HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 13, 2022 (Friday)

Today was White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s last day at the White House after 15 months. She set out to restore truth, transparency, and accountability of the administration to the press, and to that end she has held 224 press briefings—together, all of former president Trump’s press secretaries combined held only 205 in his four years in office. Psaki gave her first press conference on January 20, 2021, the day of President Joe Biden’s inauguration, telling the press, “I have deep respect for the role of a free and independent press in our democracy and for the role all of you play," before answering questions.

Psaki’s tenure has been notable for her ability to parry loaded questions, turning them into opportunities to provide facts and information. Her quick answers to leading questions have been labeled “Psaki bombs,” and they have enabled her to redirect the conversation without engaging in the hostility that former press secretaries sometimes fell into. Her conduct and evident respect for reporters has been an important corrective to the disrespect with which the press has often been treated by lawmakers in the recent past.

When she finished today’s briefing, she thanked members of the press. "You have challenged me, you have pushed me, you have debated me, and at times we have disagreed. That is democracy in action. That is it working." She continued: "Thank you for what you do. Thank you for making me better. And most importantly, thank you for the work every day you do to make this country stronger."

Karine Jean-Pierre will take Psaki’s spot as the White House press secretary. The first Black woman and openly LBGTQ person to serve as press secretary, Jean-Pierre has a background as a political analyst and worked as chief of staff for Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2020 presidential campaign.

Biden has focused on strengthening ties to Asia, and has just held the nation’s first summit in the U.S. with leaders from the 10 nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, known as ASEAN. Those nations include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. Myanmar is also a member, but its leaders were not invited because of that nation’s recent coup.

The meeting was designed to emphasize U.S. ties to the region after the previous administration pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact in 2017 and then didn’t nominate an ambassador to ASEAN. Biden is trying to lay the groundwork for future cooperation on the coronavirus, with regard to China, and against Russia; right now, he is hoping to get the ASEAN nations to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, despite the region’s ties to Moscow. The president told the leaders that the Indo-Pacific and ASEAN region are vital to the United States of America. “[A] great deal of [the] history of our world in the next 50 years is going to be written [in] the ASEAN countries and our relationship with you is the future in the coming… decades."

In his first trip to Asia as president, Biden will travel next week to South Korea and Japan. While there, he will meet with leaders from the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, a strategic alliance organized in 2007 and made up of Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.

Meanwhile, there were signs today that the split in the Republican Party is cracking further open. Former vice president Mike Pence has announced he will be campaigning for Georgia governor Brian Kemp as he tries to keep the Republican nomination away from former senator David Perdue, who is backed by former president Trump. Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, is working for Kemp’s reelection. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former president George W. Bush are also backing Kemp.

Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls the Georgia battle “a growing proxy fight…between establishment forces backing Kemp and the Trump loyalists who want to remake the state Republican Party in the former president’s mold.”

And yet, Kemp is still an extremist who toes the party line, including in his work to suppress the vote in Georgia. As Pence said of him: “He built a safer and stronger Georgia by cutting taxes, empowering parents and investing in teachers, funding law enforcement, and standing strong for the right to life.”

That embrace of that same Republican ideology in Texas has the state’s electrical grid back in the news, as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has asked consumers to scale back energy use to make up for six power-generation facilities that failed just before a hot weekend.

Most of Texas is on its own power grid, a decision made in the 1930s to keep it clear of federal regulation. This isolation means both that it avoids federal regulation and that it cannot import more electricity during periods of high demand. To keep electricity prices low, ERCOT did not prepare its equipment for freezing weather, and in February 2021 the Texas electric grid failed during a cold wave, leaving more than 3 million people without electricity or heat. Two hundred and forty-six people died, while El Paso, which is not part of ERCOT and is instead linked to a larger grid that includes other states and thus is regulated, had weatherized its equipment and its customers lost power only briefly.

The problem didn’t stop there. The then–chief executive officer of ERCOT recently testified that Texas governor Greg Abbott told ERCOT to keep the wholesale price of electricity at an astonishing $9000 per megawatt-hour (one study said this was $6,578 too high) for about three days longer than needed, thus overcharging customers by about $26.3 billion.

That money did not appear to fix the system. In June 2021, mechanical failures during a heat wave pushed the state to the verge of blackouts and prompted ERCOT to ask people to turn their AC to higher temperatures, turn off their lights, and avoid using appliances that take a lot of electricity. Now, less than a year later, the system is in trouble again.

News of the issue dropped after 5:00 this evening, prompting Democratic candidate for Texas governor Beto O’Rourke to accuse Abbott of trying to bury the story that he cannot keep the Texas power grid running. O’Rourke tweeted: “When I’m governor, we’ll fix the grid, lower energy bills and put people over profits.” Hours later, he tweeted simply: “I will fix the grid.”

Yesterday, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and threats against other countries, leaders of Finland urged their nation to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) immediately. NATO was formed in 1949 to resist the expansion of the Soviet Union and now stands against Russia. Finland, which shares 830 miles of border with Russia, would bring to the alliance significant power. Sweden, which borders Finland on the other side, is contemplating the same bid and is expected to announce a similar stance soon.

NATO member Turkey expressed concern about Finland and Sweden joining NATO, which might well be Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s way of putting pressure on Congress to approve of arms sales to the nation, proposed by the administration but not yet in place.

The House has, though, passed a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine. In the Senate, Rand Paul (R-KY) stopped its fast passage, delaying the vote at least a week.

With a giant aid package for Ukraine on the way and what looks to be the expansion of NATO, today for the first time since February 18, six days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was able to make contact with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. They spoke for an hour. Of the subject of their conversation, the defense department readout said simply: “Secretary Austin urged an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication.”

she says it the way i see it

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 15, 2022 (Sunday)

Yesterday, an 18-year-old white man murdered 10 people and wounded three others with an AR-15. The shooter traveled more than 200 miles to get to a predominantly Black neighborhood, where he put on heavy body armor and live streamed his attack as he gunned down people grocery shopping. Eleven of those he shot were Black.

The Buffalo Police Commissioner, Joseph Gramaglia, said, “The evidence that we have uncovered so far makes no mistake that this is an absolute racist hate crime. It will be prosecuted as a hate crime. This is someone who has hate in their heart, soul and mind."

Before his attack, the shooter published a 180-page screed on Google Drive. It is mostly a list of his weaponry, but in it he also explained his belief in what is known as the “great replacement theory,” embraced by white nationalists. This is the idea that white people are losing economic, cultural, and political power to Black people and other people of color. The name is usually associated with a French agitator who argued in a 2011 book that immigrants were destroying European culture, but the theory that an “other” is destroying traditional society has roots stretching far back in European history. In the twenty-first century, that theory has launched right-wing political parties and shootings around the world.

But the Buffalo shooter’s ramblings drew not only from the European theory—although there is plenty of that in his 180 pages of racism and anti-Semitism. They also drew from America’s own version of a theory of replacement.

That theory comes out of the 1870s and was explicitly connected to voting.

In 1867, Congress began the process of recognizing the right of Black people to have a say in their government. In the Military Reconstruction Act, it called for conventions in former Confederate states to write new state constitutions and permitted Black southerners to register to vote to choose delegates to those conventions. White supremacists scoffed at the idea that formerly enslaved people and those white men willing to work with them could produce coherent constitutions.

When their constitutions not only were coherent, but made adjustments to give more representation to poorer white men than the prewar constitutions had provided, white supremacists set out to make sure voters did not ratify the new constitutions. Needing to avoid the U.S. Army, still stationed in the South to protect Black people and their white allies, the white supremacists dressed up in white sheets to look like dead Confederate soldiers (no one was fooled) and tried to terrorize voters to keep them from the polls.

It didn’t work. Voters ratified the new constitutions, which guaranteed Black voting. Congress readmitted the southern states to the Union, but not until they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That crucially important amendment dissolved the state laws discriminating against Black Americans. It established that Black people were U.S. citizens and guaranteed that the U.S. government would see to it that no state could take away the rights of any citizen without the due process of law.

In 1870, white politicians in Georgia tried to undermine their new state constitution. The American people then ratified the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right of Black men to vote. Congress also created the Department of Justice to enable the federal government to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, which it promptly did. Attorney General Amos Akerman, a former Confederate who had become a Republican, oversaw more than 1000 cases against the Ku Klux Klan.

With the federal government holding them to account for their racist attacks on Black Americans, southern white supremacists began to argue that their objections to Black equality were actually about voting. By 1871, they argued that Black men voted for leaders who promised roads and hospitals and schools. Those social investments would require tax levies, and since the Black population was poor almost by definition after enslavement, those taxes would fall almost entirely on the white men who owned property. In this telling, Black voting was essentially a redistribution of wealth from those with money to those without, from white men to Black men. It was socialism.

White supremacists began to say that they objected to Black voting and to the governments Black people elected not on racial grounds, but on economic ones. They promised to “redeem” the South from the profligate state governments that they said were bleeding tax dollars out of white landowners to provide services for the poor, generally characterized as Black, although there was no racial monopoly on poverty in the post–Civil War South.

In 1876, the “Redeemers” took over the southern states, thanks partly to the rhetoric that made them sound reasonable to northern observers and largely to the violence that enabled them to keep Black men from the polls. The “Solid South” would stay Democratic until Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, running for president on a platform that called for the federal government to leave states’ racial discrimination alone, won five deep southern states in 1964.

The violence of the 1876 election, along with fears of what their lives would look like in its wake, led Black Americans to leave the South in a movement known as the Exodus. In 1879 and 1880, about 20,000 Black southerners went west to Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. “[T]he whole South…had got into the hands of the very men that held us slaves,” one recalled, “and we thought that the men that held us slaves was holding the reins of government over our heads…. [and] there was hope for us and we had better go.”

About two thousand of those migrants went to Indiana.

Indiana was a contested state in which the Republican and Democratic parties traded power. In 1876, it had gone to the Democrats by a few thousand votes.

When Black Americans began to come to their state, Indiana Democrats immediately howled that the Republicans were importing Black migrants to shift the state back toward the Republicans in the 1880 election. Their clamor was loud enough to cause a Senate investigation. The Democratic majority on the select committee concluded that the Republicans must have induced the Black southerners to leave their region because there was well-paid work and no violence in the South; Republicans retorted that if they were really trying to flood the electoral system, they would have left Black Americans where they were.

But the conspiracy theory took root. White Hoosier Democrats met Black migrants with showers of rocks and vowed to “clean out all the g–d d– –n n***ers in the county before the [1880] election.” After a political rally in Rockport, Indiana, Democrats attacked local Black inhabitants, shouting: “Kill them, kill them.” After they shot Uriah Webb, one rioter stood over his body and said, “One vote less,” while the others cheered Democratic presidential candidate Winfield Scott Hancock.

Racial hostility kept the Black population of Indiana small, but it also fed the cultural and social discrimination that made Indiana the beating heart of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Under violent con man David Curtis Stephenson, who raped, mutilated, and murdered a female state employee, the Indiana Ku Klux Klan developed the idea of “100% Americanism,” which argued for a hierarchy of races in which the white race was uppermost. Immigrants and Black Americans, that theory said, were destroying traditional America.

That argument has poisoned American politics since the 1870s. Yesterday, the Buffalo shooter echoed the modern European great replacement theory, but he also echoed the racial “socialist” argument of the U.S. He railed against Black Americans, whom he wildly insisted take, on average, $700,000 apiece from white Americans. He urged those who thought like him not to pay taxes, which he said would be wasted on such people. Then he warned white Americans not to become a political minority because minorities are never treated well.

Today’s Republican politicians, including Elise Stefanik of New York, the third ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, have pushed the great replacement theory for years and even after yesterday’s massacre have refused to denounce it. That theory is based in racial hate, but it is not only about racial hate. It is also about politics, and today Republicans are using it to create a one-party state.

“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," Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, who is one of the country’s leading proponents of the great replacement theory, said on his show. "But they become hysterical because that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it: That's true."

It was not true in 1879, it is not true now, and people making this argument have blood on their hands.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 16, 2022 (Monday)

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre began her first press briefing today by noting its significance. “I just want to say a few words about how honored I am to be here with all of you today in this role, in this room, standing behind this podium,” she said. “I am obviously acutely aware that my presence at this podium represents a few firsts. I am a Black, gay, immigrant woman, the first of all three of those to hold this position. I would not be here today if it were not for generations of…barrier-breaking people before me. I stand on their shoulders…. I benefit from their sacrifices. I have learned from their excellence, and I am forever grateful to them. Representation does matter.”

She noted that President Joe Biden and the members of his administration believe that the press room belongs “to the American people. We work for them,” she said. “And I will work every day to continue to ensure we are meeting the President’s high expectation of truth, honesty, and transparency.” Jean-Pierre told members of the press she had “tremendous respect for the work that you do…. The press plays a vital role in our democracy, and we need a strong and independent press now more than ever. We might not see eye to eye here in this room all the time, which is okay. That give-and-take is…incredibly healthy, and it’s a part of our democracy.”

In honor of the press and answering questions, I’m going to catch up on some stories that are hanging out there.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has slowed, and Ukraine appears to be gaining the advantage. Today, on Russian state television, defense analyst Mikhail Khodaryonok warned that the willingness of Ukrainian forces to fight for their homeland gave them the upper hand and that the world has turned against Russia. It was a remarkable moment, and Russia specialist Tom Nichols noted that, together with Putin’s weak Victory Day speech and the fact that Russian minister of defense Sergei Shoigu finally picked up the phone when U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III called, it might indicate a change.

Today, McDonald’s announced it is leaving Russia for good because of the Ukraine invasion. It closed its 850 restaurants in March. McDonald’s was one of the first western brands to enter the region just before the USSR dissolved in 1991. Its leaving symbolizes Russia’s isolation from the rest of the world.

On May 13, the Treasury Department released a strategy for continuing to crack down on money laundering and terrorist financing in the United States. “Illicit finance is a major national security threat and nowhere is that more apparent than in Russia’s war against Ukraine, supported by decades of corruption by Russian elites,” said Elizabeth Rosenberg, who is Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. The department will work with international partners, close loopholes, and use new technologies “to tackle the risks posed by corruption, an increase in domestic violent extremism, and the abuse of virtual assets” in order to strengthen the international financial system.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced it will make it easier for foreign manufacturers of baby formula to ship to the U.S. Regulators also say they have reached a deal to enable Abbott Nutrition to reopen the plant in Sturgis, Michigan, which closed because its machinery was contaminated. That closure stopped the production of more than 40% of the country’s baby formula, sparking the current shortage.

A new poll by NBC shows that support for abortion rights has hit a new high, with 63% of Americans opposed to overturning Roe v. Wade. Only 5% of Americans say abortion should be illegal in all cases.

While the Supreme Court has not yet handed down the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision that is expected to overturn Roe v. Wade, it did today hand down Federal Election Commission v. Cruz, in which, by a vote of 6 to 3, it struck down a limit on how much of their own money a political candidate could recoup after an election. Daniel Weiner of the Brennan Center for Justice explained that before this decision, the law capped reimbursement at $250,000. The court struck down that limit on the grounds that the limit on reimbursements violated the First Amendment right to free speech.

Joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissent. Contributions after an election to repay a loan are not about free speech to influence an election, she said; they enrich the candidate personally “at a time when he can return the favor—by a vote, a contract, and appointment.” Post-election contributions “pose a special danger of corruption.”

Weiner noted that few candidates lend their campaigns more than $250,000, so the effects of the decision will be limited. But this case builds on the redefinition of our political world launched by the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court argued that seeking influence over politicians was a positive good. As Roberts wrote: “Influence and access ‘embody a central feature of democracy,’ that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.”

But while the court is protecting the access of wealthy donors to the democratic system, Weiner noted, it has shown no interest in protecting an individual’s right to vote. Weiner characterizes FEC v. Cruz as “another step in an extraordinary transformation, wherein First Amendment doctrines traditionally used to protect dissenting and marginalized voices now primarily get deployed to defend…the already powerful.”

There are other legal cases in the news, as well.

Last Thursday, May 12, 2022, the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice has convened a federal grand jury to look into how former president Donald Trump and his associates handled the fifteen boxes of material, some of which was top secret, that they took improperly to Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Today, Frank Figliuzzi, a national security analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, explained that the convening of a grand jury means that this is not just an investigation into how things might have been mishandled, but that officers of the Department of Justice think a crime may have been committed. Noting that Trump’s businesses took in $2.4 billion during his presidency, Figliuzzi suggested that investigators will likely look into whether the documents were of monetary value to Trump or others.

And today a judge granted another delay in the sentencing of former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, who pleaded guilty to child sex trafficking and other federal charges more than a year ago. Greenberg is an associate of Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and has been cooperating with authorities. When requesting a sentencing delay in October 2021, Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Handberg told the judge, “I think this is an unusual case. The evidence takes us places. And frankly, it takes us places we did not anticipate.”

Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 17, 2022 (Tuesday)

On this day in 1954, the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision, which declared the segregation of public schools unconstitutional.

Today, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden traveled to Buffalo, New York, where ten Americans were murdered and three wounded at a grocery store by a white supremacist on Saturday.

Biden named and described the victims, ten of whom were Black: a baker, a public school teacher, an election worker, a church deacon, a retired police officer, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers. “Individual lives of love, service, and community that speaks to the bigger story of who we are as Americans,” Biden said. We’re a “great nation because we’re a good people.”

Evil will not win in America, Biden promised. “Hate will not prevail. And white supremacy will not have the last word.”

“What happened here is simple and straightforward,” Biden said, “Domestic terrorism. Violence inflicted in the service of hate and a vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group. A hate that through the media and politics, the Internet, has radicalized angry, alienated, lost, and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced—that’s the word, “replaced”—by the “other”—by people who don’t look like them and who are therefore, in a perverse ideology that they possess and [are] being fed, lesser beings.”

Biden called on “all Americans to reject [that] lie.” He condemned “those who spread the lie for power, political gain, and for profit.” “[T]he ideology of white supremacy has no place in America,” he said. “Silence is complicity.”

“We have to refuse to live in a country where fear and lies are packaged for power and for profit.

“We must all enlist in this great cause of America.

“This is work that requires all of us—presidents and politicians, commentators, citizens. None of us can stay in the sidelines. We have to resolve here in Buffalo that from…this tragedy…will come hope and light and life. It has to. And on our watch, the sacred cause of America will never bow, never break, never bend. And the America we love—the one we love—will endure.”

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who represents Buffalo, today wrote a letter to Rupert Murdoch, chair of the Fox Corporation, along with another three of the corporation’s leaders, to urge them to stop “the reckless amplification of the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ theory on your network’s broadcasts.” He noted that people who watch the Fox News Channel are nearly three times more likely to believe in the replacement myth than those who watch other networks. He pointed out “the central role these themes have played in your network’s programming in recent years,” especially on Tucker Carlson’s show. He wrote: “I implore you to immediately cease all dissemination of false white nationalist, far-right conspiracy theories on your network.”

New York representative Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, who paid for ads pushing the replacement myth, today said: “It is not the time to politicize this tragedy. We mourn together as a nation.” Other Republicans insisted they did not know what the Great Replacement Theory is, although a number of them are on video articulating it.

Interviewed by Silvia Foster-Frau of the Washington Post, Buffalo resident James Baldwin dismissed the notion that it was the devil who inspired the Buffalo shooter. “That’s not the devil,” he said. “That’s America. They made him, they brought him up, they put him there.”

There was other big news today. Glenn Thrush and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported that on April 20, attorneys in the Department of Justice (DOJ) wrote to the lead investigator for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Timothy J. Heaphy, to ask if the committee would share transcripts from some of their interviews. Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Kenneth A. Polite Jr. and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew M. Graves told Heaphy that some of the transcripts might “contain information relevant to a criminal investigation we are conducting.”

The House committee is trying to figure out exactly what happened on January 6 and in the weeks around it. It is not conducting a criminal investigation. That ground is the turf of the Department of Justice, which has so far brought indictments against at least 828 people, more than 280 of whom have pleaded guilty. The four defendants who had a jury trial were each convicted on all counts. One defendant was acquitted by a Trump-appointed judge, who agreed with the defendant's statement that he had not seen a police line and had possibly been waved into the building. (Video shows the defendant was not screaming or attacking anyone inside the building).

The request indicates that the Department of Justice is looking broadly at the period around January 6. It also suggests that the committee has covered a lot of ground very quickly and that its information might be of use to the Justice Department.

The committee will not simply hand over their material. Congress is part of the legislative branch of government, and the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, so there is the issue of the separation of powers to deal with. A source told Thrush and Broadwater that the committee and the Justice Department are negotiating. The Justice Department wants the transcripts; the committee wants any relevant evidence the Justice Department has.

Legal analyst Glenn Kirschner tweeted: “Whether this was always the DOJ plan (& whether the J6 committee knew it or not), important info has been developed by the J6 panel that would not have been developed had the witnesses been subpoenaed to the grand jury (as they would have pled the 5th).” He added: “If the J6 committee investigation HAD taken a back seat to a DOJ grand jury investigation, we would go years w/out knowing what any of the 1000+ witness[es] had said. But now, we’ll have a front row seat to it all beginning June 9 AND all of those transcripts can be used in the GJ!”

Hugo Lowell, who is a congressional reporter for The Guardian, tweeted tonight that Stephanie Grisham, a former Trump aide, will be back in front of the January 6th committee tomorrow. The committee is bringing former witnesses back in to confirm evidence and details.

The committee will begin to hold its public hearings on June 9.

There are other legal cases in the news today, too, having to do with foreign influence during the Trump administration. The Department of Justice filed a civil enforcement action to force Stephen A. Wynn to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as a foreign agent working for China. The Justice Department says that from at least June 2017 through at least August 2017, Wynn lobbied Trump and members of his administration to force out of the U.S. a Chinese national who was here for political asylum. Such a case is so exceedingly rare that the Department of Justice said it had not brought such a case in more than 30 years. Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said, “Where a foreign government uses an American as its agent to influence policy decisions in the United States, FARA gives the American people a right to know.”

During this period, Wynn was one of four Republican National Committee finance chairs; the other three were Elliott Broidy, Michael Cohen, and Louis DeJoy. In 2020, Broidy pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate foreign lobbying laws; he worked to win benefits for Chinese and Malaysian interests from the Trump administration. Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight counts of campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud. Louis DeJoy was appointed in May 2020 to head the United States Postal Service, where he made changes that appeared to be attempts to influence the 2020 election. Broidy recruited Wynn to work for China, thinking that Wynn’s work with the RNC, his business experience in China, and his friendship with Trump “would be helpful in getting access to Trump Administration officials.”

FARA scholar Carrie Levine tweeted: “So, to recap, DOJ is alleging that Wynn was contacting Trump administration officials to advocate for China while serving as RNC finance chair.”

In another case, a superseding indictment filed today in New York federal court accuses Trump’s good friend Thomas Barrack of accepting a pledge of $374 million from the United Arab Emirates while he was also illegally lobbying the administration for the UAE.

Today, in the wake of the Buffalo shooting, Miles Taylor—a member of Trump’s administration who warned anonymously of how dangerous Trump was—announced he was leaving the Republican Party and called on others to do the same. “In the wake of the mass shooting in Buffalo on Saturday,” he wrote, “it’s become glaringly obvious that my party no longer represents conservative values but in fact poses a threat to them—and to America.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 18, 2022 (Wednesday)

Finland and Sweden have applied for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a defensive alliance originally formed in 1949 to resist the expansion of the Soviet Union and now standing against Russian expansion under president Vladimir Putin. Now the 30 member nations will consider the applications. They are expected to go through, although Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he does not view their applications positively, likely to gain concessions from the United States in ongoing negotiations. The timeline to membership will be shortened since the countries are at risk from Putin’s current policies.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned Russia that U.S. and European allies “will not tolerate any aggression against Finland or Sweden” while NATO applications are under consideration.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine nears its twelfth week, the United States today reopened our embassy in Kyiv, and tonight, the Senate unanimously confirmed Bridget A. Brink as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. We have not had an official ambassador in Ukraine since Trump abruptly recalled Marie Yovanovich in 2019. Yovanovich was standing in the way of Trump’s attempt to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter before he would release the congressionally appropriated funds Ukraine badly needed to fight off Russia.

To address the baby formula shortage caused by the closing of Abbott Nutrition’s plant in Sturgis, MIchigan, and exacerbated by tariffs that keep foreign baby formula out of the U.S., President Joe Biden today invoked the Defense Production Act to prioritize the manufacture of formula, and is flying formula in from other countries.

This evening, the House of Representatives voted on a proposal to appropriate $28 million in emergency funds to address the baby formula shortage. Two Democrats did not vote, 219 Democrats voted yes. Twelve Republicans voted yes and 6 did not vote. The rest, 192 Republicans, opposed the bill. It now goes on to the Senate.

The House also voted today on the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, which steps up the sharing of information about domestic terrorism among government departments and creates an interagency task force to analyze and combat white supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement agencies. The House passed the bill by a vote of 222 to 203. All the no votes came from Republicans; all the Democrats voted in favor. It now goes on to the Senate.

There was big news today from a quarter that made it easily overlooked. In a decision about the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission to judge those accused of engaging in securities fraud, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that “Congress unconstitutionally delegated legislative power to the SEC by failing to provide an intelligible principle by which the SEC would exercise the delegated power, in violation of Article I’s vesting of ‘all’ legislative power in Congress….”

Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, after the Great Crash of 1929 revealed illegal shenanigans on Wall Street. The SEC is supposed to enforce the law against manipulating financial markets. The Fifth Circuit covers Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, and its judges lean to the right. Today’s decision suggests that the leaked draft of the decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade has empowered other judges to challenge other established precedents.

What is at stake with this decision is something called the “nondelegation doctrine,” which says that Congress, which constitutes the legislative branch of the government, cannot delegate legislative authority to the executive branch. Most of the regulatory bodies in our government since the New Deal have been housed in the executive branch. So the nondelegation doctrine would hamstring the modern regulatory state.

According to an article in the Columbia Law Review by Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley, the idea of nondelegation was invented in 1935 to undercut the business regulation of the New Deal. In the first 100 days of his term, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set out to regulate the economy to combat the Great Depression. Under his leadership, Congress established a number of new agencies to regulate everything from banking to agricultural production.

While the new rules were hugely popular among ordinary Americans, they infuriated business leaders. The Supreme Court stepped in and, in two decisions, said that Congress could not delegate its authority to administrative agencies. But FDR’s threat of increasing the size of the court and the justices’ recognition that they were on the wrong side of public opinion undercut their opposition to the New Deal. The nondelegation theory was ignored until the 1980s, when conservative lawyers began to look for ways to rein in the federal government.

In 2001, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the argument in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who said the court must trust Congress to take care of its own power. But after Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that he might be open to the argument, conservative scholars began to say that the framers of the Constitution did not want Congress to delegate authority. Mortenson and Bagley say that argument “can’t stand…. It’s just making stuff up and calling it constitutional law.” Nonetheless, Republican appointees on the court have come to embrace the doctrine.

In November 2019, Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with Justice Neil Gorsuch-—Trump appointees both—to say the Court should reexamine whether or not Congress can delegate authority to administrative agencies. Along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Thomas, they appear to believe that the Constitution forbids such delegation. If Justice Amy Coney Barrett sides with them, the resurrection of that doctrine will curtail the modern administrative state that since the 1930s has regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure.

As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, the nondelegation doctrine would mean that “most of Government is unconstitutional.”

In today’s decision, it is no accident that Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod's majority opinion recalls what President Ronald Reagan, at a press conference in 1986, called the “nine most terrifying words in the English language”: “I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” Reagan began the process of dismantling the New Deal government, and its achievement seems now to be at hand.

The decision will almost certainly be appealed.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 19, 2022 (Thursday)

Today, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol sent a letter to Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), asking for his voluntary cooperation in their investigation. The committee members believe he has “information regarding a tour you led through parts of the Capitol complex on January 5, 2021,” the day before the January 6 insurrection.

The letter goes on to say that there have been public reports of both individuals and groups gathering information about the layout of the U.S. Capitol before January 6. In response to those allegations, the committee’s letter says, “Republicans on the Committee on House Administration—of which you are a Member—claimed to have reviewed security footage from the days preceding January 6th and determined that ‘[t]here were no tours, no large groups, no one with MAGA hats on.’ However, the Select Committee’s review of evidence directly contradicts that denial.”

Ouch.

Loudermilk and the ranking member (that is, the top Republican member) of the Committee on House Administration, Rodney Davis of Illinois, released an odd nondenial, saying, "A constituent family with young children meeting with their Member of Congress in the House Office Buildings is not a suspicious group or 'reconnaissance tour’…."

Notably, the committee did not use the words “reconnaissance tour.” As well, there is a rhetorical sleight of hand here: a hypothetical tour with a family and young children is presented here as innocuous…but the Republicans’ statement doesn’t say that’s actually what happened, although it seems clear that’s the conclusion the authors hope a reader will draw. It implies that Loudermilk simply gave a tour to a family with young children, without saying so. It’s a classic nondenial, a construction that makes Loudermilk look like a victim of an overzealous critic by deflecting attention from the central question.

The statement goes on to say that the committee is "pushing a verifiably false narrative that Republicans conducted reconnaissance tours on Jan[uary] 5th. The facts speak for themselves; no place that the family went on the 5th was breached on the 6th, the family did not enter the Capitol grounds on the 6th."

So…Loudermilk did, in fact, take people around on January 5, despite denials from the Republicans on the Committee on House Administration, who claimed to have reviewed security footage, saying there were no tours? And despite the fact the Capitol complex was closed to the public because of the pandemic?

Lots of questions here, and it seems likely the January 6 committee will have new information when public hearings begin next month.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), the influential right-wing PAC of the American Conservative Union, is holding its first European event, convening today in Budapest, Hungary. Its leaders have chosen Hungary apparently because they see that country as a model for the society they would like to see in the U.S. under a strongman leader like rising authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

Orbán is the architect of what he calls “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Illiberal democracy rejects modern liberal democracy because the equality it champions means an acceptance of immigrants, LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights and an end to traditionally patriarchal society. Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.

Led by personalities like Tucker Carlson, the American right wing embraces the Hungarian model, despite the corruption, lack of legal accountability, and attacks on the press that make Hungary the only member of the European Union no longer rated as “free” by democracy watchdog Freedom House. As if in illustration of Orbán’s policies, U.S. journalists were not allowed into CPAC today.

Orbán gave the keynote speech at the CPAC convention. In it, he embraced the “great replacement theory” that says white people are being replaced by immigrants of color. This is the myth that motivated the shooter in Buffalo, New York, last weekend, when he murdered ten people and wounded three others. It is the myth from which most Republicans have tried to distance themselves since the Buffalo killings.

And yet, when CPAC leader Matt Schlapp met U.S. journalists outside, he said that ending abortion rights would address the great replacement myth: “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,” Schlapp said. “You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”

Orbán told the attendees that the right wing in Europe and the United States must fight together to “reconquer” institutions in Brussels and Washington, D.C., before the 2024 election because those “liberals” who currently control them are destroying western civilization.

It is surprising to see folks who talk about American greatness take their inspiration from the leader of a small central European country of fewer than 10 million people, about the size of Michigan. Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley commented: “Oh come on US conservatives, stop embarrassing yourselves. Have some dignity and national pride.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 20, 2022 (Friday)

As the hearings on the events of January 6th and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election approach, the extent of the operation is becoming clearer.

Last night, lawyers for John Eastman filed a brief arguing, once again, that Eastman should be able to hide documents associated with the attempt to overturn the 2020 election on the grounds that he was working for former president Trump and so their communications are protected by attorney-client privilege. Eastman was the author of the infamous Eastman memo that provided a blueprint for then–vice president Mike Pence to throw the election to Trump, and he has done his best to delay the release of documents despite court orders to turn them over.

The filing is a litany of grievances against the court, but it does offer some new information. Eastman’s team is seeking to protect communications between Eastman “and one or more of six conduits to or agents of the former President with whom Dr. Eastman dealt.” The filing goes on to specify that three of those people worked on Trump’s campaign and that the other three were “members of former President Trump’s immediate staff.” The filing says, “While Dr. Eastman could (and did) communicate directly with former President Trump at times…, many of his communications with the President were necessarily through these agents.”

Among the documents he wants to protect are “[t]wo…hand-written notes from former President Trump about information that he thought might be useful for the anticipated litigation,” as well as documents from state legislators, “a party committeewomen” [sic], and someone who was “coordinating information sessions for state legislators.”

The filing tries to assert that these documents are covered by the attorney-client privilege because Eastman was justified in believing the election was fraudulent, even though reams of evidence have proved it was not. But what it has revealed is that there is written evidence that Trump himself was directly involved in the plotting to overturn the election.

Today, Emma Brown of the Washington Post broke the story that Ginni Thomas, who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was even more deeply involved in the attack on the election than we knew. Ginni Thomas sent emails to two Arizona lawmakers on November 9, 2020, urging them to ignore the legitimately elected presidential electors for Democrat Joe Biden and replace them with “a clean slate.” Using a platform that provided prewritten emails, she urged the lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure,” and “to fight back against fraud.”

One of the people to whom she wrote, Shawnna Bolick, is married to Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick. The Bolicks are close to Clarence Thomas, who is godfather to one of the Bolicks’ children. Shawnna Bolick responded to Thomas: “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” In 2021, Bolick introduced a bill to allow the Arizona legislature to choose its own electors, regardless of the will of the voters. She is now running for secretary of state, where she would oversee the state’s elections.

Justice Thomas was apparently talking about the leak of the draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade when on May 6 he told a group of judges and lawyers that our justice system is in danger if people are unwilling to “live with outcomes we don’t agree with.”

And then, this afternoon, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Shawn Boburg, also of the Washington Post, reported that the billionaire co-founder, chair, and chief technology officer of the computer technology corporation Oracle, Larry Ellison, also participated in a call about the 2020 election. Legal filings in a court case against True the Vote, an organization that has spread lies about widespread voter fraud, contained a note from True the Vote’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht that read: "Jim [Bopp, a lawyer for True the Vote] was on a call this evening with [Trump lawyer] Jay Sekulow, [South Carolina Senator] Lindsey O. Graham, [Fox News Channel personality] Sean Hannity, and Larry Ellison…. He explained the work we were doing and they asked for a preliminary report asap, to be used to rally their troops internally, so that's what I'm working on now."

Ellison, whom Stanley-Becker and Boburg identify as the 11th richest person in the world, gives significant money to right-wing causes and candidates, including Lindsey Graham, to whom he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2018. More recently, he pledged $1 billion of the $44 billion deal for Elon Musk to buy Twitter.

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to collect information. Today, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani met with its members for nine hours. Initially, he said he would not talk with them unless his testimony was videotaped.

And the conspirators are not faring well in court: today, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols sanctioned Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who has thrown his lot in with Trump and fought hard to overturn the election. Nichols called at least some of Lindell’s claims against the Smartmatic Corporation, a voting systems company, “groundless” and “frivolous.” Nichols threw out Lindell’s lawsuits against Smartmatic and other voting systems companies, and ordered Lindell to pay some of the costs Smartmatic has run up defending itself.

Lindell told Bloomberg News: “Whatever the judge thinks, that’s his opinion. I’ve got lawyers doing more important things like removing these machines from every state.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 21, 2022 (Saturday)

On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.
But it would do more than that, he promised: it would enable every child to learn and grow, and it would create a society where people would use their leisure time to build and reflect, where cities would not just answer physical needs and the demands of commerce, but would also serve “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It would protect the natural world and would be “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
“But most of all,” he said, it would look forward. “[T]the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”
Johnson proposed rebuilding the cities, protecting the countryside, and investing in education to set “every young mind…free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination.” He admitted that the government did not have the answers to addressing the problems in the country, “[b]ut I do promise this,” he said. “We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”
Johnson’s vision of a Great Society came from a very different place than the reworking of society launched by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal had used the federal government to address the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, leveling the playing field between workers and employers to enable workingmen to support their families. Johnson, in contrast, was operating in a country that was enjoying record growth. Far from simply saving the country, he could afford to direct it toward greater things.
Immediately, the administration turned to addressing issues of civil rights and poverty. Under Johnson’s pressure, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting voting, employment, or educational discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. Johnson also won passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity which would oversee a whole series of antipoverty programs, and of the Food Stamp Act, which helped people who didn’t make a lot of money buy food.
When Republicans ran Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, calling for rolling back business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal, voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass 84 new laws to put the Great Society into place.
They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.
The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, which helped cover healthcare costs for folks with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.
Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965 that established federal standards for water quality.
But the government did not simply address poverty. Congress also spoke to Johnson’s aspirations for beauty and purpose when it created the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.
Opponents of this sweeping program picked up 47 seats in the House and three seats in the Senate in the 1966 midterm elections, and U.S. News and World Report wrote that “the big bash” was over.
And yet, much of the Great Society still lives on, although it is now under more significant challenges every day from those who reject the idea that the federal government has a role to play in the shaping of our society.
“For better or worse,” Johnson told the University of Michigan graduates in 1964, “your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.
“So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?” he asked.
“Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?...”
“There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”

Posted by rsp777 on 5/19/2022 8:15:00 AM (view original):
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 15, 2022 (Sunday)

Yesterday, an 18-year-old white man murdered 10 people and wounded three others with an AR-15. The shooter traveled more than 200 miles to get to a predominantly Black neighborhood, where he put on heavy body armor and live streamed his attack as he gunned down people grocery shopping. Eleven of those he shot were Black.

The Buffalo Police Commissioner, Joseph Gramaglia, said, “The evidence that we have uncovered so far makes no mistake that this is an absolute racist hate crime. It will be prosecuted as a hate crime. This is someone who has hate in their heart, soul and mind."

Before his attack, the shooter published a 180-page screed on Google Drive. It is mostly a list of his weaponry, but in it he also explained his belief in what is known as the “great replacement theory,” embraced by white nationalists. This is the idea that white people are losing economic, cultural, and political power to Black people and other people of color. The name is usually associated with a French agitator who argued in a 2011 book that immigrants were destroying European culture, but the theory that an “other” is destroying traditional society has roots stretching far back in European history. In the twenty-first century, that theory has launched right-wing political parties and shootings around the world.

But the Buffalo shooter’s ramblings drew not only from the European theory—although there is plenty of that in his 180 pages of racism and anti-Semitism. They also drew from America’s own version of a theory of replacement.

That theory comes out of the 1870s and was explicitly connected to voting.

In 1867, Congress began the process of recognizing the right of Black people to have a say in their government. In the Military Reconstruction Act, it called for conventions in former Confederate states to write new state constitutions and permitted Black southerners to register to vote to choose delegates to those conventions. White supremacists scoffed at the idea that formerly enslaved people and those white men willing to work with them could produce coherent constitutions.

When their constitutions not only were coherent, but made adjustments to give more representation to poorer white men than the prewar constitutions had provided, white supremacists set out to make sure voters did not ratify the new constitutions. Needing to avoid the U.S. Army, still stationed in the South to protect Black people and their white allies, the white supremacists dressed up in white sheets to look like dead Confederate soldiers (no one was fooled) and tried to terrorize voters to keep them from the polls.

It didn’t work. Voters ratified the new constitutions, which guaranteed Black voting. Congress readmitted the southern states to the Union, but not until they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That crucially important amendment dissolved the state laws discriminating against Black Americans. It established that Black people were U.S. citizens and guaranteed that the U.S. government would see to it that no state could take away the rights of any citizen without the due process of law.

In 1870, white politicians in Georgia tried to undermine their new state constitution. The American people then ratified the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right of Black men to vote. Congress also created the Department of Justice to enable the federal government to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, which it promptly did. Attorney General Amos Akerman, a former Confederate who had become a Republican, oversaw more than 1000 cases against the Ku Klux Klan.

With the federal government holding them to account for their racist attacks on Black Americans, southern white supremacists began to argue that their objections to Black equality were actually about voting. By 1871, they argued that Black men voted for leaders who promised roads and hospitals and schools. Those social investments would require tax levies, and since the Black population was poor almost by definition after enslavement, those taxes would fall almost entirely on the white men who owned property. In this telling, Black voting was essentially a redistribution of wealth from those with money to those without, from white men to Black men. It was socialism.

White supremacists began to say that they objected to Black voting and to the governments Black people elected not on racial grounds, but on economic ones. They promised to “redeem” the South from the profligate state governments that they said were bleeding tax dollars out of white landowners to provide services for the poor, generally characterized as Black, although there was no racial monopoly on poverty in the post–Civil War South.

In 1876, the “Redeemers” took over the southern states, thanks partly to the rhetoric that made them sound reasonable to northern observers and largely to the violence that enabled them to keep Black men from the polls. The “Solid South” would stay Democratic until Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, running for president on a platform that called for the federal government to leave states’ racial discrimination alone, won five deep southern states in 1964.

The violence of the 1876 election, along with fears of what their lives would look like in its wake, led Black Americans to leave the South in a movement known as the Exodus. In 1879 and 1880, about 20,000 Black southerners went west to Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. “[T]he whole South…had got into the hands of the very men that held us slaves,” one recalled, “and we thought that the men that held us slaves was holding the reins of government over our heads…. [and] there was hope for us and we had better go.”

About two thousand of those migrants went to Indiana.

Indiana was a contested state in which the Republican and Democratic parties traded power. In 1876, it had gone to the Democrats by a few thousand votes.

When Black Americans began to come to their state, Indiana Democrats immediately howled that the Republicans were importing Black migrants to shift the state back toward the Republicans in the 1880 election. Their clamor was loud enough to cause a Senate investigation. The Democratic majority on the select committee concluded that the Republicans must have induced the Black southerners to leave their region because there was well-paid work and no violence in the South; Republicans retorted that if they were really trying to flood the electoral system, they would have left Black Americans where they were.

But the conspiracy theory took root. White Hoosier Democrats met Black migrants with showers of rocks and vowed to “clean out all the g–d d– –n n***ers in the county before the [1880] election.” After a political rally in Rockport, Indiana, Democrats attacked local Black inhabitants, shouting: “Kill them, kill them.” After they shot Uriah Webb, one rioter stood over his body and said, “One vote less,” while the others cheered Democratic presidential candidate Winfield Scott Hancock.

Racial hostility kept the Black population of Indiana small, but it also fed the cultural and social discrimination that made Indiana the beating heart of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Under violent con man David Curtis Stephenson, who raped, mutilated, and murdered a female state employee, the Indiana Ku Klux Klan developed the idea of “100% Americanism,” which argued for a hierarchy of races in which the white race was uppermost. Immigrants and Black Americans, that theory said, were destroying traditional America.

That argument has poisoned American politics since the 1870s. Yesterday, the Buffalo shooter echoed the modern European great replacement theory, but he also echoed the racial “socialist” argument of the U.S. He railed against Black Americans, whom he wildly insisted take, on average, $700,000 apiece from white Americans. He urged those who thought like him not to pay taxes, which he said would be wasted on such people. Then he warned white Americans not to become a political minority because minorities are never treated well.

Today’s Republican politicians, including Elise Stefanik of New York, the third ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, have pushed the great replacement theory for years and even after yesterday’s massacre have refused to denounce it. That theory is based in racial hate, but it is not only about racial hate. It is also about politics, and today Republicans are using it to create a one-party state.

“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," Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, who is one of the country’s leading proponents of the great replacement theory, said on his show. "But they become hysterical because that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it: That's true."

It was not true in 1879, it is not true now, and people making this argument have blood on their hands.

I played a clip and Al Sharpton was grandstanding as usual. I loathe that guy.. BUT

I say the shooter should be hanged. PUBLICLY

THOU SHALT NOT KILL

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 23, 2022 (Monday)

Scandals today, and be forewarned: the first deals with sexual assault. If you want to skip over it, the next one starts about nine paragraphs down, with the word TODAY in all caps.
Yesterday, a nearly 300-page report from a third-party investigation revealed that the leadership of the Southern Baptists buried sex abuse claims for more than 20 years. They ignored accusations or attacked sex abuse survivors to protect the church from legal liability, describing survivors as “‘opportunistic,’ having a ‘hidden agenda of lawsuits,’ wanting to ‘burn things to the ground,’ and acting as a ‘professional victim.’”
The modern Southern Baptist Convention story begins in 1967, when Paige Patterson, a seminary student, and Paul Pressler, a Texas judge, met in New Orleans to discuss taking over the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. and ridding it of liberals, purging those who believed in abortion rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. By 1979 their candidate was elected head of the organization, and in the 1980s, Southern Baptists, who then numbered about 15 million people, were active in politics and were staunch supporters of the Republican Party.
Between 2003 and 2018 the church lost a million members. Both Pressler and Patterson were accused of sexual misconduct and by 2018 had been forced out of leadership roles, and a new leader called for “a new culture and a new posture in the Southern Baptist Convention.” While he set up new systems for responding to abuse, other leaders continued to blame the victims. In one internal email, senior staff member D. August “Augie” Boto, who drove much of the church’s response to abuse allegations, wrote: “This whole thing should be seen for what it is. It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”
In 2019 the Houston Chronicle ran a series calling attention to the 380 pastors affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention who had been accused of sexual abuse, blowing the lid off the scandal. In March 2021 the hugely popular leader Beth Moore, herself a survivor of sexual assault, left the church. In May, Russell Moore (no relation to Ms. Moore) left the church leadership and then, the following month, left the church itself over its handling of sexual abuse allegations and racism.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in 2021 was the largest one since 1995. Members rejected a hard-right leader and chose as president Ed Litton, senior pastor of Redemption Church in Saraland, Alabama, who since at least 2014 had focused on racial reconciliation. Members also called for an investigation of the escalating sex scandals, which had become so toxic after Trump’s election that In setting up an investigation, church members were leery enough of the leaders investigating themselves that they set up a task force to manage a third-party investigation. The task force hired the investigating team, Guidepost Solutions, on September 9, 2021.
Its report is so damning that Russell Moore’s first reaction was to say: “I was wrong to call sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention…a crisis. Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse.” The investigation, he says, “uncovers a reality far more evil and systematic than I imagined it could be.” “How many children were raped, how many people were assaulted, how many screams were silenced,” he asked, “while we boasted that no one could reach the world for Jesus like we could.”
“That’s more than a crisis,” he said. “It’s even more than just a crime. It’s blasphemy. And anyone who cares about heaven ought to be mad as hell.”
The 13 million or more Southern Baptists have provided strong support for Republicans since the 1980s, molding to their patriarchal model that president Ronald Reagan sold with the image of the cowboy. This report has ripped the cover off the abuse that model concealed. Whether that will affect voting patterns remains to be seen, but it does seriously undermine the image of the patriarchal leader as a protector of women and children, an image on which Republicans relied. Beth Moore reacted to the report by saying: “You have betrayed your women.”
TODAY, Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine sued Mark Zuckerberg, saying he was personally responsible for failing to protect Facebook users’ data, instead allowing it to be sold to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica before the 2016 election. Racine says that Zuckerberg violated the Consumer Protection Procedures Act by permitting third parties to harvest information about users without their knowledge.
The filing recounts the story, which was important to the 2016 election. In November 2013, researcher Aleksandr Kogan designed an app on the Facebook platform that identified itself as a personality test. To use it, a consumer had to give permission for the app to collect some personal data: name, gender, birthdate, likes, and friends list. What they did not know, though, was that the app also accessed the data of those folks on the friends list. “The vast majority of these Facebook friends never installed the App, never affirmatively consented to supplying the App with their data, and never knew the App had collected their data.”
About 290,000 users installed the app, but the app collected the data of about 87 million users, more than 70 million of whom were in the U.S. More than 340,000 were in Washington, D.C.
In 2014, Kogan sold the data the app had collected for about $800,000 to the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which used the information to target ads to users to promote Republican candidates in the 2014 midterm elections. By December 22, 2015, Facebook knew that Kogan had sold the data; selling data violated its terms of service. It got rid of the app but simply requested that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica delete the information. Instead, Cambridge Analytica used it during the 2016 election, targeting political ads to help first Texas senator Ted Cruz, and then Trump.
The extent of the story burst into public view in 2018, when Christopher Wylie, who had helped to start Cambridge Analytica, talked to reporters. He left the company in late 2014, apparently in disgust over its hard-right turn after a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, who was being advised by Steve Bannon. “They want to start a culture war in America,” he told Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr of the New York Times. “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”
In 2019 the Republican-controlled Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook $5 billion for deceiving its users about their privacy but did not require Facebook to admit guilt or regulate how Facebook would use information in the future. (Facebook’s revenue that year was $56 billion.) It also indemnified the company for “any and all claims prior to June 12, 2019,” a provision that the FTC’s former chief technologist Ashkan Soltani told Soo Youn of ABC News was “a $5 billion get out of jail card.”
Racine has an ongoing lawsuit against Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and now will try to bring Zuckerberg himself to account for the data breach.
In Michigan, the Bureau of Elections has ruled that five of the ten Republican candidates for governor in this fall’s elections are ineligible to run in the primaries. It appears that canvassers paid to collect signatures on the candidates’ nomination petitions forged signatures—68,000 of them on the paperwork of 10 candidates. All of the candidates have railed against election fraud. The board’s report says it does not believe that the candidates were aware of the scheme. Still, they should have had systems in place to catch this massive number of fraudulent signatures (some pages were apparently all in the same handwriting). The Board of State Canvassers will vote on the issue Thursday.
“We have never seen anything like this before, as it is an epic implosion that will likely be a cautionary tale in campaign textbooks moving forward,” wrote Mara MacDonald of Detroit’s WDIV.
Sure feels like there’s a lot of that going around.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 24, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, a gunman murdered at least 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our history.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution, on which modern-day arguments for widespread gun ownership rest, is one simple sentence: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to “bear arms” meant to be part of an organized militia.
As the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”
Today’s insistence that the Second Amendment gives individuals a broad right to own guns comes from two places.
One is the establishment of the National Rifle Association in New York in 1871, in part to improve the marksmanship skills of American citizens who might be called on to fight in another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting, complete with hefty cash prizes in newly organized tournaments. Just a decade after the Civil War, veterans jumped at the chance to hone their former skills. Rifle clubs sprang up across the nation.
By the 1920s, rifle shooting was a popular American sport. “Riflemen” competed in the Olympics, in colleges, and in local, state, and national tournaments organized by the NRA. Being a good marksman was a source of pride, mentioned in public biographies, like being a good golfer. In 1925, when the secretary of the NRA apparently took money from ammunition and arms manufacturers, the organization tossed him out and sued him.
NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. In 1931, amid fears of bootlegger gangs, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks before delivery. It backed the 1934 National Firearms Act, and parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act, designed to stop what seemed to be America’s hurtle toward violence in that turbulent decade.
But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”
This was the second thing that led us to where we are today: leaders of the NRA embraced the politics of Movement Conservatism, the political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.
Leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government.
In 1972, the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan—for the first time.
When President Reagan took office, a new American era, dominated by Movement Conservatives, began. And the power of the NRA over American politics grew.
In 1981 a gunman trying to kill Reagan shot and paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. After the shooting, then-representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that became known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases. Reagan, who was a member of the NRA, endorsed the bill, but the NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat it.
After the Brady Bill passed in 1993, the NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike it down. Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA had begun to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.
In 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.
Now a player in national politics, the NRA was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election. In that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
Increasingly, NRA money backed Republican candidates. In 2012 the NRA spent $9 million in the presidential election, and in 2014 it spent $13 million. Then, in 2016, it spent over $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump’s effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him. The NRA spent more money on Trump than any other outside group, including the leading Trump super PAC, which spent $20.3 million.
The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. Even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members—support background checks, Republicans have killed such legislation by filibustering it.
The NRA will hold its 2022 annual meeting this Friday in Houston. Former president Trump will speak, along with Texas governor Greg Abbott, senator Ted Cruz, and representative Dan Crenshaw; North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson; and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem—all Republicans. NRA executive vice president and chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre expressed his enthusiasm for the lineup by saying: “President Trump delivered on his promises by appointing judges who respect and value the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and in doing so helped ensure the freedom of generations of Americans.”
Tonight, President Joe Biden spoke to the nation: “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?... It’s time to turn this pain into action. For every parent, for every citizen in this country, we have to make it clear to every elected official in this country, it’s time to act.” In the Senate, Chris Murphy (D-CT) said, "I am here on this floor, to beg, to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues....find a way to pass laws that make this less likely."
But it was Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors basketball team, whose father was murdered by gunmen in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1984, who best expressed the outrage of the nation. At a press conference tonight, shaking, he said, “I’m not going to talk about basketball…. Any basketball questions don’t matter…. Fourteen children were killed 400 miles from here, and a teacher, and in the last ten days we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California, and now we have children murdered at school. WHEN ARE WE GONNA DO SOMETHING? I’m tired, I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families…. I’m tired of the moments of silence. Enough. There’s 50 senators…who refuse to vote on HR 8, which is a background check rule that the House passed a couple years ago…. [N]inety percent of Americans, regardless of political party, want…universal background checks…. We are being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to even put it to a vote despite what we the American people want…because they want to hold onto their own power. It’s pathetic,” he said, walking out of the press conference.
“I’ve had enough.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

May 25, 2022 (Wednesday)

All day, I have been coming back to this: How have we arrived at a place where 90% of Americans want to protect our children from gun violence, and yet those who are supposed to represent us in government are unable, or unwilling, to do so?
This is a central problem not just for the issue of gun control, but for our democracy itself.
It seems that during the Cold War, American leaders came to treat democracy and capitalism as if they were interchangeable. So long as the United States embraced capitalism, by which they meant an economic system in which individuals, rather than the state, owned the means of production, liberal democracy would automatically follow.
That theory seemed justified by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The crumbling of that communist system convinced democratic nations that they had won, they had defeated communism, their system of government would dominate the future. Famously, in 1992, political philosopher Francis Fukuyama wrote that humanity had reached “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” In the 1990s, America’s leaders believed that the spread of capitalism would turn the world democratic as it delivered to them global dominance, but they talked a lot less about democracy than they did about so-called free markets.
In fact, the apparent success of capitalism actually undercut democracy in the U.S. The end of the Cold War was a gift to those determined to destroy the popular liberal state that had regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and invested in infrastructure since the New Deal. They turned their animosity from the Soviet Union to the majority at home, those they claimed were bringing communism to America. “??For 40 years conservatives fought a two-front battle against statism, against the Soviet empire abroad and the American left at home,” right-wing operative Grover Norquist said in 1994. “Now the Soviet Union is gone and conservatives can redeploy. And this time, the other team doesn't have nuclear weapons.”
Republicans cracked down on Democrats trying to preserve the active government that had been in place since the 1930s. Aided by talk radio hosts, they increasingly demonized their domestic political opponents. In the 1990 midterm elections, a political action committee associated with House Republican whip Newt Gingrich gave to Republican candidates a document called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” It urged candidates to label Democrats with words like “decay,” “failure,” “crisis,” “pathetic,” “liberal,” “radical,” “corrupt,” and “taxes,” while defining Republicans with words like “opportunity,” “moral,” “courage,” “flag,” “children,” “common sense,” “hard work,” and “freedom.” Gingrich later told the New York Times his goal was “reshaping the entire nation through the news media.”
Their focus on capitalism undermined American democracy. They objected when the Democrats in 1993 made it easier to register to vote by passing the so-called Motor-Voter Act, permitting voters to register at certain state offices. The next year, losing Republican candidates argued that Democrats had won their elections with “voter fraud.” In 1996, House and Senate Republicans each launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that voter fraud was a serious issue and that Democrats were winning elections thanks to illegal, usually immigrant, voters.
In 2010 the Supreme Court green-lit the flood of corporate money into our political system with the Citizens’ United decision; in 2013 it gutted the provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring the Department of Justice to sign off on changes to election laws in some states, prompting a slew of discriminatory voter ID laws. In 2010, REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project) enabled Republicans to take over state legislatures and gerrymander the states dramatically in their own favor.
At the same time, the rise of a market-based economy in the former Soviet republics made it clear that capitalism and democracy were not interchangeable. An oligarchy rose from the ashes of the USSR, and U.S. leaders embraced the leaders of that new system as allies. That allyship has gone so far that this week, the Conservative Political Action Conference held a conference in Hungary, where leader Viktor Orbán, who was a keynote speaker at the event, has openly rejected democracy. At the conference, he called for the right in the U.S. to join forces with those like him; yesterday, he declared martial law in his country.
At home, where our focus on free markets has stacked our political system in favor of the Republicans, the vast majority of Americans want reasonable gun laws, reproductive rights, action on climate change, equality before the law, infrastructure funding, and so on, and their representatives are unable to get those things.
Capitalism, it seems, is also trumping democracy at home.

Posted by bagchucker on 5/24/2022 7:43:00 PM (view original):
no better than catholics

worse -- no celibacy necessary

highly confidential little bit redacted list of alleged abusers

it took me ahunnert clicks to get this list

all the major news orgs posted their version of the headline and a little blurb

but not the list. but not the list

oh my gosh to name names? we might not be able to sell advertising to baptists or the SEC or repus or church goers or pedophiles or half the derelict nation

punks of the 4th estate: be loud be proud

sound off like you got a pair

250+ of these *************.

All in the name of Jesus.

Their religion is, and always has been, something to hide behind while committing the most vile atrocities known to man.

Now you know why I call someone around here a zealot and a hypocrite.