000 on February 21, and have risen back up to just under 3,000. Deaths per day have also started increasing, but not nearly so much: After bottoming at 16 per day, they’re now up to 20 per day. In the past week, Covid-related hospitalizations in Michigan went up 32.5%. Nationally, hospitalizations are still falling, down 4.2% last week. Local experts speculate that a combination of factors might be responsible for the Michigan surge: the more-contagious U.K. variant of the disease, “Covid fatigue” that caused people to be less careful, looser restrictions on restaurants and other businesses, and the resumption of school sports programs.

As of yesterday, 81.4 million Americans had received at least one vaccine shot, and 44.1 million were fully vaccinated.

and cancel culture

I’m resisting doing a third-week-in-a-row article, because I’m afraid I’m falling into the right-wing culture-war distraction trap. But the commenters on last week’s “Is an Intelligent Discussion of Cancel Culture Possible?” posted a lot of good links that did in fact point in the direction of an intelligent discussion. So I’ll eventually get back to this topic (after paying attention to some other timely issues). But for now I’ll just take note of this week’s developments.

Using opposition to cancel culture as an excuse to keep displaying the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Tennessee state capitol could be an SNL skit if it weren’t really happening. (Forrest — slave trader, war criminal, KKK founder — is essentially the patron saint of white supremacy.) The state’s Republican governor appointed a historical commission to decide what to do with the statue, and when the commission recommended moving it to a museum, even-further-right members of the legislature started pushing to dissolve that commission and appoint a new one.

Even National Review isn’t buying it.

We need to get better at having direct and honest conversations about the ethical boundaries of our culture. … I’m sure if we put our heads together and tried some public moral reasoning for a change we could come up with a way of canceling the Klan without canceling Dr. Seuss. The question isn’t whether or not we’re going to have a “cancel culture,” it’s what we’re going to cancel people for.

This week’s other development was Teen Vogue letting go of new editor Alexi McCammond before she even started, apparently because of a staff revolt over 10-year-old tweets, which now look homophobic and anti-Asian. (I’m saying look because I haven’t read the tweets myself, so I make no judgment on what they are.)

Atlantic’s Graeme Wood laments that “American has forgotten how to forgive“, but I think he’s missing something. He’d be totally right if Atlantic or the NYT fired a new editor for something she posted when she was 17 and now recognizes as a mistake. But to the limited extent that I understand Teen Vogue, I think it’s committed to the idea that teens do things that matter. They can’t shrug off McCammond’s tweets with “Eh, she was just a teen-ager.”

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Here’s the difference between dormant and extinct: Mount Fagradalsfjall in Iceland hadn’t erupted for 6,000 years — until Friday night.

One reason Iceland is so geologically interesting is that North America and Europe meet near there, just a bit below sea level. Here a diver bridges the gap between the continents.

Maybe the saddest thing about QAnon is all the loved ones people leave behind when they vanish down the rabbit hole.

Conservative Supreme Court justices have been voicing support for a strict view of the separation of powers that is called the “nondelegation doctrine“. Wikipedia defines it as

the theory that one branch of government must not authorize another entity to exercise the power or function which it is constitutionally authorized to exercise itself

That sounds abstract and technical, but it has real implications. If making rules is a legislative function, then Congress can’t delegate that power to an agency like the EPA or the FCC. In practice, this would make regulations rigid and cumbersome. Since polluters, con-men, and other bad actors can adjust their tactics much faster than Congress can pass laws (particularly if it retains the filibuster), large segments of the economy would essentially go unregulated, at least at the federal level.

A recent article in Columbia Law Review “Delegation at the Founding” points out that although non-delegation is pushed by judges who claim to be “originalists”, there’s nothing original about it: The Founders did not view the separation of powers in this way.

The nondelegation doctrine has nothing to do with the Constitution as it was originally understood. You can be an originalist or you can be committed to the nondelegation doctrine. But you can’t be both.

and let’s close with something strangely appropriate

I can’t think of any widely known song that has ever been so appropriate for timely parodies as “My Shot” from Hamilton. In its original context, “My Shot” is the young Hamilton pledging that he will not miss his chance to succeed. The song defines his character as a man who can’t stop, because he will always see opportunities to accomplish more and rise higher. It contrasts with the song his wife sings later, “That Would Be Enough“, in which she urges him to be happy with all that life has offered them. The tragedy of Hamilton is that he can’t hear this message; nothing will ever be enough.

But now, of course, we’re all waiting for our shot of a vaccine — or maybe we’re avoiding it for some crazy reason. Either way, we’re singing about our shot.

Seven doctors in the Sacramento area have formed Vax’n 8 and made a video to promote vaccination. I haven’t found an embeddable version yet, but here’s a TV report on the backstory.

But of course Dr. Liu couldn’t possibly be the only person to think of this. Adam Shain says “I’m not gonna delay my shot.“

Last summer already, the Holderness Family did a Covid/Hamilton medley to encourage mask-wearing.

And Inverse K uses “My Shot” to make fun of the anti-vaxxers.

In “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric“, I described a process by which certain words and phrases lose all real meaning and become nothing more than pejorative labels that the Right attaches to whatever it doesn’t like. Through repetition, the movement’s followers have been trained to respond to “political correctness” and “cancel culture” like a bull to the color red; whatever those labels get attached to makes them angry, independent of whatever might be going on underneath the label.

An extreme example of this phenomenon is this week’s opposition to removing the bust of war criminal and KKK grand wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest from a prominent place in the Tennessee state capitol and placing it in the Tennessee State Museum, where General Forrest’s memory might be assessed objectively rather than simply glorified. (Far from a liberal plot, this is the recommendation of the historical commission appointed by the Republican governor.) But rather than asking “Do we want Tennessee and its legislature to be identified with a key figure in the origin of the Klan?”, moving Forrest’s statue has been labeled “cancel culture”, which must be resisted at all costs.

The latest phrase to get the political-correctness treatment is “critical race theory”. For example, Wednesday when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced a proposal to overhaul civics education, he made it clear that certain views of American history should not be taught:

Let me be clear: there’s no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.

Bills to ban critical teaching about race in American history are being proposed in Republican controlled legislatures around the country. (Sometimes the ideas being banned are connected to the New York Times 1619 Project or anti-racism.) In nearly every case, critical race theory is never defined, but rather is given a negative description like DeSantis’ phrase “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other”. These bills are often accompanied with proposals to teach a more traditional, all-positive view of American history, as South Dakota’s Governor Noem proposes:

I have tasked my administration with creating instructional materials and classroom resources on America’s founding, our nation’s history, and the state’s history. We must also do a better job educating teachers on these three subjects. Through all of this, our common mission and key objective needs to be explaining why the United States of America is the most special nation in the history of the world.

Similarly, former President Trump called for educational programs that teach students “to love America with all of their heart and all of their soul.” Such a rah-rah view of American history and the US’s role in the world gets contrasted with the “indoctrination” and “ideology” of critical race theory. As DeSantis said:

Our schools are supposed to give people a foundation of knowledge, not supposed to be indoctrination centers, where you’re trying to push specific ideologies.

These efforts build on the rhetoric in two Trump executive orders: One banned anti-racism training at companies that contract with the government, and the other established a 1776 Commission to push a US history curriculum opposed to the 1619 Project. Neither order used the phrase “critical race theory”, but instead denounced “a series of polemics grounded in poor scholarship” that “has vilified our Founders and our founding”.

This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.

As I pointed out in “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric”, phrases picked out for vilification are never defined, they are just labeled and described in a pejorative way. (Often they are described falsely. For example, anti-racist training would serve no purpose if America actually were “irredeemably racist”. Redemption is the whole point.)

So what is this “pernicious and false” doctrine? Time magazine described it as “a way of seeing the world that helps people recognize the effects of historical racism in modern American life”.

The intellectual movement behind the idea was started by legal scholars as a way to examine how laws and systems uphold and perpetuate inequality for traditionally marginalized groups.

But I think it’s important not to get lost in abstraction. Most Americans are not abstract thinkers, and when confronted with theories that are too airy to grasp, they often do what Trump, DeSantis, and the others are urging them to do: Give the abstraction a label and accept or reject it once and for all.

So instead, I want to offer a small number of facts that I believe (1) are essential to understanding the significance of race in American history, and (2) are never going to be taught in the kinds of courses Trump, DeSantis, and Noem are picturing.

1. From the turn of the 19th century to the Civil War, slavery was at the center of the American economy.

Yale historian David Blight:

by 1860, there were more millionaires (slaveholders all) living in the lower Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States. In the same year, the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.

Obviously, slavery was central to the Southern economy. In just a few decades time, the entire states of Mississippi and Alabama were taken from Native American tribes, were converted to farm land by enslaved Africans, and became the most productive cotton fields in the world.

But the importance of slavery went much further: Although Virginia did not grow much cotton, its prosperity depended on exporting slaves to the developing slave states. The factories of the North were largely textile mills that gained advantage over English mills from easy and tariff-free access to Southern cotton. So from one end of the country to the other, American prosperity was based on slavery.

Slavery is also the hidden backstory to much of American history. For example, the motivation for Texas to secede from Mexico was that Mexico was beginning to enforce its anti-slavery laws. In that sense, the battle of the Alamo really was about freedom, but not in the way I was taught in high school.

To follow up on these facts, look at The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist, The American Slave Coast by Ned and Constance Sublette, and Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert.

2. The melting-pot miracle was based on creating a new White identity that rejected and stood above Blackness.

Something genuinely wonderful about American history is the way that Europeans from warring countries could come to America and live in peace. Certainly there was rivalry and sometimes conflict between European ethnic groups. (The HBO series Broadwalk Empire centers on the struggle between Irish and Italian gangs to dominate the Prohibition booze trade.) But it was truly marvelous how French and German and Polish people could homestead western lands and become neighbors, while their relatives back in Europe continued to hate each other.

It is pleasant to tell this story as a unified “American” identity replacing previous identities as Czechs and Serbs, but there’s more to it than that: Russians and Swedes didn’t just learn to be American, they learned to be White. The same deal was not available to Black or Chinese people. (Whether it was available to Jews varied by location and era.) By identifying as White, Europeans came into the American caste system at a level one or two steps above the bottom rung of the ladder, which was reserved for non-Whites.

You can learn more about this process in Learning to be White by Thandeka.

3. The public investments that created the great American middle class intentionally excluded Black Americans.

The most obvious example is the segregated public school system, which helped poor White children gain the skills they needed to rise in the world, but either formally or informally herded Black children into schools with much less to offer. The New Deal and G. I. Bill programs that created the American Dream as we know it contained loopholes that Blacks consistently fell through: Social Security and the minimum wage didn’t apply to occupations with substantial numbers of Black people, like agricultural and domestic workers. The government would not guarantee home loans in the “red-lined” neighborhoods where most Black people lived. Black veterans of World War II could get help paying for college, but only if they found a college willing to accept them. And so on.

Learn more about this in When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson.

4. White support for those programs faded after LBJ extended them to Black people.

By the 1950s, New Deal programs (and the high tax rates on the wealthy that paid for them) were no longer controversial. In a 1954 letter to his brother, Republican President Eisenhower wrote:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

But then the Civil Rights movement happened. 1954 was the year the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation. The 1958-59 school year became “the Lost Year” after Governor Faubus of Arkansas closed all of Little Rock’s public high schools rather than integrate them. In 1963, President Kennedy had to federalize the Alabama National Guard to move Governor Wallace aside so that the first Black student could enroll in the University of Alabama. 1964 brought the Civil Rights Act banning racial discrimination. It was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which ended Jim Crow disenfranchisement.

Lo and behold, the Eisenhower consensus went away. When government programs offered Blacks the same helping hand they had been offering Whites for decades, Whites didn’t like them any more. Right-wing rabble-rousers stigmatized government programs as a way to tax Whites and give money to Blacks, and a small-government anti-tax movement started. Democrats became identified as the party of government, and no Democratic presidential candidate has received a majority of the White vote since LBJ in 1964.

As a result, tuition-free state universities are gone, inflation has eaten away the value of the minimum wage, and we argue about issues like whether children should get medical care.

Read more about this in The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee.

Last week’s “Is an Intelligent Discussion of Cancel Culture Possible?” led to a discussion in the comments that (I have to admit) was quite intelligent. I learned a lot. I’m tempted to write a post this week summarizing the best points, but that would be three weeks in a row with cancel-culture posts. I’m starting to worry that I have taken the conservative bait and gotten distracted from more important issues. So I’ll get back to it, but not this week.

Something else that caught my eye this week was the attempt to stigmatize critical race theory, and more-or-less any telling of American history that isn’t totally rah-rah. An important piece of the stigmatization process is abstraction, so I thought I would bring the discussion down to specifics. This week’s featured post is “Race in US History: 4 Facts Every American Should Know”. It should be out around 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary, the Atlanta murders raised the issues of anti-Asian racism and misogyny. (It hasn’t — but should have — raised discussion of how repressive religious doctrines turn ordinary lust into dysfunctions like “sex addiction”.) Reports came out that underlined just how blatantly Trump administration people lied to us about Russian and Chinese interference in the 2020 election, about voter fraud, and about the Capitol insurrection. The Covid new-case rate has flattened out again, and is shooting upwards in a few places like Michigan — even as vaccination continues apace. I couldn’t resist commenting on the week’s two biggest cancel-culture stories: Nathan Bedford Forrest’s bust and sacking the Teen Vogue editor. And an Icelandic volcano went off for the first time in 6,000 years (which I think is before God is supposed to have created the world).

A fun virus story — hard to believe I just wrote that phrase — is a collection of vaccine-related parodies of “My Shot” from the Hamilton musical. There’s some other stuff to throw in, and I still need a closing, but you get the idea. That should be out noonish.

Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope. The death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.

– J. Michael Straczynski

This week’s featured posts are “Is an Intelligent Discussion of Cancel Culture Possible?” and “What Makes a Good Conspiracy Theory?“

This week everybody was talking about the American Rescue Act

Thursday, President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act. The day before, the House had passed the Senate’s version of the bill, which had passed the Senate by one vote the previous Saturday. No Republican in either house voted for the bill.

Biden has not tried to hide the fact that this bill is big: A lot of Americans need help to get through this crisis, and the government is going to give it to them. He’s not pretending that this isn’t the “big government” that Bill Clinton said was over.

The political result of all this will test whether the Reagan Era is finally over.

New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz: “Rand Paul Saddened to See Government Flagrantly Helping People”.

In closing, Paul castigated his Senate colleagues who voted for the bill, accusing them of “ushering in a dangerous new era of Washington politicians intrusively abetting people’s efforts to survive.”

“You have broken your most solemn oath, which is, ‘First, do no good,’ ” he said.

More seriously, Fox News published an op-ed by Paul, who has said the spending puts the US on the path to becoming the next Venezuela. Paul has his own theory on how to fix the economy: Stop fighting the virus.

Instead of printing more money and making believe that this money will retain its value as it is sprinkled across the land, we could remove the government shackles that have caused a depression in the restaurant, retail, and entertainment sectors of our economy.

His op-ed closes with a misappropriation of a famous John Maynard Keynes quote:

The economist John Maynard Keynes famously said that stimulus works in the short run and he didn’t much care about the future because we’d all be dead. I will vote against any more ‘free’ money because I care about my kid’s future and the future of our great country.

Misquotes are often more revealing than quotes. This reading of Keynes has little to do with Keynes, but is the way Keynes is presented in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. (Rand apparently got that interpretation from Hayek.) What Keynes actually meant was that it’s hard to get people to sacrifice for policies that economists think are best “in the long run”, when the imagined benefits are so far in the future that those making the sacrifices won’t live to see them. (“It is not wise to look too far ahead; our powers of prediction are slight, our command over results infinitesimal.”)

A good example of what Keynes was talking about is Paul himself, who can’t be convinced to care about climate change, no matter what it will do to his kids’ future.

and Biden’s speech

Thursday night, which marked both the signing of the bill and the one-year anniversary of WHO declaring a global pandemic, Biden gave a televised address (transcript, video). Maybe the last four years have lowered my standards, but I thought it was masterful.

The speech wove a complex emotional tapestry. It mourned the losses we have all suffered this past year (lost loved ones, lost jobs, lost experiences, lost opportunities), regretted the ways we had been turned against each other (battles over masks, racist reprisals against Asian Americans), pointed to the progress being made (every adult will be vaccine-eligible by the beginning of May, enough vaccine will be available to cover all of us by the end of May, schools will soon be ready to reopen safely), asked for the public’s help (keep wearing your mask, practice social distancing, wash your hands frequently, get vaccinated when you have the chance), envisioned a realistic goal (safe July 4 cook-outs with friends and family), and expressed a high hope (“My fervent prayer for our country is that, after all we have been through, we’ll come together as one people, one nation, one America.”).

Biden lacks the soaring rhetorical ability of Barack Obama, but he has a different set of strengths: He embodies sincerity. He is the guy who will level with you, the guy who has taken on a difficult job and is working hard to do it well. He has suffered with you, and has not lost hope.

Jonathan Chait is onto something here:

Joe Biden has reaped the normal rewards that come from behaving like a normal president — perhaps benefitting more than most due to the contrast with his unhinged predecessor. This has naturally infuriated Republicans, who see Biden’s strategy of reaping positive coverage by acting normal as a form of cheating.

On the other hand, Biden suffers from fact-checkers needing to fill space. Fairly small exaggerations get flagged, while a comparable Trump speech would include so many whopping lies that they couldn’t all be covered.

At this point, a novelist or movie director would make the previous president pop up and say something that underlined the contrast. And so it came to pass. Wednesday, Trump issued a statement emphasizing what is most important to him: getting credit whether he deserves it or not. No one should forget the (completely ridiculous and untrue) fact that without him, vaccines wouldn’t exist for another five years, if ever.

One attempt to manufacture an issue against Biden is his lack of press conferences. David Frum argues that this is good strategy: In the current environment, presidents are polarizing. The more Biden can project the idea that action is being taken by the government rather than the President, the better.

Another advantage is that Biden is not being pressured to take positions on things that are none of his business: Should Andrew Cuomo resign? Is the British royal family racist? And so on. Unlike Trump, Biden doesn’t want to opine on everything under the sun.

and fighting the virus

This week marked a lot of different Covid-19 anniversaries. A year ago, many things started happening quickly: The WHO declared a global pandemic. One of the nation’s top sports events (the “March Madness” NCAA basketball tournament) got cancelled. Schools started going virtual. I remember picking up a friend’s son at a public-transit station. He thought he was coming home for spring break, but he actually wouldn’t return to college until January.

The thing that strikes me looking back at the pandemic restrictions is how few of us knew what we were facing. The initial school closure in my town was for two weeks. Only serious pessimists were saying that we wouldn’t have this figured out by fall.

Steady as she goes: The number of Americans with one vaccine shot (69.8 million) or a complete vaccination (36.2 million) continues to rise. The number of cases (7-day daily average 55K) is still falling, but not very fast. Deaths (1,235) are coming down faster. But we are still at levels that would have been alarming last summer.

Biden’s appointees

Whenever someone gets a raw deal, people hope for them to “get justice” someday. Well, this week Merrick Garland really did get Justice. Three cabinet nominees — Becerra at HHS, Haaland at Interior, Walsh at Labor — still need to be confirmed by the Senate. Neera Tanden’s nomination at OMB was withdrawn; a replacement hasn’t been announced.

and you also might be interested in …

Last week I nudged you to support an Amazon boycott because of the union organization effort in Alabama. Commenters pointed out that the union organizers themselves were not asking for a boycott. Best to let them decide on their own strategy.

So last week, if you didn’t send your money to a rapacious giant that is taking over the world, maybe you should have. Sorry for misleading you.

The immigrant my church has been sheltering from deportation is leaving sanctuary after three years.

“Glorious news!” wrote First Parish minister John Gibbons in an email sent to parishioners and volunteers. “This morning, Maria received official confirmation that she has a one-year stay of deportation.”

For our congregation (and the volunteers from other congregations who pitched in), this is a starfish-on-the-beach story. We all knew that the pointless cruelty Trump’s immigration policy dwarfed any response we could muster. But here was one person who needed help. That was something we could do.

Part of me says I already spent too much time on the Dr. Seuss controversy last week. But there are a couple more things worth mentioning. First, the Seussical poem “The Day Children’s Literature Died” is hilarious. Second, PDFs of all six of the books no longer being published are here — mislabeled as “banned” books, but otherwise open to inspection. (Legally? I have no idea. If the link stops working, you’ll know what happened.) If you want to form your own opinions, it helps to see the work in its full context. My opinion: I’d figure out a way to save On Beyond Zebra, which is a cute concept marred by one illustration that should be easy to fix. The others are no big loss.

Talking about things that get too much attention: I stopped caring about the British royal family in 1776, when I was minus-180 years old.

Hard to know how much attention to give to speculation about Trump’s legal problems. Lots of dark clouds are forming around him, but I don’t want to get too excited before any rain falls.

Ditto for Mike Flynn. The Pentagon was investigating him for emoluments-clause violations when that investigation got subsumed by the Mueller investigation that eventually prosecuted him for lying to the FBI. After Trump pardoned him for that crime, the old investigation reopened.

A nasty story has a happy ending. As I mentioned in one of featured posts, an announcer had an open-mic moment during a girls high-school basketball tournament in Oklahoma, racially insulting girls who knelt during the national anthem. Well, Saturday, that team won the state championship.

George Floyd’s family is getting a $27 million settlement from the City of Minneapolis. Someday cities are going to figure out that good policing is cost effective.

I have not seen HBO’s Allen v Farrow, but it’s been intriguing to watch people react to it, like Ginia Bellafante, who published “Why My Teen-Age Self Gave Woody Allen a Pass” in Thursday’s NYT. The comments on that story are mixed: Some clueless older men think Woody has gotten a raw deal; a larger number of commenters of either gender condemn him in a fairly orthodox way; some women recount personal horror stories of exploitation by older men; and a few women still remember their intergenerational relationships fondly.

To me, the interesting issue isn’t what Woody did or didn’t do, how to reevaluate his movies, or who is telling the truth. It’s watching American culture use this case to think through its changing ideas and values.

My opinion: When we raise girls to have Cinderella-like fantasies, where a powerful man swoops out of nowhere and makes her a queen, we’re grooming them for exploitation. OTOH: Protecting young women can sometimes be an excuse for refusing to let them grow up.

Also, age-of-consent (which comes up often in the pro-Allen Bellafante comments) is a blunt instrument doing delicate work. People mature on different schedules, so any one-size-fits-all age is going to throw some young women to the wolves while unjustly telling others that they aren’t wise enough to make their own decisions.

That’s why this issue needs to have a social component in addition to a legal component. Legally, a middle-aged man may be in the clear if he has sex with a young woman on her 16th or 17th or 18th birthday. But the situation may still be creepy enough that the rest of us want to shun him. (OTOH, I have never understood why the law should get involved if a boy who just turned 16 has sex with his two-weeks-younger girlfriend, and she is not complaining about it.)

and let’s close with something well timed

Somebody hit the button at exactly the right instant to capture this frisbee-catching dog.

We’ll never get rid of them, but can we at least process them better?

On this blog I frequently debunk conspiracy theories that spread among conservatives: QAnon, Obama’s birth certificate, Dominion voting machines, Antifa’s role in the Capitol insurrection, and so on. But this week a liberal conspiracy theory kept showing up in my social-media news feeds: The accusations against Andrew Cuomo are part of a scheme to install a Republican as governor of New York, so that he can use his pardon power to protect Donald Trump from New York state prosecutions.

Debunking the Cuomo theory. Before I start using this as an example of a conspiracy theory, though, let’s dismiss it as a sensible interpretation of events: Suppose Cuomo resigns or is impeached. His replacement is the Democratic Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, who has no reason to pardon Trump. Next in the line of succession are the Temporary President of the Senate, the Speaker of the Assembly, and the Attorney General — all Democrats.

Then comes the 2022 election. New York electing a Republican governor is not unheard of: George Pataki served three terms from 1995-2006. But Pataki Republicans are not exactly Trumpists, and in recent cycles Democrats have done quite well in New York. Cuomo won his last election (2018) by 23%. But he doesn’t have some unique ability to pull in votes that puts the governorship in danger if he can’t run. Biden beat Trump in New York in 2020 by 23% as well. Kirsten Gillibrand won the New York senate race in 2018 by 34%. Letitia James won the 2018 Attorney General race by 27%. And the names being discussed as 2022 Republican challengers are not ones that should cause Democrats to quake in fear, particularly if a Trump pardon becomes one of the issues.

In short, raising phony accusations against Cuomo in order to keep Trump out of jail would be a wild scheme that had almost no chance to succeed. Not even Trumpists are crazy enough to invest the kind of resources even a failed attempt would require. And besides, there’s a far more mundane explanation for Cuomo’s problems: Being an asshole finally caught up to him.

My rare attempt at bipartisanship. If conspiracy theories appear in both parties, then sensible people in both parties should want to debunk them. That’s why I was pleased to see someone I rarely agree with, New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat, contribute to that effort a little while ago with “A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies“.

He starts with the following observation: The only way to get rid of conspiracy theories completely is to induce everyone to accept the expert consensus on everything. Not only is that never going to happen, it shouldn’t happen, because sometimes the expert consensus is self-serving or corrupt or just wrong in the ordinary people-make-mistakes way. I mean, how many experts told us that Saddam had WMDs, or that Trump couldn’t possibly beat Hillary? Worse, occasionally there are real conspiracies, like Nixon’s Plumbers or the baseball owners’ free-agency collusion.

So if we can’t just deny all conspiracies, or insist that people believe whatever the experts say, what can we do?

If you assume that people will always believe in conspiracies, and that sometimes they should, you can try to give them a tool kit for discriminating among different fringe ideas, so that when they venture into outside-the-consensus territory, they become more reasonable and discerning in the ideas they follow and bring back.

Douthat suggests a few sorting principles that can keep people from falling down the Q-Anon rabbit hole.

• Simple theories are better than baroque ones.
• Be skeptical of theories that seem tailored to reach a predetermined conclusion.
• Take fringe theories more seriously when the mainstream narrative has holes.
• Don’t start accepting all fringe theories just because one of them looks right to you.

To illustrate the simple vs. baroque distinction, he contrasts two origin-of-Covid-19 conspiracy theories: One says “it was designed by the Gates Foundation for some sort of world-domination scheme”, and the other that “it was accidentally released by a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan, a disaster that the Beijing government then sought to cover up”. Douthat rejects the former out of hand, but finds the latter plausible — not true, necessarily, but possibly worth investigating further.

The difference is that the Gates theory requires postulating a whole bunch of other stuff not in evidence. (What powers those nano-chips in the vaccine once they get into your bloodstream?) But the lab-accident theory just has one unusual event, after which a lot of people behave the way we know a lot of people behave: They would rather lie than accept blame. [1]

He illustrates the predetermined-conclusion point by looking at Trump’s various stolen-election theories. If you’ve ever argued with a Trumpist about this, you’ve probably observed what Douthat did: When you disprove one election-fraud theory, the Trumpist doesn’t reconsider his position, but just comes back with another election-fraud theory. If Georgia’s hand-recount disproves the corrupted-voting-machine-software theory (it does), then what about Detroit having more votes than voters? After you debunk that, what about dead people voting? And so on. The conclusion (Trump really won) remains fixed; the conspiracy theories are just roads to get there.

That should count against them.

Douthat’s point about holes in the mainstream narrative is similar to Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions: Novel theories shouldn’t dislodge an accepted theory unless the accepted theory is having trouble explaining anomalies. As Einstein reflected, “If the Michelson–Morley experiment had not brought us into serious embarrassment, no one would have regarded the relativity theory as a (halfway) redemption.”

The example Douthat gives is Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein’s career is so unlikely that you can hardly blame people for trying to place him in a larger story. I would point to the pee-tape theory of Putin and Trump. There is essentially no evidence of a pee tape, but Trump’s defenders have never offered an alternative explanation of why he was so subservient to Putin. Instead, they just denied what we could all see. If the alternative to the conspiracy theory is believing that the Trump/Putin news conference in Helsinki is perfectly normal behavior for an American president, then I’ll keep looking for a pee tape.

The fourth point ought to go without saying, but there is a strong pull in the opposite direction: Once you leave the mainstream, other outside-the-mainstream folks feel like compatriots. (Once you accept alien visitors, why shouldn’t Atlantis be real?) Douthat makes a good point, though: All the world’s revealed religions have stressed that not every voice that pops into somebody’s head is the voice of God. You have to practice discernment.

I’ll support him by pointing out that even though the experts aren’t always right, they usually are. So when you believe a conspiracy theory, you’re betting on a long shot. Long shots occasionally come in, but no gambler makes a successful career out of betting on one long shot after another.

My additional principles. I agree with all of Douthat’s principles, but I don’t think he goes quite far enough. I want to add some ideas that I can easily imagine him agreeing with. And even if he doesn’t …

You don’t have to accept the convention wisdom, but you should know what it is. If you reject it, you should have a reason. Before you retweet something bizarre, take a moment to google a news story on the topic, or check some reference like Wikipedia. Is there a widely accepted explanation you hadn’t considered? Is there a reason not to accept it? If you have such a reason, fine. But at least consider a non-conspiracy explanation.

Evil people face the same problems you do. Have you ever tried to organize something? It’s hard. It gets harder the more people you need to coordinate, and harder still if it’s something like a surprise party, where it’s supposed to be secret, so you can’t just blast out an announcement.

It’s not any easier to organize something nefarious. If you can’t imagine how a richer, more powerful version of yourself could pull something off, be skeptical that somebody else is managing it.

Who are “they”? One way to avoid realizing just how big and complicated a conspiracy would have to be is to attribute it to a nebulous “them”, as Donald Trump Jr. does in this clip: “There’s no place that they won’t go. This week alone, they canceled Mr. Potato Head, they canceled the Muppets. They’re canceling Dr. Seuss from reading programs.” They who?

Everybody in a conspiracy needs a motive. The reason the baseball-owner-collusion theory was plausible (even before it turned out to be true) was that all 32 owners had the same financial incentive: paying their players less.

Now consider the theory that ICUs are faking the Covid pandemic. Everybody who works there needs to be in on it: nurses, doctors, cleaning staff, and so on. Either they’re not telling their loved ones, or the loved ones are in on it too. What motives could possibly unify all those people?

Very few people are motivated by evil for its own sake. A theory I heard fairly often as same-sex marriage cases were working their way through the courts was that same-sex couples weren’t actually interested in getting married, they were just trying to destroy marriage for the rest of us. We are all occasionally tempted to do something out of spite, but seriously: Would you devote a big chunk of your life to a project that gained you nothing, but just destroyed something for somebody else? Not many people would. [2]

As new information comes in, bad conspiracy theories have to grow. A good conspiracy theory might even shrink. A sure sign of a bad theory is that every objection is met by expanding the conspiracy. “They’re in on it too.”

But if you imagine organizing a conspiracy yourself, you wouldn’t be constantly trying to bring more people in, because each new person is a new risk. Instead, you’d try to identify the smallest possible group that could pull the operation off.

So if you’re on the trail of an actual conspiracy, the more you find out, the closer you should get to understanding the vision of the planner. Rather than “He’s in on it too”, you should start to realize how a small group of people really could do this. [3]

Contrast this with the nanobots-in-the-vaccine theory. Anybody who has access to a Covid vaccine might put it under a microscope and see those bots. Why aren’t they saying anything? They must all be in on it.

[1] My favorite Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theory is similar: After Oswald fires that first non-fatal shot, a Secret Service agent’s gun goes off by mistake, killing JFK. The agent’s superiors then try to cover that up, and things spiral from there.

Having brought up the Kennedy assassination, which educated my whole generation in conspiracy theories, I have to tell this joke: Two authors of JFK-assassination-conspiracy books are sharing a car as they drive to a convention where they’ll both be on a panel. Unfortunately, they are involved in a highway accident and die. But they’re both virtuous people, so they arrive together in the afterlife.

Their introductory tour of Heaven is given by God Himself, and somewhere between the infinite beach and the endless ice cream bar he tells them that there are no secrets in Heaven. “So if you ever want to know anything — about Heaven, about the Earth, about Me — you just have to ask.”

So one of the authors raises the question he’s been wrestling with for years: “Who really did kill Kennedy?”

And God answers, “Oswald, acting alone, pretty much the way the Warren Report says.”

The authors go silent for a while, until eventually one leans over to the other and whispers, “This goes up much higher than we ever imagined.”

[2] This is one reason I suspect that conspiracy theories do better among religious groups that believe in an active Devil. Unlike anybody you actually know, the Devil is motivated by evil for its own sake. And if the Devil has minions, they also are just trying to do harm.

[3] One of my favorite Kennedy-assassination conspiracy books was Best Evidence by David Lifton. (I’m not endorsing his theory, I’m just illustrating a point.) His theory revolves around how investigators think: They trust some kinds of evidence more than others, and they’ll explain away less-trusted evidence if it contradicts more-trusted evidence.

In a murder case, the best evidence is the body; or, after the body is out of reach, the autopsy. So if you could control that evidence, then you wouldn’t need to involve the whole FBI; they would naturally discount eye-witnesses who saw something that the autopsy says didn’t happen.

Maybe. But we’ll have to cut through a lot of nonsense first.

In case you missed previous posts like “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric” and “Silly Season in the Culture Wars“, here’s what I’ve concluded: The rhetoric on “cancel culture” is wildly overblown, and articles denouncing it almost invariably

• fail to define what they’re talking about, making me wonder if “cancel culture” is really a thing at all,
• use a bunch of imaginary examples that fall apart as soon as you look at them, like the “cancellation” of Mr. Potato Head or Dr. Seuss. [1]

Mostly this is a debate between the Right and the Left, with conservatives prophesying the fall of civilization and liberals wondering what the problem is. But a segment of the mainstream commentariat has tried to stake out a middle position, recognizing that Green Eggs and Ham is in no danger and Pepe Le Pew should have disappeared a long time ago, but still repeating right-wing talking points about the Jacobin nature of the “woke mob”.

Bai and Hennessey. Case in point: Matt Bai, warning in Friday’s Washington Post about the dangers of the ongoing “cultural revolution” (and admitting that he’s invoking Mao intentionally). He brushes off the Fox News freakout about Mr. Potato Head, but then takes aim at people like me. [2]

the overwhelming leftist response to Republican hysteria has been to say that there is no such thing as “cancel culture,” no actual threat to free expression. It’s all just a lot of Trumpian nonsense, propagated by racists and sexists.

This isn’t true, and it isn’t helpful.

You know what would be helpful? If folks like Bai would define their terms and offer actual examples that can be be analyzed and compared, so readers don’t just have to take his word for what is or isn’t true. But instead, he makes this sweeping but totally unsupported claim:

A culture of self-censorship pervades media and the arts — a fear that using the wrong word or recommending the wrong book can derail a career.

We are, in fact, witnessing the most direct assault on free expression in my lifetime, mainly because a loud segment of younger activists view free expression as a convenient excuse for perpetuating oppression.

Despite the once-in-a-lifetime gravity of this situation, Bai does not find it necessary to identify a single career that has actually been derailed for “using the wrong word or recommending the wrong book”.

So what exactly is he talking about? If I don’t already know, he’s not going to tell me.

Most sensible liberals I talk to — in politics, news, entertainment or academia — understand this. But there’s a palpable fear of getting on the wrong side of the woke mob, and it doesn’t seem worth the risk.

Who is in this “woke mob”? He doesn’t say, beyond “younger activists” (which, sad to say, leaves me out as I research my Medicare options). But apparently my advanced age has not made me “sensible”, because I have no idea what he means.

Bai is not an isolated example. One of my unimpeachably liberal Facebook friends linked approvingly to this New York Post article by Matthew Hennessey, which tries to rally Gen-Xers against cancel culture’s “millennial Maoists”. (What is it about Mao?) Predictably, Hennessey also doesn’t define “cancel culture”, and (unlike Bai) recites the right-wing litany of imaginary examples. (The article’s illustrations include images from The Cat in the Hat and Gone With the Wind, both of which remain readily available.) And he perversely advocates fighting back against cancel culture by canceling anti-racists:

We will have to engage in a thousand tiny battles every day and it will be terribly uncomfortable. It’ll be hard standing up to school administrators pushing an ‘anti-racist’ curriculum on your kids.

Yeah, how dare the still-unidentified “woke mob” try to teach your children about slavery or structural racism? You absolutely need to protect freedom of speech by censoring that curriculum before the kids ever learn anything from it.

OK, I’ve got that out of my system now. Let’s see if it’s possible to find something here we can think about with some amount of rigor.

Outlines of a reasonable discussion. I suspect the term “cancel culture” is now poisoned beyond recovery. But let’s see if we can tease some kernel of legitimate concern out of the mass of nonsense. Let’s begin with some ground rules.

The phenomenon we end up discussing can’t have political bias built into it, as “cancel culture” currently does. I’m not willing to adopt a frame in which, by definition, only conservatives can have a grievance. If Gina Carano is a victim of whatever-it-is, then so are Colin Kaepernick and the Dixie Chicks.

Whatever-it-is has something to do with the proper limits of free speech. And that discussion needs to start by acknowledging that some limits, both legal and cultural, are necessary and proper. For example, there is room to argue about whether Trump’s January 6 speech should qualify as an illegal “incitement to riot”. But if he had openly said, “Now go to the Capitol and do whatever you need to do to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes”, he should go to jail. Freedom of speech can’t be absolute.

As for cultural limits, consider the example of an announcer’s I-didn’t-know-the-mic-was-live moment at a girls high-school basketball game in Oklahoma Thursday night. (When some of the student athletes knelt during the national anthem, he commented: “Fucking niggers.” [3]) I don’t think you have to be a Maoist to believe he should be fired for that. Not jailed, not lynched — but there should be consequences when somebody goes that far over the line.

And finally, there’s a difference between tolerating someone’s right to say something and providing them a platform so they can say it again. That’s another aspect of the basketball-announcer example. If a guy sitting in a bar makes the same comment to the TV screen, the people who hear it should give him strange looks, and that might well be the end of it. But should a network keep giving this guy a microphone?

To give another example, The Birth of a Nation is a racist movie from 1915, which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube. I’m fine with that, and I’d also be fine with Google (which owns YouTube) deciding not to host it. I would oppose a law that made distributing or watching the movie illegal.

But providing a public venue to screen the movie is a more complex discussion. If I were part of a university community — as either faculty or student — I’d be fine with an on-campus group showing it as part of a larger conversation about racism in film, one that allowed for discussion of the ways it misrepresents the Reconstruction Era. But I would protest if the movie were brought to campus without any context, in a hey-you-might-like-this way, or in any other way that used the university as a platform to promote the film’s racist point of view. [4]

So: It would be valuable for American culture to have a broad conversation about the proper limits of free speech and the proper ways of responding to offensive speech. A worthy goal would be to develop impartial standards that balance what I can do against what can be done to me, regardless of whether I am liberal or conservative.

Another valuable conversation would involve how we want to look at our history. How should we judge people who lived in other eras, when cultural values were different? What points of view have been systematically excluded from our history, and how does the story change when we let those points of view in?

I’ve heard a lot of people claim that eventually we’ll be renaming the Washington Monument, but I’ve never heard anybody seriously propose that. As in the previous discussion: What are the proper limits? Acknowledging someone’s historical significance is not the same as continuing to celebrate that person. We can leave people in the history books without naming schools after them.

Is anybody having that discussion? Maybe, a little. I’ll point you to a couple of worthwhile recent contributions.

First, Scott Illing’s interview with Jeffrey Sachs at Vox. Sachs has recently written an article at ARC on the bills state legislatures are considering (and even passing) that suppress critical race theory. In the interview, he contrasts the left-wing and right-wing threats to free expression.

I’m not comfortable either saying that one side is more dangerous than the other. What I will say is that the threats from the left tend to involve informal mechanisms of sanction, and they are no less censorious for that informality. They can do enormous damage, and it’s a significant problem that can be addressed if more college and university administrators grow a backbone and stand up to that kind of behavior.

Whereas the censorious instinct on the right is largely coming from off campus, and it involves much quieter tools that escape the notice of many commentators.

“Quieter” mainly because the national media doesn’t cover small-state legislatures like South Dakota, where a bill under consideration would

prohibit the use of any material designed to promote an ideological view of history, but simultaneously Gov. Kristi Noem has proposed or has requested $900,000 to overhaul the state’s history curriculum in order to promote the idea that “the United States of America is the most special nation in the history of the world.”

I hope Sachs eventually tells us specifically about the “enormous damage” to colleges and universities that he sees the Left doing. But the distinction — the Left operating mainly on campus and using social pressure, while the Right uses its political power in red-state legislatures — is useful.

Another worthwhile article is “Cancel Culture is Not a Movement” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in the New Yorker. Wallace-Wells looks at particular cases and questions whether the “woke mob” operates more as a fear-inducing mirage than as a political force.

To Dr. Seuss Enterprises, it might have seemed possible that a progressive mob was waiting, ready to turn on “McElligot’s Pool” and “Mulberry Street.” But it is also possible—to me, it seems likely—that there was no such consensus at all. …

The college president, the city-council subcommittee, the panel of experts: these figures are often described by their political opponents as if they were as coherent and determined as a closed fist—that there is something cohesive that could be called cancel culture. My own sense is that something close to the opposite is true. The claims of racial justice have upended liberal élites in interesting and profound ways, and left them deeply uncertain: about how much history should be revised, about what kinds of retributive steps should be taken, and, above all, about how many people, really, want radical change.

Just about everyone left of center recognizes that white supremacy persists and is unjust, but “white supremacy” isn’t just a law that can be repealed or a corporate policy the board can change at its next meeting. So the desire to be on the right side of history often runs up against practical uncertainties: What can someone in my position actually do? And how much political capital does the will to change actually have? Will the apparent support for organizational change evaporate if I ask people to commit serious resources or accept significant change in their own lives?

The result can be bold announcements that lack bold follow-through, like Minneapolis City Council members vowing to “end policing as we know it”, but not allowing a police-defunding proposal to go to the voters. Or symbolic actions of little real impact, like San Francisco renaming its schools, or Speaker Pelosi wearing a kente-cloth stole to a demonstration.

College administrators can fire the people at the center of incidents, and sometimes do so too quickly and without due process, because they feel a need to demonstrate that they take the incidents seriously. Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter can boot people off their platforms, but the algorithms that identify such people are often no better than the algorithms that show us so many off-base advertisements. Publishers can decide not to publish objectionable books, either before or after someone objects to them. Stores can pull products off their shelves. Individuals can carry signs at Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Such actions display concern, but how well thought-out are they, and what next steps do they lead to?

The sum total of these actions can create the impression of a vast conspiracy reaching out to change every aspect of our lives, when the reality is quite different: A small group of activists has identified a problem that a much larger group of sympathizers recognizes as legitimate. But the larger group is fumbling to decide both what it can do about it, and how much it is willing to do.

[1] Jeff Tiedrich expressed this point with a little more vigor than I usually do.

[2] I would be amazed if Bai has ever heard of me or this blog, but he’s aiming directly at the arguments I’ve been making here. It’s had not to take it personally.

[3] It’s always a question whether to quote exactly what someone said or alter it in some way, like “f**king ni**ers” or “effing N-words”, or to refer vaguely to “a racial slur”. When I’m tempted to do one of those things, I always ask myself, “Who would I be protecting?” In this case, I think I’d be protecting the announcer, by making his words sound less serious than they actually were, so I repeated the offending phrase as he said it.

This policy is open for discussion. The one caution I would give is: Don’t try to speak for other people. I want to know what offends you, not what you think would offend someone else.

[4] In giving these examples, I’m modeling the kind of conversation I’d like to see. In particular, they make the conversation real in a way that the Bai and Hennessey articles are unreal.

After “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric” and “Silly Season in the Culture Wars“, I figured it was time to let the cancel-culture debate rest for a while. But then Matt Bai wrote a Washington Post column that could have been a direct answer to my posts. (I’m sure it wasn’t. I’ve never seen any indication that Bai is a Sift reader.) And liberal social-media friends who ought to know better started using right-wing-talking-point terms like “woke mob” and linking to New York Post articles making a generational case against the “millennial Maoists”. (I’m nowhere near the millennial generation, but I’m starting to sympathize.)

Possibly unwisely, I took the bait. The result is “Is an Intelligent Cancel-Culture Discussion Possible?”, which is just about done and should be out shortly. In it, I don’t just respond to criticism, but also lay out some ground rules for an intelligent discussion of the issue, and point you to a couple of articles I found helpful.

I refused to let that post delay yet again a post that didn’t get done last week: “What Makes a Good Conspiracy Theory?” Two weeks ago, Ross Douthat wrote a column “A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies“. I almost never get to agree with Ross, so I didn’t want to let this opportunity go by. His “tool kit” for separating plausible theories from crazy ones is pretty good, as far as it goes. So I wanted to review it and add to it. In general, I think we’d do a better job of fighting back against QAnon and other crazy theories if we had a widely acknowledged set of standards, rather than making an ad hoc case against each new theory.

That post should appear maybe around 11 EST.

Then there’s the news of the week. Covid relief really did pass! If it continues to be as popular as it has been so far, it might mark a turning point in the public’s relationship to government. Maybe the Reagan Revolution could finally be over. We marked the one-year anniversary of Covid being declared a pandemic, which led to a lot of retrospectives. Personally, I noticed because I was watching the Big Ten basketball tournament; the same tournament getting abruptly cancelled last year was when I noticed that things had gotten serious. Biden gave a prime-time address. Voting rights legislation continued on its collision course with the filibuster. And a few other things happened. I’ll try to get the weekly summary out by 1.

Mr. Potato Head! An army of Mr. Potato Heads!

– Weird Al Yankovic
planning session for “Dare To Be Stupid“

This week’s featured post is “Silly Season in the Culture Wars“.

Last month’s post “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric” has become the Sift’s first authentically viral post in a long time. It should pass 20,000 page views soon, the first Sift post to do that since “You Don’t Have to Hate Anybody to be a Bigot” in 2015. Given the changes in the social media landscape, I had wondered if that was still possible.

This week everybody was talking about Covid Relief passing the Senate

Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief package passed the Senate Saturday without the $15 minimum wage, but without a lot of other major changes. Because it isn’t exactly what the House had passed, the House needs to pass it again. Democrats hope to do that tomorrow, getting the bill on President Biden’s desk before some previous Covid-related benefits run out on March 14.

At the risk of counting unhatched chickens, I want to point something out: Congress is doing something major, and getting it done on time. No posturing and then pointing fingers at each other about why nothing is happening. No driving up to the cliff, giving yourself an extension, and then driving up to the cliff again. Biden won’t go back and forth on whether to sign this, as Trump did in December. This isn’t a reality-TV show that needs some suspense to boost its ratings, it’s governance.

I think the American people are going to like this: You say something needs to get done, and then you go do it. That’s not what we’re used to out of Congress.

I think people are also going to notice that this passed without a single Republican vote in either house. Republicans are trying to spin that in their favor: When the Republican Senate passed a bill in December, it was bipartisan. But that’s putting lipstick on a pig: The December bill was bipartisan because Republicans didn’t have the votes to pass anything without Democratic help, not even in the Senate. A bunch of their people wouldn’t vote for any Covid relief at all.

Paul Krugman analyzes what’s in the plan, and why he thinks it needs to be this big. Basically, it funds stuff that needs to happen to fight the virus (vaccinations, testing) and get the country back to normal (preparing schools to reopen safely). It helps individuals who are in financial trouble because of the pandemic (unemployment, stimulus checks). And it makes up for state and local tax shortfalls that otherwise would have governments laying people off at the worst possible time. Some people who need help don’t fit into any obvious categories, so they’re hard to target; that’s where the checks-to-almost-everybody feature comes in. That makes the price tag bigger than a perfectly efficient bill would carry, if anybody knew how to design one.

Will the bill overstimulate the economy and produce inflation? Krugman admits he doesn’t know: We’ve never been in this situation before. If it does cause inflation, he foresees more of a one-time pop than the kind of inflationary spiral we saw in the 1970s.

and Covid itself

Things are looking good in the battle against the pandemic, but a number of Republican governors are spiking the ball on the five-yard line. They’re acting like the battle is already won and everything can go back to normal right away — repeating the mistake that so many of them made last May, after the March/April surge began to die down.

The good news is that with the third vaccine now available, vaccination rates are soaring. 59 million Americans have gotten at least one shot, and more than 30 million are fully vaccinated. 2.9 million shots were given Saturday, and the 7-day average is up to 2.2 million. This is well past Biden’s post-election pledge of 100 million shots in 100 days. His current projection is that enough vaccine will be produced for every American adult to be vaccinated by the end of May. At some point, the problem will shift from not having enough vaccine to convincing reluctant Americans to get vaccinated.

While the share that is most enthusiastic to get vaccinated increased across racial and ethnic groups, Black and Hispanic adults continue to be more likely than White adults to say they will “wait and see” before getting vaccinated. Nearly four in ten Republicans and three in ten rural residents say they will either “definitely not” get vaccinated or will do so “only if required,” as do one-third (32%) of those who have been deemed essential workers in fields other than health care.

The sort-of-good news is that after hiccuping these last two weeks, the new-case curve looks like it is continuing downward, but at a slower pace than the precipitous fall we saw from mid-January to mid-February. The current daily average of new cases is just under 60K, down from a peak of 250K. But don’t forget: The peak that had us all so rattled last summer was 70K, so it’s not like we’re in a good place yet.

The bad news is that red states — especially Texas — are rolling back their Covid restrictions and canceling their mask mandates. This is the same mistake that many of the same states made last May, leading to the virus’ second wave in the summer.

Meanwhile, there’s actual evidence that mask mandates save lives and indoor dining costs lives. And whatever masking-and-distancing is doing to fight Covid, we can see that it clobbered the flu this year. Chris Hayes says this stat blew his mind: Positive flu specimens in week 7 of flu season were 174K last year and 1.5K this year.

“At least 100” protesters gathered in front of the Idaho state capitol in Boise Saturday. They burned face-masks to dramatize their opposition to government-imposed mask mandates.

Supposedly this has something to do with freedom and limited government, but I don’t get it. Does it violate your freedom when restaurants insist you wear shoes? When stores require pants?

Many Catholic bishops have an issue with the J&J vaccine, because it uses “lab-grown cells that descend from cells taken in the 1980s from the tissue of aborted fetuses”. I’m not a theologian, Catholic or otherwise, but it seems to me that at some point the clock runs out on these kinds of moral considerations. The J&J vaccine will keep people alive, while refusing to take it will not save a single fetus, much less bring back any of the ones aborted in the 1980s.

We use the body parts of organ donors who die by violence or are victims of drunk drivers. Getting some good out of their deaths does not condone the violence or excuse those responsible. So if you hold the un-Biblical belief that fetuses have souls, I think you should say a short prayer of appreciation for their sacrifice, and then roll up your sleeve.

and more legislation in the pipeline

The House has passed the George Floyd Police Reform Act and the For the People Act to protect voting rights and defend democracy. Both face Republican resistance in the Senate, and aren’t amenable to the reconciliation work-around that let Democrats pass Covid relief. The Biden administration is working on its infrastructure proposal, which could go through under reconciliation, but 50th vote Joe Manchin doesn’t want it to. Of course, Manchin still believes that Republican cooperation is possible, so we’ll see what he does when he discovers that it isn’t.

In any case, the filibuster issue is going to come to a head before much longer. Republicans at the state level are doubling down on voter suppression. (The lowlight here is Georgia’s proposal that would make it illegal to give water to someone waiting in line to vote.) They clearly believe that the solution to their problems isn’t to win over more voters, it’s to make sure fewer people vote, and to continue rigging the system so that they can return to power even if a majority votes against them.

It’s going to be a serious crisis for the Democratic Party if they do nothing while their voters are disenfranchised, because they are more loyal to “bipartisanship” or “Senate tradition”.

and you also might be interested in …

Texas consumers were overcharged around $16 billion for electricity during the recent winter-storm crisis, but the Texas Public Utility Commission has decided not to do anything about it. “It’s nearly impossible to unscramble this sort of egg, and the results of going down this path are unknowable.”

Amazon workers in Alabama are trying to unionize, and fighting an anti-union campaign from the company. You can help.

To support Amazon workers and let the company know that we do not approve of their union-busting tactics, a one-week boycott of the company has been planned. From Sunday, March 7th to Saturday, March 13^th, everyone is being asked to not use Amazon or Amazon Prime and do not stream videos using the Amazon Prime video service.

In case you needed it, here’s more evidence that Trump only cares about Trump: His lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They’ve been using his name and image in fund-raising pitches, and he doesn’t even get a cut!

Missouri Republican Senator Roy Blunt says he’s not running for re-election. Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson hasn’t decided, but says he’s leaning against running. Rob Portman of Ohio is also not running.

2022 is going to see some off-the-wall primary campaigns, as Republicans compete to be the most outrageous, Trumpiest candidate. Wisconsin is a swing state, but Missouri is deep red and Ohio is trending that way. But history shows that a wacky enough candidate can blow an election in any state.

One more data point in favor of a guaranteed basic income:

The city of Stockton, California, embarked on a bold experiment two years ago: It decided to distribute $500 a month to 125 people for 24 months — with no strings attached and no work requirements. The people were randomly chosen from neighborhoods at or below the city’s median household income, and they were free to spend the money any way they liked. Meanwhile, researchers studied what impact the cash had on their lives.

Conservatives say that if you give people money, they won’t work. Liberals say that no-strings money will help people escape the poverty traps that keep them from working. The Stockton experiment supports the liberal theory.

The most eye-popping finding is that the people who received the cash managed to secure full-time jobs at more than twice the rate of people in a control group, who did not receive cash.Within a year, the proportion of cash recipients who had full-time jobs jumped from 28 percent to 40 percent. The control group saw only a 5 percent jump over the same period.

My theory: Looking for a job is like looking for a date. If you’re too desperate, you’re unattractive.

Jen Psaki continues to be a press secretary worthy of The West Wing.

In case your nightmares have been getting repetitive, here’s something new: six-foot long bioluminescent sharks. You’re welcome.

The featured post responds to this week’s conservative ravings about imaginary liberal attempts to “cancel” Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and the Muppets. But here’s what an attempt to cancel really looks like: a petition to get American Girl to pull its Doll of the Year off the shelves, because her backstory involves two lesbian aunts.

and let’s close with something life affirming

I can’t explain why watching this beaver chow down on cabbage makes me smile. It just does.

If the only message you have is to stoke your base’s grievances, occasionally you have to make some up.

This week contained a lot of important news, so you might imagine that conservative news networks would have a lot to talk about. You might even say they had work cut out for them.

• President Biden’s $1.9 trillion (with a T) spending bill was being debated in Congress, and the opposition message wasn’t getting through to the American people. In one poll, the proposal won support from 68% of Americans, including 37% of Republicans.
• The battle against the Covid pandemic had major developments: Biden announced that enough vaccine for all adult Americans would be available by the end of May, two months earlier than previously thought. Meanwhile, Republican governors in Texas and Mississippi were removing mask mandates and other pandemic-related restrictions from their economies, and others were thinking of following suit — despite the fact that daily case-numbers and death-totals are either worse or not much different than when those restrictions were announced.
• The Senate has been holding hearings on the January 6 insurrection, including testimony from the FBI director.
• Police reform and voting rights bills passed the House.
• Refugees are returning to our southern border.
• A big-state Democratic governor is battling scandal.
• The Senate still has Biden nominees to confirm. Surely one or more of them has done something worth getting upset about.
• Biden is planning another trillion-with-a-T infrastructure bill to rebuild America in ways that Trump promised but never delivered on.

Serious stuff. Worth calling viewers’ attention to. Some of it even invites a conservative spin.

But instead, right-wing hosts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity filled entire segments of their shows with Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss, two purported examples of “cancel culture” that (1) are trivial by comparison to several of the issues I just listed, and (2) don’t stand up to even a small amount of scrutiny.

Let’s examine the reality at the root of these controversies.

Mr. Potato Head. Not quite two weeks ago, Hasbro announced that it was changing how it markets its Mr. Potato Head toys:

Hasbro is officially renaming the MR. POTATO HEAD brand to POTATO HEAD to better reflect the full line.

In other words, Hasbro is de-centering masculinity: Instead of being an “accessory” to her husband, Mrs. Potato Head is now an equal member of the family. Horrors! Your daughter might get the idea that she can find her own place in the world, and doesn’t need a man to define her. And then the Hasbro announcement got even more sinister:

Launching this Fall, the CREATE YOUR POTATO HEAD FAMILY is a celebration of the many faces of families allowing kids to imagine and create their own Potato Head family with 2 large potato bodies, 1 small potato body, and 42 accessories. The possibilities to create your own families are endless with mixing and mashing all the parts and pieces.

So the toy is no longer hetero-normative. If they want, children can build a family with two Mommies or two Daddies. The branding no longer fights that. (Like that matters. I mean, you never cross-dressed Barbie and G. I. Joe, right? Sure. Me neither.) Of course, if you want a Potato Head Family with a Mommy, a Daddy, and a Tater Tot of your own gender, that still works too. (And you can still remove Daddy’s mouth, so he can’t yell at the Tot.) As best I can see, there are no losers here.

Dr. Seuss. The Dr. Seuss situation is similar: A private enterprise is managing its brand in a way that hurts no one.

When Theodore Seuss Geisel died in 1991, the copyrights on his works passed to his widow, Audrey Geisel, who lived until 2018.

In 1993 she founded Dr. Seuss Enterprises, whose stated mission was to “protect the integrity of the Dr. Seuss books while expanding beyond books into ancillary areas.”

Since then, DSE has done a pretty good job keeping Geisel’s flame burning.

Dr. Seuss — who died in 1991 — was one of the top-earning dead celebrities of 2020, with $33 million in total earnings, according to Forbes. That’s up from $9.5 million in 2015. His estate actually earned more than any late celebrity except for Michael Jackson, whose estate earned $48 million.

So maybe they know their business, and their judgement deserves the benefit of the doubt. Tuesday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that six of its more obscure titles would no longer be published.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises, working with a panel of experts, including educators, reviewed our catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of the following titles: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.

None of these six was particularly popular.

“And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” one of the six books pulled by the estate, sold about 5,000 copies last year, according to BookScan. “McElligot’s Pool” and “The Cat’s Quizzer” haven’t sold in years through the retailers BookScan tracks.

For comparison, DSE sold over half a million of Oh, the Places You’ll Go!.

So what about these particular six books is “hurtful and wrong”? Unless you have copies lying around — and most people don’t, that’s what it means to be unpopular — it’s hard to judge for yourself. In situations like this, mainstream publications don’t want to call your attention to something just to demonstrate how hurtful it is. (And nether do I, so I’ll provide links you can chase if you’re curious rather than post the images themselves.)

The problem isn’t with the text of the books so much as the illustrations. None of them that I have seen is aggressively racist, like Nazi caricatures of Jews often were, but they contain demeaning stereotypes of Africans and Asians. (The anti-Japanese cartoons Geisel drew after Pearl Harbor, though, are aggressively racist, as many cartoons of the era were. None of them are currently being published by DSE.) You’re not supposed to hate these books’ non-white characters so much as find them different and strange. (The theme of Mulberry Street is that you don’t have to go far to see bizarre things, like “a Chinaman who eats with sticks“.) And a lack of diversity doesn’t help: The monkey-like African natives in If I Ran the Zoo would be less problematic (though still far from acceptable) if they weren’t the book’s only black characters.

(For what it’s worth, I’ll tell a story on myself: When I was three, I had pneumonia and my parents took me to the hospital. In the waiting room, I saw a Black family, maybe the first real-life Black people I had ever noticed. Dark skin was something I only knew from cartoons, when characters fell into mud puddles or got blown up with dynamite. “Mommy!” I announced (or so I’ve been told). “Those people are dirty.”)

If you’ve watched many old Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons — a lot of which have quietly been taken out of circulation — you know that none of this is unusual for the era. Explicitly non-white characters were rare, and the ones that do show up represent something “other”; you’re supposed to react to them, not identify with them. So the problem isn’t that Dr. Seuss was a bad man in the context of his time — in many ways his books were more progressive than their competitors — but that some of his work has aged badly.

What should be done about that depends on what you want Dr. Seuss to be in 2021. If he’s to be a historical figure — a leading children’s-book author of the mid-to-late 20th century — then his work should speak for itself. Leave it alone, and organize a conversation around it, as HBO Max did when it briefly withdrew and then re-launched Gone With the Wind. (GWTW is a spectacular example of 1930s movie-making, as well as a valuable artifact in the history of America’s attitudes towards race. So I encourage you to watch it. Just don’t imagine that its Lost Cause mythology is an accurate depiction of the Old South or the Reconstruction Era.)

But if Theodore Geisel’s legacy is supposed to be timeless — Audrey’s vision — if his work is supposed to live through our era and beyond, then it needs to be curated. Parents and grandparents should be able to trust the Dr. Seuss brand. When you sit down to read to your four-year-old, you should be able to pick up a Dr. Seuss book without worrying that you might put something bad into a developing mind.

That curation is precisely what Dr. Seuss Enterprises was doing when it removed these six books from its catalog. By taking this action, DSE is making it more likely that kids will still be reading The Cat in the Hat or How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 2050.

The conservative policy vacuum. To understand the overblown response to the Potato Head and Dr. Seuss news, think back for a moment to Reagan Era conservatism. Whether you loved it or hated it — and even if you believed some ulterior motive was hiding in its background — you knew its defining principles:

• Bold foreign policy that maintains America’s military strength and isn’t afraid to use it.
• Free trade.
• Less regulation, lower federal spending, and lower taxes.
• Local self-determination with less central control from Washington.

That all went out the window with Trump. He liked to spend a lot of money on weapons, brag about American military strength, and occasionally threaten other nations with “fire and fury”. But he also pulled back from wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; distanced the US from allies like NATO, Japan, and South Korea; and let Vladimir Putin do whatever he wanted wherever he wanted to do it. Mao was probably wrong when he referred to the US of his era as a “paper tiger“, but Trump’s America really was one.

Free trade was replaced by tariffs and trade wars. Some regulations went away — particularly those protecting the environment — but others he stretched to interfere more aggressively in the decisions of US and foreign corporations. Big spending (and big deficits) weren’t worth mentioning any more. And no president in my lifetime did quite so much to impose federal policy on cities and states that didn’t want it. (Last summer, only resistance from the Pentagon kept him from invoking the Insurrection Act and sending active-duty troops into American cities.)

As a result of this reversal, and the absence of any new guiding principles to explain it, today’s Republican Party no longer has a policy agenda. The 2020 Republican platform was to support Trump — period. When the GOP controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, it couldn’t decide what to do with that power, other than pass one big tax cut for rich people. It couldn’t even fulfill its promise to repeal ObamaCare, because that would leave a void that it had no idea how to fill. “Complain all you want that the covid-19 relief bill has been packed with all sorts of unrelated stuff from the Democratic wish list,” Megan McArdle wrote yesterday. “At least the Democrats have a wish list. What’s the Republican equivalent?”

Conservatism today is defined not by principles or programs, but by a Leader, an identity, and (most of all) an attitude: Conservatives are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more. Mad at “Them” — the libs, the Deep State, Big Tech, the blood-drinking pedophiles — who keep threatening and insulting them.

But the Biden administration is policy-centered, so to the extent that Biden is driving the national conversation, Republicans have little to say. If they wanted to oppose Biden on substance, they’d need to have a Covid relief proposal of their own. (Ten GOP senators did make a laughably low-ball offer that they knew Biden couldn’t accept, but even they only represented themselves. The Republican leadership offered no proposal at all.) Or a coherent response to January 6 and the larger problem of domestic terrorism. Or an infrastructure plan. Or an immigration plan. Or something.

With no ideas to offer, they can only keep their base riled by promoting a never-ending string of “outrages”. Otherwise they’ve got nothing.

The cancel-culture freak-out. The essence of Trump’s message to his base (a message no other Republican is in a position to compete with) is grievance: Somebody is trying to take something from you, so you need a strong authoritarian leader to fight for you.

Some of these threats may be exaggerated, but they have at least a foothold in reality. Many Democrats really would like to take away assault rifles and other military-grade weaponry, or at least stop Americans from buying more. But the number proposing to “disarm” the country entirely is vanishingly small. Many Americans do compete for jobs with foreigners abroad and immigrants at home, though trade and immigration also create jobs and the balance is debatable.

But other “threats” are almost entirely imaginary: Non-white races are trying to “replace” you. Gays and lesbians are conspiring to destroy marriage and the family. Liberals want to criminalize Christianity. Big Tech is trying to steal your voice. Covid is a conpsiracy to take away your freedom. It has become a formula: When the Right needs to energize its base, they invent some nebulous force — “Them!” — that is trying to take away something that should be yours.

This week’s Seuss/Potato story has made this technique really obvious, because the frame fits so badly. Nothing is being taken away from anybody. Whatever you had hoped to do with Mr. Potato Head, you can still do. No one is coming for your Dr. Seuss books. And if you want more, you can buy more, except for a few books you probably had forgotten even existed. What’s more, the rights to those books never belonged to you anyway; if Dr. Seuss Enterprises thinks its brand is healthier without them, that’s up to them.

Conservative rabble-rousers did their best to pretend something else was happening. “They are banning Dr. Seuss books,” said Glenn Beck. They. Not the legal owners of the copyrights, or the organization created by Seuss’ widow to protect his legacy, but a nebulous “panel of ‘educators’ and ‘experts’.”

How much more do you need to see before all of America wakes up and goes “This is fascism!”? This is fascism. You don’t destroy books. What is wrong with us, America? Go out and buy those books today. Find out if you can get them. Buy Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, because it’s the end of an era. It is the end of freedom in America.

Beck is so strongly attached to these six books — none of which are being destroyed — that he gets some of their names wrong.

He wasn’t alone. On Fox & Friends, Donald Trump Jr. also warned about the sinister “they”, and seemed to imply The Cat in the Hat had been canceled.

There’s no place that they won’t go. This week alone, they canceled Mr. Potato Head, they canceled the Muppets. They’re canceling Dr. Seuss from reading programs. … I literally know The Cat in the Hat by heart without the book there because I read it so many times to my children.

(I almost forgot about the Muppets. Last month, Disney Plus began streaming all five seasons of The Muppet Show, making it more easily available than it has ever been. But Disney committed the unforgivable sin of putting content warnings on some episodes, like the one where Johnny Cash sings in front of a Confederate flag. But you can still watch it. No one has had the Muppets taken away from them.)

Kevin McCarthy similarly implied that the most beloved Dr. Seuss books were being canceled — not by the organization charged with maintaining his brand, but by people who don’t like Dr. Seuss. He tweeted “I still like Dr. Seuss” and then read Green Eggs and Ham on Twitter. Why didn’t he read If I Ran the Zoo and show us the primitive African natives?

Tuesday morning, as Christopher Wray verified that white supremacist groups were involved in the Capitol insurrection and Antifa wasn’t, Ted Johnson noticed a subtle difference in what news networks were covering.

The Washington Post provided the numbers:

Over the course of the past week, Fox News has spent 4 hours and 38 minutes on Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head and Biden’s comments about Neanderthals, according to a tally by the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America. That compared to 42 minutes from CNN and 39 minutes from MSNBC on those topics.

Fox News on Tuesday alone devoted an hour and nine minutes to Dr. Seuss — more than the combined amount it spent on the coronavirus vaccine and FBI testimony about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

So this is what conservative media has come to: If you have nothing to say to America, and yet you need to keep your base riled up, then you need to rile them up about nothing.

It’s always a dilemma for me when a Nothingburger story gets hot. If all I’m going to do is point out that this story doesn’t deserve the attention it’s getting, then I have become part of the problem: I’m drawing your attention to something that doesn’t deserve it.

The alternative is to go meta: Of all the Nothingburgers in the world, why has this one turned into a Big Mac? Who is pushing it? Why does it serve their purposes? How have they managed to distort it into something it’s not?

You’ve probably guessed where I’m going with this: Dr. Seuss. Mr. Potato Head. Some private companies did some completely innocuous rebranding, and the whole conservative media went wild. Hang on to the cat in your hat, because the “woke mob” is banning the icons of your childhood! “This is fascism!” Glenn Beck announced, as if piles of Green Eggs and Ham and plastic potato parts were being doused with lighter fluid and set aflame.

I couldn’t let that go, so I went meta. The featured post this week is “Silly Season in the Culture Wars”. First off, I’ll tell you something Tucker Carlson never will: exactly what happened and who did it. In particular, I won’t use “they” or “them” without an antecedent, as Trump Jr. did when he said, “They’re canceling Dr. Seuss.”

Then comes the meta part: Conservative media needs to invent outrages like this, because in the post-Trump world, they have no ideas to discuss. There was no 2020 Republican platform, there is no conservative legislative program, and they don’t even have a coherent critique of what Biden is proposing. If not for an endless series of outrages-of-the-week, they’d have a lot of dead air.

The form of an outrage-of-the-week is that liberals are trying to take something you love away from you: your guns, your job, your freedom, your son’s masculine identity, … something. So a story about liberals taking away your fond childhood memories fits right in. The fact that it isn’t true is just a detail to work around.

Anyway, that’s ready to post, so it should be out soon. The weekly summary then has the week’s actual news to cover: The Covid relief bill is getting close to Biden’s desk. Other important bills are in the pipeline, and the moment-of-truth on the Senate filibuster is approaching. Vaccinations are accelerating. Covid case-numbers have started going down again, but are still so high that Texas is crazy to end all restrictions. The Senate held hearings on the Capitol insurrection. Andrew Cuomo’s future is in serious doubt. Plus we have bioluminescent sharks, an excuse to link to my favorite Weird Al video, and one very enthusiastic beaver. I should have that out before noon.

Reading: “There Is No Easier Way” by Elizabeth Nguyen

Sermon: Tough Love Saves Us All

When my partner and I were first together, our parents used to talk about us with their straight friends and co-workers by making sure they knew that we were “just like everyone else.”

“You know,” they’d say, “they pay their taxes.” 

This desire to point to our sameness, how we were just like them, was motivated by love, and it was an attempt to activate love. They were trying to overcome what they imagined or knew for sure their friends were thinking, trying to address whatever fears they might have, or image that came to mind when they thought about LESBIANS. If we were more the same than we were different, then we would be less scary, less “other,” more human. 

The Unitarian Universalist minister and historian Mark Morrison Reed talks about the central task of the religious community as revealing the bonds that bind each to all – the connectedness and the relationship across everyone everywhere that compels us to act on one another’s behalf.  This is the impulse behind this claim that we are basically the same. It is a way to invoke relatedness, and the duty to care, or at least the duty not to cause harm. 

Twenty years later, our parents don’t do this too much anymore. They and a bunch of others making the same argument seem to have convinced sufficient numbers of straight people that the “gay agenda” was often as boring as the straight one…I mean…we do pay our taxes.

And this works relatively fine for those of us who successfully pass or code switch our way in the straight community, those of us whose gender expression perfectly lines up with the societal expectations for the gender we were assigned at birth, those of us who are monogamous, aiming for marriage, and/or parenthood, those of us who are white, and who are citizens…you probably get my point.

When the bonds that bind each to all are grounded only in the ways that we are alike, or the idea that we must “like” each other –someone’s always going to remain outside the circle; someone is always going to be the definition of “regular human,”and someone else is always going to be…irregular.  Maybe even, sub-human, or “undermensch” as the so-called “scientific” field eugenics called it, or undermenschen as the Nazis came to apply it in their philosophy, picking up directly from the Jim Crow laws of the US. 

In her book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson delves deeply into this history – if you haven’t yet found your place in our Common Conversation, check out foothillsuu.org/caste. In an accessible, compelling narrative, Wilkerson offers a framework to understand how we have found ourselves caught in a culture that ranks one another’s humanness based upon a certain sameness, a culture where some are perpetually assessed to be insufficiently human, and so therefore outside the circle of care, or love. 

Relying on sameness to determine a duty to care or the presence of love is not unusual, of course. It’s actually the norm.  Despite political or religious slogans affirming justice for all, as non-violence expert and activist Kazu Haga writes, “when we say ‘all,’ do we really mean all? Usually what we mean to say is that we are fighting for justice for all of our people, the people we like, the people on our side.  And too often, justice for our people comes at the expense of those people. When we are able to defeat those people, then our people will have justice.”

I think we all do this.  Intentionally, unintentionally, consciously or subconsciously. We’re trained through our culture, and rewarded in our politics – maybe now more than ever before – to set these limits around who we actually mean when we say “all.”  

I caught myself in this mindset earlier this week when I was working on vaccine equity. I felt that one of the groups was working against the goals that I felt were critical, and so, I wanted to shut them out. If they could be defeated, then our OUR people would win. I felt pretty righteous about my outrage for a while, and my strategy for success. Until I heard myself talking to a friend about it on the phone, and suddenly, I was like….hmm. maybe there’s another way…   

I feel some shame admitting this, especially assuming that any of those partners might be hearing or reading this, and wondering if I mean them. I want to just say – I’m being vague on purpose. Because the point is – my impulse was sincerely wrong. And it goes against a core commitment of our Universalist faith –that when we say all, we actually mean all. 

Universalism, as a religious tradition, started off as a theological claim about life after death. Our religious forebears asserted that there was no way that an all-loving God would damn any of God’s own people to eternal punishment and torment.

The idea was inconsistent with love in an ultimate sense. Universalism was a claim that whatever destiny any of us is meant for, all of us are meant for.

In the 20^th century, this after-life affirmation became instead a claim, and a commitment we make about this life.  An affirmation that as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Whatever lines we may consciously or subconsciously seek to draw between us and them, enemy and friend, good or bad, worthy or unworthy –there is no escaping or undoing how interconnected we are, how interdependent.

No matter how different or disagreeable, no one is less or more human than any other of us. 

No one.

The outcome of this theological claim is what King described as the Beloved Community.  BeLOVEd as in fueled by and held together by the promises of love. Not just any love, but agape love. Whereas other types of love are directed at particular individuals –romantic love, or the love of friends, King described agape as the sort of love that “makes no distinction between a friend and enemy …it is an overflowing love that is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative…the love of God operating in the human heart….” 

King went so far to call it “disinterested love” because it is the sort of love that doesn’t care whether it is loved back.   It is the love that will “go to any lengths to restore community.”

It’s helpful to remember that we are not always responsible for generating this love. Instead, our work is just to show up on its behalf, and further its reach.  It’s helpful to remember this when we encounter people who are distinctly difficult to love, that while we need not generate love that is unconditional and universal, it is there nonetheless.

Including for us. 

Maybe the fact that this is way harder than it sounds explains why – while we can glimpse pieces of Beloved Community, and these glimpses in their beauty compels us to keep moving forward – it is resoundingly a vision for the future. 

King was doing the life-saving work of moral imagination, the sort of work that moves us out of the limitations of what is into the infinite beauty of the possible. 

Imagine: In the Beloved Community, all people share in the wealth of the earth, and all people care for the earth. There is no hunger, or poverty, or homelessness. There’s no racism or other prejudice, and there is no war.  

Which is not the same as saying there is no conflict; King understood that conflicts are inevitable in human communities that embrace rather than shun differences.  It’s just that these conflicts are resolved through a commitment to non-violence, and grounded in a mutual respect for one another’s dignity. 

Which again, is not the same as mutual agreement, or liking each other, or even spending time together.  As Kazu Haga reminds us “… the Beloved Community is a big place, so we have can have love for people, and they can live all the way over there in Beloved Community.”

I appreciate this reminder for many reasons –first, it affirms the role of boundaries in Beloved Community (that Sean and Elaine talked about last Sunday),and, in affirming Beloved Community’s bigness, it reminds us that in the Beloved Community, there’s enough of everything for everyone. 

It’s a big tent with big resources with big love.

In the Beloved Community, no one hoards resources, and power is shared – we practice power with rather than power over; and there is no need to compete for some small slice of pie that is already stingy and insufficient – we can lift each other up, ensuring that each person, and each community has what they need. 

This is one of the most radical ideas embedded in the vision of Beloved Community, because it stands in direct contrast to 21^st century capitalism where we are taught there’s never enough, that you need to hustle to get what you need, and if you don’t have what you need, that’s on you.    

I’ve seen this too in the work for vaccine equity. 

Each organization is so accustomed to needing to compete for funding to meet the needs of their community, the idea that we could work together for a common good requires trusting that there will be enough for everyone – enough vaccines, enough funding support, enough acknowledgment of the labor and expertise and care to go around. 

Given the realities of funding, the bureaucracy of government, and the overwhelming number and loud presence of white people in Northern Colorado, I get why these communities who serve people of color and immigrants would be doubtful and suspicious, and always wondering if they should instead pull out of collaboration and instead look out for themselves. They haven’t done this, but I get why they would.

The system we have created rewards competition and isolation, and the loudest and fastest movers get the attention from those who hold power-over and without any idea or model for power-with….It’s not really any one person’s fault, I want to be clear – it is the system that we have all inherited, the system we are caught in. In this system – this slow, messy, non-hierarchical emergent collaboration seeking to creatively meet our shared needs means it’s really unclear, for example, who will sign a Memo of Understanding, or receive funds with the appropriate 501c3. And to be clear – we want that memo of understanding, and the funds to the c3s – because that is the only way to move through the system as it currently exists!

It’s just that – in the end, however, this slow, messy and hard to document type of collaboration for the common good across deep differences and divides, the work of inviting folks out to tea and dinner and beers – the work of building the relationship that endures – this is the work that it actually takes to build the Beloved Community.

It is agape love not in the generic idealistic sense, but agape love in the particular. Where you have to find ways to overcome your instinct to defeat the person who annoys you or who seems like they are actively working against you or who you just don’t get – and instead find an authentic way to widen the circle so it includes them too. 

And by you, I obviously mean, me.

The term Beloved Community was actually coined by philosopher Josiah Royce in the early twentieth century. He spoke of Beloved Community as that community worthy of our ultimate loyalty – what he called, the loyalty of loyalties. Unlike partial communities that seek to put limits around love or duty, the Beloved Community is that community that keeps drawing the circle wider and wider still. 

It is a loyalty that is based not in our sameness, but to the Love that holds us across our differences. To call this Love holy, to pledge our allegiance to it. 

Which in turn requires critical awareness of our own tribe, and our own trauma. 

Our own tribe so that we can be aware of our implicit bias, that is, the hierarchy we hold deep in our brains and our bones for who is more, or less, our people; and in turn, perhaps, more or less human. 

And then, our own trauma. We need to be aware of the struggles we carry from our own lifetimes, and those we inherit from past generations.  We need to know when we are acting out of our wounds, rather than our hope; we need to know, so that we can heal – backwards, and forwards -and together. 

Grounding our understanding of Beloved Community in Royce’s original ideas of loyalty reminds us that the heart of Beloved Community is not a belief in an idea, but a steadfast, unshakable commitment –  a tough love.

Martin Luther King Jr was very clear that Beloved Community is possible in this life, but it is only possible when a critical mass of people make this commitment, based on an understanding of what it means to be loyal to this love.    

This commitment is what drives the proposal for an 8th principle – because our principles are the covenant we make as Unitarian Universalists – our promises to ourselves, to one another, and to life itself.   The 8th principle says: we commit our loyalty to the building of the Beloved Community, and our loyalty to the love that binds us each to all, the love that meets us across all of our beautiful diversity. 

I wish I could say that making the commitment to the tough love of Beloved Community is is the hard part.  Like the vote we’ll have in May is the end, when really it’s just the beginning. 

Because the hardest part is what comes next.  When we live as if all actually means all, “there is no easier way.”  “…the work of justice often asks us to do impossible, hard, terrifying things.” 

It asks us to risk things that actually matter, especially our own comfort, our sense of order, or control. It asks us to risk our own safety, our privilege, our hearts.

But the good news is that along with the hardest part also comes the sweetest part – because in following the hardest part we also more often get to to see, and we get to know the beauty. The goodness. We get to glimpse the promise of true Beloved Community, and the freedom that is based in a love that is unconditional, transformational, and universal. 

The tough love that saves us all. 

May it be so, and amen.

Morning glow, by your light
We can make the new day bright,
And the phantoms of the night
Will fade into the past.

– Stephen Schwartz, “Morning Glow“
from the musical Pippin

This week’s featured posts are “North Dakota Is About to Kill the National Popular Vote Compact” and “The Action Shifts to Congress“.

This week everybody was talking about Congress

One of the featured posts covers the progress of bills through Congress (Covid relief, the Equality Act) plus Senate action on Biden’s nominees.

and bombing Syria

Thursday, America planes struck in Syria near the Iraqi border. The raid was aimed at Iranian-backed militias that the Pentagon says attacked American and allied forces in Iraq with rockets. President Biden sent a letter to congressional leaders explaining the attack, as the War Powers Act requires. He found justification for the raid in “the United States’ inherent right of self-defense”.

A lot of Americans have probably forgotten that we still have troops in Iraq, but we do: about 2,500 of them. Their main mission is to prevent the Islamic State from reforming.

and Covid

The precipitous drop in new Covid cases looks like it might have leveled off. The 7-day average of new cases per day bottomed out at around 66K on February 21. Coincidentally, that’s two weeks after the Super Bowl. So maybe people let down their guard for Super Bowl get-togethers, or maybe the more-transmissible variants are starting to take hold, or maybe it’s random fluctuation. 66K is way below the peak of 259K on January 8 (two weeks after Christmas), but would have been considered shockingly high back in early October.

Curiously, deaths also have plateaued at around 2,000 per day, down from over 3,300 at the peak. This is odd because death totals usually trail new-case totals by a week or two, so they should still be going down.

Vaccination continues to gain ground. As of Sunday evening, 49.8 million Americans had received at least one shot, and 24.8 million have been fully vaccinated.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine got FDA approval Saturday. Sunday, the CDC recommended it for use.

“The J&J vaccine, which is easier to transport and store… is going to dramatically increase our vaccine availability,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, told CNN Saturday. “It’s a big, big deal.” About 3.9 million doses will be available for ordering right away, according to Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials — which could add about 25% more Covid-19 vaccination capacity for states.

3.9 million doses are available, and distribution might start today. Matt Yglesias speculates:

If Pfizer, Modern, and J&J all hit their stated delivery targets we’re going to be doing 4 million doses/day in March, and by April the whole vaccine story will shift to be about reluctance/hesitancy/resistance.

The NYT posted a very powerful short film: “Death Through a Nurse’s Eyes“.

and CPAC

Trump made his return to the public stage yesterday, giving his first speech since leaving the White House. Reportedly, he talked for 90 minutes, so (life being short) I haven’t watched it. CNN’s Chris Cillizza listed the 50 most ridiculous lines, and I couldn’t even make through them.

Trump’s fans (and many of the people who fear him) still don’t realize he’s a has-been, but he is. He lost in 2020 by over 7 million votes. After he lost he tried to overthrow American democracy. He’s stuck in the past talking about personal grievances that have nothing to do with the lives of American voters. And odds are at least 50-50 he’ll be in jail when 2024 rolls around. So if Republicans want to run that loser again — hey, don’t let me stop you.

Two crazy stories come out of CPAC. One is true and the other is at best an amazingly unfortunate coincidence. The true one is that CPAC featured a golden statue of Trump. Comparisons to the Biblical golden calf idol appeared independently all over social media, but CPAC participants happily got their photos taken with their own idol anyway. The kicker is that the statue was made in Mexico.

The other story is CPAC’s main stage, whose elaborate design closely resembles the Norse odal rune, a symbol used by the Nazis. That sounds like the kind of insane thing Twitter users are always going on about, but the resemblance is hard to deny, once it has been pointed out to you.

The unresolved question is whether this was an intentional message to the international far right, a weird attempt to invoke some kind of dark magic, or some other sinister thing. Snopes calls such claims “unproven”, which it’s hard to argue with. CPAC organizers deny any intent and seem appropriately outraged, if not appropriately embarrassed. (I mean, the rune is really there, and the Nazis really did use it. I’d be embarrassed.)

I wasn’t going to mention the controversy if it was was just liberals entertaining each other by finding faces in the clouds and tweeting their outrage. But I decided to ask two additional questions: What do the people who cover Norse paganism think? And are actual Nazis getting the message?

As for the pagans, the Wild Hunt blog is taking this seriously. The Hunt notes that the stage shape is not driven by functionality, so somebody liked the design for other reasons:

The wings of the CPAC stage lead nowhere – they do not lead to stairs, and the stage’s entrances and exits are in the rear, flanking the back wall. The red triangle toward the rear of the stage similarly serves no apparent functional use. This means that the set was intentionally designed this way, not for its utility, but for its visual appeal – an image that looks, unquestionably, like the odal rune.

The Nazi connection runs deeper than just a photo of some SS officer’s collar insignia. (Go to the Hunt’s article if you want the full history.) And it’s not hard to see why, if you know the rune’s traditional interpretations:

The odal rune’s historical meaning deals with inherited estates, homelands, or the aristocracy.

So it’s an ideal “Make das Vaterland great again” symbol. In addition, the significance is not just Hitler-era history.

In the present day, the odal rune has been adopted as a replacement for the swastika in American far-right circles, notably by the National Socialist Movement (NSM), who changed their logo to the odal rune in November 2016. The change was specifically in response to the election of Donald Trump, as the NSM’s leadership hoped there would be an opening for their entry into mainstream conservative contexts under Trump and believed the odal rune would be more presentable to the public than the swastika.

On the other hand, I failed to find any actual Nazis high-fiving each other about this. I don’t have much in the way of Nazi contacts, but I looked around on the Daily Stormer and Stormfront web sites — I wonder what lists that got me onto — and didn’t run across any excited odal-rune chatter (though lots of folks at Stormfront were planning to livestream Trump’s speech).

and the report on the Khashoggi murder

The Biden administration released an unclassified report on the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. The short version: MBS did it. The report is just four pages, and doesn’t say how the operation went down or how we know what happened, presumably in order not to reveal how we spy on MBS and the Saudis generally.

Congress had demanded a report during the Trump administration, but Trump stonewalled in order to protect the Saudi Crown Prince, who was chummy with Jared Kushner. Biden released the report to fulfill his obligation.

It’s hard to know what to do next. MBS ordered an American resident murdered. But he’s also the de facto head of state of a country that the US sees as a counterweight to Iran in the Middle East. We no longer need Saudi oil ourselves, but our allies do. Biden has already shown an intention to distance the US from Saudi Arabia somewhat. For example, we are backing away from the Saudi proxy war in Yemen, though it’s not clear exactly what that means.

and you also might be interested in …

Things got worse for Andrew Cuomo this week. In addition to the recent scandal about reporting Covid deaths in nursing homes, he now faces a second accusation of sexual harassment. The new charge is of verbal harassment — when they were alone in a room, the governor allegedly asked a young female aide leading questions that seemed to suggest they should start a sexual relationship. Earlier, another female aide had accused him of giving her an unwanted kiss after a number of similarly suggestive conversations.

The NYT looked for someone to corroborate the first accuser’s story:

The New York Times spoke to three people who worked in the governor’s office during Ms. Boylan’s time there. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that while they could not corroborate her allegations, they concurred that the governor would sometimes make inappropriate remarks during work and comment on people’s appearances.

Cuomo denied the accusation, but responded to the second with one of those half-way apologies that seemed to cover the first accusation as well.

At work sometimes I think I am being playful and make jokes that I think are funny. I do, on occasion, tease people in what I think is a good natured way. … I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal and that some of my comments, given my position, made others feel in ways I never intended. I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that.

The WaPo’s Karen Tumulty believes Cuomo will be forced to resign, and I think that is appropriate. At the very least, he should announce that he will not run for a fourth term in 2022. Trump can claim that his dozens of accusers are all liars, and be confident that members of his cult will just repeat whatever he says. But standards are higher among Democrats.

BTW: Those who talk about the “liberal media” need to recognize that it wasn’t Fox News that broke this story. It was the New York Times.

The Perseverance Mars rover sports decals of its “family” of previous Mars rovers.

Two counties in North Dakota are trying to save their coal-mining jobs by blocking wind power. A local coal-powered electric plant might close, and if it does, the nearby coal mine that supplies it will probably close as well, with a total cost of a thousand jobs.

The problem is that coal isn’t competitive economically any more, not just with renewables, but with natural gas as well. Stopping farmers from letting wind-energy companies put up windmills on their land probably won’t save the coal jobs for long.

In a 50/50 Senate, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin can kill a bill or a nominee (or save the filibuster) all by himself. Frustrated progressive Democrats often ask, “Can’t we do better?”. Philip Bump looks at the last several elections in West Virginia, both presidential and senatorial. He concludes that the answer is no.

Another test for the QAnon theory: Thursday is March 4, which was the original Inauguration Day before the 20th Amendment changed it to January 20. Well, apparently, nothing that happened after 1871 is really legit.

QAnon believers claim that the US federal government secretly became a corporation under a law they believe passed in 1871 but does not actually exist, rendering every president inaugurated and every constitutional amendment passed in the years since illegitimate. But on March 4, the narrative goes, Trump will return as the 19th president, the first legitimate president since Ulysses S. Grant, with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as his vice president.

Any resemblance to the many restoring-an-ancient-line-of-kings myths is purely coincidental, I’m sure. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

and let’s close with something clever

Not my cleverness, other people’s. Like this young man’s technique for watching a movie on his phone.

Lisa Turner has collected dozens of such “life hacks” — some more clever than others — on her My Health Gazette blog.

The country now depends on its most dysfunctional branch of government.

Joe Biden began his presidency with a flurry of executive orders, concerning everything from public health to immigration to racial equality. But the United States is not (and should not be) a dictatorship, so executive orders can only go so far. Executive orders can redecorate the rooms of our government, but they can’t remodel the building. To make real change, you need Congress to appropriate money and pass laws.

So as the Biden administration enters its sixth week, the action has shifted to Congress. Congress (as I have pointed out before) is the most dysfunctional branch of American government, and its weakness is the root cause the dysfunction of the other two branches: Both the White House and the courts overreach, because someone has to pick up the responsibilities that Congress drops.

Syria. We saw an example this week, when Biden ordered an air strike on Syria. The legality of this is questionable, because Congress has never specifically authorized military action in Syria. But the last few administrations have justified whatever they wanted to do in the Middle East by stretching the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) resolutions that Congress passed in 2001 after 9-11 and in 2002 prior to the Iraq invasion. The entire Obama/Trump campaign against ISIS, which culminated in Syria, happened under authority that Congress never realized it was granting two decades ago.

But the blame here belongs to Congress. A responsible legislative body would debate the exact bounds of presidential war-making in the area, and pass a new AUMF that repealed the previous two. Some — Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Todd Young (R-IN), for example — have pushed for this, but most congresspeople would rather dodge responsibility and then complain later if things go wrong in either direction.

In this case, you can be sure that if the US suffered some major reversal in the Iraq/Syria theater — say, a high-casualty attack against our forces or a resurgence of ISIS — many of the same congresspeople who complain about unauthorized military action now would be complaining then that the President hadn’t done enough. Again, this pattern is independent of parties. It was equally true in the Trump and Obama administrations, and under congressional leadership of Republicans and Democrats alike.

Covid relief. The biggest bill facing Congress right now is the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, which passed the House Saturday without a single Republican vote and two Democrats defecting. The Washington Post summarizes the content:

Beyond the minimum-wage increase, the sprawling relief bill would provide $1,400 stimulus payments to tens of millions of American households; extend enhanced federal unemployment benefits through August; provide $350 billion in aid to states, cities, U.S. territories and tribal governments; and boost funding for vaccine distribution and coronavirus testing — among myriad other measures, such as nutritional assistance, housing aid and money for schools.

The bill is popular with the American people, as well as with many Republican governors and mayors. But that isn’t enough to get it Republican votes in Congress. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have imprinted the lesson they learned during the Obama administration: If you monkey-wrench the economy, ultimately the party in the White House will get blamed for it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The Democrats will be able to pass a bill popular with more than 3 out of 4 of us only because they have a slight majority in the House and can use a special budget measure to work around the Republican senators who represent 41.5 million fewer Americans than the Democrats do.

The coronavirus relief bill illustrates just how dangerously close we are to minority rule.

Minimum wage. Meanwhile, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that raising the minimum wage doesn’t fit inside the rules defining the reconciliation process. So if Senate Democrats use that process to pass Covid relief — as it looks like they must to overcome the expected Republican filibuster — the minimum wage won’t be in it. Raising the minimum wage is also popular on its own, and will probably be offered as a stand-alone bill. But popularity with the American people probably won’t garner it enough Republican support to overcome a filibuster.

The New Yorker blows up one central argument against raising the minimum wage:

The fast-food chains insist that if they were to pay their employees more they would have to raise menu prices. Their wages are “competitive.” But in Denmark McDonald’s workers over the age of eighteen earn more than twenty dollars an hour—they are also unionized—and the price of a Big Mac is only thirty-five cents more than it is in the United States. There are regional American fast-food chains that take the high road with their employees. The starting wage at In-N-Out Burger, which is based in Southern California, and has two hundred and ninety-five restaurants in California and the Southwest, is eleven dollars. Full-time workers receive a complete benefits package, including life insurance—and the burgers are cheap and good.

Matt Yglesias:

The genius of America is you need a 60-vote supermajority to raise the minimum wage, but the president can bomb some militia in Iran based on … I dunno … an AUMF from two decades ago that was about something else entirely or something.

The Equality Act. Thursday, the House passed the Equality Act, which would explicitly protect Americans against discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s not inconceivable that the bill could also pass the Senate and become law, but getting the ten Republican votes necessarily to overcome a filibuster looks like an uphill struggle.

Whether it passes or not, the bill is becoming a hot-button culture war issue for conservatives, raising all kinds of dark fantasies that have little basis in reality. Most conservative attempts to argue this point don’t even try to assemble evidence, and the few that do are unconvincing. For example, a Heritage Foundation report against allowing access to single-sex facilities according to gender identity includes a nine-page appendix listing “Individuals charged with sex crimes in intimate facilities”, including such incidents as voyeuristic men dressing as women to enter women’s bathrooms.

I’m sure Heritage believes its readers should be impressed with this mound of “evidence”. But the question is not whether such incidents happen, or whether they continue to happen in venues that allow trans access to bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity. The question is whether changing the rules causes such incidents to increase. A trans-friendly bathroom policy exists in enough places now that the question should be answerable.

The Heritage report also does not consider the danger that a transwoman faces if the law forces her to use a men’s bathroom. It’s as if violence and harassment directed at transgender people should not count.

I also note another example of the selectivity of conservative care: They regard the possibility of opposite-sex voyeurism in bathrooms as a world-shaking problem. But men entering men’s bathrooms to look at boys elicits no policy response at all; the status quo is just fine.

The looming filibuster battle. I can imagine readers asking “What’s the point? Why pass bills in the House that Republicans can successfully filibuster in the Senate? They’re not going to change anything.”

That question has both a principled and a practical answer. The principled answer is that you always want to give people a chance to do the right thing, even if you don’t think they will. When politicians make excuses for not serving the people, they should never be able to say, “Nobody asked me.” All the major advances in civil rights started with people making demands that (in the short term) they knew would be turned down. Asking the question is how you get from a vague “It’s just not possible” to a specific “It would happen if those people stopped blocking it.”

The practical answer is that a showdown over the filibuster is looming, and Democrats need to be united to win it. Currently they’re not: Both Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona have come out against eliminating the filibuster.

Turning them around is going to require building popular support. But the filibuster itself is a procedural Senate thing that the average voter doesn’t care about. So the debate will turn on what the filibuster means to ordinary people as they live their lives. Popular bills need to come up and go down — along with the For the People Act, which would ban gerrymandering and many voter suppression tactics, as well as controlling dark money and encouraging small-donor campaign financing — to connect the filibuster with problems that people can see.

Defenders of the filibuster sometimes warn that Democrats will be sorry if they end the filibuster and then lose the Senate, as they might in 2022 (while still representing more voters than the GOP). But that observation ignores how the Republican Party has changed in the last decade: It has no legislative program beyond tax cuts, which can pass through reconciliation.

Conversely, Democrats are more likely to lose the Senate if voters see that a Democratic Senate can’t accomplish its goals.

Biden’s nominees. Politico published a summary of how Biden’s nominees were faring in the Senate as of Thursday. Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland is likely to be approved by the Judiciary Committee today, sending his nomination to the Senate floor for final approval.

PBS Newshour notes the “pattern of minority nominees encountering more political resistance than white counterparts”. A look at Politico’s list demonstrates that the difference isn’t across-the-board. Some Black (UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin), female (Greenfield, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines), Latino (Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas), and gay (Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg) nominees have gotten through the process relatively unscathed.

But where Republicans have unleashed fireworks, the targets have largely been people of color, particularly women, and white transwoman Rachel Levine, who endured some abusive questioning from Rand Paul. The Newshour article focuses on Deb Haaland, who seems likely to become the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, but took some harsh grilling from Republicans on the Energy Committee. Afterwards, John Kennedy of Louisiana told reporters she was “a neo-socialist, left-of-Lenin whack job”. (Haaland’s sin appears to be a desire to phase out fossil fuels. I suspect Lenin was pro-fossil-fuel, so Kennedy may not be completely wrong.)

Newshour continues:

The confirmation of Neera Tanden, who would be the first Indian American to head the Office of Management and Budget, was thrown into doubt when it lost support from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. He cited her controversial tweets attacking members of both parties.

Critics also have targeted Vanita Gupta, an Indian American and Biden’s pick to be associate attorney general, and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as Health and Human Services secretary. Conservatives launched campaigns calling Gupta “dangerous” and questioning Becerra’s qualifications.

I think the apparent racism is less personal animosity than an attempt to exploit the implicit racism of the Republican base. (Manchin is a Democrat, but needs Republican votes to stay in office.) The GOP strategy is to paint Biden’s nominees as way-out, far-left, bomb-throwing extremists. As Republicans noticed during the Obama administration, and later refined in their attacks on the Squad, that kind of mud doesn’t stick as well to a white man as it does to a woman of color. (That’s why when Bernie Sanders and AOC support the same thing, the attack goes against AOC. The GOP has made AOC the face of the Green New Deal, while poor cosponsor Ed Markey can barely get any credit.) The base doesn’t even have to notice that they’re responding in a racist or sexist fashion, they just have to unquestioningly accept accusations against the chosen targets that they might doubt if the same things were said about white men.

Julian Brave NoiseCat writes about Deb Haaland:

What Haaland actually brings — and what the Republican Party seems to consider so dangerous — are experiences and perspectives that have never found representation in the leadership of the executive branch. In fact, Republicans’ depiction of the first Native American ever nominated to the Cabinet as a “radical” threat to a Western “way of life” revealed something about the conservative id: a deep-seated fear that when the dispossessed finally attain a small measure of power, we will turn around and do to them what their governments and ancestors did to us.

Presidential elections are rigged in favor of Republicans. North Dakota wants to keep it that way.

As we’ve seen in the last two elections, the Electoral College gives the Republican candidate about a 3-4% advantage, which might be growing as the rural areas (which the EC over-weights) get more conservative and the cities (which it underweights) more liberal.

Hillary Clinton won the 2016 popular vote by 2.1% but still lost the election, and Biden’s 4.4% victory in 2020 goes away if you lower his margin by .7% across the board. (He loses Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, leading to a 269-269 tie that the House — with one vote per state delegation — would have decided in Trump’s favor.) Hillary would still have lost if you similarly boosted her margin in every state by .7%.

So the Electoral College’s thumb-on-the-scale was worth about 2.8% in 2016 and 3.7% in 2020. Republicans like to talk about “rigged elections”. Well, they’re right: Presidential elections are rigged in their favor.

The straightforward way to unrig our elections would be to pass a constitutional amendment eliminating the Electoral College and awarding the presidency to the candidate who gets the most votes. But that path requires a 2/3rds majority in both houses of Congress and ratification by 3/4ths of the states, so it can’t pass without bipartisan support. Few Republicans have a sense of fair play or respect for democracy, so they’re not going to give up the unfair advantage the EC gives them. [1]

An alternative scheme for unrigging our elections is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: States agree to appoint electors for the candidate who wins the national popular vote, even if that candidate didn’t win in their particular state. If states representing 270 electoral votes all passed a law joining the compact and fulfilled their commitments, the Electoral College would never screw the American people again.

I have mentioned before that, as much as I like this idea, I would never trust this agreement. In 2020, we saw how many bad-faith actors hold positions of authority in the Republican Party. (Though most Republican election officials did their jobs honestly; Biden could not have won without them.) It was hard enough to feel secure that Republican legislatures wouldn’t step in and illegitimately award their electors to Trump, even though he got fewer votes both in their states and in the nation as a whole. If a Republican legislature in a place like Georgia or Wisconsin could give a Republican the White House just by agreeing with the voters in their state, I have to believe they would, no matter what commitments they might have made previously. [2]

Well, it looks like messing up the NPVIC is even easier than I had thought. North Dakota, owner of exactly three electoral votes, may be about the skewer the whole thing: The state senate has passed a law that forbids state election officials to release their popular vote totals until after the Electoral College meets.

[A] public officer, employee, or contractor of this state or of a political subdivision of this state may not release to the public the number of votes cast in the general election for the office of the president of the United States until after the times set by law for the meetings and votes of the presidential electors in all states

The upshot is that there would be no official national popular vote total. Compare this to the process laid out in the NPVIC:

Prior to the time set by law for the meeting and voting by the presidential electors, the chief election official of each member state shall determine the number of votes for each presidential slate in each State of the United States and in the District of Columbia in which votes have been cast in a statewide popular election and shall add such votes together to produce a “national popular vote total” for each presidential slate.

The chief election official of each member state shall designate the presidential slate with the largest national popular vote total as the “national popular vote winner.”

The presidential elector certifying official of each member state shall certify the appointment in that official’s own state of the elector slate nominated in that state in association with the national popular vote winner.

If everyone involved would carry out the spirit of this agreement in good faith, probably there would be no problem. It’s extremely unlikely that North Dakota’s votes would make the difference in the national popular vote, so even without knowing their totals, the popular-vote winner should be apparent. In 2016, for example, only 344K votes were cast in North Dakota, and Hillary won nationally by 2.9 million.

But now let’s talk about the real world, where bad-faith actors abound. If I’m, say, a Republican official in 2016 Wisconsin, where a good-faith application of the NPVIC would have me appoint pro-Hillary electors even though Trump won my state, I can claim that without the North Dakota votes the conditions of the NPVIC have not been fulfilled. Would the Republican legislature or a Republican-appointed judge overrule me? I kind of doubt it.

So I think the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is dead. This particular hole could be patched without a constitutional amendment, if Congress could pass a law (over a Republican filibuster) mandating that states release their vote totals in a timely fashion. But I think this would just start a game of whack-a-mole. And what if a red state whose vote totals do matter, like Texas, decides to play?

I think the monkey-wrenchers win this battle, and we’re stuck with the Electoral College until we can muster a constitutional amendment.

[1] Electoral College advocates sometimes hide their partisan intentions by making arguments that sound good, but don’t hold up to even a small amount of scrutiny. For example:

A presidential campaign aimed at achieving a popular vote majority would completely ignore most states and focus, instead, on a few populous states containing the nation’s largest cities. This urban-centric strategy would silence the political voice of most regions of the country.

Anybody who has lived in a state with a big city knows this isn’t true. If it were, no Illinois candidate would ever leave Chicago, Texas campaigns would only happen in Houston and Dallas, and Florida candidates would camp out in Miami. They don’t — and for good reason. Consider, for example, the map of the Ted Cruz/Beto O’Rourke Senate race of 2018. Cruz lost just about all the cities — Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso — but won anyway because the rural areas came through for him.

In a popular-vote system, candidates look for votes wherever they think they can get them, because all votes count the same. Convincing somebody to vote for you in Chugwater, Wyoming counts just as much as convincing somebody in Los Angeles.

In fact, if you apply the make-them-campaign-everywhere argument honestly, it will point you in exactly the opposite direction: Because of the Electoral College, presidential candidates only campaign in swing states like Pennsylvania and Florida, and ignore most of the American people. Here’s a map where states are sized according to how many presidential campaign events happened there in 2012. Three of the four biggest states — California, Texas, and New York — don’t even show up. But neither do small states like Alaska, Utah, or Rhode Island, because nobody bothers to compete in states where the electoral votes aren’t up for grabs.

In a popular-vote system, it would make sense for a Democratic candidate to campaign in, say, the Black neighborhoods of Memphis or the Hispanic areas around El Paso — because there are people there who might be convinced to vote for you. Similarly, a Republican candidate should hold rallies in upstate New York or conservative Chicago suburbs. But they don’t, because in the Electoral College system, competing for votes that won’t tip a whole state is wasted effort.

So in fact it’s the Electoral College that silences “the political voice of most regions of the country”.

[2] The Compact tries to deal with the question of states changing their minds:

Any member state may withdraw from this agreement, except that a withdrawal occurring six months or less before the end of a President’s term shall not become effective until a President or Vice President shall have been qualified to serve the next term.

But there is no enforcement mechanism, and a basic principle of our system of government says that no legislature can claim power over a future legislature. (As Jefferson put it: “The dead should not rule the living.”) So if Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan had joined the compact in 2015, and then in 2016 one of them passed a law refusing to award their electors to Hillary, I think Trump still becomes president. States might sue each other later, but the deed would be done.

The center of the news this week has been Congress, which is a refreshing change. The Founders intended Congress to be the most powerful branch of government, but the combination of partisan gridlock and a Republican Party that has no legislative agenda has all but sidelined Congress in recent years.

So one of the two featured posts this week, “The Action Shifts to Congress”, will cover the current state of various bills and other Congressional actions: Covid relief, the Equality Act, the minimum wage, and approving Biden’s nominees (or not). That should be out sometime between 10 and 11 EST.

In the meantime, though, I want to call your attention to a small state wielding a big monkey wrench: North Dakota looks poised to pass a law that could completely skewer the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The NPVIC, if you remember, is an attempt to sideline the Electoral College by getting enough states to agree to give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. You might think that North Dakota, with its three electoral votes and tiny electorate, couldn’t do much to mess that up. But where there’s a will to preserve minority rule, there’s a way.

That post, “North Dakota Is About To Kill the National Popular Vote Compact”, should appear soon.

That leaves the weekly summary with virus and vaccine updates, the Syria bombing, the bizarre personality-cult spectacle that CPAC has turned into, the finally-released report on Saudi Arabia’s murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Andrew Cuomo’s troubles, and a few other things. Let’s project that to appear between noon and 1.

I preached from this sermon manuscript online for the Universalist National Memorial Church, on February 21, 2021 using lessons from the Revised Common Lectionary: Genesis 9: 8-17 and Mark 1: 9-15.

Thank you for having me back in the pulpit, and to Pastor Dave for inviting me. Last week, he found us metaphorically on mile twenty-two (or so) of this year-long marathon; the end might still be almost a year away. Solutions take time, and can outstrip a human patience. Despite the vaccine roll-out, the declining death rate, the better-functioning government and even the brighter skies, it could change suddenly. We might face a mutant variant of the virus or that wind storm on Tuesday. We’re not at the end, even if we want to be (I want it to be) and there’s no promise we won’t get something new and awful to replace it. The virus replaced, or rather partially displaced, other troubles for too many of us. They’re still there. This is the first Sunday of Lent. All that was my way of saying I’m not giving up anything for Lent.

Lent is the period of reflection and abstinence leading to Holy Week and Easter. But the last year has already been odd mixture of abstinence and indulgence, but without spiritual benefit or earthly pleasure. Like suffering the hangover without having the party. I’ve gained thirty pounds and lost hair. Ordinary pleasures, like talking to your neighbors or a cup of coffee out, are dangerous, or suspected of being so.

In other years, Lent comes as an opportunity to reflect on one’s spiritual state and to act to improve or develop it. The pandemic is different than other challenges because it has been a common struggle. Our personal griefs and hardships, even unmanageable opportunities; for not all stress is because something bad happens — all these happenings that force to look at ourselves and examine ourselves — or pay the price if we don’t — happen without regard to what’s happening to the mass of humanity. The pandemic is more like more like modern war, where you will be affected whether you like it or not.

All those party-goers and revelers that rightly earn our wrath — what are they thinking? — are also affected by the pandemic, but in a different light I’m willing to see that they also work under pressures that need release and deliberate misinformation that makes some of their choices makes sense. That’s why I’d like to look at what we have in common — an equal distance and access to God — rather than our personal self-improvement, and how we can find truth — as bruised a concept as any — in what we find in God.

So if we’re going keep Lent at all and adopt a spiritual discipline, let it be a really good one; let’s try making some sense of what God reveals to us. Dabbling in revelation sounds like the beginning of a Gothic horror film: “oh, what are those kids going to conjure up!?” I can imagine discussing my deep exploration into the mind of at lunch at work – if we ever get to do that again – and try not to sound like a loon or conspiracy theorist. I can imagine not being very successful.

Even if the category of revelation is at odds with our culture, at some point we’re going to have to deal with how God speaks to us. Aloofness about revelation, even to spare public embarrassment, isn’t sophistication; it’s being condemned to being haunted by God. It’s thinking that there’s something deeply true that underscores our lives without ever being able to know anything about it. And it’s precisely because God’s will has been so closely identified in the public mind with proclamations of right-wing politics and an abdication from thinking, that if we’re not clear about seeking God’s will and doing it, then our own lives become a lesson that (1) either God is not important and does not care for us, or (2) that a certain set of people have a monopoly on divine understanding and blessing. That will not stand, if we have faith or even self-respect; that cannot stand.

The problem is that you can’t just summon up an understanding of divine revelation. For one thing, experience shows that if you’re certain about God speaking to you, you’re almost certainly wrong. If there’s not a lump in your throat or pang in your belly when you feel God is speaking to you, you’re almost certainly not. A maxim to preachers I learned long ago: if you go to the pulpit to speak an oracle of God and don’t shudder a little with fear, beware. Like Moses, we go before the Almighty humbled, trembling, with our shoes cast off — but we must go. Let us turn to the lessons.

Today’s reading from Mark acts as a rationale for Lent; Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days, and Lent is forty days long. The word Lent doesn’t refer either to wilderness or self-reflection, but refers to spring (think, “the days lengthen”); wilderness somehow seems more appropriate. This past week of strange, hostile weather and this past year of social isolation seems to me to have more in the same wilderness that Jesus met, and where he met Satan, the great adversary.

But why the wilderness? Why not try to meet Satan on the corner or even in the market where he’s so famously overturned the tables of the money changers?

I’ve been in the Judean desert, in fact, once. It was twenty-two years ago, when a friend and minister invited me along as her guest to see Israel for a few days. (She won the trip as a prize in a game show and I was eager to expand my horizons.) But I was flat broke and the only chance we had of seeing some of the famous out-of-the-way sites near Jerusalem was to take what was known as the sixty shekel tour. For about $19, you would meet an antiquated Mercedes bus near the historic Damascus Gate in the middle of the night, and go nonstop from site to site. You didn’t see anything for very long but you were promised the fortress at Masada, wading in the Dead Sea, a chance to see a nature reserve, a stop at Qumran (where the Dead Sea scrolls were found) and a visit to Jericho, one of the oldest cities in the world.

The antiquated bus had other ideas. The road from Jerusalem down towards Masada was very steep. Just as the sun was rising I saw a sign warning in Hebrew, Arabic and English to shift into low gear. That’s when the transmission or the engine failed; I forget which. The bus stopped and we tourists piled out of the bus in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately the tour operator had a radio in the bus and called for a backup, but that left us sometime to contemplate our surroundings. I looked the grapes and Turkish delight I brought along, wondering how long they’d have to last. There were no other cars passing.

On one side of the road, a hill rose sharply covered in the same powdery tan rock we’ve seen all over the region, here little more than gravel. On the other side of the road the hill descended just as sharply, and in the distance we could see the Dead Sea, shimmering with the dawn. In the distance, we could make out the lights of factories or perhaps a refinery, in Jordan. The bus, the road sign and the refinery were the only evidences of modern technology, and having had that theological education it was easy to imagine that we could meet angels or devils. Surely the landscape was too desolate for anything living.

So I can imagine Jesus’ audience knowing and probably fearing the desert, the wilderness, and wondering what wild creatures could survive there. It’s exactly where you would face Satan, and temptation. The context is absolutely crucial. You feel small, vulnerable, out of place. You look for help, divine or automotive. But in such extreme environments you might also find God, in part because the exposure can be both figurative or literal. One is as revealing as the other. Might Jesus’ flight into the wilderness be figurative and spiritual, following the crashing, fluttering experience of the Spirit in his baptism? The narrative is filled with biblical allusions, but little detail. It might easily be an extended metaphor, but well understood.

Maybe that’s why our hour by the roadside is the part of the day that sticks with me the most even now. Being lost, in an unfamiliar setting, wondering what comes next, looking in the distance: these are as true spiritually as literally.

On the other hand, the passage from Genesis recounts the covenant God made with all living things, but also has to do with context. To recap, covenant between God and Noah and his heirs came before the flood. (W. G. Plaut, ed., The Torah: A Modern Commentary, 68.)

But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. (Genesis 6:18, NRSV)

This covenant was with Noah and his family, excluding the rest of humanity.

As many of you know, an ancient story of an all-consuming, universal flood is not unique. It is seen in the epic of Gilgamesh and in other ancient Middle Eastern literature. The flood was a commonplace, but the outcome in Genesis makes it special.

God says

I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. (Genesis 9:11)

The rainbow is a sign of this covenant, and a reminder to each generation of what God pledged. I’m sure we’ve covered this in other sermons, or if not, it’s one of those biblical stories that is still widely discussed in the larger culture. I want to focus on another part of the story.

So, why Noah? What made Noah right? Why would he and his family be the basis of a new human race? Why would God make a covenant with him? Was it because of his superlative goodness? Unlikely. As we hear in chapter 6:

Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God. (Genesis 6:9)

“Blameless in his generation” is what sticks out. Noah was righteous, but by what measure? Reviewing commentary (see Plaut), it’s possible that Noah wasn’t overwhelmingly exceptional, but simply was the best of a bad lot.

But more, what did Noah think of himself and his family being singled out, alone in the whole world? Was Noah lacking in compassion? It would be a mistake to treat this episode like history, or worse, to apply modern sensibilities or morals to it. But there’s no evidence of longing, of regret or of mercy to all who would die.

But if we treat Noah as a good, but not supernatural figure; and perhaps traumatized and not simply callous, we can appreciate something else about revelation. Throughout scripture, we see God communicate clearly with human beings, either directly or through intermediaries. The days of this kind of special revelation are now past — that’s the majority opinion — and what we receive is a general revelation through scripture. A constant Universalist witness is that scripture contains this revelation,

the trustworthiness of the Bible as a source of divine revelation (UNMC)

the trustworthiness of the Bible as containing a revelation from God (1899)

Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest and final destination of mankind (1803)

(You get the idea.) That revelation is contained in scripture, but in contrast to fundamentalism, isn’t the revelation itself. You have to look for it, find it and interpret it, and that’s not easy. The encouragement we get from this passage is that looking, finding and interpreting God’s intent is not limited to the exceptionally, extraordinarily good, but be taken on by those with a good intent and a willingness to understand.

Friends, both the passages from Genesis and Mark have themes of wildness and liminality. The churning waves, the desert being the Accuser’s domain. And there’s even a connection in the waters: between those that evoked God’s presence in destruction, and God’s presence in the blessing of baptism. (That itself is another sermon.) Both come with blessing, survival for Noah and his family, and for Jesus,

And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (v. 11)

May your searches prove a blessing, too.

In previous sermons, I’ve talked about having an imagination would approach you scripture, as a way of understanding what God is saying. Today, I would add a sense of empathy and curiosity. I encourage you to dig deep wells of patience, or at least thoroughness in your examinations, and a forbearance that values your everyday opinion over others.

This is path which leads to understanding what God may reveal to you.

I know I need a small vacation
But it don’t look like rain.
And if it snows, that stretch down south
Won’t ever stand the strain.

– Jim Webb, “Witchita Lineman“

This week’s featured post is “Who Messed With Texas?“

This week everybody was talking about Texas

The weather caused power failures which caused water failures, and now the weirdness of Texas’ energy system is resulting in outrageous electricity bills. All that is in the featured post, plus the state’s history of mismanagement and its leadership’s attempt to deflect blame onto sustainable energy, which works fine in much colder places like Wisconsin and Antarctica. And Ted Cruz is the comedy relief, standing in the Cancun airport with his flag-of-Texas face mask demonstrating how much he identifies with the state he was running away from.

As long as that article is, one point got left out. Remember the Russian SolarWinds hack, the one that spread into more systems than anyone has fully listed? One of the things computer-security wonks (like my wife) worry about is penetration of systems that control the power grid.

Probably the scariest thing about the whole Texas situation was what would have happened if ERCOT hadn’t starting pulling the plug to reduce demand:

The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.

That scenario could have left Texas blacked out for months (kind of like Puerto Rico). But now think about this: Imagine some hostile hacker, maybe from the Russian military, has penetrated ERCOT’s control systems. Maybe the hack only survives because the hackers don’t do anything to draw the system’s attention, but they know they have a short time window to meddle before they get detected and booted off. What if that time period is long enough to block the ERCOT shut-down order for the “minutes and seconds” necessary to trigger that worst case?

and legislation

The March 14 deadline is looming for Congress to pass Biden’s Covid relief package, or something like it. (Otherwise people start to lose unemployment benefits.) The administration is still hoping to get some Republican support, but also preparing to push a bill through the Senate using the reconciliation process that would circumvent a Republican filibuster.

That’s probably all going to work out somehow, because Biden has been going around the Republican opposition in Congress to get support from state and local Republican officials, as well as the American people. Neither Democratic nor Republican moderates will want the blame if nothing passes.

But two other bills will come up shortly, and their fates are much less certain: an immigration bill and a democracy bill.

The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 includes: an eight-year pathway to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants; a shorter process to legal status for agriculture workers and recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; and an enforcement plan that includes deploying technology to patrol the border.

The For the People Act

makes illegal essentially all of the anti-enfranchisement tactics perfected by the right over the past decades. It then creates a new infrastructure to permanently bolster the influence of regular people.

The bill’s provisions largely fall into three categories: First, it makes it far easier to vote, both by eliminating barriers and enhancing basic outreach to citizens. Second, it makes everyone’s vote count more equally, especially by reducing gerrymandering. Third, it hugely amplifies the power of small political donors, allowing them to match and possibly swamp the power of big money.

Neither bill is likely to get support from ten Republican senators. Nor does either fit within the tight constraints on the reconciliation process, which is focused on issues of taxing and spending. So that will be the point where the filibuster issue can’t be finessed any further. Either Democrats will have to eliminate the filibuster (or poke such a big hole in it that it might as well be eliminated), or they will have to go back to core constituencies and admit failure.

The For the People Act stands in stark contrast to the hundred or more voter-suppression laws being considered in Republican state legislatures.

This is a good time to repeat the theme of a 2018 Sift post “You can’t compromise with bullshit“. At that time, I was focusing on the various “border security” measures Trump and his nativist allies were pushing: the wall, concentration camps for asylum seekers, and so on. The point of these measures was to end the “American carnage” of a non-existent immigrant crime wave. Trump pushed this dark fantasy again and again, to the point of implying that the US has no indigenous criminals: “STRONG BORDERS, NO CRIME” he tweeted.

For years, Democrats had hoped for a grand bargain on immigration: Legal status for the 11 million undocumented immigrants already here in exchange for increased border security. The reason that deal has never worked out is simple: Because the “immigrant crime wave” never existed, no amount of border security can stop it.

Same thing with elections: No amount of “election security” can ever be enough to satisfy Republicans, because the “voter fraud” problem they are trying to solve doesn’t exist. As I wrote in 2018:

When claims are based on nothing, they can go on being based on nothing, no matter what you do to mollify the people who make those claims.

and the virus

The statistics continue to improve, while the spread of new variants of Covid-19 looms ominously. (I think the cartoon is too pessimistic, but it expresses an important point of view.) The US recorded its half-millionth Covid death, a total that is already well past the number of deaths the country had in World War II. 43.6 million Americans have gotten at least one vaccine shot, and 18.9 million are fully vaccinated. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which requires only one shot and can be stored in a simple refrigerator, is getting closer to approval. Shots could start in early March.

One of the striking facts about vaccine distribution is the racial inequity.

This is a good example of the kind of systemic racism conservatives deny exists. (Laura Ingraham is offended that President Biden even uses the phrase “systemic racism”.)

I’m pretty confident that nobody in the public-health power structure has been saying “Let’s not waste our scarce vaccines on people of color.” (That would be overt, personal racism, not systemic racism.) But somehow, things just work out so that white people are more likely to get vaccinated first. If nobody consciously makes racial equity a priority, the gears just turn in a way that favors Whites.

and the Mars landing

One of my earliest memories is of my grandfather and I watching the countdown on John Glenn’s Mercury flight. For a lot of people of my generation, space flights still evoke that little-kid belief that anything is possible if we all work towards it. Hearing that we had landed a new rover on Mars rekindled some of that.

The Mars rover has its own Twitter account

and Rush Limbaugh

He died of lung cancer on Wednesday.

It’s hard to decide what to say about him. He doesn’t deserve the protection of maxims like “Speak nothing but good about the dead”, because his whole career was about scorning those kinds of rules (like when the “AIDS Update” segment on his show mocked dying gay people). On the other hand, it’s not the dead who benefit from such restraint. Vindictive thoughts are corrosive; we control them for our own well-being.

So it’s tempting to say nothing, but Limbaugh had a big impact on American political culture, so his death requires an assessment. That assessment can’t be positive, because his impact was far from positive. But I refuse to revel in his death. I have smiled at some of the more vicious things I’ve seen posted on Facebook, but I won’t pass them on.

Over a 40-year period, Limbaugh’s voice popularized a new style of conservatism. Pre-Rush conservative media personalities like Bill Buckley and George Will modeled upper-class intellectuality: Some people are just better than the rest, and government attempts to pretend otherwise are bound to backfire. They could be funny in a clever, Victorian way; sometime the next morning you might figure out exactly how you had been insulted. They were embarrassed by the yahoos, the Birch-society conspiracy theorists of their day, and did their best to keep them in the closet. Most of all, the Buckley/Will conservatives were about ideas — bad ideas, for the most part, but defended with all the skill their Yale and Oxford educations could bring to bear.

Limbaugh changed all that, creating a conservatism that was about tribes rather than principles or programs. Day after day, he fought a scorched-earth culture war. He championed the yahoos, reveled in conspiracy theories, and lied without qualm or apology. The goal was not to persuade liberals, but to make them cry.

The Republican Party today, the party of Trump, is largely his creation. It has no core ideas or governing philosophy, but instead has personalities and grievances. It cares nothing about facts, doesn’t believe in democracy, and is comfortable being supported by violence. It can motivate 74 million people to vote, but it can’t come up with even a back-of-the-envelope diagram of a healthcare plan.

Did he have any virtues? Fellow conservative pundit Rich Lowry tweeted:

Liberals who didn’t listen to Rush, and just read the Media Matters accounts, never understood how *funny* he was. What set him off from his many imitators was how wildly entertaining he was, and the absolutely unbreakable bond he formed with his listeners.

But what kind of “funny” was he? Humor revolves around surprise: An expectation is set up and then violated. In most of the Limbaugh humor I saw, the surprise came from violating the taboo against cruelty. (“I can’t believe he said that!”) As Slate’s Justin Peters put it: “his was the wit of the prep school bully making fun of the foreign exchange student’s lunch.”

Limbaugh violated “political correctness” by relentlessly mocking and insulting anyone who threatened his white male Christian privilege. If you were similarly privileged (as Rich Lowry is), and if you felt stifled by a culture that increasingly disapproved of the vicious things you wanted to say, it was probably cathartic to hear Limbaugh say them and defy the consequences. But I’ve googled various versions of “Limbaugh’s funniest lines”, and all I get are the outrages collected by his critics. “Limbaugh jokes” will lead you to jokes about Limbaugh, not jokes he told. (They’re not particularly funny either.) Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf verified my finding:

He will likely be remembered more for the worst things he said than the best things he said, because unlike Buckley, who said his share of awful things, no Limbaugh quote stands out as especially witty or brilliant.

Rolling Stone’s Bob Moser commented:

He wasn’t selling political ideas — and he never has. He was selling political attitude. The swaggering certitude. The mocking dismissiveness. The freedom to offend. The right to assert your privilege without guilt or embarrassment.

and continued fallout from the Trump coup attempt

Even after I have the thought “There oughtta be a law”, it’s still sometimes surprising to discover there actually is one: the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D- Mississippi) has filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, invoking the KKK Act’s provisions for civil compensation:

The carefully orchestrated series of events that unfolded at the Save America rally and the storming of the Capitol was no accident or coincidence. It was the intended and foreseeable culmination of a carefully coordinated campaign to interfere with the legal process required to confirm the tally of votes cast in the Electoral College. …

Accordingly, this action seeks the award of compensatory damages to redress the harm to the Plaintiff caused by the Defendants’ use of intimidation, harassment and threats of violence to interfere with his discharge of his legally required duty as a Member of Congress and punitive damages to punish the Defendants for the reckless and malicious manner in which they acted and to enjoin and deter a recurrence of this unlawful conduct. …

Under the Ku Klux Klan Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1985(1), Defendants may not “conspire to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person … holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States … from discharging any duties thereof; or to induce by like means any officer of the United States to leave any … place[] where his duties as an officer are required to be performed, or … to molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede him in the discharge of his official duties.” …

As a result of the acts set out in the above paragraphs committed in furtherance of this conspiracy, Plaintiff Thompson was hindered and impeded in the discharge of his official duties and suffered the deprivation of his right to be free from intimidation and threats in the discharge of his official duties, as explicitly protected under Ku Klux Klan Act. …

As a result, Plaintiff Thompson seeks an award of compensatory damages [and] an award of punitive damages to punish the Defendants for engaging in a concerted and continuing course of unlawful conduct and to deter the Defendants and others from engaging in similar unlawful conduct in the future.

[Don’t be confused like I was: The quote above doesn’t say that the KKK Act is from the year 1985. It’s section 1985 of the U.S. Code.]

Nine members of the Oath Keepers are also facing criminal charges.

A 21-page indictment alleged that the defendants “did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with each other and others known and unknown” to force entry to the Capitol and obstruct Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden as president in riots that led to five deaths and assaults on 139 police.

One of the attorneys who filed one of Trump’s baseless lawsuits to overturn the election is going to have to explain himself. The judge in that case has ordered him to face a grievance committee that could recommend discipline. (Disbarment? The article doesn’t specify.) The attorney “has not sufficiently allayed the court’s concerns regarding potential bad faith.”

you also might be interested in …

After a long delay, which might have been intended to avoid interfering with the election campaign, then not interfering with Trump’s attempt to invalidate the election, and finally not interfering with his impeachment trial, the Supreme Court has ruled that Trump’s accountants have to turn over the documents that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance wants, including his tax returns. Vance responded with a laconic statement: “The work continues.”

Last spring, the country briefly went ga-ga over Andrew Cuomo’s Covid briefings. They were such a realistic contrast with happy talk that came out of the White House.

Well, Cuomo has his own Covid scandal now.

An investigation by the New York State attorney general found that the governor’s office may have misled the public on the number of pandemic deaths in nursing homes after it ordered elderly people hospitalized with the virus returned to their facilities.

One of the more interesting links in this week’s featured post came from the Chicago Tribune. Well, enjoy it while you can. The Tribune Company is about to be bought by a slash-and-burn financial group. In the same boat are the Orlando Sentinel and New York Daily News, which the Tribune Company owns. But Baltimore gets a reprieve. The Baltimore Sun will be spun off to a nonprofit organization.

Having lived in the Chicago in the 1980s and visited many times since, I’ve already mourned the Trib that I used to know. It once was the kind of paper you couldn’t finish in a single sitting. Those days are long gone, but the Trib still retains the ability to do a certain amount of real journalism. That’s probably going to end soon too.

Advice from Heather Thompson Day on responding to sexist jokes:

My dad just told me “never laugh. They will mistake your nervous laughter as compliance. Instead, pretend you don’t get it, and watch them explain to you why you should be laughing.” I’ve used this advice my whole life since.

When I was 19 my boss said I should be a phone sex operator & laughed.

I said “I don’t get it”

He said “it’s a joke”

I said “explain it to me”

& that’s how I learned that once sexual harassers have to explain why their inappropriate jokes are funny, they stop laughing.

The fact that President Biden is far more popular with the American people than Trump ever was is really bugging right-wing media. The counter-attack is already underway, using the old Karl Rove tactic of trying to turn an opponent’s strength into a weakness.

Tucker Carlson sarcastically poked at the Joe-and-Jill relationship, which seems infinitely warmer and more genuine than previous first couple’s. In the process, he managed to repeat his denial of climate change and invoke the ridiculous Biden-is-senile trope. (Trump never had the kind of mental acuity Biden demonstrated in his CNN townhall Tuesday in Milwaukee — though he did misstate a few statistics. When asked a question, Biden actually answered it, rather than talking over it and daisy-chaining rambles about himself and his grievances, as Trump usually did. His answers reflected his ability to imagine what the questioner’s life is like — something Trump could never do.)

The Bidens’ affection is totally real. It’s in no way part of a slick PR campaign devised by cynical consultants determined to hide the president’s senility by misdirection. No, not at all! Their love is as real as climate change!

Meanwhile, Newsmax picks another target: Biden’s 12-year-old German shepherd Champ.

and let’s close with something energetic

In 1943, the Nicholas Brothers performed what Fred Astaire claimed was the greatest dancing he had ever seen on film. The NYT told the brothers’ story, and here’s the video, from the movie “Stormy Weather“. (Hat tip to another sifter, the twisted one.)

This week’s human tragedy was caused by a political failure that no one is taking responsibility for.

This week’s Texas disaster has really been three related stories:

• The situation on the ground has been horrific. Millions of people were significantly inconvenienced, many thousands had to leave their homes, and dozens died.
• Bad weather was the immediate cause, but the deeper cause was bad policy. Texans’ hardships arose directly from the state’s short-sighted, low-regulation, keep-the-government-out-of-my-business political philosophy.
• The response of the Republican politicians whole hold power in Texas has been reprehensible.

It’s important to keep all three stories in mind, and not let the entirely justified outrage you feel about Ted Cruz running away to Cancun or Greg Abbott blaming renewable energy divert your attention from the underlying human tragedy. So let’s examine the three aspects of this week’s events in their appropriate order.

What happened. A major winter storm hit most of the country this week. In the Midwest and Northeast, people expect that kind of thing from time to time, so we’re ready for it. Here in Massachusetts, we began the week with a foot of snow already on the ground from the previous storm. But even here, winter weather still causes problems: We haven’t put all our powerlines underground where they belong, so occasionally a heavy snow will bring one down and black out a neighborhood or two for a few days. But it seldom leads to a widespread calamity like Texas experienced.

Winter storms are much rarer in the South, so Southerners are not as well prepared. For example, it turns out that Memphis only has 13 snowplows for its 7,500 miles of streets. The situation was probably not much better in places like Mobile or Little Rock or Tulsa.

But nowhere else in the United States experienced the kind of cascading disasters that unfolded in Texas. By Sunday, the weather was more-or-less back to normal, with temperatures in the 60s and 70s across much of the state. But the crisis is far from over. CNN summarizes:

At least 26 people died across the state since February 11. Millions lost their power, forcing families to huddle over a fireplace, scavenge for firewood or spend nights in their car trying to stay warm. Others spent hours searching for food as shelves emptied and weather conditions led to food supply chain problems. The frigid temperatures caused pipes to burst, leading to water disruptions for roughly half the state’s population. Covid-19 relief efforts, including food banks, were shuttered. Vaccine shipments were delayed and many appointments were canceled.

It could have been even worse. According to unnamed officials quoted by The Texas Tribune, as demand increased and suppliers dropped out of the system, the state’s power grid was “minutes and seconds” away from “a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months”.

The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.

If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.

What would that worst case look like? Probably something like this:

As a result of the blackouts, at least three Texans died of carbon monoxide poisoning because they ran their cars in unventilated garages. Elsewhere, the freeze affected local water-treatment systems, creating situations where people needed to boil their tap water (with what power source?) before drinking.

Some 13.5 million people throughout Texas have experienced water disruptions, with nearly 800 water systems reporting issues like frozen or broken pipes, according to Toby Baker, executive director for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. About 725 systems are under a boil-water advisory, Baker said. …

In Austin alone, the state capital’s water supply lost 325 million gallons due to burst pipes, Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros said in a Thursday news conference.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation says that’s 43 million cubic feet of water, which is bigger than the 37 million cubic feet in the Empire State Building.

Aftermath. It will be weeks before the state’s plumbers can fix all the broken pipes, or we learn how many Texans caught Covid while gathering in the homes of whichever friends or relatives happened to have heat or water.

And the hits keep coming: In the aftermath of the natural disaster, many Texas households face an unexpected financial disaster: The New York Times profiled one Texan who suddenly found himself owing $16,732.

The steep electric bills in Texas are in part a result of the state’s uniquely unregulated energy market, which allows customers to pick their electricity providers among about 220 retailers in an entirely market-driven system.

Under some of the plans, when demand increases, prices rise. The goal, architects of the system say, is to balance the market by encouraging consumers to reduce their usage and power suppliers to create more electricity.

But when last week’s crisis hit and power systems faltered, the state’s Public Utilities Commission ordered that the price cap be raised to its maximum limit of $9 per kilowatt-hour, easily pushing many customers’ daily electric costs above $100. And in some cases, like Mr. Willoughby’s, bills rose by more than 50 times the normal cost.

Dallas Morning News elaborated:

That means $9 for a kilowatt-hour that usually costs [Griddy customer Karen] Cosby around 7 cents, and sometimes as little as 2 cents. … The price per megawatt-hour reached $9,000 around 10 p.m. Sunday night and stayed there for much of Monday and all of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday morning, it fell to $35 and kept dropping. At 4 p.m., it was 85 cents. …

While searching for a new provider, Cosby flipped the breakers connected to her heating units and moved into a small bedroom with an air mattress and her two dogs, Onie and Birkin, and shut off the rest of the house. Her energy use was limited to a space heater, making a cup of coffee in the morning and using the microwave for four or five minutes to heat her meals.

“It’s been 43 degrees in the house since Monday, and I still have a $5,000 bill,” she said.

Why it happened. One of the striking things about the crisis was not just that Texas was hit worse than neighboring states, but that some parts of the state did much better than others. On Tuesday, at the height of the power disruptions, only .04% of households tracked in El Paso County were without power, while the comparable number was 29% in Dallas County, 44% in Travis County (Austin), 41% in Tarrant County (Fort Worth), and 18% in Harris County (Houston).

The difference was that El Paso, sitting at the far western edge of the state, is outside the Texas power grid. (MSNBC frequently interviewed Beto O’Rourke, who was sitting in his brightly lit El Paso home.)

Texas is the only state that has its own grid, which it maintains in order to avoid federal regulation. The rest of the US is on either the Western power grid (like El Paso) or the Eastern Power grid, like the panhandle and a few counties on the state’s eastern border. (In Bowie County, home of Texarkana, 10% of households lost power.) So when Texas’ supply/demand situation went bad, the rest of the country couldn’t bail them out.

As for why it went bad, there’s an immediate answer and then a more general answer. The immediate answer is that at precisely the time when Texans wanted more heat, suppliers were failing to handle the cold.

The system broke down this week when 185 generating units, including gas and coal-fired power plants, tripped offline during the brunt of the storm. Wind turbines in West Texas froze as well, and a nuclear unit near the Gulf of Mexico went down for more than 48 hours. Another problem emerged: Some power plants lost their pipeline supply of gas and couldn’t generate electricity even if they wanted to capture the high prices.

All sources of power were affected, but the biggest problem was natural gas.

The biggest shortfall in energy production stemmed from natural gas. Gas pipelines were blocked with ice or their compressors lost power. Much of the gas that was available was prioritized for heating homes and businesses rather than generating electricity. That’s helpful for people who use gas for heating but less so for those who use electric furnaces.

That’s the short-term cause, but nothing about that was inevitable. The Chicago Tribune contrasted Texas’ problems with power generation in Wisconsin.

So why does the power continue to work in places like Wisconsin, where bitter cold is a way of life? The reason is simple: Generators in the Upper Midwest are designed to work in frigid conditions, unlike those in Texas.

“We designed all our infrastructure for these bitter-cold temperatures,” said Paul Wilson, a professor of nuclear engineering at UW-Madison who studies electrical systems.

That means insulation, heated pipes, crushers to break up frozen coal.

“We design everything with the understanding that it can get down to 40 degrees below zero and even stay there for a few days,” said Madison Gas and Electric spokesman Steve Schultz. “We also test our equipment regularly to make sure it’s working properly and prepared for frigid conditions.”

Wind turbines are equipped with winter weather packages such as heating elements to keep ice off the blades and insulated gearboxes, allowing them to work at temperatures as cold as 22 below zero.

But that costs money, and the Texas system prioritizes price over reliability.

Industry experts say there are no explicit regulations that outline cold weather reliability, but there are economic incentives in regulated states like Wisconsin, where electricity rates are structured to give utilities a return on their investments in power plants.

“In a place like Texas where you’re competing to be the cheapest all the time you’re able to take those risks,” said Marcus Hawkins, a former engineer with the Wisconsin Public Service Commission who now runs a multi-state regulatory organization. “Any added capital costs makes you less attractive to the market.”

The Wall Street Journal has more detail:

Texas has long prided itself on its wholesale power market. It was born from a legislative effort in the 1990s that broke up the state’s utility monopolies, introducing competition among a larger universe of power generators and retail electricity providers.

The result was a laissez-faire market design that rewards those who can sell power inexpensively and still recover their capital costs. That keeps prices low when demand is steady. When demand spikes, however, so do prices, which can climb as high as $9,000 per megawatt-hour to incentivize power plants of all kinds to fire up.

If an electricity producer agrees to supply power into the market and then fails to deliver, the producer has to pay for the cost of replacing it. But if a plant trips offline and stays out of the market for an extended period, as happened this week, there is no penalty besides lost revenue.

USA Today describes one of the key features making Texas’ system vulnerable:

The ERCOT grid is what’s known as an “energy only” market, in which generators are compensated only for electricity actually delivered. In an “energy plus capacity” market, they also would be compensated for generating capacity that’s maintained but kept in reserve for special or unusual circumstances.

The result is a system that runs cheaply most of the time, but is prone to catastrophic failures like the one that happened this week. Essentially, the state is like a household that decides to save money by not paying for fire insurance. As long as your house isn’t burning down — and how often does that happen? — you’re winning.

Similarly tempting personal decisions would be not changing the oil in your car, not having health insurance, or not fixing the leak in your roof. Those things cost money, so in the short term your bank balance looks better if you skip them. For a while, Karen Cosby saved money by contracting for variable-rate electricity through Griddy. But this week she lost far more than she had ever saved.

The reason we have government regulations is precisely to remove short-term temptations (for both individuals and corporations) that have negative long-term effects. You could save money by buying a car without seatbelts or airbags, for example, but the government won’t let you. When Hooker Chemical started burying barrels of chemical waste in Love Canal in the 1940s, that probably looked like the most economical way to deal with it. But a few decades later it had caused a public-health disaster that cost $400 million to clean up. So in the long run it wasn’t economical at all. If there had been an EPA in the Roosevelt administration, Hooker undoubtedly would have complained about the cost of its regulations, and how much they added to the price of chemicals. But in the long run those regulations would have saved not just lives, but money as well.

Warnings. You can’t fault leaders for failing to see something that is truly unforeseeable. But while this winter storm was certainly unusual, there had been warnings that such things were possible. The Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011 similarly led to rolling blackouts, for the same reasons as played out this week:

Post-analysis indicated that the cold temperatures had caused over 150 generators to encounter difficulties; loss of supply, instrumentation failures, and gas well-head freezing were some of the source causes

After that event, the Texas Public Utilities Commission issued a report. The Austin Statesman article on that report quoted a previous report from 1990 about a 1989 winter storm.

“The winter freeze greatly strained the ability of the Texas electric utilities to provide reliable power to their customers. Record and near-record low temperatures were felt throughout the state resulting in a significantly increased demand for electrical power.

“At the same time that demand was increasing, weather-related equipment malfunctions were causing generating units to trip off the line.” As a result, it noted, the state suffered widespread rolling blackouts and “near loss of the entire ERCOT electric grid.”

A state senator in 2011 recalled the 1990 report and said:

What I don’t want is another storm and another report someone puts on the shelf for 21 years and nobody looks at.

But the only difference this time around is that the report only sat for 10 years rather than 21. (Which, BTW, is exactly what climate change predicts: Extreme weather events will happen more frequently.) Both reports listed ways ERCOT and the generating companies could make the system more resilient in the face of cold weather. But in typical Texas fashion, most of the recommendations were neither mandated by law nor motivated by subsidy. They were simply best practices that a responsible company should follow, even if the market pulls them in another direction.

So here we are again.

Political response. In a state like Texas, where one party has been in power since George W. Bush became governor in 1995 and the GOP gained full control of the legislature in 2003, I suppose it’s too much to expect the political leadership to say, “Wow, we really screwed up. But now we’ve got religion about winter storms and regulation, so we’re going to do better.” Even so, you might hope for a blame-free let’s-focus-on-the-future stance that more-or-less deals with the reality of the situation.

That’s not what has happened. Instead, the process seemed to go like this: What Republican talking points are lying around to respond to unreliability in the energy grid? How can we use those pre-established frames to shift the blame onto liberals?

For years, the fossil fuel industry’s criticism of solar and wind power has been that it’s unreliable: Sometimes the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, but you can always burn coal or natural gas. Republican politicians like ex-President Trump frequently echoed that claim:

You know, Hillary wanted to put windmills all over the place. Let’s put up some windmills — when the wind doesn’t blow, “just turn off the television darling, please. There’s no wind — please turn off the television quickly!”

So that explanation was sitting in Republican voters’ heads, ready to be activated when Governor Greg Abbott told Sean Hannity:

This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. … Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis. … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.

Right-wing media picked that up and ran with it. Tucker Carlson described Texas as “totally reliant on windmills”.

Then it got cold and the windmills froze, because that’s what happens in the Green New Deal. … Now the same energy policies that have wrecked Texas are going nationwide — coming to your state.

And again:

So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died.

Trump-administration Energy Secretary Rick Perry arguably is more to blame for this week’s disaster than anyone else, because he was the governor who received and ignored that PUC report on the 2011 storm. But rather than apologize for his failures, he criticized President Biden:

If this Green New Deal goes forward the way that the Biden administration appears to want it to, then we’ll have more events like we’ve had in Texas all across the country.

National Memo’s Joe Conason points out the larger pattern:

If the fatal farce in Texas seems all too familiar, then you may be noticing an eerie resemblance to the botched pandemic response of the Trump administration. The impulse of Republicans in government is not to govern but to shift responsibility and try to affix blame, almost always on “liberals” or “socialists” or some other partisan goblin. What they seem utterly unable to provide are honest leadership and real solutions.

And finally we come to Ted Cruz. If these events ever become a major movie, Ted Cruz is going to be the comedy relief, the buffoon whose self-centeredness is so absurd that the audience can only laugh. You’ll see footage of a family shivering in their car or some elderly woman hoping her daughter will return soon with a fresh oxygen canister, and then you’ll see pot-bellied Ted Cruz standing in the Cancun airport wearing his flag-of-Texas face mask. (All that’s missing is somebody to play Laurel to his Hardy.)

Because that’s leadership in Texas: When the people they represent are suffering in the cold, leaders jet off to a nice warm beach, taking police away from emergencies to provide an escort to the airport.

After he’d been spotted and the story was blowing up on social media, Cruz did what any good father would do and blamed his pre-teen daughters.

Like millions of Texans, our family lost heat and power too. With school cancelled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon.

That statement wasn’t just craven, it was misleading: Dropping the kids off wasn’t in the original plan. Ted’s original ticket had him staying through the weekend. Anyway, the jokes practically wrote themselves: When a failed state can’t provide basic services, who can blame a father for leading his family across the Mexican border to find a better life?

Almost as bad as Cruz’ original decision was the way that right-wing media defended him: He’s just a senator. What could he possibly do?

The fact that people think Ted Cruz, a United States Senator, can do anything about a state power grid, even his own, is rather demonstrative of the ignorance of so many people who cover politics.

Moving his family to a pricey beach resort was, in fact, the responsible thing to do.

People who can take care of themselves and their families in an emergency should take care of themselves and their families in an emergency, if only to remove the possibility of their having to be taken care of by the public. Of course, Senator Cruz probably will be more comfortable in Cancun than he would be in River Oaks, but it is no less the case that by absenting himself from the scene, he has given Houston — including its utility providers and its emergency services — one fewer person to worry about. From that point of view, Senator Cruz has a positive moral obligation to be in Cancun.

Atlantic’s David Graham makes the proper response:

Cruz’s error is not that he was shirking a duty he knew he should have been performing. It’s that he couldn’t think of any way he could use his power as a U.S. senator to help Texans in need. That’s a failure of imagination and of political ideology.

You know who thought of something he could do? Beto O’Rourke, who narrowly lost to Cruz in 2018. He organized volunteers to call Texas senior citizens, find out if they needed anything, and help them access available resources.

BIG THANKS to the volunteers who made over 784,000 phone calls to senior citizens in Texas today. You helped to connect them with water, food, transportation, and shelter. And you made sure that they knew we were thinking about them and that they matter to us.

Somebody else who came through was the congresswoman right-wingers love to hate: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who used her fame and connections to raise millions of dollars for Texas relief. Ted knows a bunch of rich people who supposedly care about Texas. Do you think maybe he could have done that?

But Ted couldn’t lift a finger, because doing so would just promote the idea that the public good is a real thing, that people should expect politicians to care about them, and that government has a role to play in dealing with forces beyond the scale of individual action.

And if people started to believe things like that, the Republican Party would be toast.

This is another week where events knocked me off the article I planned to write. At first, I thought the Texas winter-storm story would just be a few paragraphs in the summary, with some links to more detailed articles and maybe a picture of Ted Cruz in the airport. But the deeper I looked into the Texas disaster — I’m over-using “disaster” today because I keep looking for synonyms not being satisfied with them — the more I felt that nobody was telling the full story.

This week’s Texas disaster is really three stories: the suffering on the ground, the failure of regulation that caused it, and the irresponsible responses of the Texas political leadership. (Cruz has become the poster boy for that irresponsibility, but he’s far from unique.) There’s a lot to know about all those things, but I haven’t found anybody pulling it all together the way I want it pulled together. It’s way too easy just to laugh at Cruz and miss the more serious implications.

So the featured post today is “Who Messed With Texas?” and it will be out around 10:30 EST. It’s long, but full of details I find fascinating. (I hope you do too.) Like: After the Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011, a Texas state senator recalled the report written in 1990 after a 1989 winter storm shut down a lot of the power grid, and said, “What I don’t want is another storm and another report someone puts on the shelf for 21 years and nobody looks at.” Good call, senator: The 2011 report only sat on the shelf for ten years. Or: Burst pipes in Austin alone have released enough water to fill the Empire State Building.

A lot of good analysis is out there, like the Chicago Tribune explaining why the power grid works in frigid Wisconsin, and video like the scary surge arcing through urban power lines, and pictures of windmills operating normally in Antarctica. But I hadn’t seen anybody assemble it all, so I did.

The weekly summary then has the ongoing virus-and-vaccine news, Biden’s immigration and voting-rights policies taking shape as legislation, the Mars landing, my attempt to process Rush Limbaugh’s death without either whitewashing his baneful influence or kicking his corpse, conservative media’s effort to fight Biden’s growing popularity by attacking his wife and dog, and Rep. Bennie Thompson’s lawsuit against Trump invoking the KKK Act of 1871. Finishing that should take me until about 1.

Without drawing that bright line, you are ceding your party to this: a party of not living in facts, that bullying is acceptable behavior and that violence is acceptable behavior if you are trying to preserve your “way of life”, whatever that means. This will result in more people, especially within the echo chamber they are living in, seeing people that they disagree with as a mortal enemy, which for some small percentage of them translates into “I have a justification for violence.“

– Elizabeth Neuman,
former Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy
in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security

This week’s featured post is “The Week That Broke Trump’s Brand“.

This week everybody was talking about impeachment

Most of what I want to say about the impeachment trial is in the featured post. But it was already getting long and a few odds and ends didn’t fit there.

Lisa Murkowski’s vote to convict may be evidence for the moderating influence of what is sometimes called the “jungle primary” system. In November, Alaska passed a ballot initiative that changed its elections. Instead of the usual system, where parties hold primaries and then the winners of those primaries meet in the general election, Alaska now has a unified primary for the entire state. The top four vote-getters advance to the general election, which is decided by ranked-choice voting. That change seems like a big deal to me, so I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about it until now.

In other words, Murkowski doesn’t have to fear facing a Trumpist candidate in a primary restricted to Republican voters. Both the primary and the general will involve the entire electorate.

Of course, Murkowski may not have feared a primary anyway. In 2010, she lost the Republican primary to a more conservative candidate, but then won the general election as a write-in candidate.

I want to call attention to one of the arguments Trump’s defenders used: This bad precedent will come back to bite you. Trump lawyer Bruce Castor put it like this:

If you go down the road Mr. Raskin asks you to go down, the floodgates will open. The political pendulum will shift one day. This chamber and the chamber across the way will change one day and partisan impeachments will become commonplace.

He warned that former officials that Republicans love to hate — like Obama attorney general Eric Holder — could be impeached. Lindsey Graham predicted Kamala Harris will be impeached if Republicans take back the House in 2022.

In other words, the arguments used in this case and the precedents it establishes could be used in bad faith in the future. But that’s true of any government action: If we raise tax rates now, some future Congress could raise them to 100% and confiscate everything! If we convict a murderer of murder, someday you could be convicted of murder too!

Just stop. If there’s some reason to believe that the current impeachment was pursued in bad faith, Castor should have brought that up for discussion. Similarly, if there is something regrettable about a good-faith application of this precedent — say, if you think Democrats will be sorry when Biden is prevented from using violence to hang onto the White House four years from now — Trump’s defenders should have talked about that. But don’t threaten us with the unknowable bad faith of future Congresses.

Another bad argument is the one McConnell and Portman made after voting to acquit: The criminal justice system should handle this. That really is a precedent that could come back to bite us.

Here’s what’s wrong it: I don’t know of any specific law against hanging onto power after you lose an election. Crimes were involved in Trump’s scheme, like possibly incitement to violence or election tampering, but his fundamental wrongdoing was political. He attempted a subversion of the entire system rather than the kind of specific action that a law might ban.

Having watched Trump’s attempt to wiggle through the loopholes in American democracy, I can imagine that a cleverer usurper might stay in power after losing without provably breaking any laws at all, just by abusing the power of his office and the zeal of his supporters to intimidate or cajole officials into doing what he wanted. Think back to the Raffensperger call, and now imagine that the Georgia secretary of state had believed — without the president even hinting at it — that some Trump supporter would kill his family if he didn’t “find” those eleven thousand votes. There might not be any provable crime, just the derailing of our constitutional system.

That’s why it’s wrong to take an overly legalistic view of impeachment. The point is to protect democracy, and the attack might consist of actions that nobody has ever thought to make illegal, because only the president can do them, and no president has ever tried before. “High crimes and misdemeanors” is vague for a reason. Similarly, beyond-reasonable-doubt is a good standard if we’re talking about putting someone in jail. But I don’t think everyone should stand around doing nothing if we’re only 75% sure our democracy is being subverted.

When our entire republic is threatened, Congress should do what it needs to do.

I find myself agreeing with Ben Sasse way more often these days. Should I worry about that, or should he?

Conservatives regularly denounce executive overreach – but we ought primarily to denounce legislative impotence. … If Congress cannot forcefully respond to an intimidation attack on Article I instigated by the head of Article II, our constitutional balance will be permanently tilted. A weak and timid Congress will increasingly submit to an emboldened and empowered presidency.

The NYT’s Charles Blow believes the January 6 riot and the Republican unwillingness to hold Trump to account for it is the end of the Blue-Lives-Matter movement.

In the Senate’s acquittal — or more accurately, abetting — of Donald Trump, they stripped away the facade of the opposition to Black Lives Matter and the elevation of Blue Lives Matter.

It was never about preventing the desecration of American symbols. Members of the insurrection mob smeared feces throughout the Capitol after they broke into it.

This was never really about the protection of officers, generally speaking, but about allowing officers to treat with more impunity the people who protested the maltreatment of Black people.

but there’s still a pandemic going on

The numbers continue to improve. CNN reports:

Covid-19 infection and hospitalization numbers are now plummeting nationwide after rounds of devastating surges that followed the holidays. The country’s seven-day average of new cases is now below 100,000 — down from a peak of about 250,000 in early January, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Hospitalizations are also way down from their peak of more than 132,400 on January 6, data from the COVID Tracking Project show.

Deaths are also down, but not as sharply. The seven-day average death toll is down to 2600, after peaking at over 3300 a few weeks ago. It makes sense that deaths would be a lagging indicator, because people usually don’t die until some while after they’ve had a positive test and been hospitalized.

The number of Americans who have gotten at least one vaccination shot is up to 38 million, and increasing by 1.5-2 million each day. But the experts CNN talked to believe that isn’t the reason for the decrease in cases. After taking chances with social gatherings during the Thanksgiving-to-New-Years holiday season, people have become much more careful. (I described this a few weeks ago as the deal-with-God theory: “If you just let me get through Christmas, I’ll be good.”)

Meanwhile, the more-contagious variants continue to spread, though none of them have become the most common version yet.

and Congress needs to do something about it

Right now, Biden’s $1.9 billion Covid-relief proposal is being turned into a fully detailed bill by the House Budget Committee. This is currently at the behind-the-scenes stage of putting together a proposal that has full Democratic support. Nothing formal will happen this week because Congress is on recess.

If House Democrats can stay united, they have enough votes to pass the package. The problem will come in the Senate, where the bill will either need to attract 10 Republican votes are fit through the filibuster-proof reconciliation process.

The looming deadline is March 14, when the Covid-related unemployment benefits lapse.

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Covid relief is a sufficiently popular bill that Senate Democrats will probably be OK with using reconciliation to get it through, especially if they can attract a handful of Republican senators, but not enough to overcome a filibuster. But the filibuster will become a real issue when the focus shifts to political reform: outlawing voter-suppression tactics, ending gerrymandering, and so on. Reconciliation was designed to get must-pass budget items through, so non-financial legislation doesn’t fit well into that process.

The voter-suppression issue is particularly important in the Black community, because Blacks have so often been targets of suppression. And Democrats owe a considerable debt to their Black supporters: High turnout in Black precincts was a major factor in Biden’s win, and even moreso in the two Georgia races that allowed Democrats to take the Senate.

A voting-rights bill should come out of the House before much longer. If moderate Democrats in the Senate let a filibuster kill it, the moderate/progressive split in the Party could reopen in a big way.

I’m trying hard not to let my relief that Trump is gone make me too gullible about the Biden administration. For example, I love watching Jen Psaki’s press briefings, because so often she communicates actual information that, when you check on it, turns out to be true. And she handles hostile questions without getting hostile in return. But I have to keep reminding myself: She’s a press secretary, so if the Biden administration ever needs something covered up, she’ll be the face of that effort.

Similarly, I’m cynical enough to know that no presidential interactions with the press are truly spontaneous. But damn. This four-minute clip of Joe and Jill out walking their dogs on the White House lawn and talking about what Valentine’s Day means to them. It’s awfully endearing.

Maybe stuff like that is why the public has been giving Biden the kind of honeymoon every president used to get. So far, his approval rating has never fallen below 50% — a level Trump never reached. 538 has him at 54.6% positive 37.3% negative.

In general, Biden is doing a good job of selling his positive image: a basically decent guy who is working hard and trying to do the right thing. If people continue to believe that about him, they’ll forgive him for policies they don’t fully agree with.

and let’s close with something old made new again

One of the classic songs about the dehumanization of the working class was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons”. Geoff Castellucci has used his incredibly deep voice and some self-harmonizing software to produce a 21st century version.

One of the under-appreciated aspects of this song is how much religious content it has. Right from the first line: “Some people say a man is made out of mud.” Who says that? Genesis does. It says that humans are shaped by the hand of God, who breathes a soul into them. The second line’s counter “A poor man’s made out of muscle and blood” essentially denies that account. Maybe you rich folks were sculpted by God and endowed with a soul, but nothing in a poor man’s life testifies to that.

Going theological for a second, “having a soul” is a poetic way of saying that your life is an end in itself. You have your own reasons to be on this Earth; you’re not just a tool for other people to use. “Sixteen Tons” raises the question: Do we really believe that? About everybody?

Officially, Trump was acquitted. But he still lost, and the Republican Party lost with him.

[I’m not sure who to credit for the cartoon above, but I found it here.]

At this rate, the fourth impeachment will nail him. (No. Seriously, I hope this is the last impeachment article I ever have to write.)

The Senate vote. When Trump was impeached in 2020, a majority voted for acquittal: 52-48 on the abuse-of-power article and 53-47 on obstruction of Congress. Only one Republican (Mitt Romney) voted to convict, and him only on abuse of power.

Saturday, in contrast, seven Republicans voted against Trump, resulting in a 57-43 majority for conviction. That was still ten short of the 2/3rds supermajority needed, but makes laughable Trump’s characterization of the trial as “the greatest witch hunt in the history of our Country”.

The seven Republicans with spines were Romney again, the two “moderate” women who always come up when Democrats are looking for bipartisan support (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine), the guy who is positioning himself to be the take-back-the-GOP-from-Trump 2024 presidential candidate (Ben Sasse of Nebraska), two guys who don’t have to worry about a primary challenge because they’re retiring (Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Richard Burr of North Carolina), and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whose term runs until 2026, and who gave a refreshingly simple explanation of his vote: “I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.” (That vote got him immediately censured by his state GOP.)

The guilty-but-acquitted faction. You might think Cassidy’s explanation goes without saying — that of course people who thought he was guilty voted to convict — but in today’s intimidated Republican Party it doesn’t. Mitch McConnell also thought Trump was guilty, but he voted to acquit anyway, because that’s the kind of guy McConnell is.

The speech McConnell gave immediately after the vote, when he could just blow smoke without any consequences, resembled a summation for the prosecution. He called the insurrection “a disgrace” caused by Trump’s “disgraceful dereliction of duty”. He held Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the attack on the Capitol, because “The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.” After the insurrection began, Trump’s response was “unconscionable”. “He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed, and order restored.”

McConnell didn’t convict because he manufactured a constitutional reason not to, one in conflict with the practice of the framing era, against a precedent set in the 19th century, and rejected by the Senate itself just a few days ago: “We have no power to convict and disqualify a former officeholder who is now a private citizen.”

Other too-timid-to-vote-their-conscience GOP senators — Thune, Portman, Capito, and maybe more — also hid behind this bogus “constitutional” principle. I predict this interpretation will go out the window if it ever protects a Democrat.

McConnell went on to say (in a section of his speech he apparently added at the last minute, because it wasn’t in the pre-speech transcript his office provided):

President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office. … He didn’t get away with anything yet. Yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.

This idea will go out the window even sooner. If Trump does get criminally prosecuted, expect McConnell and all the other “constitutional” objectors to denounce his indictment as a politicization of the justice system. Republicans never admit that they have placed Trump above the law, but any forum that tries to hold him accountable is the wrong one.

The witness controversy. Saturday morning there was a flurry of uncertainty, as the House managers asked have a witness: Republican Rep. Herrera Beutler, who had reported on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s phone conversation with Trump:

When McCarthy finally reached the president on January 6 and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol. McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That’s when, according to McCarthy, the president said: ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’

This incident is damning, because it emphasizes not just that Trump wasn’t eager to call the mob off, but that he was using the attack to pressure Congress; he wanted them not to finalize his loss by accurately counting the electoral votes.

The problem with Beutler’s account is that it’s hearsay; the story of the call was “relayed to me” by McCarthy. Her testimony would backfire if Trump’s lawyers then called McCarthy to the stand and he denied that the incident ever happened. If Trump’s lawyers wanted to call a lot of witnesses — they claimed they would, but that was probably a bluff — the trial might have continued for two weeks or more.

In the end, a compromise was worked out: An affidavit from Beutler was entered into the record, no witnesses were called, and the trial wrapped up on Saturday as planned.

On my Twitter feed, I saw the progressives I follow — both national figures and my personal friends — react in outrage. DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas tweeted (and was retweeted by Amanda Marcotte):

The storyline just changed from “soulless Republicans acquit guilty Trump” to “cowardly Democrats abandon case”

I don’t see it. (And as a matter of record, that was not the Sunday morning headline.) To me it looks like this: As of Saturday morning, the prosecutors had achieved everything they were going to achieve. They had performed flawlessly and made a convincing case to the country, while Trump’s lawyers looked pathetic. They had persuaded enough Republican senators to invalidate Trump’s predictable claim of a “witch hunt”, but not enough to convict.

The wonderful thing about a trial is that it cuts through the cacophony of conflicting voices and focuses attention on a single narrative, or two competing narratives. Trump’s scattershot approach — Antifa! the George Floyd riots! — may work on social media, but he had no answer for the story the House managers told: After Trump had lost the election, he tried to hang onto power through lies and violence.

America heard that story.

Keeping the trial going for another week or two would not have changed the outcome. It’s possible those two weeks would have gilded the lily. Maybe Republicans would squirm more and look worse to the public. But another possibility was that something unpredictable would give Trump’s supporters a talking point. (Imagine, say, that another police shooting had led to violence from groups Democrats support.) Maybe the trial would bog down in procedural issues and the nation would tune out. Maybe the politics would turn as voters wondered why the Senate was talking about Trump rather than Covid relief.

If I had been in the Democrats’ strategy room, I think I’d have said, “We’ve got what we’re going to get. Let’s end this before anything goes wrong.”

Trump lost. One reason I feel that way is that I agree with David Frum: Trump lost. As the NYT’s Peter Baker put it, the vote was “an escape, not an exoneration”.

I think the 57-43 vote, in which Democrats stayed united and Republicans fractured, is the final episode of the 2020 election — the loss that concludes four months of Trump losing.

Ever since the vote totals started moving decisively towards Biden late on Election Night, Trump has been assuring his supporters that vindication was coming: Election boards would refuse to validate Biden’s win. No matter how many times Trump’s lawyers failed, the next court case would be the big one. Republican governors would refuse to certify the election results. Republican legislatures would appoint their own electors. Mike Pence would refuse to recognize the swing state votes; and if he didn’t, January 6 would be “wild”.

I hope that someday, somebody in Trump’s inner circle lets us know what he thought was going to happen when he sent his mob to the Capitol. His pre-insurrection speech didn’t instruct them just to protest the inevitable culmination of the electoral process, he told them to stop it: “stop the steal”. But how did he imagine they would do that? Just standing outside the Capitol waving Trump flags clearly would not do it. And even their violent riot only delayed Trump’s defeat by a few hours. So what was his plan for victory? Did he really expect them to hang Pence? Hunt down Pelosi? Use those zip-ties to take members of Congress hostage? Capture or destroy the electoral-vote ballots? What?

Whatever he imagined, it didn’t work. The insurrection was another defeat. His QAnon supporters then had elaborate fantasies of what would happen on Inauguration Day, but that vision only yielded another disappointment. And this week, if you were waiting for Trump himself or his brilliant legal team to humiliate his accusers, you were disappointed again.

The broken brand. When I think about Trump’s appeal, I remember a line out of Robert Penn Warren’s classic political novel All the King’s Men. Weeks after the Boss, Governor Willie Stark, has been assassinated, the narrator runs into Stark’s stuttering driver Sugar Boy. “They w-w-wasn’t n-n-nobody like the B-B-Boss,” he says. “He could t-t-talk so good.”

People look for things in their heroes that they find lacking in themselves. In Trump, people who felt like they were losing identified with a winner. Americans who felt voiceless and powerless identified with someone who was loud, unafraid to say outrageous things, and impossible to ignore. If they feared being called “racist” or wearing some other negative label, they loved that Trump never took such criticism lying down, but always gave back better than he got. I’ve heard his White House’s communications strategy described like this: Every day should be a drama in which Trump defeats his enemies.

That’s been his brand: a fighter, a winner. And this week completely wrecked it. Day after day, the House managers described his “Big Lie” of election fraud, and how it led to the failed insurrection. And no one struck back. He was invited to testify and chickened out. His lawyers had a giant stage on which to prove to the world that Biden stole the presidency, but (like the lawyers in most of his court cases) they didn’t try. Instead, they argued narrow legal points: The Constitution doesn’t allow the Senate to convict a former president. The First Amendment gave him a right to say what he did, whether it was true or not.

Rather than defend him, Republican senators hid behind technicalities. No talented lawyers would take his case, so he was left with clowns that Jamie Raskin’s crew completely outclassed. At times it seemed as if Trump’s lawyers hadn’t even talked to their client. When did Trump find out the riot was happening? asked Senators Collins and Murkowski, two potential swing votes. There was no way to know, claimed Michael Van Der Veen (a personal injury lawyer suddenly called up to the big leagues), because the House managers had refused to investigate. Later, Van Der Veen whined that the trial was “the most miserable experience I’ve had down here in Washington, D.C.”, setting Raskin up to respond: “For that I guess we’re sorry, but man, you should have been here on January 6th.”

Trump is no longer the larger-than-life winner his followers need him to be. He’s a loser surrounded by losers. (And that’s only going to get worse as lawsuits and indictments unrelated to January 6 start to roll in.) Trump was supposed to make people stop laughing at his supporters, but if you’ve been echoing his repeated claims of vindication, you keep getting embarrassed when they come to nothing.

Now that the trial has ended, the country’s attention will shift back to the battle against Covid, and to Biden’s $1.9 trillion proposal to repair the economic damage it has done. For months — even while he was still president — Trump has had nothing to say about the pandemic. And now, no one cares what he thinks.

The broken party. The Senate outcome — Democrats united, Republicans divided — symbolizes a larger political reality going forward. The split wasn’t between those who believed the Democratic narrative and those who don’t. A bipartisan consensus of Americans understand now that Trump tried to stay in power through lies and violence. Democrats are united in believing this was bad. Republicans are split about it.

CNN’s Ronald Brownstein examines the polling and finds a disturbing fault line in the GOP.

One-sixth to nearly one-fifth of Republicans have praised the January 6 attack in polling from PBS NewsHour/Marist and Quinnipiac. That’s a far higher percentage than among the public overall (just 8% in the Marist survey and 10% in Quinnipiac.) In the American Enterprise Institute poll, about 3-in-10 Republicans said they believed the QAnon conspiracy theory.

The share of Republican voters who express support for the use of force to advance their political goals in general is considerably larger. In the American Enterprise Institute survey, 55% of Republicans agreed that “we may have to use force to save” the “American way of life.” Roughly 4-in-10 agreed with an even more harshly worded proposition: “If elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent actions.”

Brownstein suggests that what Mitch McConnell has described as a “cancer” in the party may have gotten so big that it is inoperable. Maybe the conspiracy-theory-and-violence faction of the GOP is too small to win with, but too big to win without.

I don’t think anybody over there has an answer for that.

Whenever I do a philosophical post like last week’s “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric“, I wonder how well it will catch on, and worry that I’m basically just talking to myself. It turns out I shouldn’t have worried this time: The post is as close to viral as the Sift gets these days. It’s got over 9K page views so far and should pass 10K before it’s done. It’s the most popular Sift post since NRA types realized that they hated “How Should We Rewrite the Second Amendment?” in 2019. (Of course, neither post compares with ones from the golden age of viral blogs, before social-media algorithms added more friction to the system. Between them, “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party” and “The Distress of the Privileged” have over a million page views.)

Anyway, this week there’s really no choice about where to focus: The impeachment trial was historic, significant going forward, and the center of the public’s attention. You can take a glass-half-empty view that Trump should have been convicted and banned from future office, or a glass-half-full view that the trial fractured the Republicans and leaves Democrats united.

I take a half-full approach in this week’s featured post “The Week That Broke Trump’s Brand”, which should be out around 10 EST. The House managers’ narrative — that Trump lost the election, but tried to hang onto power through lies and violence — is pretty widely accepted now. The senators differed on how they feel about lies and violence as a political strategy. Democrats rejected it, and Republicans split three ways: some rejected it along with the Democrats, some continue to favor it, and a sizeable chunk in the middle doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of those who favor it.

This is going to be a problem for the country, but we’ll figure it out. The Republican Party, though, is in a serious fix. The lies-and-violence faction is too big to alienate, but not big enough to win with. The 2022 Republican primaries are going to be a circus.

Anyway, there’s still a pandemic to discuss, and a $1.9 trillion package waiting for Congress to act on. That will be the main subject of the weekly summary, which I guess will appear around noon.

 https://lleachie.wordpress.com/

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This trial arises from President Donald J. Trump’s incitement of insurrection against the Republic he swore to protect.

– House impeachment manager’s pre-trial brief

This week’s featured post is “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric“.

This week everybody was talking about the impeachment trial

Which starts tomorrow. Both the prosecution and the defense have filed briefs outlining their positions. The prosecution (technically the “impeachment managers from the House”, but I think that’s a needless mouthful of words) requested that Trump himself testify, and he has refused.

He could be subpoenaed, but that would undoubtedly set off a long litigation that Democrats would rather avoid. Instead, I believe the purpose of asking for Trump’s testimony was to make it clear that it’s his choice not to speak under oath, where his lies could result in perjury charges. Whenever the ex-President’s lawyers make some claim about what he was thinking or what he intended, prosecutors can point out that this is hearsay, and that they wanted to get direct testimony but were rebuffed.

If he did testify, this cartoon from his first impeachment would be relevant again.

CNN explains why both sides want a speedy trial: Democrats don’t want the Senate distracted from approving Biden’s nominees for too long, and Republicans want the country to stop thinking about the January 6 insurrection.

It looks like the lawyers have prevailed on Trump not to use the impeachment trial to repeat lies about his “landslide” victory over Biden, and how it was stolen from him. Instead, they’ll claim (falsely) that it’s unconstitutional to hold an impeachment trial for an ex-president. That allows Republican senators to acquit for procedural reasons, without supporting or justifying the insurrection Trump incited.

BTW: Every statement coming out of the Trump camp refers to him as the “45th President”. He is not allowing his people to call him the “ex-president” or “former president”, presumably because he still does not acknowledge that Biden (or anyone else) is the 46th president.

However, his lawyer’s claim that the proceedings are unconstitutional rests on the fact that he is no longer president. One reason he doesn’t want to testify, in my opinion, is that he could be asked questions like “Is Joe Biden the President of the United States?” or “Did Dominion voting machines send results overseas to computers that flipped your votes to Biden?”, where his answers would mark him as either delusional or a liar.

and the Covid relief bill

It’s good to see Biden avoiding the bipartisan trap Obama fell into in 2009. The point of “unity” is to give Republicans a bill they could support, and that many of their voters do support, but Biden can’t control whether any Republicans will vote for it. Biden knows the public will hold him responsible for the results, so his first priority is passing the bill the country needs. That’s why he hasn’t backed off of his $1.9 trillion proposal.

It seems likely the House will pass it with few changes. The question is whether it gets through the Senate, which it will if all 50 Democrats vote for it and Vice President Harris provides the tie-breaking vote. Friday, the Senate passed a budget resolution on party lines. That is a procedural prerequisite for invoking the filibuster-proof reconciliation process to pass Covid relief.

Republicans are complaining about this tactic, which they used to pass the Trump tax bill, claiming that it shows a lack of commitment to bipartisanship. But in reality, the only hope of getting Republican support is to have a Plan B if they won’t get on board.

In general, I think Democrats should compromise in only two situations:

• What Republicans are asking for is actually a good idea.
• The changes Republicans want don’t make the bill significantly worse, and they will vote for the bill if it is changed.

Too often, the Obama administration compromised with Republicans, got none of their votes anyway, and then were blamed by the public for the less-effective bill.

The big question is whether the Senate Democrats can hold together. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is the most likely defector, but so far he is staying on board. He is insisting on a “bipartisan process”, but says that means “Democrats and Republicans will have amendments”, not that the bill will be held hostage until it can get Republican votes. It helps that West Virginia’s Republican governor has come out in favor of a big relief package.

and the Covid statistics turn

Fewer Americans are now hospitalized with Covid than at any time since the Thanksgiving wave started. New cases are down sharply, to 107K Saturday from 318K on January 8. Deaths are edging lower, but not by nearly as much: The average number of daily deaths for the past week is 2800, down from several days above 3300 in mid-January. Deaths are always the last statistic to turn. In a week or two the daily average should be well under 2000.

Those are all numbers we would have considered horrifying in October. But at least they’re headed in the right direction now.

Everyone is complaining about the vaccine distribution process, but it is happening. By yesterday, 31.6 million Americans had gotten at least one dose, and 9.1 million were fully vaccinated.

The interesting question is how demand will hold up. Right now, many more people want to be vaccinated than can get appointments. But at some point, all the people who describe themselves as “eager” to be vaccinated (like me) will have had their shots. Then the burden will shift to coaxing reluctant people to be vaccinated. Nobody is sure when that shift will happen.

Johnson & Johnson has applied for approval of its vaccine, which is simpler but somewhat less effective. It is one shot instead of two, and can be stored in an ordinary refrigerator. The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine is nearly ready to apply for approval as well. It is a two-dose vaccine, but can be stored in a refrigerator.

HuffPost posted the article “It’s Not Just You. A Lot of Us Are Hitting a Pandemic Wall Right Now.” I realize that’s supposed to be reassuring: There’s nothing wrong with you; it’s perfectly normal to want to run naked through the streets with an AR-15.

Somehow, though, I’m not comforted by the thought that everybody else in the world is just as close to the end of their rope as I am.

and the QAnon lady* in Congress

[* I’ve heard MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace refer to her that way, and I kind of like it.]

As I pointed out last week, freshman Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has promoted a lot of truly horrific ideas over the last few years, both orally and on social media. Wednesday, the House Republican caucus decided she is not a problem, and no disciplinary action is needed.

Democrats were not having that, so Thursday evening the full House voted to kick her off of the committees the GOP had assigned her to: Education and Budget. Only 11 Republicans voted for that resolution; the rest support her.

In the debate over that resolution, Greene gave a self-justifying speech; some Republicans have said it was similar to the speech she gave to the Republican caucus before it decided not to punish her. I link to the full text so that you can judge it in context, without relying on me (or anybody else) to interpret it correctly.

Having provided that backstop, here’s what I see in her speech.

• She avoided taking responsibility. “The problem with that is though is I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions about them and talk about them.” Who “allowed” her to repeat all those crazy things? What does that even mean?
• She falsely claimed that her objectionable statements are all from years ago, and all from social media. “If it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today and you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong.” Actually, things she has said and done in person are just as disturbing, and she was defending QAnon as recently as December 11: “Asked by @ryanobles on Pelosi saying GOP has ‘QAnon in [their] caucus,’ Marjorie Taylor Greene said ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong w/ people looking things up & not believing things in the news…it’s unfair to criticize regular Americans looking things up on the internet’.” On December 4, she praised a pro-Q news article.
• She falsely claimed that her words have been taken out of context. “Big media companies can take teeny tiny pieces of words that I’ve said, that you have said, any of us and can portray us and to someone that we’re not, and that is wrong.” The full context of her statements usually makes them worse, not better. Last week I called your attention to a completely unhinged 40-minute video she uploaded to YouTube in 2018. Even if she had completely repudiated all the claims she made then, people’s habits of thinking don’t turn over that quickly (at least not without some kind of medication). The lunatic in that video should not be making decisions for our country.
• She equated QAnon with the mainstream media, and in particular equated believing that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to the conspiracy theories of QAnon. “I started seeing things in the news that didn’t make sense to me like Russian collusion, which are conspiracy theories also, and have been proven so … Will we allow the media that is just as guilty as QAnon of presenting truth and lies to divide us?” Reports from both the Mueller investigation and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Russia intended to help Trump get elected, that Trump knew they were helping, and that (at least in some instances) his campaign welcomed that help. That doesn’t sound like Jewish space lasers to me.
• She vaguely alluded to changes in her views, but did not specifically deny any previous claim. For example, she said “School shootings are absolutely real. … 9/11 absolutely happened.” But she did not say that the Parkland school shooting (the one she badgered survivor David Hogg about in 2019) really happened, or that a plane really did strike the Pentagon on 9/11. While saying in general that she had “stopped believing” parts of QAnon, describing it as “a mixture of truth and lies”, she never said which parts she denies and which she still thinks are true. Does she, for example, still believe that top Democrats are pedophiles who drink children’s blood? (On January 31 she tweeted: “What would the list of the anti-Trump pedos and associates look like? It would likely contain all of the people currently frothing with MTG hate.”) At a bare minimum, I think Greene should submit to questioning about such things. I’d start with: “Is David Hogg a crisis actor, or was he present at a real event where his classmates were murdered?”
• She did not acknowledge that she advocated violence against other members of the House, apologize for advocating violence, or disavow violence going forward. CNN’s KFile claims to have seen videos Greene has since deleted from her Facebook page, which she said that Nancy Pelosi was guilty of treason, which was “punishable by death”. She liked comments that talked about executing Pelosi and other Democrats by hanging or firing squad.

Weirdly, in a tweet the day after the Capitol Insurrection, Greene accused numerous Democrats of being “accomplices” to “Antifa/BLM terrorism”, and added: “Those who stoke insurrection & spread conspiracies have blood on their hands. They must be expelled.”

Josh Marshall makes a good point:

Q is not a “conspiracy theory”. The faked moon landing was a conspiracy theory. Perhaps birtherism was a conspiracy theory, though one with similarities to QAnon because of its strong ideological valence. But Q is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fascistic political movement which predicts and advocates mass violence against liberals (and everyone else outside its definition of true Americans) in an imminent apocalyptic political reckoning. What we call the ‘conspiracy theories’ are simply the storylines and claims that justify that outcome. They could easily be replaced by others which serve the same purpose.

In other words – and this is still a very basic confusion – the Q phenomenon is not a factual misunderstanding that more credible news sources or prevalent fact-check columns would deflate and tame.

In the big picture, it’s not all that important whether or not Greene believes that the Clintons sabotaged JFK Jr.’s airplane or George Soros started a California wildfire with a space laser. But whether she is still part of “a fascistic political movement which predicts and advocates mass violence against liberals” matters a great deal.

and protests against Putin

Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader Putin had poisoned, returned to Russia on January 17 after recuperating in Germany, and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for violating his probation on an embezzlement charge that he claims was trumped-up to discredit him. Since returning, he has been a symbol of opposition to Putin, inspiring protests around the country.

The center of the protests is not Navalny’s personal popularity, but the failures of the Putin regime, which is corrupt, has let economic inequality get worse, and has not handled the pandemic well.

But economic inequality is the reason that people are most unhappy with Putin, according to research by Moscow-based independent pollster, the Levada-center. Some 45% of respondents faulted Putin for “failing to ensure an equitable distribution of income in the interests of ordinary people” in 2018, up from 39% in 2015. In Russia, the top 10% own 83% of the country’s wealth, making it the most unequal of the world’s largest economies followed by the U.S. and China, according to Credit Suisse Research Institute in 2019.

and you also might be interested in …

A memo from new Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin:

We will not tolerate actions that go against the fundamental principles of the oath we share, including actions associated with extremist or dissident ideologies. Service members, DoD civilian employees, and all those who support our mission, deserve an environment free of discrimination, hate, and harassment. … I am directing commanding officers and supervisors at all levels to select a date within the next 60 days to conduct a one-day ” stand-down” on this issue with their personnel. Leaders have the discretion to tailor discussions with their personnel as appropriate, but such discussions should include the importance of our oath of office; a description of impermissible behaviors; and procedures for reporting suspected, or actual, extremist behaviors in accordance with the DoDI. You should use this opportunity to listen as well to the concerns, experiences, and possible solutions that the men and women of the workforce may proffer in these stand-down sessions.

A number of former and active-duty military people were involved in the Capitol Insurrection, and there are other signs that the military has a problem with white supremacist groups recruiting in the ranks.

Biden is taking steps to get ICE under some kind of control.

“They’ve abolished ICE without abolishing ICE,” said one distraught official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because that person was not authorized to speak to the media.

I suspect the distraught official is exaggerating, but I wouldn’t be sorry if he weren’t. Trump’s ICE was a rogue agency that knew nobody above them cared about the people they could detain.

I find it weird that lawsuits by corporations are the most effective ways to strike back at political disinformation.

A voting technology company swept up in baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election filed a monster $2.7 billion lawsuit on Thursday against Fox News, some of the network’s star hosts, and pro-Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, alleging the parties worked in concert to wage a “disinformation campaign” that has jeopardized its very survival.

I can’t vouch for how they figure the $2.7 billion, but the basic idea of this suit makes a lot of sense: A group of people knowingly spread lies about Smartmatic, and those lies had dire financial consequences for the company. Another lied-about voting-tech company, Dominion, has already sued.

Within days, Fox News had axed Lou Dobbs, who helped spread many of Trump’s election-fraud conspiracy theories on the air.

Suits like Smartmatic’s are rare, because they’re hard to win — unless the person who smeared you does it really blatantly. Josh Marshall explains:

The Supreme Court rightly put a very high bar on success in libel suits for public people and entities. You have to be wrong. And you have to have known you were wrong or have had a malicious indifference to whether you were right or wrong. It’s very hard to [meet] that standard. …

The Smartmatic/Dominion cases are the first case at scale that seems almost to try out the Sullivan standard. Fox and various other pro-Trump entities made numerous, repeated and HIGHLY damaging claims which certainly in the cases of the institutions and almost certainly with the individuals (with Lindell he may simply be crazy) they [knew] were false.

The Texas Republican Party has endorsed legislation that would ask the voters whether they want the state to secede. I wonder what they would do if they didn’t love America so much.

Politico:

The U.S. trade deficit over the four years of President Donald Trump’s presidency soared to its highest level since 2008, despite his tough tariff tactics intended to bring it down, a new Commerce Department report showed on Friday.

The combined U.S. goods and services trade deficit increased to $679 billion in 2020, compared to $481 billion in 2016, the year before Trump took office. The trade deficit in goods alone hit $916 billion, a record high and an increase of about 21 percent from 2016.

Like most of what he did, Trump’s trade policy was mainly a reality show. It was always more about creating the appearance of action than achieving results.

President Biden has decided that Trump should not get intelligence briefings, which former presidents usually have access to. While he was president, Trump occasionally let some valuable piece of intelligence slip, but Biden refused to speculate about what he might do now. What Biden did say was revealing:

I just think that there is no need for him to have the — the intelligence briefings. What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?

The main reason former officials of all sorts are given access to intelligence is that current officials might want to consult them about ongoing situations that have roots in the former official’s tenure. When he says there’s “no need”, Biden is really saying that he can’t imagine a situation where he’d want Trump’s advice. It’s a subtle but devastating barb.

and let’s close with something unexpected

Who knew that a two-cello mash-up of Beethoven’s Fifth and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” would work?

It’s not just that conservatives define terms differently. Sometimes their relationship to words defies definition entirely.

If you’re like most liberals, you probably from time to time take a walk on the other side of the line. Maybe you channel-scan through Fox News or even Newsmax. Or click on some of the links your Trump-adoring relatives send you. Or listen to a speech by some politician you can’t stand. Maybe you go so far as to read entire books written by people like Tucker Carlson or Newt Gingrich, or by academic types who are probably liberals themselves, but have spent years studying Trump supporters in rural Louisiana or in Evangelical churches.

And you still don’t get it.

It’s worse than just that you can’t follow the arguments, such as they are. You can’t even understand the words. Why is it “cancel culture” when Josh Hawley loses his book contract after cheerleading an insurrection, but not when Colin Kaepernick gets drummed out of the NFL for protesting racism? What does it mean when conservatives say “America is a Republic, not a Democracy“, as if that explained something obvious? Why are college professors and Hollywood actors “the elite”, but billionaires like the Kochs and the Mercers aren’t? Why is it “socialism” to subsidize windmills, but not coal mines? And who exactly are these “real Americans” that Donald Trump speaks for, when the American electorate rejected him by over seven million votes?

The cancel-culture example. The usual liberal response when we run into one of these one-sided pejorative terms, terms that apply to us but never to them, is to charge hypocrisy. From the way the term applies to us, we intuit a definition, then ask why conservatives don’t apply that definition consistently. [1]

Wil Wilkinson, formerly a vice president at the liberal Niskanen Center, is sometimes pointed out as an ironic victim of “cancel culture”, because he recently lost his job after making an unfortunate joke on Twitter. [2] The irony comes from the fact that Wilkinson has been a critic of the whole cancel-culture conversation. To some conservatives, Wilkinson getting “canceled” is like the moment in a horror movie when the monster attacks the guy who’s been claiming there’s no monster.

Interestingly, though, Wilkinson himself still doesn’t believe cancel-culture is a thing. He defends his skepticism by stating his faith in something else: the power of definitions.

I also tend to believe that terms that successfully pick out real things in the real world — terms that aren’t merely vehicles for yay! / boo! sentiments — can usually be given a definition that allows us to get at least a rough handle on what’s included and excluded from the category. But I’ve yet to encounter a definition of “cancel culture” that overcomes my suspicion of sloganized epithets.

Wilkinson quotes L.D. Burnett: “There is no such thing as ‘cancel culture’. There is only culture.” In other words, societies have norms, and violating those norms leads to consequences. If you behave in ways your community considers unacceptable, people will shun you in an attempt to shame you into compliance.

In the Burnett/Wilkinson model, the examples of so-called cancel culture are just situations where norms are changing. Actions that used to be acceptable (like a male executive referring to his female secretary as “my girl”) have become unacceptable, and actions that used to be forgivable examples of bad taste (like making racist or sexist jokes at the expense of a co-worker) are now firing offenses.

If you still believe in the old norms, then the consequences that follow from violating the new norms are extreme over-reactions. But instead of openly debating the old norms versus the new norms, old-norm advocates simply apply a pejorative label to the new-norm consequences.

Slogans like “cancel culture” and “political correctness” are used again and again to short-circuit debate, avoid the underlying substantive controversy, and shift the entire burden of justification onto advocates of the rival position. … That’s why “cancel culture” tends to strike me as more of an evasive maneuver than a coherent idea with determinate content.

I was glad to see Wilkinson bring in “political correctness”, because that is an important example of the same phenomenon: Groups that used to be politically and culturally powerless, or even invisible, (like non-whites, women in the workplace, gays and lesbians, or Hindus) can now demand to be treated respectfully. If you show the kind of disrespect that used to be common, you will face consequences.

Instead of debating that norm-change openly, though, people who refuse to adjust to the new norms apply the pejorative label “political correctness” to the consequences. Like “cancel culture”, the term has no definition.

Let’s go meta. Burnett points out that labeling some action as “cancel culture” is itself an attempt to induce shame. In other words, it tries to enforce what the shamer sees as a norm.

Wilkinson’s article is also trying to enforce an unstated norm, one about how people are supposed to think and argue: Words are supposed to have definitions, and not be “merely vehicles for yay! / boo! sentiments”. Arguments are supposed to appeal to universal principles that go beyond just “my side is right and your side is wrong”. People who violate those norms should be ashamed of themselves, and the rest of us should refuse to take their arguments seriously until they change.

In academic circles, those standards go without saying. No one in any field would write in a journal article: “I’ve decided to leave ‘the elite’ undefined, so that I can apply the term pejoratively to my enemies but not my friends.” From the academy, similar norms have trickled down to the educated classes — who don’t always respect or observe them, but nonetheless accept that they ought to respect and observe them.

We sometimes forget, though, that not everyone thinks this way. In fact, there was a time when no one thought that way. Entire civilizations have functioned without definitions or universal principles.

Definition versus usage. If you’re a physicist, the word “red” has a very precise definition for you: light with a wavelength between 620 and 720 nanometers. For the rest of us, not so much. I’ve been using “red” for as long as I can remember, and I didn’t know that definition until I just looked it up.

It’s not that I have some other definition of “red”. I don’t have one at all, and yet I never feel the lack of it. I have a very clear idea what “red” means. I just can’t express it in words.

I don’t remember learning “red”, but I suspect it was the same way I’ve seen parents teach it to their children: Somebody pointed at red things and said “red”. When I tried to imitate them, they corrected my mistakes and cheered when I got it right. Eventually my performance became flawless.

Sometimes an undefined term has a paradigmatic example. At the paint store, “red” is specified by a color card: If something resembles the color card, it’s red. Similarly, “sweet” is the taste of sugar. To the extent that a taste resembles sugar, it’s sweet.

You could live your whole life without ever learning the dictionary definition of anything. Your community would train you in the proper usage of words, and when people disagreed, some paradigmatic example could resolve the dispute. The idea that you’re supposed to be able to define your words in terms of other words would just go right past you.

That’s what’s going on with “cancel culture”, “political correctness”, and the conservative phrases I listed above. They don’t have definitions, they have usages. People learn how to use these terms by hearing other people use them, then doing trial-and-error until their usage matches the rest of the rest of the conservative community.

So why isn’t Colin Kaepernick an example of cancel culture? Because it’s not used that way. If someone pointed at a dandelion or a banana and said “red”, I would just know that they’re wrong. I couldn’t explain why they’re wrong; they just are. “Red” isn’t used that way.

What does “America is a republic, not a democracy” mean? Nothing, actually. The phrase has a usage, not a meaning. Conservatives say it when liberals object to some minority-rule tactic like gerrymandering or the Electoral College or giving Wyoming the same number of senators as California, but DC and Puerto Rico none at all. If you’re hoping for some definition of “republic” that turns that usage into a meaning, though, you’re not going to get one.

Oral culture versus literate culture. If you want to see a society just beginning to grasp how to use the definitions and principles of logical thought, go read one of Plato’s dialogues. Most of them follow the same formula: Socrates is talking to somebody who uses a word, like “courage” (Laches) or “temperance” (Charmides) or “justice” (Republic). Socrates asks them what the word means, and they give him an example of its proper usage. So Laches says: “He is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy.” Socrates points out that an example isn’t a definition, and they go round and round from there.

What becomes clear in these dialogues is that in Golden Age Greece, definitions were kind of a new thing, and the idea that you ought to be able to define the terms you use was novel, even a bit weird. Literate culture was still being invented, and it was trying to replace an oral culture where words had proper usages, but not definitions. Folks like Laches clearly expected a process like this: If two people aren’t sure they mean the same thing by a word, they trade examples (“Fire trucks are red.” “Ripe strawberries and tomatoes are red.”) until the agreement is clear.

Universal principles were similar innovations of literate culture. In the previous oral culture, traditional wisdom consisted of stories, and of aphorisms that might be the morals of stories. Aphorisms typically are not even trying to be universally true, like principles, but often come in contradictory pairs. So “Always look before you leap” contradicts “He who hesitates is lost”. Oral-culture discernment revolves around understanding the story you happen to be in. Is the current situation part of a look-before-leaping story or a hesitate-and-lose story? A stop-and-smell-the-roses story, or a make-hay-while-the-sun-shines story? [3]

Discernment is primarily a community process that depends heavily on tradition and authority. That gives it a resilience and stability, but also makes it prone to perpetuating a community’s bigotry and justifying the self-serving pronouncements of corrupt authorities. (It’s way too tempting to discern that we’re in a you-have-to-yield-to-me story.) Literate culture’s logic aimed at replacing discernment with more individual and algorithmic processes like measurement, calculation, and deduction.

In spite of its books and intellectuals, Evangelical Christianity is fundamentally an oral culture. Trumpist conservatism is built on top of it. One of the challenges conservative Christians have faced since pledging their allegiance to Trump is how to justify supporting a man who has literally no Christian virtues, and who appears to understand nothing about the Christian religion.

The answer they found was a story: the end of the Babylonian Captivity and the refounding of the Temple in Jerusalem. A key player in that story is Cyrus the Great of Persia, who was not a follower of Jehovah, but nonetheless was used by Israel’s God to fulfill His promise to Jeremiah and the Jewish people.

For believers who subscribe to this account, Cyrus is a perfect historical antecedent to explain Trump’s presidency: a nonbeliever who nevertheless served as a vessel for divine interest. For these leaders, the biblical account of Cyrus allows them to develop a “vessel theology” around Donald Trump, one that allows them to reconcile his personal history of womanizing and alleged sexual assault with what they see as his divinely ordained purpose to restore a Christian America.

That’s how oral culture works: This is the story we’re in, so we should do these things. No principles of action are being proposed, so you can’t argue about it in a Socratic sense. It arises from a process of community discernment, not a process of logical thought.

If you push further on Trump’s transgressions, you’re likely to hear that Christians believe in forgiveness. A text from the Bible will be quoted to prove it. Of course, they didn’t believe in forgiving Bill Clinton, but that also is Biblical, because the Bible contains both harsh and forgiving verses. Clinton was a harsh-verse situation, and Trump is a forgiving-verse situation. [4] If you can’t see that, you’re not part of the community. [5]

If you look at how QAnon works, it too is an oral culture. A few weeks ago, The New York Times profiled a “digital warrior” of QAnon.

For her, QAnon was always less about Q and more about the crowdsourced search for truth. She loves assembling her own reality in real time, patching together shards of information and connecting them to the core narrative. (She once spent several minutes explaining how a domino-shaped ornament on the White House Christmas tree proved that Mr. Trump was sending coded messages about QAnon, because the domino had 17 dots, and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet.)

When she solves a new piece of the puzzle, she posts it to Facebook, where her QAnon friends post heart emojis and congratulate her.

This collaborative element, which some have likened to a massively multiplayer online video game, is a big part of what drew Ms. Gilbert to QAnon and keeps her there now.

“I am really good at putting symbols together,” she said.

Q has identified the story we are living inside [6], and the community now attempts to discern how current events fit into that narrative.

How should we respond? I wish I had a better answer. The main advice I have is to recognize what’s happening and stop doing things that don’t work, even if you think they should work.

The factor you have the most control over is your own thinking. So: Don’t read meaning into things that don’t have any meaning. And don’t respond as if they meant the things you think they ought to mean. “Cancel culture” and “political correctness”, for example, are a sticks-and-stones situation. If they meant something negative, and that meaning applied to something you were doing, then you should probably feel bad about it. But they don’t mean anything; they’re just words that are said in particular settings.

Rather than answer based on the meaning you imagine a phrase has, question it. If the person you’re talking to thinks a term has a meaning, let them explain it. Chances are that they can’t. Let them be frustrated rather than you. (WWSD. What would Socrates do?)

When dealing with people you know well, consider the possibility that they don’t know (or have forgotten) that literate culture and logical thought are even possible. Providing an example of a different way of thought will probably not produce sudden results. But over time it might be significant.

[1] A few conservatives also interpret this behavior as hypocrisy. Robby Soave of Reason wrote:

If you only criticize cancel culture when it’s your side being canceled, then you aren’t really attacking the concept—you’re just playing defense for your team.

[2] “If Biden really wanted unity,” Wilkinson tweeted, “he’d lynch Mike Pence.” The joke — that if Biden did lynch Pence, he’d be carrying out an ambition of radical Trumpists, thereby promoting unity — was lost on his bosses, who focused on the apparent call for violence. They don’t let conservatives get by with the it’s-a-joke excuse for endorsing violence, so they didn’t accept that excuse from one of their own either.

[3] Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato is all about life on the boundary between oral culture and literate culture. The reason Plato was so hostile to poets, in Havelock’s telling, was that poetry was the source of the aphorisms that competed with principles. As long as people revered the poets as fonts of muse-inspired wisdom, logical thought would never take hold.

[4] “The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.” – Mark Twain, Europe and Elsewhere, “Bible Teaching and Religious Practice”

[5] An example of how the same narrative can be either positive or negative: Compare the Biblical characters of Esther and Jezebel. Both are women who marry foreign kings, and use their influence to make the king more accepting of the religion of their homeland.

Esther is one of the Old Testament’s great heroines, and Jezebel one of its villainesses. The difference is almost entirely a my-team/their-team thing: Esther is a Jewish queen of Persia who uses her influence to save Jews from persecution. Jezebel is Phoenician queen of Israel who induces King Ahab to open Israel to the religion of Baal. (Trumpist pastors have begun calling Kamala Harris “Jezebel”. It appears to mean nothing more than that she’s a powerful woman they don’t like.)

[6] The story is that “elites” at the top of the media and the Democratic Party (but also some Republicans) are Satan worshipers who practice pedophilia and drink human blood. Donald Trump is the hero who is going to bring them down. The exposure and punishment of these crimes, leading to mass arrests and executions, is always just around the corner.

This week presents a challenge I think I’ll be stuck with for some while: The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress are doing some very important things, but it’s hard to pull my eyes away from the Republicans as they set themselves on fire.

So: a $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill is steaming ahead, and stands a chance of passing before long. Biden continues to announce major changes in policy; we should soon hear how he plans to control the Gestapo-like organization ICE had turned into under Trump. The new administration is struggling to deal with the vaccine-distribution mess Trump left behind, while the new-infection numbers are finally turning around. Little by little, Biden’s cabinet is getting approved.

But meanwhile, Trump’s impeachment trial starts tomorrow, and he just refused to testify voluntarily. While state GOP organizations are censuring life-long conservatives like Ben Sasse and Liz Cheney, Republicans in the House nearly all supported keeping QAnon lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene on major committees after she gave a lie-laden speech in her own defense. The GOP leadership in both houses is digging in to oppose a Covid relief bill that 2/3rds of the voters want.

What to pay attention to? Serious sensible governance during a time of crisis? Or raving lunacy?

You’ll see my quandary this week: I’ll try to highlight governance, but I’ll also mention the other stuff — and once I start talking about it, it’s hard to stop. MTG is a case in point: I hate to give her this much attention, but I don’t feel like I can leave that speech alone.

Anyway, the featured post, which should be out soon, focuses on Republicans, but in a more philosophical way: “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric”. I end up claiming that conservative rhetoric arises out of what is fundamentally an oral culture, and that liberals make a mistake when we try to understand it from a literate-culture point of view. We waste a lot of time trying to decipher and respond to notions like “cancel culture” and “political correctness” as if they had logical content, when actually they don’t.

The weekly summary goes back and forth: from impeachment to the Covid bill to the Covid pandemic to MTG’s speech to anti-Putin protests in Russia and so on. I’m still picking a closing, but there are several good ones to choose from. I’m going to try to get that out by noon.

 This is just to remind people that my blog is now located at lleachie.wordpress.com. Please visit me there!

 I will be moving this blog to WordPress starting today. I have been having trouble with Blogger, so I feel the need to move the blog. The new site will be http://lleachie.wordpress.com

I am hoping my readers can make the jump.

Thank you.

Speaking of anticipating good things happening , I've noticed that pessimists often call themselves "realists", yet I haven't heard optimists say the same thing. It's almost as if, again, we expect bad things to happen and not good.

I'm trying to focus on good things happening -- the good deeds of humans, the unexpected good thing, achievements and accomplishments, and so on. The things that spark gratitude and, thus, happiness. 

Being an optimist is not the same as descending into toxic positivity. I don't chirp "Look on the bright side!" to people who are going through tough times; I listen to them. I don't ignore my own feelings of hurt. I don't choose to ignore the bad things in the world. 

I hope. That is the core of optimism -- hoping for good things in the future. 

It's hard sometimes. I worry that I am enjoying my white privilege. I deal with a pessimistic inner voice that tells me I'm just going to get hurt. I wonder if I'm fooling myself. 

However, I think I'm doing the right thing. Pessimism makes us ill and makes us unhappy with life. I hope to stick with optimism because it seems healthier.

"Your life could change in an instant."

People always think of the worst when they say this -- a dire diagnosis, a car wreck, murder.

It also means, however, that our lives could change for the better in an instant -- a windfall of money, a job offer, a baby in the family. Is it a sign of pervasive pessimism that we can only think of the negative implications of the phrase? 

Yes, I think people are born pessimists. I think it's a survival mechanism, because without the belief that bad things can happen unexpectedly, we won't prepare for them. Disaster preparedness (knowing where the fire exits are, packing a "bugout bag" in case of evacuation, having a plan for tornadoes) is a good example of preparing for the unexpected. Insurance is another example. Without the belief that one's life could change for the worst, would people invest the time and money to mitigate the unexpected calamity.

The key is to anticipate possible events, both good and bad, and set things in place. There's always an event that will surprise people, but setting in place the acknowledgment that surprises need plans will help deal with the unexpected -- even the good unexpected.

 I found out about #SFFpit on Twitter with two days to spare. #SFFpit is a pitching opportunity on Twitter for people who write science fiction and fantasy (hence SFF).  "Pitching" refers to distilling one's novel into three lines or less -- shorter for an "elevator pitch", longer for a pitch on Twitter. 

I set up my pitches using a web app called TweetDeck, which is free and allows you to put in a series of pitches to be timed for posting throughout the day. So when I set up pitches, I put them into TweetDeck so I don't have to go back and remember to post them.

So this is another opportunity to hope. I take all the opportunities to hope that I can, and someday I may have an agent!

Probably the story of our time in politics is that the Republican Party is radicalizing around an explicitly anti-democratic violent white nationalist ideology, and that most of elite establishment media is uninterested or editorially incapable of accurately telling that story

– Brian Murphy

This week’s featured posts are “The Biden Blitz” and “The Republican Party Chooses Not to Change“.

This week everybody was talking about the Biden administration

One featured post goes through the flurry of executive orders that Biden has already issued. For the most part they are important orders that turn the country in the right direction. But to really be successful, Biden has to get legislation through Congress. The first item on his agenda is his Covid relief plan. It provides economic relief to individuals, sends money to states to use distributing vaccines, funds the changes necessary to reopen schools, and institutes a national testing-and-contact-tracing plan.

Ten Republican senators — exactly the number needed to overcome a filibuster — have approached Biden with a much smaller effort: $618 billion rather than $1.9 trillion. I’m not sure exactly what the differences are. Biden is meeting with the senators today.

Biden has three avenues open: Pass something small with bipartisan support (assuming all ten of these senators stay on board, which I regard as a large assumption); pass something large through the reconciliation process with only (or almost entirely) Democratic votes; or pass a small bipartisan bill now and then come back with a larger Democratic bill later. (This would give Republicans cover: They voted for something and opposed something.)

I’ve been pleased that so far Biden has been unwilling to close off his options without getting any concessions back. If he had pledged, say, not to use reconciliation, then I doubt Republicans would be making a counter-proposal.

Chuck Schumer did something similar with the filibuster.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about why the Senate should abolish the filibuster. (My argument transcended any particular legislation that might get filibustered: If a tiny slice of the electorate — say, small majorities in the 21 smallest states — can block what most of the country wants, the American people are going to lose faith in democracy.)

Well, this week Mitch McConnell essentially filibustered to save the filibuster: He blocked the organizing resolution that would allow the Democratic majority to replace the Republican committee chairs, holding out for a stipulation that the Senate would not alter the filibuster during these next two years. Chuck Schumer held out for the agreement Tom Daschle and Trent Lott worked out the last time there was a 50-50 Senate, which made no such promises.

Schumer held his ground and McConnell yielded. What McConnell got instead of an amended resolution was that two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, repeated filibuster-supporting promises they each made when they were elected in 2018.

It’s important to understand that this all about appearances: Whatever the organizing resolution says, and whatever individual senators might pledge, Democrats can end the filibuster any time they want — if they are unanimous. The question is how the politics would shake out: Will Manchin and Sinema look bad to their voters if they change their minds? Would the entire Democratic Senate majority look bad if they had passed a resolution defending the filibuster and then later reversed themselves?

And the answer to those questions is entirely situational: What will McConnell use the filibuster to block? That partly depends on how clever Democrats are in using the filibuster-avoiding maneuver known as reconciliation (which is how Republicans passed the Trump tax cut and nearly repealed ObamaCare).

If some very important, very popular legislation gets filibustered, that creates an opportunity for Manchin and Sinema to say “When I supported the filibuster, I never imagined Republicans would misuse it like this.” (Both say they’re not open to changing their minds, but who knows if they will? Neither comes up for reelection until 2024, and by then the filibuster could be ancient history.) Or maybe Schumer will come up with some trick for negating the filibuster in that particular case without getting rid of it completely, giving Manchin and Sinema some cover.

In short, this is not the best time fight this battle, and Schumer wouldn’t have the votes to win right now even if he wanted to fight it. That explains why the party’s progressive wing isn’t pushing too hard for it right now. At the moment, it’s an abstract battle about Senate procedure. Soon the terrain will shift to something voters care about, and then the situation will change.

Having the option of eliminating the filibuster pushes the Republicans to negotiate in good faith. Democrats should not give that up without getting something back.

and impeachment, which is all about where the Republican Party is going

Most of what I had to say about this is in one of the featured posts. But a few odds and ends didn’t fit.

The trial starts a week from tomorrow. But Trump is having a hard time finding lawyers willing to defend him.

Former President Donald J. Trump has abruptly parted ways with five lawyers handling his impeachment defense, just over a week before the Senate trial is set to begin, people familiar with the situation said on Saturday. … Mr. Trump had pushed for his defense team to focus on his baseless claim that the election was stolen from him, one person familiar with the situation said.

And that’s a problem because, unlike the Republican Party, the legal profession has standards.

Any defense attorney holds a broad obligation to represent his or her client zealously. That’s a crucial part of our adversarial justice system. But there are limits on what a defense attorney can argue. For example, per the American Bar Association, it would be unethical for any attorney to raise an argument “that he knows to be false.” The “rigged election” narrative certainly fits that description.

According to the NYT, something similar happened as early as November 12: Trump’s lawyers told him there was no fraud on a scale sufficient to flip the election in his favor, so they parted ways and Rudy Giuliani took over.

Thursday the 12th was the day Mr. Trump’s flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable.

Conservatives sometimes try to divert attention from Majorie Taylor Greene with the “What about left-wing radicals in Congress?” ploy. But Democrats are responding with a bring-it-on attitude. And they should: AOC, like Bernie Sanders, is more liberal than some Democrats want to be, but I think everybody understands that she lives in the real world. Progressives want the US to be more like Denmark, not Camelot. Denmark is a real place that is doing fine.

Greene, on the other hand, does not live in the real world.

Another typical whataboutist move diverts discussion of the Capitol Insurrection by bringing up the violence associated with the George Floyd protests (most of which were peaceful). The best description of the difference between those two incidents comes from Tom Robinson on Quora:

One of these things was protesting murder while the other was protesting Democracy.

Typically, an American political party that loses the presidency by seven million votes asks how it can appeal to a larger slice of the electorate. The GOP is asking how it can stop Democrats from voting.

An MTG-endorsed conspiracy theory (about how Jewish-funded space lasers caused a California wildfire) makes this Mel Brooks clip timely again.

and Christianity has some introspecting to do

An Atlantic article on impeachment-supporting Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger focuses more on his criticism of his church than of his party.

The problems that led to the January 6 insurrection are not just political. They’re cultural. Roughly half of Protestant pastors said they regularly hear people promote conspiracy theories in their churches, a recent survey by the Southern Baptist firm LifeWay Research found. “I believe there is a huge burden now on Christian leaders, especially those who entertained the conspiracies, to lead the flock back into the truth,” Kinzinger tweeted on January 12.

I think conservative Christians won’t solve this problem until they realize how deep it goes. The original “fundamentalists” in the early 20th century were reacting against two developments in modern thought: Darwinian evolution and the “higher criticism” of the Bible, which applied to scripture the techniques of interpretation scholars had invented to understand ancient texts like the Homeric epics. The fundamentalist response was to avoid these challenges by encouraging the development of bad thinking habits among Christians. Any kind of denial or logical fallacy was fine if it came to the right conclusions.

Well, a century later, those bad thinking habits have been exploited by purveyors of all kinds of nonsense: climate-change denial, Covid denial, QAnon, “Stop the Steal”. The conservative Christian mind is now like a poorly designed software application; it has back doors that allow hackers to circumvent the usual protocols and make the app serve purposes unrelated to its designers’ intent. That’s how we arrive at the situation Kinzinger diagnoses so clearly:

There are many people that have made America their god, that have made the economy their god, that have made Donald Trump their god, and that have made their political identity their god.

Christianity in general is not going to fix this problem until until it goes back to the source: It needs to figure out how to deal with the reality of evolution, and with the uncanny resemblance of the Bible’s oldest sections to many other texts from the same eras. A few of the more liberal sects did this work a long time ago, but the bulk of the movement would rather build a fortress around its errors than change.

and you also might be interested in …

What if an electric car could recharge in five minutes?

Ever since the Inauguration, the Bernie meme has been everywhere. This is my favorite.

Space.com collected some other Bernie-in-space images. He’s also been in famous paintings, at historic events, and in classic movie scenes.

Several writers have tried to explain what this phenomenon “means”. Like, why is it happening? Why Bernie? Why this particular image? I think it’s not hard to understand: The original Bernie-at-the-Inauguration photo captured a truth we all recognized: Wherever Bernie goes, he’s still Bernie. The historic grandeur of an inauguration doesn’t change him, so why would anything else?

Biden had a phone conversation with Putin.

In his first phone call with Vladimir Putin since taking office, President Biden pressed his Russian counterpart on the detention of a leading Kremlin-critic, the mass arrest of protesters, and Russia’s suspected involvement in a massive cyber breach in the United States.

In short: we’re an independent country again. Our president is no longer under the thumb of the Russian president.

Hakeem Jefferson on this weekend’s snowstorm:

DC’s so white today the GOP might vote to grant it statehood.

and let’s close with something musical

I can’t decide between a good-bye-Trump or a hello-Biden song, so I’ll post one of each. On the last day of the Trump administration, James Corden did this wonderful send-up of “One Day More” from Les Miserables.

And after President Biden suggested that Janet Yellin — the first female Treasury Secretary — should get a musical just like the first male Treasury Secretary did, Marketplace got Dessa, a member of the hip-hop collective Doomtree and one of the artists who contributed to “The Hamilton Mixtape” working on it. That led to “Who’s Yellin Now?“

Impeachment is a chance to put the Trump Era in its rearview mirror, but instead the GOP is doubling down on authoritarianism and conspiracy theories.

Less than a month ago, then-President Donald Trump incited a mob to attack Congress, for the purpose of hanging onto power in spite of having decisively lost the November election. At the time, that crime seemed to put the capstone on the most lawless administration at least since Richard Nixon’s, and maybe in all of American history.

Republican members of Congress, who (like Democrats) had to evacuate the House and Senate chambers in fear for their lives, briefly seemed willing to reconsider where their unquestioning support of Trump had brought them. Trump’s attempted coup — the culmination of a months-long plot attempt to undo his loss and effectively end American democracy — brought to a head a theme that the country has been debating since 2015: How far will Republicans let Trump go?

Back then, the debate was about norm-violations that look small compared to insurrection, but had previously been beyond the pale: calling Mexican immigrants rapists, or claiming that American POWs are not heroes, or ridiculing a reporter by imitating his disability, or encouraging his supporters to be violent, or bragging about sexually assaulting women.

Trump critics raised a reasonable question: If those actions aren’t over the line, where is the line? We never got an answer, but instead were accused of paranoia. Trump was unorthodox and not “politically correct”, but imagining that he was dangerous to the American Republic was just “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, a particular form of craziness induced by an irrational hatred of a man most of us didn’t care about one way or the other before he began running for president.

Closing ranks. This week we got some additional information: For the majority of the GOP, physically attacking Congress and trying to end democracy isn’t over the line either.

Tuesday, 45 of the 50 Republican senators signaled their unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for inciting the Capitol lnsurrection by voting not to hold an impeachment trial at all, on the grounds that the Constitution doesn’t allow impeachments of former officials. (That’s not a credible position, as explained in the Appendix.) Among the 45 was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who previously had seemed open to conviction.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, meanwhile, made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to get back in Trump’s good graces. In the wake of running for his life, McCarthy had said Trump “bears responsibility” for the insurrection. But Thursday he needed to kiss the ring.

Purging anti-Trumpists. Instead, the party has decided to punish those Republicans who showed some loyalty to America’s constitutional system of government. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), went to Wyoming to raise ire against Rep. Liz Cheney, who said “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution” than Trump inciting a mob to attack Congress, and then voted for impeachment. Don Jr. spoke to the anti-Cheney rally by phone. A state senator has already announced a primary challenge.

The Arizona Republican Party has censured Governor Ducey, ostensibly for taking action against Covid, but the fact that he refused to misreport Trump’s electoral loss was probably also a factor. South Carolina’s Republican Party has censured Rep. Tom Rice for his pro-impeachment vote. Trump is calling for Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to face a primary challenger, again because he refused to overrule the voters and give Georgia’s electoral votes to Trump.

Defending extremism. Simultaneously, the GOP is doing little to distance itself from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump-supporting freshman Congresswoman from Georgia who has brought a new level of insanity to the Capitol. Here’s one good summary of the full range of Greene’s unhinged-ness and here’s another one.

But if you prefer to see for yourself and make your own judgments, Greene posted a 40-minute rant to YouTube in 2018. (Warning: that’s 40 minutes of your life you’ll never get back. I recommend skipping the first half, which is mainly about how Facebook is censoring her — by applying the same community standards it applies to everybody.) If you’re looking for a point to it all, she never really gets around to making one. But along the way you’ll learn such fascinating things as

1. Hillary Clinton had JFK Jr. murdered to clear the field for her Senate race in 2000. It was “another one of those Clinton murders”.
2. No plane actually hit the Pentagon in the 9/11 attack.
3. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was part of an intentional plan to destabilize the Middle East, so that the US could be “invaded” by Muslim refugees. “And that happened under Barack Obama’s presidency.” George W. Bush barely comes up in the entire 40 minutes.
4. Obama was also responsible for the immigration lottery (which goes back to 1989) and chain migration (back to 1924 and expanded in 1965).
5. White liberals who voted for Obama are “really the racists”.
6. MS-13 gangsters were “the henchmen of the Obama administration” who did “the dirty work” like murdering Seth Rich.

The GOP House leadership has appointed Greene to the House Committee on Education and Labor. McCarthy intends to have a talk with her this week, but it’s hard to imagine that talk leading to any discipline, since Trump is backing her. (AOC to Chris Hayes: “What is [McCarthy] going to tell [Greene]? Keep it up?”)

Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) is introducing a resolution to expel Greene from Congress, but without some Republican support it won’t get the 2/3s majority needed to pass.

Prague Spring. The best analysis of the GOP I’ve seen came from New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who used a Soviet analogy. While the post-insurrection openness to criticizing Trump may at first have looked like Glasnost, it was actually a Prague Spring, “a brief flowering of dissent and questioning of dogma quickly suppressed by a remorseless crackdown.”

Chait breaks the Party into three factions:

• Never Trumpers. Flake, Romney, Kasich, and a bunch of mainstream-media columnists.
• Violent authoritarians. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, QAnon, the Proud Boys. They’re sorry Trump’s insurrection failed to keep him in power, but have no other regrets about it.
• Soft authoritarians. McConnell, McCarthy, Rupert Murdoch and his media empire. (To my mind, these folks are equivalent to the Hindenburg conservatives of the Weimar Republic.)

The heady predictions that the party would break free of the Trumpist grip already seem fanciful. If anybody is suffering repercussions for their response to Trump’s autogolpe, it is the Republicans who criticized it. Conservative Republicans are threatening to strip Liz Cheney of her leadership post after she voted to impeach Trump. … Adam Kinzinger, another pro-impeachment Republican, is facing censure. The Michigan Republican member of the state board of canvassers, who broke with his party to certify the state’s election results, is losing his job as a result of his refusal to go along with Trump’s lie. Fox News is firing journalists associated with its election call that Biden won Arizona. …

The path of least resistance for the soft authoritarianism will be to oppose Trump’s conviction on technical grounds, and then hope he fades away quietly.

Least resistance. The sad thing is that the soft authoritarians could get their wish if they weren’t such cowards. They have the power to push Trump off the stage, if they would only use it. But they won’t.

McConnell, McCarthy, and the rest need to ask themselves where this going. Trump’s behavior is not going to improve. The domestic terrorist movement he has allied with isn’t going to stop. Next-generation Trumps like Greene aren’t going to tone it down. The soft authoritarians are tying themselves to people whose actions they can neither control nor predict.

This is how bad it’s gotten: Eric Cantor is the voice of reason. The GOP’s problems didn’t start with Trump, he writes. They started when Republican politicians started pandering to their base voters’ fantasies rather than telling them what is and isn’t true or possible.

For Cantor, the government shutdown of 2013 was a key moment. Ted Cruz and some other leaders told the base that the party could defund ObamaCare, if only its leaders fought hard enough. They couldn’t and didn’t, but pretending that they could put the nation through a pointless crisis. Here’s how Cantor sees the path forward:

In many ways, it is the classic prisoner’s dilemma. If the majority of Republican elected officials work together to confront the false narratives in our body politic — that the election was stolen (it wasn’t), that there is a QAnon-style conspiracy to uproot pedophiles at the heart of American government (there isn’t), that a Democratic-controlled government means the end of America (it doesn’t; it may produce worse policy, but the republic has survived 88 years of Democrats occupying the White House) — all Republicans will be better off. If instead most elected Republicans decide to protect themselves against a primary challenge through their silence or even their affirmation, then like the two prisoners acting only in their own interests, we will all be worse off.

Trump’s impeachment trial is a golden opportunity to start rooting out those false narratives. But for that to happen, Mitch McConnell will have to provide leadership. That seems unlikely.

Appendix: The Constitutionality of Impeaching Former Officials

Slate does a good job explaining why former officials can be impeached. It’s not even a close call.

Let’s start with the Constitution, which never directly addresses the question. Article I says that the House “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and the Senate “shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments”. It limits the punishments for the convicted to “removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States”, leaving any further punishment to the courts. Article II stipulates that convicted officials “shall be removed from office” after conviction, but it is silent about whether former officials can be disqualified from future office.

That’s all the guidance it gives. The implication of these sparse instructions is that people at the time of the founding already knew what impeachment meant. (Similarly, the Constitution also doesn’t define “Money” or “credit” when it gives Congress power “To borrow Money on the credit of the United States”.)

What everyone would have known was how Great Brtain handled impeachments. (In Federalist #65, Alexander Hamilton said the Constitution’s notion of impeachment derived from Great Britain’s.) They also would have known how the already-existing state governments did it. Slate spells it out:

Indeed, the British impeachment that most informed the Framers’ thinking about the impeachment power was the impeachment of Warren Hastings for improprieties as the governor-general of Bengal. Hastings had been out of this office for two years before his impeachment by the House of Commons. Moreover, at least two states—Virginia and Delaware—had established that their impeachment power extended to former officers.

Also, Congress has faced this issue before, and resolved it during the Grant administration:

Congress has also expressly addressed this question and resolved it in favor of the original understanding. In 1876, the House drafted articles of impeachment against President Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap, but Belknap resigned before the House could vote on the articles. The House debated whether Belknap’s resignation deprived the House of jurisdiction. After the debate, the House voted to impeach Belknap, implicitly rejecting the argument that it lacked jurisdiction. The Senate also took up the issue and voted 37–29 that Belknap’s resignation did not deprive it of jurisdiction.

So the question has an obvious answer, for those who are willing to know it: Trying Trump after he has left office is entirely constitutional. Claiming it isn’t is just an excuse to let Trump off the hook without considering the evidence against him.

What the new president’s flurry of executive orders do and don’t do.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, all the issues facing the Biden administration have a background theme: proving democracy still works. Beating Trump at the ballot box and thwarting his attempted coup didn’t end the threat of authoritarianism in America. (That’s clear from the way Republicans are circling the wagons around Trump now, even after he launched an insurrection to try to hold on to power.) Most likely, Biden is going to wind up resembling one of two political leaders from the 1930s: Franklin Roosevelt, who held the line against a global wave authoritarianism by leading the US through a major transformation without abandoning democracy; or Fritz Von Papen, the German chancellor whose floundering induced President Hindenburg to bring Adolf Hitler into the government (in spite of Hitler having previously led an insurrection).

The best way to prove democracy still works is to get major legislation through Congress. We’ll see how that goes, but even if it works, it will take time. To his credit, though, Biden has grasped the need to demonstrate quickly that his election matters. The people voted, so things will change.

What he can do quickly is issue executive orders — 22 in his first week, as opposed to Trump’s four and Obama’s five. ABC News has listed 33.

This is a tricky business, because a government that runs by executive order is not a democracy, even if the executive was elected. So it’s important that Biden’s orders have three qualities: They need to be popular, so that he is seen to be speaking for the American people rather than dictating to them. (Maybe a few could be unpopular, but the broad sweep of his orders needs to garner public support.) They also need to effective, because orders that sound like something but turn out to be nothing will just erode trust in democracy even more.

But most of all they need to be legal, so that he’s not furthering the authoritarian drift of the last four years. That legality needs to be bulletproof, because the judicial branch is now full of Trump appointees who would be happy to find a reason to block Biden’s efforts. So he can’t appropriate money (as Trump did for his wall), or change laws.

He is even limited in the ways he can alter or revoke regulations, once an agency has officially announced them in the Federal Register. Congress has specified a procedure for promulgating new regulations, which may require official studies, reports, or public hearings — all of which take time. (Most of the Trump executive orders that got hung up in court suffered from failures of process.) That’s why many of Biden’s orders instruct some department or agency to begin a process, rather than implement some change immediately.

But that doesn’t mean the new president is powerless, as we’ve seen. Let’s take the Biden EOs by subject.

Covid and public health

Executive orders can’t appropriate money; that’s what Biden’s Covid-relief plan in Congress is for. But the Trump administration often worked at cross purposes with itself: one department saying one thing, a different department something else, and the White House pushing some other point of view entirely, which might change from one day to the next. As a result, the country was denied something only the federal government is in a position to provide: a coherent plan for moving forward, based on the kind of data only the federal government is in a position to collect.

The US is rejoining the World Health Organization. Quitting it was one of Trump’s dumber ideas, which this letter undoes.

Mask-wearing and social distancing have been mandated in federal buildings.

to protect the Federal workforce and individuals interacting with the Federal workforce, and to ensure the continuity of Government services and activities, on-duty or on-site Federal employees, on-site Federal contractors, and other individuals in Federal buildings and on Federal lands should all wear masks, maintain physical distance, and adhere to other public health measures, as provided in CDC guidelines.

A separate order mandates masks in airports, airplanes, trains, intercity buses, ferries, and all other forms of public transportation. This takes the onus off private companies like the airlines, who can now tell recalcitrant customers: “We may not like it either, but it’s not our call. Those are the rules.”

School reopening. The legislation Biden has proposed would appropriate money to pay the expenses associated with schools reopening safely, something he can’t do by himself. But he has ordered his administration to produce a single coherent set of guidelines and practices for safe in-person schooling.

Creating a White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator. This sounds a lot like what Mike Pence was supposed to be doing in the Trump administration. We can hope that Biden’s team — a Coordinator (Jeff Zients) who knows how government works and a Deputy Coordinator (Vivek Murthy) who knows public health — will be allowed to do their jobs without so much political interference.

OSHA will make guidelines for Covid-safe workplaces.

A Pandemic Testing Board will produce and coordinate a national strategy for Covid testing.

The government will also take responsibility for organizing the supply chain of material needed to fight the pandemic, invoking the Defense Production Act as necessary. There will be a plan for helping local hospitals, including using the National Guard where appropriate.

Climate and the Environment

The US rejoins the Paris Climate Agreement. By itself, this announcement doesn’t change US greenhouse gas emissions. But it is a powerful symbolic step.

The permit to construct the Keystone XL Pipeline is revoked. This is part of a long order with many parts. It also put a halt on oil leases in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. Trump had announced a leasing program last August; a lease sale was held on January 6; and the first leases were announced publicly on Trump’s last day in office.

It’s not clear how much of that Biden can undo. He can certainly prevent any new leases. Whether he can undo the ones already granted probably depends on how serious the “legal deficiencies” in Trump’s program are.

In light of the alleged legal deficiencies underlying the program, including the inadequacy of the environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Secretary of the Interior shall, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, place a temporary moratorium on all activities of the Federal Government relating to the implementation of the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program, as established by the Record of Decision signed August 17, 2020, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Secretary shall review the program and, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, conduct a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the oil and gas program.

Yale School of the Environment website E360 outlines the difficulties Biden faces. Basically, it’s the same problem anybody might run into: Once the government signs a contract, it’s hard to back out.

The same order instructs departments to examine all Trump-era environmental regulations and see what can be rolled back. It mentions specifically Trump’s shrinking of several national monuments, including Bears Ears; allowing gas-drilling and gas-transporting companies to leak more methane; rolling back automobile fuel-economy standards; and rolling back energy standards on new appliances. (Looking at all those actions in one list makes me realize just what a force for evil the Trump administration was.)

Electric vehicles. In the comments he made Monday on his “Buy American” executive order, Biden announced his intention to phase fossil-fuel-burning vehicles out of the federal fleet. That provision didn’t actually appear until “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad” came out on Wednesday.

The plan shall aim to use, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, all available procurement authorities to achieve or facilitate … clean and zero-emission vehicles for Federal, State, local, and Tribal government fleets, including vehicles of the United States Postal Service.

This is both a great idea and a big deal.

It’s a great idea because much of what the federal fleet does is a perfect job for electric vehicles. Think postal trucks, for example (225,000 of them): They don’t take long trips that would expose EVs’ range problems, and they return to the same depots every night, so they’re not going to get stranded somewhere in Montana, far from any charging station.

It’s a big deal because the federal fleet is huge: 645,000 vehicles, of which only 3,215 were electric as of last July. Knowing that those purchases are coming would put a floor under the US electric vehicle industry, creating economies of scale that would make EVs more affordable for the general public.

This order is also a sweeping policy statement whose full implications are hard to predict. In general, the US pledges to use its international influence to fight climate change rather than sabotage that fight, as the Trump administration had been doing.

It’s hard to know whether to post this under climate or public health, but Biden also has elevated the role of science in this administration by establishing a President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, similar to the existing Council of Economic Advisors.

Immigration

The easiest and most obviously legal changes Biden can make is to undo Trump’s executive orders, many of which were legally shaky to begin with.

Ending the Muslim ban. Probably the most egregiously bad of Trump’s immigration executive orders was his Muslim ban, which required several iterations even to become legal. Biden’s rescinding order calls the ban “a stain on our national conscience”, “inconsistent with our long history of welcoming people of all faiths and no faith at all”, and “a moral blight that has dulled the power of our example the world over”.

He promises “a rigorous, individualized vetting system” for people applying to come to the US, and orders US embassies “resume visa processing in a manner consistent with the revocation of the Executive Order and Proclamations specified in section 1 of this proclamation”.

The countries that had been subject to the ban were: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Nigeria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan, and Tanzania.

DACA deportations halted (maybe). By itself, Biden’s executive order on DACA doesn’t appear to do much; it simply instructs DHS to “take all actions [deemed legal and appropriate] to preserve and fortify DACA”. Trump frequently used such language to appear to be doing something when he really wasn’t.

But Biden’s order led to a memo from the acting secretary of DHS ordering “a 100-day pause on certain removals”. The Texas attorney general filed suit to invalidate the 100-day pause, which led to a temporary restraining order from a Trump-appointed judge. It’s not clear how this will play out.

The phony border emergency is over. When Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, even after he forced a government shutdown, he declared a state of emergency and moved funds from the Defense budget into wall construction. Congress passed a resolution canceling the emergency, but Trump vetoed it and Congress was unable to muster the 2/3 vote to override his veto. In effect, this meant that the President plus 1/3 of one house of Congress can appropriate money.

Biden has terminated the emergency and paused border-wall construction while his administration looks into legal options for canceling the existing construction contracts.

[B]uilding a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution. It is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security. … It shall be the policy of my Administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall.

Trump’s Executive Order 13768 is rescinded. The EO-13768 tried to do a variety of things. It restricted “sanctuary cities” from getting certain kinds of federal grants; increased the number of immigrants defined as “priorities for removal”; attempted to raise public ire against undocumented immigrants by publishing a weekly list of crimes they had committed; and tried to deputize local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law. A lot of that had already been blocked by the courts, but Biden’s order ends it.

Liberian refugees can stay a while longer. In 1991, President Bush the First granted temporary protected status to refugees form the Liberian civil war. (In this context, it’s worth noting the historical connection between the US and Liberia, a country established by freed American slaves.) Their legal situation has been complicated ever since, and then Trump targeted them for repatriation in 2018. Various obstacles have prevented their expulsion, which Biden has now blocked.

The census will count undocumented immigrants. Trump tried to change the census so that the population figures used to apportion representation in the House of Representatives (and consequently, electoral votes of the states) would only count US citizens and documented immigrants, rather than all inhabitants. This was counter to the 14th Amendment:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

Biden is changing it back.

At no point since our Nation’s Founding has a person’s immigration status alone served as a basis for excluding that person from the total population count used in apportionment. … [T]he Secretary [of Commerce] shall report the tabulation of total population by State that reflects the whole number of persons whose usual residence was in each State as of the designated census date in section 141(a) of title 13, United States Code, without regard to immigration status.

Discrimination and Racial Equity

Phasing out federal contracts with private prisons. The order is self-explanatory:

The Attorney General shall not renew Department of Justice contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities, as consistent with applicable law.

This is not an explicitly racial issue, but is deeply intertwined with mass incarceration of people of color. NPR interviews the ACLU’s David Fathi:

[T]he order to the Justice Department to end its contracts with private prisons is a very important step. It will not by itself end mass incarceration, but it will curb an industry that has a financial interest in perpetuating mass incarceration.

Letting these contracts run to the end of their term will take years, and the order doesn’t apply to the private prisons holding detained immigrants. Reportedly, Biden is considering such an order, but some sources don’t expect it to happen. I’ll take a wild guess about the obstacle: So many immigrants are detained that no existing federal facilities can hold them, and Biden still doesn’t know exactly how many such immigrants he wants to continue detaining. Releasing just one guy who turns out to be dangerous — think Mike Dukakis and Willie Horton — could be a political disaster.

The “gag rule” is on its way out. Current law doesn’t allow federal money to pay for abortions or to be used in family-planning clinics that also perform abortions. Biden can’t change that by himself. But HHS regulations go further, and stipulate that a federally-funded family planning clinic can’t even tell a woman how to get an abortion or refer her to a clinic that does them. Similarly, regulations deny federal funding abroad to organizations that have anything to do with abortion, even if they use non-US-federal money to do those things.

To the extent those policies are enshrined in regulations, Biden can just ask the regulating agencies to review their policies and start a regulation-altering process. To the extent he can order more than that directly, he is.

Trump’s order banning diversity training is revoked. In September, Trump issued an executive order that labeled diversity training — basically, any program that mentions “white privilege” or “male privilege” — as “race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating”, and banned federal agencies and contractors from spending money on it. Biden’s order rescinds Trump’s order.

The same order revokes Trump’s order establishing his 1776 Commission, which produced a very shoddy report telling a whitewashed story of American history in which racism barely figures, and “progressivism” is covered in the same chapter as fascism and communism. Trump had hoped that report would form the center of an American history curriculum counteracting the NYT’s 1619 Project. No federal money will now go towards that purpose, though of course the report exists and can still be adopted by local school districts that want to propagandize their children.

The order includes more abstract things that could turn out to be important, like this policy statement.

Affirmatively advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our Government. Because advancing equity requires a systematic approach to embedding fairness in decision-making processes, executive departments and agencies (agencies) must recognize and work to redress inequities in their policies and programs that serve as barriers to equal opportunity.

So we can hope that we’ve seen the last of roomfuls of white men discussing women’s health or racial discrimination.

Transgender troops can serve in the military again.

Therefore, it shall be the policy of the United States to ensure that all transgender individuals who wish to serve in the United States military and can meet the appropriate standards shall be able to do so openly and free from discrimination.

The order instructs the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security (which covers the Coast Guard) to “immediately prohibit involuntary separations, discharges, and denials of reenlistment or continuation of service on the basis of gender identity or under circumstances relating to their gender identity”. People already drummed out of service will have their service records “corrected”, presumably to eliminate any less-than-honorable discharge associated with their gender identity.

Where appropriate, the department concerned shall offer such individuals an opportunity to rejoin the military should they wish to do so and meet the current entry standards.

A different order denounces discrimination on the basis of gender identification or sexual orientation and instructs all agencies to review their regulations with that in mind, but it’s not clear what the practical effects will be.

Respecting tribal sovereignty. This is more of a policy-and-process announcement than an immediate change. It should give Native American tribes more weight when they protest against actions (like the Keystone XL pipeline) that threaten the environment on tribal lands.

It is a priority of my Administration to make respect for Tribal sovereignty and self-governance, commitment to fulfilling Federal trust and treaty responsibilities to Tribal Nations, and regular, meaningful, and robust consultation with Tribal Nations cornerstones of Federal Indian policy. The United States has made solemn promises to Tribal Nations for more than two centuries. Honoring those commitments is particularly vital now, as our Nation faces crises related to health, the economy, racial justice, and climate change — all of which disproportionately harm Native Americans.

Other

Another order freezes changes to federal regulations that had not been finalized by the end of the Trump administration, and advises departments to delay implementation of changes that got in under the wire for 60 days, so that they can be reviewed.

Biden extended a Trump order to stop collecting on federal student loans and temporarily stop charging interest on the outstanding balance.

 Today is National Dark Chocolate Day. Oh no! I have no dark chocolate in the house! I must go out and buy some!

But do people actually go out and buy ice cream on National Ice Cream Day (July 18), or pickles on National Pickle Day (November 14), or avocados on National Avocado Day (July 31)? According to the above article, they do. 

(Right now, my cats are trying to convince me that National Cat Day is every day, and that International Cat Day (August 8) is also every day and they get double treats).

Every morning, my husband announces the National Day of the day, which is how I know that today is National Dark Chocolate Day (today). I don't really care if I'm being sold to; I just have fun hearing how ludicrous some of the candidates can be. 

I'm not sure what behavior the keepers of the National Day Calendar are trying to support with National Grab Some Nuts Day (August 3), however.

Right now, I am learning that not all music helps me concentrate. The beginning to realize that "Apassionata" by Beethoven is not the relaxing Sunday morning adjunct to writing this blog. It's waking me up, but it's taking up too much of my attention. Dum dum dum dum dum dum DUM! on the piano seems to take over my thoughts.

It's easy to listen to, yet it's not the "easy listening" genre found in grocery stores. It has musical merit with original tunes rather than sanitized versions of popular music. I would be distracted by easy listening, usually wailing with a certain "What did they do to this song?"

Concentration music seems to help put me in the zone, bolstering my writing without sucking my attention in. It's not neutral; it actually helps me write. Richard seems okay with me playing this more relaxed music when I think he'd rather listen to Beethoven. I'm thankful that this music exists.

Right now I'm listening to Eric Satie, having given up on Beethoven. This piece is getting written. All is good with Sunday morning's blog.

I have not a single idea today. Unless you want to hear about hot baths, or about coffee again.

What does a writer do when they run out of ideas? I can answer that for myself:

• Talking to someone. My husband is a good person to bounce things off of, so sometimes he comes up with an amazing idea. (Sometimes he comes up with utter dreck.) Playing “what if” is a very good exercise with another person.

• Writing exercises. I like just freewriting until I come up with an idea, usually with the topic (“What is going on with Josh,” for example) on the top line.

• Meditating/napping. At my age, both seem to be the same thing. When I try to meditate, I sleep. But I do get help from my dreams.

• Stepping back. Sometimes I lose ideas because I work too hard.

I could use more strategies if any of my readers have some. Reach me at lleach (at)  classicnet.net

Written version of a sermon shared with the Shoreline UU church

JANUARY 24, 2021 – WHO IS IN CHARGE HERE? –

READINGS: Ancient and Modern

The Readings today are about Who or What is in Charge. Both of them refer to a very personal deity, but our religion asserts that reality, the ultimate truth is unified, but has no singular description, no perfect name.   If you need to, listen to how these poetic, mythic, and imaginative descriptors of truth run parallel to the existential, literal, and logical. 

The Ancient Reading is from Jewish and Christian scripture, the Biblical Book of Numbers chapter 11 verses 10-17.  The setting is that the people have escaped slavery with God’s protection and Moses’s leadership, but are now wandering the wilderness.   

“Moses heard the people of every family wailing at the entrance to their tents. The Lord (GOD) became exceedingly angry, and Moses was troubled. He asked the Lord, “Why have you brought this trouble on your servant? What have I done to displease you that you put the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant, to the land you promised on oath to their ancestors? Where can I get meat for all these people? They keep wailing to me, ‘Give us meat to eat!’ I cannot carry all these people by myself; the burden is too heavy for me.  If this is how you are going to treat me, please go ahead and kill me—if I have found favor in your eyes—and do not let me face my own ruin.”

The Lord said to Moses: “Bring me seventy of Israel’s elders who are known to you as leaders and officials among the people. Have them come to the tent of meeting, that they may stand there with you.  I will come down and speak with you there, and I will take some of the power of the Spirit that is on you and put it on them. They will share the burden of the people with you so that you will not have to carry it alone.”

The modern reading comes from “Communicating Our Faith” By the Religious Educator, Liz Jones, and the Reverend, Tom Owen-Towle. It invokes the sense in our faith that everyone carries religious authority and thus everyone is in Charge. 

“As Unitarians we hold that every unit of existence is inherently valuable and to be treated as such. We also contend that the cosmos is unitary, that reality is indivisible and whole, that God or Goddess [or Truth Ultimate] is one.

As Universalists we contend that wisdom is discoverable in every era and corner of the universe. And we assert that the only salvation worth having is communal not individual, and that all creatures are held in the eternal embrace of a loving deity, rest assured.

As Unitarian Universalists we covenant together… focusing on shared vows rather than set creeds. Our lives are ultimately measured by right relations instead of right beliefs. We promise our spiritual kin that we will comfort, celebrate, challenge, and companion one another for better, for worse, -ongoingly-. Universalist forebear Hosea Ballou caught the kernel of our covenant in 1805: “If we have love, no disagreement can do us any harm; but if we have not love, no agreement can do us any good.”

Now we will respond to the readings by singing together the very UU song, Spirit of Life. 

HYMN OF REFLECTION (CS): #123, Spirit of Life

SERMON:

These past few weeks have been amazing, filled with fear and hope. Change and resistance to change.  Personally, I cannot say how great is my relief that we now have a US President who understands the difference between being a democratically elected executive and being a politically powerful demagogue. 

American culture is a constant tug-of war between “Me” and “We,” between individual needs and shared responsibilities. A couple of days ago, after listening to an article on NPR about the baseball player, Hank Aaron, and his life of excellence, dignity and inclusion, I heard a conservative Trump supporter say, “We just want to be left alone.” At its worst, the struggle is not simply between me and we but over exactly who is included in “We the people.”  

Freedom and connection, risk and protection, continuously vie for our minds and hearts.  Attitudes of “my way or the highway,” or “victory at all costs,” surely undermine the healthy process of democracy.  So, as religious people one of our core values and promises is to “promote the rights of conscience and the use of the democratic process” in this world and I hope this recent US election makes it more likely that we can fulfill that part of our mission.

But the challenge goes deeper.  You should know, that a liberal UU congregation as well as an entire nation can be divided by questions of control and power.  All of human history and individual experience includes repeated struggles about who is in Charge.  In a cartoon I read this past week, a little boy is playing with little cars spread over the living room floor. His mom is reading in the next room.  Then, older sister comes home and trips on a vehicle. “Clean up this mess!” she demands. 

Little brother stands in response, “You’re not the boss of me.”

She tenses at this, glaring at him, so he steps back and tries to shore up his position, “I don’t have to do what you say.”

She continues to glare and balls both fists, so he looks to the next room and adds, “especially when mom is around.”

It is good to know who is in Charge, and to whom you are accountable for your actions. Although, the comic actress, Tina Fey, was interviewed a few years back and was asked, who is your boss?  She responded, “My six-year-old daughter. “Kids are definitely the boss of you. Anyone who will barge into the room while you are on the commode is the boss of you.”

IN a UU congregation the ultimate boss must be not a person, but that quality of being that is both loving and reasonable. The boss is called by many names, Spirit of Life, Compassionate Reason, buddha dharma, the gestalt of the good, true and beautiful. 

Our basic theology was summarized in the reading by Jones and Owen Towle.  It is this: the power of the good and true is found most clearly in individual lives. But the one best way for individuals to bring the true and good into their lives is through an encouraging community of people. We come closer to our goal by seeking the true and good together, and weighing the impact of their insights and choices in one another’s lives.

Thus, Unitarian Universalists trust in congregations. We have faith in congregational life.  Our polity, the way we govern and organize congregations, is called congregational polity. That means that each congregation is in control of itself, not a bishop, nor episcopate, nor district council, nor national body, or global authority. No one is the boss of us. No one can tell a congregation what it can and cannot do.  To be sure, we are bound to other UU congregations by the power of covenants, open-ended agreements about shared goals, and shared works. This church is in community with other UU congregations, and we make decisions with them about many things. But they cannot tell us what to do for and among ourselves, ever. 

So, at an elementary and practical level, the congregation is in Charge here. But notice that the community forms to invoke and serve the truth tempered by compassion, an open and transparent heart, and mind.  So, the question of how to reach that must temper all our choices. 

For example, when I was in seminary, I worshipped for half a year with a Quaker meeting in Colorado, the kind with no minister or governing board. They lived the classic ideal of Quakerism that required unanimity in group decision making. They owned a small building with a border of grass, flower-beds, and a few trees.  The climate there is arid; 16 inches of rain a year compared to our 37.  So, they needed a watering system that would keep all their plants alive instead of dying and being replaced every two years or so.  They also had a problem with individuals leaving the water on too long, both an ecological and financial issue.  So, they decided to install an automatic sprinkler system.  It only took them one meeting to discuss this idea and agree. Then they had to decide which system to buy and how much it would cost. Then they had to decide who would install it and for how much. Then they had to choose when it would be installed.  I met them, five years after they decided to get an automatic system, beaming with pride at their brand new, economical, water-smart, and healthy landscape.  But I wondered if five years was way too much time for such a decision. 

When I asked, they told me that “this was how God works.” I thought to myself, if God only took six days to create the world, why did he take five years to install a sprinkler system? Truthfully, I understood. That community valued participation in group decisions and peaceful management of conflict over being quick and efficient.

This was a small congregation, perhaps a hundred people.  In America, the average size of a congregation, in any religious tradition, is about 150 members because it is still possible for the leaders to know and talk with everyone.  When congregations that grow much beyond that size must delegate power and decisions to smaller groups within the congregation.  This takes some centralized control.  As the reading about Moses illustrates, if everyone is in Charge then no one is and one person cannot be in Charge of everything. So, we distribute power and delegate control to various responsible persons in the congregation, including the minister. 

When I was a teenager and young man, my most favorite movie of all time was Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  King Arthur is out looking for lords to join with him at the round-table to rule all of Briton. Approaching a castle, he sees a peasant on the road and calls out “Old woman!” The peasant responds, “Man.” 

“Oh, man, sorry.  Can you tell me what knight lives in that castle over there?”

The peasant responds, “I’m 37.” 

King Arthur, quite confused, asks “What?” 

“I’m 37,” The man indignantly responds “I’m not old.” 

“I did say sorry about the “old woman,” Arthur explains, “but from behind you looked…”

The peasant cuts in, “What I object to is you immediately treat me like an inferior.” 

“Well, I am king.” Arthur responds.

” Oh, King eh… and how’d you get that? By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma and by exploiting the workers…”

He later explains that the peasants have formed an anarcho-syndicalist commune where all take turns to act as an executive for the week, but their choices have to be ratified at a special meeting. My point is that a congregation does not need a king, but it is not a commune either.  In UU congregations large enough to call a minister, people must make choices about how to share ministry with that minister while also dividing responsibilities.

On common point of tension between ministers and leaders is that both have “the Congregation” as their boss.  This is problematic because a congregation is not really a person, or thing.  It exists, perhaps, in congregational meetings and gatherings, but even there it still is nothing more than the overlapping ideas of many individuals about what it is and isn’t.  The larger a congregation the more it is made up of overlapping circles, but not all of these are perfectly in communication.  Sometimes these circles have no common person between them, except the minister. 

Because of my role, I am near the center of many things.  I speak personally and work in many groups. My very job is to speak to common values, the roots of our tradition the truth that inspires us and the vision of the future that bind us. Thus, I invoke the center. But to be certain, I am not The Center. The center is the ever moving and changing overlap of many minds, and thus moves like the wind and can not be pinned down. That is why love and thoughtfulness must be our boss, to anchor our community and relationships.  

What also greatly helps such relationships is to state clearly for what each is responsible and how not to step on the work of the other.   Also, it helps to state what choices we share and exactly how we will decide together.  For example, in our congregation as in most, there is a clear difference in most people’s minds between the minister and the board of trustees.  But if you read our bylaws you will see that I am automatically a member of the board, not as a trustee but as the minister.  So, what would it mean for me to hold me accountable for my ministry?  Am I on the board or not? Similar questions arise bout the relationship between the board and committees, especially when the same people serve on both.  Does the board control committees or are committees ruled by leaders, or by the congregation? Furthermore, if I am on a committee, can I be the boss of that committee? In the end, the question is if no one is in control of everything, then who is in control of specific things and who will back that person up or hold that person to account for their work? 

When I was in my second year of ministry, the small congregation I was serving had conflict. This caused a shortfall between the proposed budget and the results of the pledge drive.  A small group of people came to the board meeting where we were to decide what to do.  I am not going into all the reasons for it, but those people came with a written proposal that I be given a six-month contract, and if the money did not come in that time, I would be let go.  My response was to tell them that a ministerial call is not a job. They had called me because they wanted what a full-time minister could do for them.  Either they should commit to having a long-term, full-time minister, or admit that they did not want a minister and call a congregational meeting to dismiss me.  Half measures would not work.  Because I was clear, a middle-aged couple spoke up. I did not know these people very well. They came to worship but did little else because they had done it all for decades before I arrived. One said that the two of them knew the congregation well enough to know they had the resources to pay me. They also said that they would lead a second round of the pledge drive.  Then they got a few others to help and the net result was that I stayed and continued to serve them for a total of eight years. 

In the end it was not me alone, nor what I said that won the day. Nor was it that couple and their leadership alone. In the end it was the whole of the congregation, working together to make shared decisions that ended up growing the congregation by 10% and helping me be a successful minister. 

So, as we put one step in front of the other and go together in the light of a new day let love be our guide and let the clear light of reason illuminate our steps.  May we be clear about who does what, realizing that in the end we must all work together in harmony. Let us be told what to do only by the clear mind and the caring heart.  Our worship Companion, Cal Spengler, will now call for our offering and we will listen to a song written in November of 2016.  As the song says, “I know you’re scared / And I’m scared too / But here I am, / Right next to you. You gotta put one foot in front of the other / and Lead with love.”

Note: I am in good health and in no more danger of dying right now as other people in good health.

 I'm fifty-seven years old. I think of dying.

I'm not morbid; I don't think of dying all the time, and I am not possessed by those thoughts. But between the other thoughts, it does occur to me, especially in the time of COVID.

I think about the process of dying. I don't like the thought of being in pain, and many of the ways to die are painful. I'm one of those people who would like to die in old age in my sleep, but that may not be possible. I know that if there's any chance of being savable, I will be kept alive and in pain. I don't know what I think of that, but I have a DNR (do not resuscitate) order in my things that needs to go into a safety deposit box.

I'm afraid and growing more certain that I might experience a glimpse of heaven before I die, but will fade to black. And then nothing. 

How can anyone be ready to die without an afterlife? That's what I'm trying to find out. The only solution I can come up with is to live as well as I can now.

It felt good. I have been struggling with this book for so long that it's refreshing to have a streak where writing is effortless. I had a day of flow.

Here is an excerpt of my story: 

Josh and Penny sat down with their beverages. “I hear you play violin,” Josh said, falling into the typical conversation gambit.

“Yes, I do. At the conservatory. In the Baroque Symphony and a string quartet. I’m second chair.”

“I like baroque,” Josh said awkwardly. “It helps me relax.”

“Your mother says you’re an instructor at a college. Tell me about it,” she countered, sounding equally awkward.

“Yes, I am. I teach English composition. I also write — mostly poetry.” I won’t show you what I write, Josh thought, because it’s all about Jeanne. He had written some of his best poetry about Jeanne.

“Have you been published?” Penny asked as she dug her phone out of her purse. 

“Yes, a few places. It’s part of what you have to do as a faculty member — at least once you’re a professor.”

Penny pulled up a picture on her phone of a tall woman with a spare body and sharp cheekbones, wearing black and white concert dress. “This is my girlfriend, Natalie.” Natalie’s hair was short and spiked, and she held a clarinet. 

Josh looked again — the woman was compelling — until the words registered to him: “Girlfriend?” He felt an unholy glee that his mother's plans were foiled.

“I hope that doesn’t bother you. I tried to tell your mother, but — “

“Nobody tells my mother anything she doesn’t want to hear,” Josh sympathized. “Besides,” he pulled his own phone out, “I just broke up with the love of my life.” He pulled up a picture of Jeanne sitting in the cafe in a purple sweater that brought out all her color.

“She’s beautiful,” Penny said. “Why did you break up?”

“Because she thinks I’m too young. She says I have my whole life ahead of me.” Josh closed his eyes because he didn’t trust them not to leak tears.

“How much older is she?” Penny picked up the phone and studied it more carefully.

“She’s twenty years older. But that didn’t matter to me. I never felt like I was that much younger, because — I don’t know. I feel like I went from too young for my contemporaries to too old for them overnight. And he knew which night — the night he saw a tree struck by lightning as he stood out in a park after midnight. And Jeanne understood — or tried to, anyway; Josh wasn’t sure anyone could truly understand his visions without experiencing them.

“Natalie is seventeen years older than me. Look,” and Penny showed him another picture of Natalie, a close-up picture of a woman who certainly looked about forty. “I’m not sure it’s as big a thing for lesbians.”

“So tell me about her,” Penny coaxed.

“We’re broken up,” Josh said miserably. “But she’s a professor of plant biology, and she designs gardens for people with trees and berry bushes and all sorts of edible things, nestled in their backyards. She has a voice that carries effortlessly. She’s got a dry sense of humor, and she’s passionate about things, and she — I’m not used to being at a loss for words,” Josh finished. He looked at his hands.

“It’s a bummer when you break up with someone, isn’t it?” Penny said, and got him another cup of tea.

Certainly, our citizens are facing the PTSD symptom of arousal -- a constant vigilance against future harm. This seems appropriate as a response to the grinding down of our psyches. This will not go away immediately as Biden takes office, because PTSD takes months, if not years, to go away. Biden is taking over a shell-shocked country.

I anticipate a year where Americans are wary of what the government will do, a pessimism about government, a feeling of a heavy weight on our hunched shoulders. 

Doubled by the burden of COVID, we in the US are grouchy and protective of ourselves. We need to find a way to take care of ourselves, by taking time to ourselves, finding an absorbing activity, spending time with our roommates and pets, and thinking outside ourselves. 

We need to be good and merciful to ourselves, and to others. The long nightmare will fade away.

 from a Zoom service of First Parish in Billerica, Massachusetts
January 24, 2021

Opening Words

The opening words are by Pheidippides, the Athenian messenger who ran all the way from the plains of Marathon to the Acropolis. Just before collapsing and dying from exhaustion, he announced the outcome of the battle against the Persian invaders: “Nike! Nike! Nenikekiam!” Victory! Victory! Rejoice!

Meditation

Imagine that it is a year ago — January 2020. We are gathered in your beautiful, historic sanctuary. I’m standing at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s pulpit, when suddenly I am overcome by the spirit of prophesy. And I tell you that one year hence, we will have inaugurated a new president, who will receive a record number of votes and win by more than seven million, even flipping states like Arizona and Georgia. For the first time in American history, a woman of color will be vice president. The new White House will be backed up by majorities in both houses of Congress.

Now imagine that you all believe me. After the service, we go downstairs to share that wonderful spread of food you always assemble. Listen to the room as it burbles with optimism and idealism and we envision all the wonderful things the new administration might accomplish.

Responsive Reading

“It Matters What We Believe” by Sophia Lyon Fahs

Reading

Excerpts from:  “A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling” by Kevin Roose.

Every morning, Valerie Gilbert, a Harvard-educated writer and actress, wakes up in her Upper East Side apartment; feeds her dog, Milo, and her cats, Marlena and Celeste; brews a cup of coffee; and sits down at her oval dining room table.Then, she opens her laptop and begins fighting the global cabal.

Ms. Gilbert, 57, is a believer in QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory. Like all QAnon faithful, she is convinced that the world is run by a Satanic group of pedophiles that includes top Democrats and Hollywood elites, and that President Trump has spent years leading a top-secret mission to bring these evildoers to justice. ...

These are confusing times for followers of QAnon. They were told that Mr. Trump would be re-elected in a landslide, and that a coming “storm” would expose the global pedophile ring and bring its leaders to justice.

But there have been no mass arrests, and Mr. Trump is leaving office on Wednesday under the cloud of a second impeachment. Many prominent QAnon followers have been arrested for their roles in this month’s deadly mob riot at the U.S. Capitol. They are being barred by the thousands from major social networks for spreading misinformation about voter fraud, and law enforcement agencies are treating the movement as a domestic extremist threat.

These setbacks have left QAnon believers like Ms. Gilbert hoping for a last-minute miracle. Her current theory is that Mr. Trump will not actually leave office on Wednesday, but will instead declare martial law, declassify damning information about the “deep state” and arrest thousands of cabal members, including President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. ...

What attracts Ms. Gilbert and many other people to QAnon 
isn’t just the content of the conspiracy theory itself. It’s the community and sense of mission it provides. New QAnon believers are invited to chat rooms and group texts, 
and their posts are showered with likes and retweets. They make friends, 
and are told that they are not lonely Facebook addicts 
squinting at zoomed-in paparazzi photos, 
but patriots gathering “intel” for a righteous revolution. ...

Q, who once sent dozens of updates a day, has essentially vanished from the internet in recent weeks, posting only four times since the November election. ... But Ms. Gilbert isn’t worried. For her, QAnon was always less about Q and more about the crowdsourced search for truth. She loves assembling her own reality in real time, patching together shards of information and connecting them to the core narrative. ... When she solves a new piece of the puzzle, she posts it to Facebook, where her QAnon friends post heart emojis and congratulate her.

This week, when Mr. Biden becomes president and Mr. Trump leaves the White House, it will be a huge blow to QAnon’s core mythology, and it may force some believers to acknowledge that they’ve been lied to. Many will cope by spinning the development as a win, or saying it proves that Mr. Trump is playing the long game. Others will quietly ditch Q and transfer their enthusiasm to a new conspiracy theory. A few might be jolted back to reality.

But Ms. Gilbert is undeterred. She trusts Q’s plan, at least for a little while longer, and she wants [others] to trust it, too.