A “T-cell priming” vaccine could provide better COVID-19 immunity than mRNA vaccines

The development of mRNA vaccines, a long-promised and much-touted biotechnology, is regarded as a great victory of medical research spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nowadays, millions of people have been inoculated with these novel vaccines, which comprise both the Pfizer/BioNTech shot as well as Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Yet mRNA vaccine technology is not the only immunological innovation that may emerge from the pandemic. Now, a company based in the United Kingdom called Emergex is preparing to test a next-generation COVID-19 vaccine based on a radical new technology. Unlike the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines — which inject a bespoke strand of messenger RNA that generates Spike proteins within the human body — this new vaccine technology is delivered via a skin patch, and relies on T cells, which are white blood cells that are part of the immune system, to kill infected cells.

It is believed that a T-cell vaccine would incite a more rapid and durable response to fighting the infection.

“Although current COVID-19 vaccines have made significant progress in reducing mortality and morbidity, challenges still remain, especially with the development of new variants,” said Professor Blaise Genton, Principal Investigator for the trial from the Center for Primary Care and Public Health (Unisante) at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. “This exciting new scientific approach to developing a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 addresses the need to generate a T-cell response to elicit long term immunity.”

One of the constituent types of immune system cells, T cells play a vital role in fighting threatening foreign substances in the human body. Unlike some immune system cells, T cells do not attack any foreign body; rather, they are laser-focused only on specific pathogens. This trait, researchers believe, could be exploited such that their vaccine could instill a T-cell response in the human body — without actually giving their immune system the dangerous SARS-CoV-2 virus first.

Emergex’s proposed vaccine would prepare T cells to remove infected cells from the body right after being infected. This would prevent the virus from replicating and progressing to COVID-19. By targeting and priming the T cells, this would also reduce the transmissibility between infected and non-infected people because it would stop the virus from replicating and prevent the onset of symptoms.

Current vaccines elicit an antibody response that stops the virus from affecting cells, but researchers believe that targeting the T cells directly might be a more direct approach. Of course, this mechanism of action is all yet to be proven until it is tested rigorously in clinical trials.

As Genton noted, this new vaccine technology is theorized to provide longer-lasting immunity than the current vaccines on the market, which are known to wane over time in their effectiveness.

Robin Cohen, the firm’s chief commercial officer, likened the technology of the vaccine to an asteroid hitting a planet, according to The Guardian.

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“The virus is the asteroid: it fires into the planet and a viral code, a signature for that virus, is rapidly displayed all over the surface,” Cohen said. “These signatures are read by T cells as foreign, and the T cells kill the cell before it can produce new live viruses.”

Interestingly, the vaccine will be administered not through a needle, but as a skin patch the size of a thumbnail. Small, tiny micro-needles release the shot within seconds. Unlike the mRNA Moderna and Pfizer vaccines that need to be stored in a freezer — or the Johnson & Johnson vaccine which needs to be stored in a fridge — the Emergex vaccine can survive for up to three month at room temperature. However, it is a two-dose vaccine, akin to Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccines.

“Our T-cell priming vaccines may offer significant benefits over current COVID-19 vaccines including longer lasting immunity and broader protection against new variants,” Cohen said. “We are proud to announce the initiation of this trial and look forward to gathering data to support the development of this important next generation vaccine.”

The first phase of the clinical trial is a small one, and involves two groups of 13 volunteers who will receive high and low doses of the vaccine or a placebo. As a double-blind study, neither the patients nor the researchers know which study group the patients are in during the trial. The first patient is expected to receive their first dose of the vaccine at the start of January 2022.

As the last couple of years have revealed, the process of vaccine development is very involved and can take months or years. In the United States, there are set processes that each pharmaceutical company must follow in order to get approval. These start with a preclinical trial, and then three phases of testing before being approved.

If the Emergex vaccines succeeds with its clinical trials, and is approved for world-wide use, it could be another way to effectively deploy and administer a vaccine across the world.

“Emergex vaccines have been designed to be administered via the skin using microneedles and to be stable at ambient room temperature for beyond three months, facilitating rapid and efficient distribution across the world and making administration of the vaccine more patient friendly,” the company stated in a press release.

“QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley sentenced to three years in prison for Jan. 6 role

Jacob Chansley, the Arizona man best known as the shirtless, headdress-wearing “QAnon Shaman” who raided the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, was sentenced to more than three years in prison Wednesday.

During a hearing on the matter, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth dressed down Chansley’s actions as “horrific,” saying, “What you did was terrible. You made yourself the epitome of the riot.”

He pleaded guilty in September to a single count of felony obstruction of an official proceeding. Prosecutors described him as “the public face of the Capitol riot.”

Meanwhile, lawyers for Chansley argued that while his behavior was “indefensible”, he was not a violent criminal. While speaking to the court, he said “I am not a violent man or a white supremacist. I am truly repentant.”

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Chansley’s team also argued that he is on the autism spectrum and suffers from a personality disorder, which defense lawyer Albert Watkins said contributed to a diminished decision-making ability. Advocates for those affected by autism have blasted Chansley’s use of the disorder as an excuse for his actions as offensive.

During the hearing, Chansley’s incendiary social media activity was discussed. In the months leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Paschall said that Chansley posted “vitriolic messages on social media, encouraging his thousands of followers to expose corrupt politicians, to ID the traitors in the government, to halt their agenda, to stop the seal, and end the deep state.”

“That was a call to battle,” Paschall said, adding that Chansley also posted numerous times in support of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.

Prosecutors argued that Chansley, who was one of the first rioters to enter the Capitol, “used a bullhorn to rile up the crowd and demand that lawmakers be brought out.” In January, Chansley asked then-President Trump to pardon him before he left office — though his pleas went unanswered.

Over 650 people have now been charged in association with the Jan 6. riot.

Another Capitol rioter, Jenna Ryan, recently said in an interview that she was watching Youtube videos to prepare for her jail time — though she stopped short of saying she was sorry for her actions that day, calling remorse a “thought crime.”

Inflation is accelerated by our addiction to fossil fuels — Biden’s agenda can break that dependency

President Joe Biden hadn’t even signed the bipartisan infrastructure bill yet when centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia found a new excuse to start reneging on his agreement to vote for the Build Back Better plan. Having already torn up the previous agreement to pass both bills at once, Manchin — whose bad faith is boundless — suddenly discovered a bunch of “concerns” with the social spending bill that he had already forced the White House to cut in half with phony promises that he would support it. His latest excuse to delay until the Build Back Better plan dies completely? Inflation.

“Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) — whose vote, like that of 49 other Senate Democrats, is key to enacting Biden’s social spending bill — cited rising inflation as a reason to pause on some parts of the White House’s agenda,” the Washington Post reported last week. They cited a smarmy statement by Manchin about how from “the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real.”

Gas pump? What is it you say about gas pumps, senator? Because yes, it is true that gas pumps are a primary cause of inflation.

Our society is so oil-dependent that a rise in gas prices typically drives up the costs of consumer goods. This was true in the 1970s, when rapidly rising oil prices drove record inflation. And it’s true now. On the same day that Manchin was complaining about inflation, the Washington Post also reported that a “main driver of the wave of inflation besetting the country is the price of energy.” Gasoline, in particular, is skyrocketing. “Demand for energy — from motorists, truckers, airlines, shipping lines, manufacturers — rebounded from the pandemic slump much more quickly than production has been able to recover.”

Too many people competing for a limited supply of oil? Gosh, seems like one way to keep that from happening is to reduce demand for oil — by moving more people towards cleaner forms of energy. This just so happens to be a huge part of the Build Back Better bill! Yes, even the much smaller one that Manchin negotiated and then started to make up excuses not to vote for.

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The bill that Manchin supported before he started backpedaling would invest $300 billion on “clean energy investments and deployment, improve energy efficiency, and encourage vehicle electrification,” would focus on “high-speed rail projects that would reduce reliance on higher-emission cars and planes; grant programs to integrate low-carbon materials into transportation projects and develop low-emission aviation fuels and technology,” and move people to more fuel-efficient or electric cars, while also weatherizing homes and buildings to reduce energy use. All of these measures are primarily meant to reduce carbon emissions, but a nice side benefit is that it reduces consumer demand for fossil fuels — and can help therefore protect against inflation.

“Increasing the share of clean energy in the economy is therefore likely to further moderate, rather than exacerbate, inflationary swings,” explains economist Richard Newell in a piece for Barron’s. That’s because clean energy technologies, such as wind farms or solar panels, “do not rely on traditional fuels of inelastic supply and demand like oil and gas to operate.” As Trevor Higgins of Center for American Progress explains, “Indeed, investing in clean energy would directly reduce household energy costs by an average of $500 per year, protect the economy from volatile fossil fuel markets, and slow the pace of climate disruption.”

Economic analysis is great, but there’s also common sense here. When people complain about how much it takes to fuel up their cars, shouldn’t the immediate answer be that we need fewer people filling up cars in the first place? Everyone knows that fossil fuels are a grotesque addiction Americans would be better off kicking, both for the planet and for their pocketbooks. But every time there’s an effort to move towards a more sensible system that does less damage, people like Manchin step in, with their bad faith arguments like “‘inflation” and stop the changes.

Manchin likes to pretend it’s because he’s looking out for his constituents, but they would also benefit from lower and more stable energy costs — and transitioning to green jobs, instead of the slowly collapsing coal industry. No, the sad reality is Manchin’s obstinance, like so many obstacles to progress in our society, goes back to old-fashioned corruption.

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Manchin is heavily invested in and supported by the fossil fuel industry, and indeed has become quite a wealthy man from dirty fuel. That’s no doubt why he doesn’t even bother to come up with coherent arguments against even the mildest policy efforts to reduce American reliance on oil and gas. For instance, he’s trying to remove a tax incentive from Build Back Better that would reward automakers who produce electric and hybrid cars with union labor. His excuse is, “We shouldn’t use everyone’s tax dollars to pick winners and losers.” This is perhaps a land speed record in both smarm and bad faith.

Manchin absolutely wants to use tax dollars to pick winners and losers. He just wants the winners to be corporate lobbyists, such as those from Toyota, who have been pressuring Manchin to come out against the tax credit. But the American people desperately need to see tax dollars geared towards protecting them — against climate change, against anti-worker policies, and against the vagaries of an oil-dependent economy.

Inflation sucks. There’s no use in denying it and Democrats just sound out of touch when they try to wiggle around the issue. But that doesn’t mean that Biden and the majority of his party, have to accept this nonsense narrative that Build Back Better would contribute to inflation. (Even inflation hawk Larry Summers admits it wouldn’t!) On the contrary, there’s a lot in there that could help stabilize the economy. At the top of the list is the clean energy investments. Democrats need to be out front about how fighting climate change and fighting inflation are the same fight, and not let oil-corrupted politicians like Manchin imply otherwise.

FBI raids home of Lauren Boebert’s ex-campaign manager in Colorado election tampering probe

The FBI on Tuesday raided the home of a Colorado election clerk and three others in an investigation into a voting system security breach.

Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a Republican, was accused by state officials in August of helping to leak voting system passwords to a right-wing blog. Peters later appeared at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s conspiracy-laden “cyber-symposium,” where the pillow magnate promised but failed to produce evidence of election-rigging. Peters later briefly went into hiding with Lindell’s help amid FBI scrutiny.

On Tuesday morning, the FBI and local prosecutors raided Peters’ home.

“We executed four federally court-authorized operations today to gather evidence in connection with the investigation into the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s Office,” District Attorney Dan Rubinstein told Colorado Politics. “We did so with assistance from the DA’s office from the 21st Judicial District, the Attorney General’s Office and the FBI.”

Peters in an interview on Lindell’s online streaming channel said the raid left her “terrified.”

The FBI also raided a home in Garfield County, Rubinstein confirmed. Lindell said one of the homes raided belongs to Sherronna Bishop, a Garfield County resident who served as Rep. Lauren Boebert’s, R-Colo., campaign manager. Bishop has been one of Peters’ most prominent allies in stoking unfounded allegations of voting machine problems in the election and hinted at a rally last month that she was privy to unreleased data from Mesa County and Lindell’s “cybersecurity team.”

A judge last month banned Peters from overseeing elections in her county after a lawsuit filed by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat. Griswold led an investigation over the summer that found that Peters shut off surveillance systems and allowed an unauthorized person to access the county’s voting system during a security update. Just days later, Ron Watkins, a Qanon conspiracy theorist believed to be one of the masterminds behind the movement, published photos of election equipment that he said he received from a whistleblower. Watkins and the far-right blog Gateway Pundit also published passwords unique to Mesa County officials used to access the county’s Dominion voting system computers and servers. Two copies of the Dominion server hard drive were later published as well. Griswold in August ordered dozens of pieces of the county’s election equipment to be decertified over the security breach and appointed a supervisor to oversee the county’s future elections.

Peters, during the probe, appeared at Lindell’s 72-hour “cyber symposium,” where he invited reporters to view evidence of his vote-rigging conspiracy theory but failed to produce any. Peters, who was met with cheers at the event, now casts herself as a victim of a politically motivated investigation and compared Colorado to Nazi Germany.

“The FBI raided my home at 6 a.m. this morning, accusing me of committing a crime. And they raided the homes of my friends, mostly older women. I was terrified,” Peters told Lindell TV on Tuesday, adding that authorities used a “battering ram” to destroy one of her friend’s front doors.

Peters said the agents “took all of my electronics.”

“Essentially, they were soldiers in combat gear. They were not men in suits with badges,” she said. “They looked very much like they were in a combat zone — soldiers with automatic weapons and combat gear.”

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Peters has claimed that she has evidence that Dominion deleted election files, which conspiracy theorists have cited as proof of their claims that voting machines switched votes from former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden. Griswold’s office said that the files that were deleted included accounting forms, certificates of registration, voter applications, spoiled ballots and replacement ballots that were not required under the election code, according to KREX-TV. Former Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, a Republican who was appointed by Griswold to oversee the county’s elections, also said that none of the deleted files could affect election outcomes.

Along with the security breach, the state’s Independent Ethics Commission on Tuesday unanimously voted to move ahead with their investigation into a complaint accusing Peters of violating the state’s constitution by accepting private flights and travel expenses from Lindell.

“They want to shut me up, shut me out, prosecute me, do whatever they can to villainize and demonize me just to cover up their dirty deeds,” she said Tuesday. “I can’t unsee what I’ve seen.”

But Peters’ actions in response to Trumpworld’s conspiracy-mongering has raised new concerns about potential insider threats to election security.

“I’ve always worried, working in this space, about people who want to harm our elections or sabotage them from the outside — the foreign actors trying to hack elections. I’ve never until now had to worry about what goes on on the inside. And now we’ve crossed that threshold,” Mike Beasley, a lobbyist for the Colorado County Clerks Association, told The Washington Post.

“If these local offices become weaponized in a way that subverts the free and fair election,” added Tammy Patrick, an election administration expert who serves as a senior adviser at the nonpartisan Democracy Fund, “then we no longer live in a healthy democracy.”

Mike Lindell’s South Dakota “cyber symposium” has a bumpy launch: No real evidence

Lindell-apalooza melts down: MyPillow guy claims antifa sabotaged his “cyber symposium”

Republicans don’t care about death threats against colleagues — they are too busy seeking revenge

Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar is a piece of work. A conservative Republican who first came to Congress in the 2010 Tea Party wave, he has obtained a national profile in the last few years by garnering the dubious distinction of being the most radical member of the House GOP caucus, and that’s saying something. He’s a full-fledged conspiracy theorist and white nationalist whose own family has publicly disowned him. But no one in the GOP leadership has felt it necessary to rein him in for any of this, not even after he posted a photoshopped anime video of himself killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and assaulting President Joe Biden.

Apparently, the GOP believes this dangerous extremist can literally do no wrong. Meanwhile, they are very busy plotting revenge on the Republicans who voted last week for the infrastructure bill, so it’s understandable that they might not have time to discipline a congressman who publicly fantasizes about killing a Democratic member of Congress and attacking the president. They have priorities.

What this all means is that the Democrats will have to take matters into their own hands just as they were forced to do when the newly elected far-right bomb thrower Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, had years of racist, anti-semitic, violent comments brought to light last winter, including liking Facebook comments calling for the execution of Democrats Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. (She also threatened violence against Ocasio-Cortez, which seems to be a favorite pastime among the looniest GOP backbenchers.) Since Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was too cowardly to take Greene on himself, the Democrats, being in the majority, stripped her of her committee assignments. The House will vote today on a resolution to do the same to Gosar and censure him as well.

The Republicans just don’t have a problem with death threats.

One of them, Tom Emmer of Minnesota was quoted saying that the video was inappropriate but “unfortunately, in the world we’re in right now, we all get death threats, no matter what the issue is.” See, it’s no biggie. In fact, they are happy to let the Democrats do their dirty work for them by reeling in their violent gadflies — and then make them pay for it the next time the Republicans take power. It’s a win-win.

Recall that after Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of her committees, they made it explicit. McCarthy took to the floor to remind the Democrats that when they nuked the filibuster for lower court nominees in 2013 (after having most of President Obama’s nominees blocked by the GOP for years) Mitch McConnell told them “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think” — and then he nuked it for Supreme Court justices the first chance he got. The idea that he wouldn’t have done it anyway is laughable, but they like to pretend they are victims and are just acting in self-defense.

McCarthy made the threats explicit saying that Republicans have a “long list” of those they plan to strip of committee assignments including Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Congressman Jim Banks, a Republican from Indiana who McCarthy wanted to install on the January 6th Committee despite Banks’ vote against certifying the 2020 election, warned in a now-deleted tweet that Swalwell, Omar, Waters and Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga. should be “begging Speaker Pelosi not to go through with this.” (I don’t know how he expects the House of Representatives to strip committee assignments from a U.S. senator, but maybe he just couldn’t think of any other Black representatives in the moment.)

And then there was this fine fellow, known mostly for being heavily involved in Donald Trump’s attempted coup:

#Socialists to strip #MarjorieTaylorGreene committee assignments for alleged PRE-ELECTION conduct. BAD IDEA!

Socialists subvert democracy & diss voters who elected MTG.

When GOP recaptures House in 2022, this precedent lets GOP dictate ALL Socialist committee assignments! Hmmm.

— Mo Brooks (@RepMoBrooks) February 4, 2021

I have absolutely no doubt that they mean it and that they will do it. Following the lead of Donald Trump, revenge and retribution is Republicans’ first principle now, whether against any Republican who crosses Dear Leader or votes with Democrats or against any and all Democrats once they are back in power. Just this week they had another hysterical meltdown over the fact that former White House adviser and podcaster Steve Bannon was indicted for contempt of congress.

Congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado tweeted: “Now that Democrats have started these politically-motivated indictments for Contempt of Congress, I look forward to seeing their reactions when we keep that same energy as we take back the House next year! Future House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Oh., pledged that the Biden administration will spend virtually all its time under subpoena if the Republicans win back the House in 2022. He tweeted, “Joe Biden has evicerated [sic] Executive Privilege. There are a lot of Republicans eager to hear testimony from Ron Klain and Jake Sullivan when we take back the House.” I’m pretty sure neither of them have been involved in any coup plotting or riot inciting, but I have little doubt that these people will turn the House of Representatives into a three ring circus the minute they take the gavel.

The big enchilada, of course, will be the inevitable impeachment of President Biden. You know it’s going to be on the top of the agenda. As Salon’s Chauncey DeVega wrote a few weeks ago, Senator Lindsey Graham is already casting about for reasons:

During a recent interview with Newsmax TV, Sen. Lindsey Graham continued his demands that Joe Biden be impeached for “dereliction of duty” because of conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Graham told Newsmax host Eric Bolling, “I think the guy deserves to be impeached for this,” citing an “invasion” by migrants and immigrants from Latin America and Haiti.

He’s suggested that Biden should be impeached for Afghanistan as well. I’m sure they’re already drawing up a list of articles of impeachment as we speak. It’s what they do. After all, they were poised to impeach Hillary Clinton, even before the 2016 election:

Senior Republican lawmakers are openly discussing the prospect of impeaching Hillary Clinton should she win the presidency, a stark indication that partisan warfare over her tenure as secretary of state will not end on Election Day. Chairmen of two congressional committees said in media interviews this week they believe Clinton committed impeachable offenses in setting up and using a private email server for official State Department business. And a third senior Republican, the chairman of a House Judiciary subcommittee, told The Washington Post he is personally convinced Clinton should be impeached for influence peddling involving her family foundation.

Listening to them caterwaul about Democrats launching politically motivated investigations is enough to drive one to drink.

As DeVega rightly pointed out “impeaching Biden is one tactic in a larger plan to delegitimize any election that Republican do not win.” But it’s also just plain old revenge. The Democrats won the last two elections and impeached Donald Trump twice. They must pay for that insult.

The Republicans will find a reason to impeach Biden and they will no doubt find some reason to censure some Democratic representatives, the more absurd the charges the better. It’s the exercise of power that matters. They are going to use it ruthlessly.

How the NRA got hacked and then attacked by Twitter bots

The National Rifle Association (NRA) appeared to be recently hacked by a Russian ransomware group named Grief. The group reportedly got hold of internal NRA documents about grant proposals, emails, and meeting minutes and posted the files online, threatening to leak more if the NRA did not pay up. The documents are now deleted from Grief’s website and the NRA has remained silent about whether or not they have paid the ransom, however, according to a report from “The Daily Beast”, Grief went even beyond to try to get their pay.

When the hack made headlines, a mysterious group of Twitter bots started sharing and posting almost exclusively about Grief. Sam Riddell, associate threat intelligence analyst of information operations at FireEye’s Mandiant, told The Daily Beast that the bot’s purpose seems to be to amplify coverage of Grief’s hacking incidents.

It appears that Grief has been dissatisfied with the attention their activities have been getting, according to security experts that spoke with The Daily Beast. “These groups have started to adopt new strategies, or new levers, effectively, for pushing out their message and getting people to pay attention to it.” said Jeremy Kennelly, senior manager of financial crime analysis at Mandiant.

Riddell said that odds are high that Grief is operating this mysterious network of Twitter bots. And Kennelly said that this could be a new tactic that other groups might use to extort their victims. “It wouldn’t surprise me if in the wake of this we see that used more broadly.” said Kennelly.

Another security firm, GroupSense, told The Daily Beast the bots are also posting about political issues, such as the NRA, gun violence and Nazis. The CEO of GroupSense, Tom Richards, said these hacking groups could be influenced by “nation-state actors.”

But the effectiveness of this Twitter network and tactics like it have experts like Ridell skeptical. “Just because these actors are trying this doesn’t mean it’s successful.”

Biden proposes 20-year drilling ban near sacred Indigenous site

Indigenous tribes have fought for years to protect Chaco Canyon, one of the oldest and most culturally important native sites in the United States, from the oil and gas industry. Located in the high desert of northwest New Mexico, the historical site served as a hub for ceremony, politics, and trade from the ninth to 13th centuries. Today, the 1,000-year-old stone structures still stand.

On Monday, President Joe Biden proposed a 20-year ban on new oil and gas drilling on federal lands within 10 miles of Chaco Canyon. The announcement was made at the Biden administration’s first Tribal Nations Summit.

“Chaco Canyon is a sacred place that holds deep meaning for the Indigenous peoples whose ancestors lived, worked, and thrived in that high desert community,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a press release. Haaland is from New Mexico and a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe. She has previously fought to protect the Chaco landscape.

According to a National Parks Conservation Association report, Chaco Culture National Historical Park is one of the public parks most at-risk from oil and gas development in the United States. While Chaco Canyon itself is currently protected from drilling, the surrounding area is not. The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, leases 90 percent of federal land around Greater Chaco for drilling. The extraction sites cause significant noise, water, light, and air pollution.

Last year, under the Trump administration, the BLM held public comment meetings on a plan that would have added 3,000 new oil and gas wells in the area around Chaco Canyon. Public comment periods are required to solicit community feedback, but critics decried the agency for holding the meetings in the middle of a pandemic. Indigenous communities have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. In May 2020, the New Mexico Health Department reported that Native Americans made up 56 percent of coronavirus cases despite representing just 11 percent of the state’s population. In addition, less than half of rural tribal households have broadband internet service, which made it difficult for communities near Chaco Canyon to participate in virtual meetings about the Trump proposal.

Environmentalists celebrated the Biden administration’s new proposed drilling ban. “We are thrilled that the Biden administration is heeding the calls of Indigenous communities that have been fighting for hundreds of years to protect their ancestral lands from further desecration,” Alex Taurel, a director for the League of Conservation Voters, said in a press release. “We hope this process results in long-term protections for the Chaco Canyon area. Embracing this and other examples of tribally-led conservation efforts can help the United States fight climate change and advance equity at a time when we must act boldly on both fronts.”

The process to ban new drilling in the Chaco region will take approximately two years. The agency must conduct an environmental analysis and seek public comment on the plan, during which time the land will not be available for leasing. Beginning in 2022, the BLM and the Bureau of Indian Affairs plan to initiate formal tribal consultation about the future of energy development in the region. The new ban would not impact current leases or resource rights.

Robert McEntyre, a representative for the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, told the New York Times he thought the 10-mile rule was “arbitrary.”

“There doesn’t appear to be a scientific or environmental rationale for that 10-mile radius,” he said. “Given the role that oil and gas plays in the economy of that area, we shouldn’t have an arbitrary number that would limit economic opportunities, perhaps the only economic opportunities, in that part of the state.”

Facebook is blocking access to data about misinformation

Leaked internal documents suggest Facebook – which recently renamed itself Meta – is doing far worse than it claims at minimizing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on the Facebook social media platform.

Online misinformation about the virus and vaccines is a major concern. In one study, survey respondents who got some or all of their news from Facebook were significantly more likely to resist the COVID-19 vaccine than those who got their news from mainstream media sources.

As a researcher who studies social and civic media, I believe it’s critically important to understand how misinformation spreads online. But this is easier said than done. Simply counting instances of misinformation found on a social media platform leaves two key questions unanswered: How likely are users to encounter misinformation, and are certain users especially likely to be affected by misinformation? These questions are the denominator problem and the distribution problem.

The COVID-19 misinformation study, “Facebook’s Algorithm: a Major Threat to Public Health“, published by public interest advocacy group Avaaz in August 2020, reported that sources that frequently shared health misinformation — 82 websites and 42 Facebook pages — had an estimated total reach of 3.8 billion views in a year.

At first glance, that’s a stunningly large number. But it’s important to remember that this is the numerator. To understand what 3.8 billion views in a year means, you also have to calculate the denominator. The numerator is the part of a fraction above the line, which is divided by the part of the fraction below line, the denominator.

Getting some perspective

One possible denominator is 2.9 billion monthly active Facebook users, in which case, on average, every Facebook user has been exposed to at least one piece of information from these health misinformation sources. But these are 3.8 billion content views, not discrete users. How many pieces of information does the average Facebook user encounter in a year? Facebook does not disclose that information.

Market researchers estimate that Facebook users spend from 19 minutes a day to 38 minutes a day on the platform. If the 1.93 billion daily active users of Facebook see an average of 10 posts in their daily sessions – a very conservative estimate – the denominator for that 3.8 billion pieces of information per year is 7.044 trillion (1.93 billion daily users times 10 daily posts times 365 days in a year). This means roughly 0.05% of content on Facebook is posts by these suspect Facebook pages.

The 3.8 billion views figure encompasses all content published on these pages, including innocuous health content, so the proportion of Facebook posts that are health misinformation is smaller than one-twentieth of a percent.

Is it worrying that there’s enough misinformation on Facebook that everyone has likely encountered at least one instance? Or is it reassuring that 99.95% of what’s shared on Facebook is not from the sites Avaaz warns about? Neither.

Misinformation distribution

In addition to estimating a denominator, it’s also important to consider the distribution of this information. Is everyone on Facebook equally likely to encounter health misinformation? Or are people who identify as anti-vaccine or who seek out “alternative health” information more likely to encounter this type of misinformation?

Another social media study focusing on extremist content on YouTube offers a method for understanding the distribution of misinformation. Using browser data from 915 web users, an Anti-Defamation League team recruited a large, demographically diverse sample of U.S. web users and oversampled two groups: heavy users of YouTube, and individuals who showed strong negative racial or gender biases in a set of questions asked by the investigators. Oversampling is surveying a small subset of a population more than its proportion of the population to better record data about the subset.

The researchers found that 9.2% of participants viewed at least one video from an extremist channel, and 22.1% viewed at least one video from an alternative channel, during the months covered by the study. An important piece of context to note: A small group of people were responsible for most views of these videos. And more than 90% of views of extremist or “alternative” videos were by people who reported a high level of racial or gender resentment on the pre-study survey.

While roughly 1 in 10 people found extremist content on YouTube and 2 in 10 found content from right-wing provocateurs, most people who encountered such content “bounced off” it and went elsewhere. The group that found extremist content and sought more of it were people who presumably had an interest: people with strong racist and sexist attitudes.

The authors concluded that “consumption of this potentially harmful content is instead concentrated among Americans who are already high in racial resentment,” and that YouTube’s algorithms may reinforce this pattern. In other words, just knowing the fraction of users who encounter extreme content doesn’t tell you how many people are consuming it. For that, you need to know the distribution as well.

Superspreaders or whack-a-mole?

A widely publicized study from the anti-hate speech advocacy group Center for Countering Digital Hate titled Pandemic Profiteers showed that of 30 anti-vaccine Facebook groups examined, 12 anti-vaccine celebrities were responsible for 70% of the content circulated in these groups, and the three most prominent were responsible for nearly half. But again, it’s critical to ask about denominators: How many anti-vaccine groups are hosted on Facebook? And what percent of Facebook users encounter the sort of information shared in these groups?

Without information about denominators and distribution, the study reveals something interesting about these 30 anti-vaccine Facebook groups, but nothing about medical misinformation on Facebook as a whole.

These types of studies raise the question, “If researchers can find this content, why can’t the social media platforms identify it and remove it?” The Pandemic Profiteers study, which implies that Facebook could solve 70% of the medical misinformation problem by deleting only a dozen accounts, explicitly advocates for the deplatforming of these dealers of disinformation. However, I found that 10 of the 12 anti-vaccine influencers featured in the study have already been removed by Facebook.

Consider Del Bigtree, one of the three most prominent spreaders of vaccination disinformation on Facebook. The problem is not that Bigtree is recruiting new anti-vaccine followers on Facebook; it’s that Facebook users follow Bigtree on other websites and bring his content into their Facebook communities. It’s not 12 individuals and groups posting health misinformation online – it’s likely thousands of individual Facebook users sharing misinformation found elsewhere on the web, featuring these dozen people. It’s much harder to ban thousands of Facebook users than it is to ban 12 anti-vaccine celebrities.

This is why questions of denominator and distribution are critical to understanding misinformation online. Denominator and distribution allow researchers to ask how common or rare behaviors are online, and who engages in those behaviors. If millions of users are each encountering occasional bits of medical misinformation, warning labels might be an effective intervention. But if medical misinformation is consumed mostly by a smaller group that’s actively seeking out and sharing this content, those warning labels are most likely useless.

[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]

Getting the right data

Trying to understand misinformation by counting it, without considering denominators or distribution, is what happens when good intentions collide with poor tools. No social media platform makes it possible for researchers to accurately calculate how prominent a particular piece of content is across its platform.

Facebook restricts most researchers to its Crowdtangle tool, which shares information about content engagement, but this is not the same as content views. Twitter explicitly prohibits researchers from calculating a denominator, either the number of Twitter users or the number of tweets shared in a day. YouTube makes it so difficult to find out how many videos are hosted on their service that Google routinely asks interview candidates to estimate the number of YouTube videos hosted to evaluate their quantitative skills.

The leaders of social media platforms have argued that their tools, despite their problems, are good for society, but this argument would be more convincing if researchers could independently verify that claim.

As the societal impacts of social media become more prominent, pressure on the big tech platforms to release more data about their users and their content is likely to increase. If those companies respond by increasing the amount of information that researchers can access, look very closely: Will they let researchers study the denominator and the distribution of content online? And if not, are they afraid of what researchers will find?

Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication, and Information, University of Massachusetts Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Michigan GOP’s latest vote-crushing scheme could eliminate 20% of polling sites

A controversial scheme by Michigan Republicans to circumvent Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s veto of their proposed voting restrictions could eliminate one in every five polling sites in the state, according to a new study.

The head of the Michigan Republican Party is funding the “Secure MI Vote” petition, which includes a ban on in-kind contributions to local election clerks. Organizers have acknowledged that this provision would in fact end the use of donated polling sites, such as churches. Some cities and townships could lose half their polling sites — or in some cases all of them — under the new restrictions, according to a new report from the liberal advocacy group Progress Michigan.

“I hope people are able to see the danger and the impact of this proposal,” Mary Clark, president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks and Delta Township clerk, said in a statement. “This is the type of policy that causes me to lay awake at night because it will cause so much confusion amongst voters and put clerks in impossible situations. This would absolutely negatively impact legally registered voters in my jurisdiction and every jurisdiction in this state.”

Michigan Republicans, who introduced a 39-bill package to change the state’s voting laws in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat, in September launched an effort to pull an end-around on Whitmer’s veto of their proposed voting laws by introducing a ballot petition — one that voters will never get to see. An unusual quirk in the state’s constitution allows the Republican-dominated state legislature to adopt the initiative rather than put it on the ballot if they collect just 340,047 signatures, or 8% of the number of voters who participated in the last gubernatorial election. Whitmer has no power to veto such an initiative if it is passed by the legislature.

The initiative would create the “most restrictive voter ID law in the entire country,” voting rights groups say, even though the state already has a voter ID law on the books. It would also ban election officials from “sending or providing access to” an absentee ballot application unless it is requested and ban election clerks from accepting donated spaces or private donations to help administer the elections.

Local election clerks have sounded the alarm over the proposed initiative, arguing that the stricter voter ID requirement amounts to a “poll tax” and will restrict ballot access while causing confusion among voters. But the ban on donated spaces “would be devastating,” Clark said in a news conference last week.

Churches and religious spaces accounted for 664 of the state’s 3,355 polling places in 2020. Religious spaces accounted for more than 40% of polling places in five counties and more than 20% of polling places in 15 counties. More than 1.5 million voters across Genesee, Kalamazoo, Kent and Ottawa counties could lose about half of their polling locations, according to the Progress Michigan report. Religious sites also made up more than 25% of polling locations in the state’s largest counties, Wayne and Oakland. About 111 cities and townships used churches as 50% or more of their polling sites and 28 cities and townships used churches as 100% of polling locations.

Ingham County, which includes most of Lansing, could lose a quarter of its polling locations.

“The most effective way to kill something in government is to cut off its funding,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum told Salon. “Republicans, through this petition, are trying to starve our clerks, who safeguard and administer our democracy, of funding in every way possible. The result will be a democratic system that is anything but.”

Delta township had 16 polling locations for 26,000 voters, Clark said, 12 of which are located in religious sites. Under the proposed ban, local election clerks would have to make do with fewer polling locations or pay to use sites they otherwise would have accessed for free.

“I wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘Where am I going to put 26,000 voters?’ There are townships that don’t have a township hall. What are you going to do in a small community?” she said, adding, “It’s alarming, it’s frustrating, and it’s scary. … It’s starting to create panic about how we are going to manage this.”

Jamie Roe, a spokesman for the Secure MI Vote ballot committee, did not respond to questions from Salon but defended the provision in a statement to the Associated Press.

“We do not believe that it is improper for churches to serve as polling places,” he said. “It’s wholly appropriate. The fact of the matter is, though, churches are providing a benefit to the public and they should be compensated for that benefit.”

The initiative does not include any funds for local election clerks to cover the cost of the new polling sites, meaning that cash-strapped election officials may be forced to reduce the number of polling locations. This could lead to longer lines and longer journeys for voters to get to the polls, the report said. But state law also requires election clerks to provide a minimum number of polling places depending on the population, meaning that local election officials will have to find ways to stretch budgets to pay for locations they would have had access to for free.

“Banning donated spaces while not also increasing budgets for local clerks will mean that precincts have to move to cheap, inaccessible spaces, be consolidated, or be paid for at the expense of other necessary fiscal expenditures for the smooth operations of the municipal clerks’ offices,” Bynum explained. “So it will be difficult for voters to use, will be consolidated so that lines are long and force voters to wait for hours to cast a ballot, or will disrupt the local clerks in carrying out their duties in other, unforeseen ways.”

Changing polling locations voters have used for years could also spark confusion. When voters who have been voting at the same location for years “show up to vote and are turned away, they are being disenfranchised,” Byrum said.

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While the new report focuses only on houses of worship, the language in the petition would also ban clerks from using schools and senior centers as polling sites.

These locations “all give this space as their contribution to our democracy and their community,” Clark said. “It’s quite unsettling.”

The religious sites listed in the report as “just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sam Inglot, deputy director of Progress Michigan.

“This proposal will negatively impact voters and clerks across Michigan,” he said. “This initiative will change where voters have voted in previous elections, in some cases for decades, and could reduce the overall number of polling places available to voters. This systematic defunding of our elections will result in longer lines, longer drives and less people able to make their voices heard.”

A survey of members of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks found that 82% of respondents oppose at least some components of the petition, Clark said, leading the group to oppose the initiative.

“It’s not a Dem issue, it’s not a Republican issue, it’s a voter issue,” she said, adding that no one from the state legislature reached out to the group for input on the provision.

The proposal in the Secure MI Vote petition are similar to the voting restrictions introduced by Republicans in the state legislature amid a slew of Republican legislation restricting ballot access nationwide amid baseless allegations of voter fraud from President Donald Trump and his allies. But the ban on private donations appears aimed at Republican suspicions over “Zuck bucks,” or private grants from a nonprofit that received funding from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

The couple gave $400 million to the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonprofit that donated funding to local election officials to help administrators conduct elections amid the pandemic. The funds, including nearly $8 million that it donated to cash-strapped election officials in Michigan, were meant for renting polling places, recruiting poll workers, equipment and PPE, according to the organization.

Though the organization said it donated funds to urban, suburban and rural areas, Republican lawmakers have raised suspicions over “what strings are attached” to the grants and whether third-party group donations may favor liberal areas. Some Trump allies have used the donations to claim that tech “oligarchs” are “buying the administration of the state’s elections.”

Byrum rejected the Republican argument, questioning whether lawmakers also want to ban sheriffs from using grant money because it is “tantamount to buying off law enforcement.”

“Is Mark Zuckerberg calling up 1,600 local clerks in Michigan? We have dozens of safeguards that prevent malfeasance at every level,” she said. “We can review paper ballots if needed, the results are tabulated, canvassed, audited, audited a second time and can be recounted if the candidate believes there is some kind of error.”

Beyond the impact of the ban on donated spaces, prohibiting cash-strapped election clerks from accepting outside funding could make it more difficult to administer elections.

“No other constitutional office holders are restricted from accepting grants and donations to supplement the meager funding that we get to do the jobs that the constitution requires of us,” Byrum said. “Clerks use these grants to buy ballot drop boxes, tabulators, envelope openers and office supplies.”

Republicans in Michigan and around the country have framed their onslaught of new voting restrictions as necessary to preserve “election integrity” amid Trump’s years-long fear-mongering over baseless allegations of voter fraud and unfounded concerns about mail voting. But Republicans in Michigan and other states have failed to find any evidence of voter fraud, and some have even admitted that restrictions are necessary for their party to counter the increase in voter turnout boosted by the expansion of mail voting during the pandemic.

“Let me be absolutely clear about what the intent is of this petition as well as other efforts by Republican lawmakers in Michigan and across the country: The intent is to ensure that fewer people vote,” Byrum said. “In Michigan, the Senate Republican leader stated that more voters did not ‘accrue to his interest’ during the 2020 election. But this is not just true for 2020. Republicans have tried to suppress the vote for decades because when more people vote, they lose.”

Read more on voter suppression tactics built on the Big Lie:

Former Bush lawyer Richard Painter on the Jan. 6 cover-up: “Like the mistake Weimar Germany made”

There seems to be no realistic prospect that Donald Trump and members of his inner circle, along with Republican collaborators in Congress and other financiers and organizers of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will ever be punished for their many and obvious crimes. For that matter, the foot soldiers of the Trump regime are not being prosecuted to the full extend of the law either.

Donald Trump is continuing to rally his movement behind the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that Joe Biden is a usurper. Trump is also targeting any Republican candidates or elected officials he deems disloyal. The Republican Party and its propaganda machine are accelerating an internal purge with the goal of purifying Trump’s political personality cult. Some observers have suggested that this means Trump’s movement is becoming weaker, but the opposite is true.

Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, played a key role in Trump’s coup attempt, literally advocating that the military be deployed to enforce martial law and invalidate the 2020 election. If that idea had been carried through, American democracy would have been effectively suspended for an indefinite period.

Flynn continues to make public threats against American democracy, suggesting last weekend that the U.S. should have “one religion.” Some months ago, Flynn appeared to endorse the idea of a military coup, similar to the one that occurred recently in Myanmar, presumably as a way of returning to power.

It has recently been reported that Trump’s coup attempt was more advanced and broader in scope than was known at the time. Former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis apparently sent detailed instructions to Mike Pence’s chief of staff, outlining a plan to derail certification of the electoral votes in Congress. The idea was to throw the election into the House — something that has not happened since the early 19th century — presumably resulting in a second term for Trump.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chairman and White House strategist, surrendered to federal authorities this week on charges of contempt of Congress for his refusal to testify before the House committee investigating Jan. 6. Bannon is not likely to be deterred by this prosecution, wishful thinking among the hashtag-resistance aside. Instead, as Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton has observed, Bannon will use this new moment in the limelight as political theater, to the delight of his neofascist fan base.

Why are Attorney General Merrick Garland and the other leaders of the Department of Justice so reluctant to use the full force of the law against the Trump regime and other Republican fascists? Is the Biden administration’s desperate desire to appear “apolitical” endangering democracy and the rule of law? What, if anything, does the Bannon prosecution mean in the larger context of the Trump regime’s criminal acts? or not – for its approach to the Trump regime’s crimes more generally?

In an attempt to answer these questions I recently spoke with Richard Painter, who was White House chief ethics counsel under President George W. Bush. He is also a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN and other news networks. His most recent book, co-authored with Peter Golenbock, is “American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump is the Worst Offender.”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

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Why are Donald Trump and his co-conspirators not in jail for their likely or evident crimes connected to Jan. 6 and the coup plot? Are there no consequences for what they did?

The Department of Justice has not even started to investigate the higher-ups in connection to Jan. 6. The Jan. 6 committee [in Congress] cannot prosecute anything. They are also having a difficult time getting the documents and testimony they need for their investigations. Donald Trump is resisting every step of the way. In the end we will just have to wait and see what the committee comes up with when they finish their work.

I am very disappointed in the Department of Justice. It is being too deferential to Donald Trump. There has been some improvement, with the Department of Justice deciding that the Trump White House documents are not privileged. But again, the Department of Justice is not investigating Donald Trump and other senior people in the White House who may have been involved in the events of Jan. 6.

It is unfortunate that the Department of Justice has decided to go that route, because whether or not a crime is prosecuted should not be a political judgment call. If someone commits a crime — including insurrection and sedition, or inciting insurrection — it should be prosecuted. I am very upset the Department of Justice has not appointed a special prosecutor to focus on Jan. 6 as well as other alleged criminal acts committed by the Trump administration.

One of the common excuses and deflections is that we must be patient because the law moves slowly. There are levels of “slow.” But how do we explain the lack of urgency being shown by the Biden administration and the Department of Justice?

They need to appoint a special prosecutor. I do not expect Merrick Garland and Biden’s other appointees to prosecute Donald Trump and his cronies in connection with the events of Jan. 6. That would look too political. This is not a question of things taking too long — they have not even started their work.

Garland is trying to avoid the appearance of looking “political” by aggressively pursuing the Trump administration and its allies. But a coup and insurrection are by definition political acts. Please help me sort out Garland’s logic.

There is one type of politics in a representative democracy, and there is another type of politics in an authoritarian dictatorship or a country that has otherwise descended into chaos. The making of the law and the passing of laws is a political process, where Congress is involved in agreeing what the law is. Once we have a law and someone violates it as a criminal act, then they need to be prosecuted.

In a society where the law is deemed to just be political, it can be taken to an extreme. The law becomes discretionary and tied to political ideology. That’s where you end up with a dictatorship, such as with Nazi Germany.

In a well-functioning representative democracy, once the law has been enacted through the political process, if someone violates it — for example, by inciting a coup or an insurrection — that person or persons is prosecuted. That is the political system I thought we lived under here in America. We should expect that prosecutors are going to do their job.

And it’s critically important, because the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, Section Three, says that anyone who’s taken an oath of office to support the United States who then engages in an insurrection, or gives aid and comfort to an insurrection or rebellion, is disqualified from public office.

Therefore, we could have a number of people, perhaps including the former president, Donald Trump, who are actually disqualified from public office because they gave aid and comfort to an insurrection on Jan. 6.

Steve Bannon, who is publicly implicated in the 2020 coup plot, has finally been indicted for refusing to testify before the Jan. 6 committee. What does this mean in terms of the Department of Justice and its refusal to go after Donald Trump and the other coup plotters?

The Department of Justice had little choice but to prosecute Bannon — his contempt of Congress is obvious. It might as well not be a crime, if Bannon is not prosecuted.

I see little change in attitude at the Department of Justice on the big picture: They must appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any crimes leading up to and after the 2020 election. It is inexplicable that the Department of Justice has not done so.

I have no idea whether others in Trump’s inner circle will cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee. Unlike Bannon, most were White House staffers at the time, so there is a claim of executive privilege — by Trump, not by Biden — that needs to be soundly rejected by the courts on appeal. They probably cannot be prosecuted until those appeals are exhausted.

Jan. 6 and the related events before and after that day constitute the actions of a cabal who were involved in what, by all common-sense definitions, was a conspiracy. Again, this gets to the question of urgency. That language is being actively avoided by the mainstream news media and political leaders.

Yes, that is what was taking place. We went through this when Donald Trump became president by collaborating and colluding with the Russians. What we have here is not ,collusion with the Russians but instead collusion and collaboration with domestic terrorists or insurrectionists who planned to overthrow the United States government. We have not had to deal with something of this magnitude since the Civil War, and it needs to be properly investigated.

What message is being sent if Trump, the coup plotters and his foot soldiers are not punished?

The message is that you can get away with the most egregious crimes, including insurrection and sedition, so long as you have enough political power that people do not want to stop you or otherwise interfere with you.

That is not how a representative democracy is supposed to function. We need to revisit the question of whether the most powerful people in this country are going to be held accountable under the Constitution and our criminal laws just like everyone else.

It also seems as if those who participated in the January insurrection and the Capitol assault are receiving relatively minor punishments, under Department of Justice guidelines and instructions.

The people who showed up on Jan. 6 and invaded the Capitol should be held accountable. They should not be punished with small fines and little jail time. This was an attempted coup. It was violent. People were killed. Those who were involved should be serving time in jail. Extraordinarily light sentences are being handed out in view of what happened here, which was an attempt to overthrow the government. That is considered treason in many respects, and is one of the most serious felonies imaginable. These are not misdemeanors. These are not minor felonies. I would think people would be getting some serious jail time.

The people who are behind the events of Jan. 6 are not even being investigated, much less prosecuted. I don’t believe that crowd just came out of thin air. Those events were not spontaneous. There were individuals and groups pushing them to be there and organizing and inciting those events. None of those people are being held responsible, and that may ultimately include the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump.

At some point the full truth of Jan. 6 and the Trump regime’s coup plot will be revealed to the American people and the world. I am deeply concerned that these investigations will take so long that people will be so exhausted that they no longer care. In essence, the reaction will be, “So what?” If the Trumpists and coup plotters are able to escape serious punishment, then it will mean the end of the country’s democracy, because another coup is almost guaranteed to happen. Am I being too pessimistic and cynical?

That is a grave risk. People must be held accountable for their actions. These events can’t be discounted or minimized as being “just a crazy insurrection” with a bunch of “crazy guys,” where in the end some people are sent to prison for a small length of time and are then let out, as though nothing is going to happen again that the public needs to be worried about.

That is like the mistake that Weimar Germany made in 1923, when Hitler and his followers had the Beer Hall Putsch and thought they could take over the German government. They were all tried and sent to jail. Hitler did one year or so in prison. Then he gets out and he is elevated by the right-wing extremists as a hero. Ten years later, Hitler is sitting in the chancellor’s office running the whole country.

When people engage in a coup attempt like this and are allowed to come back, it will be much worse the second time around.

From Salon’s coverage of the latest Jan. 6 revelations:

“Inexcusable”: Manchin leads charge against Biden’s pro-union electric vehicle tax credit

Advocates for both workers’ rights and climate policy are condemning Sen. Joe Manchin’s latest statements opposing provisions in the Build Back Better Act, the $1.75 trillion social spending and climate action package that has already been substantially weakened due largely to the right-wing Democrat’s objections to numerous anti-poverty and environmental measures.

Manchin’s most recent opposition is to tax incentives for electric vehicles made by American workers who are represented by unions.

At an event last week with officials from Toyota, whose plant workers have no union representation, the senator told Automotive News that incentivizing the purchase of electric vehicles from the only three auto companies with unions — the U.S. based Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler — would be “un-American” and “wrong.”

“We shouldn’t use everyone’s tax dollars to pick winners and losers,” Manchin told the outlet at the event, where Toyota announced it would be investing $240 million in a non-union West Virginia plant to produce hybrid vehicles.

Toyota and other foreign-run auto companies have been lobbying against the provision, while United Auto Workers (UAW) has expressed support. If passed as it’s written now, the Build Back Better Act would provide purchasers of electric vehicles with a maximum tax credit of $7,500, and would add a $4,500 credit on top of that starting if the vehicle is manufactured by unionized workers.

As Earther reported Monday, the tax incentive could have a major impact on Americans’ ability to purchase vehicles not solely reliant on fossil fuels, as “price still remains the number one barrier in preventing new [electric vehicle] adoption.”

A 2020 survey by Ipsos Global showed that consumers would be willing to pay only 10% more for electric vehicles. The tax credit would bring down the cost of some electric vehicles by $12,000 to around $20,000, far below the current average cost of about $42,000.

President Joe Biden said last month that he wants workers and companies that benefit from the tax incentive to be “here in Michigan, not halfway around the globe.”

Ray Curry, president of the UAW, said last month the tax incentive “would be a win for auto manufacturing workers” while also encouraging “nonunion manufacturers to let their workers freely organize.”

Evidently, writer and attorney David Lurie said, “Manchin thinks being pro-labor is un-American.”

Joining Manchin in opposition to the tax incentive are Republican lawmakers including Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., whose states would also benefit from promoting the purchase of electric vehicles from non-union companies like Nissan and Tesla.

With the Senate evenly split between the Democrats and Republicans, Biden and Senate Democrats need Manchin’s support to pass the Build Back Better Act—a dynamic that’s directly resulted in the scrapping of provisions including the Clean Energy Performance Program and paid family and medical leave.

Now, said progressive campaign group Our Revolution, Manchin’s opposition to the tax credits is “inexcusable.”

“Our climate is running out of time — yet Manchin wants to stand in the way of affordable and sustainable solutions,” said the group. “Shame!”

Cubans definitely want change — but not necessarily regime change

“If you build it, they will come,” said Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams.” In Cuba, they didn’t come. Dissidents on the island, with their U.S. backers, had been working feverishly for months to turn the unprecedented July 11 protests into a crescendo of government opposition on Nov. 15. They built a formidable structure, with sophisticated social media (including an abundance of fake news), piles of cash from Cuban-Americans and the U.S. government, and declarations of support from a bipartisan Congress and all the way up to the White House.

Even after the Cuban government denied the protesters a permit on the grounds that they were part of a destabilization campaign led by the United States, anti-government forces insisted that they were undeterred and were ready to take the risks. But in the end, their Field of Dreams turned out to be an illusion. What happened?

Intimidation of dissidents was certainly a key factor. The leader of the Facebook group Archipelago, Yunior Garcia, was kept under virtual house arrest. Other leaders were threatened with arrest and repudiated by their pro-revolution neighbors.

But at the grassroots, I talked to Cubans who had second thoughts about the usefulness of street protests. They had come into the streets on July 11, spontaneously, with all kinds of legitimate gripes: the scarcity of food and medicines, the long lines for basic goods, the rapid spread of COVID, the hard-currency stores they didn’t have access to. But in the intervening months between the July protests and November, many realized that street protests only created division when the country needed unity. They realized that despite all the social media hype, the government was not about to fall, and that even if it did, there was no telling what would follow. If it was chaos and civil strife, or a rush of voracious Cuban-Americans trying to grab waterfront island properties, their precarious economic situation might get even worse.

“I was out protesting on July 11,” a young mother in Old Havana told me. “But since then, I’ve been weighing the pros and cons. The food situation here is terrible — we have to stand in lines for everything. On the other hand, we are safe. People don’t have guns and go around killing each other; the police don’t shoot people; we don’t have to worry about our children when they are outside playing and they get a good education for free. If this government really collapsed, I’m afraid we might lose more than we gain.”

People were also turned off by the choice of the date, Nov. 15, which was timed to wreak havoc on the precise day of Cuba’s planned reopening after nearly two years of strict pandemic restrictions. Cubans who make their living from tourism, the island’s major industry that had been decimated by the COVID showdown, have been anxiously awaiting the Nov. 15 resurgence of foreign visitors. The last thing they wanted was to scare off tourists with internal conflict.

And Nov. 15 was also the first day all schools would be open. Children in their neatly pressed uniforms were bursting with excitement after being cooped up for so long. Parents were thrilled that life was slowly getting back to normal now that almost the entire population — starting at age 2 — had been vaccinated with their locally produced vaccine. Whoever picked this momentous day for nationwide protests made an epic mistake.

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Moving forward, most Cubans seem more concerned with getting their economy fired up than toppling their leaders. Even if they blame their government for mismanagement, corruption and a system that stifles private enterprise, few fail to recognize the enormous impact of U.S. sanctions. While the island has been under some form of sanctions for the past 60 years, the Trump administration added over 200 new measures that dealt serious blows, such as stopping the flow of remittances from Cuban-Americans to their families back home and prohibiting U.S. cruise ships from making stops in the island (a business that had flourished under Barack Obama’s openings). Trump’s catering to right-wing Cuban-Americans was successful in terms of winning Florida and giving the Republicans two more South Florida congressional seats, but it made life miserable for the Cuban people. Unfortunately, President Biden has continued Trump’s hard line — putting partisan politics above the well-being of 11 million people.

There is little Cubans can do to alter U.S. policy, but they can — and want to — make their own internal changes. A theme I heard over and over from young revolutionaries is that the best way to challenge the counterrevolution is to make the revolution better. At an in-person gathering of leftist Cubans who, during the pandemic, created a popular Telegram chat group called La Manigua, I asked what kind of changes people would like to see. One by one, they gave examples: challenge the stifling bureaucracy, fire inept or corrupt people from their positions, encourage more grassroots initiatives, pass the Family Code that would give full rights to women and the gay community; get serious about confronting racism.

The last person wanted to talk about what he didn’t want to change. That included the nation’s emphasis on health care, science and education, which allowed Cubans to come up with their own vaccine and vaccinate the entire population; the sense of community that Cubans displayed as they helped each other through this pandemic; and the values of international solidarity embodied in the Cuban health care brigades that have, for decades, been going around the world saving lives.

* * *

The weekend before the planned protest, a new group of revolutionary youth called Pañuelos Rojos, or Red Scarves, set up a 48-hour encampment with music, theater, games and group discussions. On the last day of the encampment, there was a concert. The young people were sitting on the floor, grooving to the music of Tony Avila, when the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, showed up. The students cheered as he sat down on the cement floor with them. Avila was in the middle of a song called “Mi Casa” (“My House”). “I’m going to change the furniture in my house,” he sang. “I’ll change the color of the walls, redo the doors, the windows, and take down some of the walls.” Everyone was singing with him, and the president’s head was nodding up and down. The crowd roared when it came to this verse: “Although I’m happy in my house, there are changes that must be made. But I won’t go too fast, because I don’t want to damage the foundation.”

Certainly, the efforts by the dissidents and their U.S. backers to damage the foundation and topple the Cuban government are not over. But as the head of the North American division in the Foreign Ministry, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, tweeted, “The US government misread Cuba when it decided to invest so heavily in trying to instigate insurrection. We Cubans want to improve our country & move forward, not back to the times when we were the friendly playground of US capital, corruption & ambition.” If only the U.S. government would learn this 60-year-old lesson.

More from Medea Benjamin on the contradictions of U.S. foreign policy:

These are the documents Donald Trump doesn’t want the House Jan. 6 panel to see: report

Court records reveal the documents that Donald Trump and his White House officials most want to keep hidden from the House select committee.

The twice-impeached one-term president has claimed executive privilege over 39 pages from the 136 pages of documents that were set to be released Friday by the National Archives and Records Administration, and those documents include handwritten notes about Jan. 6, appointments for White House visitors, and switchboard logs that show calls between Trump and former vice president Mike Pence, reported USA Today.

“These records all relate to the events on or about January 6, and may assist the Select Committee’s investigation into that day, including what was occurring at the White House immediately before, during and after the January 6 attack,” wrote Justice Department lawyers in a court filing for the National Archives and archivist David Ferriero.

A federal appeals court temporarily delayed the release of those documents to allow Trump’s challenge to play out, and oral arguments are set for Nov. 30, but the former president’s filings reveal the contours of what congressional investigators want to see.

“Of the 763 pages in which Trump asserted privilege, 629 are talking points prepared for the press secretary and 43 include presidential schedules, appointments, activity logs, call logs, among other documents, according to the filing from the National Archives,” USA Today reported. “The National Archives identified nearly 1,600 pages of records that fit the committee’s request, with thousands more yet to be reviewed, according to the agency. Trump sought to keep nearly half the pages confidential, but the Justice Department replied that they are crucial to the investigation.”

The committee has asked for any records — including calendar entries, videos or photographs — related to Jan. 6 and coordinated efforts to delay the certification of the electoral vote, and the requests cover Trump’s public statements about the 2020 election and its validity.

The records have been divided into four installments, with the first batch scheduled to be released at the end of last week, and the second and third batches set for Nov. 26, and the fourth was still under review.

The first set of documents includes daily presidential diaries, schedules, activity logs and first drafts of speeches, while the second batch covers talking points and other documents from the White House press secretary, and a “much smaller” tranche includes handwritten notes, a draft of a speech for the “Save America March” and a draft of an executive order concerning election integrity.

A third batch includes a draft proclamation honoring Capitol police officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood, who died after the attack, and a memo that originated outside the White House concerning a possible lawsuit by the United States against several states won by Joe Biden.

CNN host stumps Steve Bannon’s lawyer with series of Jan. 6 questions

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has been indicted on charges of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena to testify before the House select committee on the January 6 insurrection. Bannon’s attorney David Schoen vigorously defended his client during a November 16 appearance on CNN’s “New Day,” but he clearly met his match in host Brianna Keilar — who wasn’t about to let him get away with misleading claims.

Bannon has maintained that because former President Donald Trump enjoyed “executive privilege” on January 6, he cannot testify before the House committee. Schoen echoed those claims on “New Day,” but Keilar clearly got the better of him.

Schoen argued that because Trump enjoyed executive privilege, that applied to Bannon as well. Keilar, however, reminded Schoen, “Trump did not formally invoke privilege with the committee.”

Schoen, sounding frustrated with Keilar’s questioning, angrily responded, “You keep saying that, and I’m telling you that Mr. Bannon advised the committee that he was advised by President Trump, in writing, that he is not to appear and not to answer the questions — which, by the way, is supported by the Office of Legal Counsel also when an executive member of the executive branch is subpoenaed.”

But Keilar reminded Schoen, “Many of the things you say, a court has not found in favor of. Some of these things are squishy, or they’re very much theoretical, just to be clear. Nonetheless, this committee has outlined 17 categories of documents that it sought from Steve Bannon. Does Bannon have them?”

Schoen responded, “I don’t know. I’m not going into those details now. As I say, I just got hired on Sunday. Today was the first day I’ve seen the subpoena in the case. So, I’m not prepared to talk about that. I’m prepared to talk about the process.”

Keilar was more than happy to discuss “process” with Schoen, pointing out that “advice of counsel is not a defense when it comes to contempt of Congress charges such as this.”

Keilar told Schoen: “It is very clear: There was a 1961 decision. This isn’t even anything recent. It is very clear, and you know that.”

Keilar went on to play Schoen a clip of Bannon, during a January 5 segment of his “War Room” podcast, infamously saying, “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow…. Tomorrow, it’s Game Day. So, strap in.” And Schoen claimed, “He’s not talking about violence” — inspiring Keilar to ask, “You’re saying he had no foreknowledge of the events that played out on January 6?”

“I’m not in a position to speak on his behalf about any foreknowledge,” Schoen told Keilar — to which she responded, “Yes you are. You’re his lawyer.”

Watch the videos below:

New “chilling” memo by Trump loyalist is “cause for considerable alarm”

ABC News’ Jonathan Karl has reported that on October 19, 2020, Trump loyalist John McEntee — then serving as White House director of presidential personnel — issued a memo listing reasons to fire then-Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper from the Trump Administration. Never Trump conservative Max Boot discusses Karl’s reporting and that memo in his November 15 column for the Washington Post, explaining why McEntee’s memo should be a “cause of considerable alarm” if Donald Trump runs for president in 2024.

Boot was highly critical of Esper in the past, describing him as a Trump enabler. But in light of Karl’s reporting, the conservative columnist now believes he “may have been too harsh on” the former defense secretary — who Trump fired on November 9.

“Now that we have seen fresh evidence of how much Trump and his henchmen loathed Esper, he is rising in my estimation,” Boot explains. “That evidence comes courtesy of ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, who has unearthed a memorandum from Johnny McEntee, Trump’s director of presidential personnel, listing 14 reasons for ousting Esper. That document was dated October 19, 2020. Three weeks later, Esper was fired by a Trump tweet.”

The very premise of McEntee’s memo was both sinister and ludicrous — a 30-year-old of no distinction, whose path to power was carrying Trump’s bags, was making the case for getting rid of a senior Cabinet officer for insufficient loyalty to the president. https://t.co/XzdM0u7Q3y

— Max Boot 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@MaxBoot) November 15, 2021

Describing McEntee’s memo as “both sinister and ludicrous,” Boot notes that the Trump loyalist “was making the case for getting rid of a senior cabinet officer for insufficient loyalty to the president.”

“This revealing and chilling document deserves to be read not as a historical curiosity, but as a terrible portent of what could be in store if Trump wins another term,” Boot writes. “He appears determined to turn the military into his personal goon squad.”

Boot goes on to note some of McEntee’s reasons for wanting Esper fired. Esper, McEntee complained, “approved the promotion of Lt. Col. (Alexander) Vindman,” a key witness during Trump’s impeachment — and Esper “publicly opposed the president’s direction to utilize American force to put down riots just outside the White House,” McEntee wrote.

Boot observes, “This was a reference to Esper’s brave decision in June 2020 to resist Trump’s desires to deploy active-duty troops to suppress Black Lives Matter protests. Esper acted after he and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been lured by Trump into a bizarre photo op in Lafayette Square, which been cleared by force of peaceful protesters.”

In the memo, Boot adds, McEntee (now 31) also wanted Esper fired for removing Confederate flags from military installations.

McEntee’s memo, the Never Trump conservative warns, underscores the fact that a second Trump presidency —should he run in 2024 — would be disastrous for the United States.

“Trump would want to ensure that the ‘guys with guns’ are on his side,” Boot warns. “If he wins a second term, Trump’s next defense secretary — Johnny McEntee perhaps? — would almost certainly be somebody more devoted to him than to the Constitution. For anyone concerned about the future of U.S. democracy, that should be a cause of considerable alarm at a time when Trump and (President Joe) Biden are running almost neck and neck in polling matchups.”

John Oliver rips into Jan. 6 defendant Jenna Ryan: “She’s actually going to prison!”

Last night, on Last Week Tonight’s season finale, host John Oliver ripped into Jenna Ryan, a participant in the January 6th riots.

Oliver singled out Ryan of the Jan. 6 defendants. Ryan, who is a Texas real estate agent, flew out to the Capitol to participate in the riots. In March, two months after the riots, Ryan tweeted, Definitely not going to jail. Sorry I have blonde hair white skin a great job a great future and I’m not going to jail. Sorry to rain on your hater parade. I did nothing wrong.”

Definitely not going to jail. Sorry I have blonde hair white skin a great job a great future and I'm not going to jail. Sorry to rain on your hater parade. I did nothing wrong

— Jenna Ryan 🇺🇸 (@realjennaryan) March 26, 2021

“On one hand, a dangerously brazen tweet,” said Oliver, “But on the other, a pretty great real housewives catchphrase.”

“To be fair, Jenna Ryan was right. She’s not going to jail,” continued Oliver. “Because she’s actually going to prison.”

Two weeks ago, Ryan pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, and was sentenced to 60 days in prison. In an interview with WFAA, Ryan said of the riots, “We’re storming the Capitol. And I meant we’re storming with our words and our- we’re going down to tell them- and you know, free speech…”

The interview then cut to Ryan shouting at the riots, “You know what? We are armed and dangerous, this is the beginning!”

Oliver played the interview to his live crowd to laughs and cheers. “What are you talking about? You Marjorie Taylor Wanna-Greene? Storming with words? That’s not a thing. That’s never been a thing. If you look up thing in the dictionary, I’m pretty sure it says ‘not storming with words.'”

The interview continued with Ryan explaining how she was preparing for her prison sentence. “It’s all you can think about. I’m watching all the YouTube videos on how prison is. How to go to prison, what to do.”

“Alright, I don’t know what’s weirder there: that she seems so casual or that an adult has to go to YouTube to learn how prison is. I’ll tell you. It’s bad Jenna. Really bad!”

Conservatives and billionaires have a new dirty word

Senator Joe Manchin, echoing the rightwing billionaire’s think-tanks’ PR and every Republican in Congress, recently said his objection to free college for students and eyeglasses for seniors was that such things created an “entitlement society,” a slur that means “a nation of welfare recipients.”

In that, he displays a fundamental ignorance about what governments do and how societies work, as well as the difference between what we usually call the “social safety net” and things people should expect simply as a “right of citizenship” in a first-world country. He also misunderstands the difference between expenses and investments.

A “social safety net” is there to catch you when you fall. Unemployment insurance keeps you from becoming homeless when capitalism has one of its periodic hiccups. Food stamps tide you over in rough times. FEMA programs provide mobile homes and a stipend to keep people rendered homeless by natural disasters like hurricanes, forest fires, and floods alive and well.

These are the sorts of things that we generally refer to as “welfare.” They’re there to “catch us” and keep us from falling through society’s “floor.”

They also prevent people from “breaking” when they fall, whether it’s a temporary hiccup in capitalism (recession, depression), a natural disaster, or a region that’s failed to invest in itself so long that there are simply no jobs available. We know, for example, that inequality, along with the poverty and mental illness it causes, drive up costs to society that can be covered with these kinds of help.

So these shorter-term programs (or, in some cases, even longer-term for already-wounded people) keep society stable. Finland, for example, is providing free housing for all their homeless; it’s cheaper than the police, hospital and mental health services that houseless people otherwise use. But these are still programs to “catch” people and regions who’ve fallen or been injured by life, not to grow and expand society.

A “citizenship right” is something altogether different. It’s what nations provide as rights of citizenship to keep a society functioning on a normal plane, and to help that society grow and improve socially and economically.

As citizens of America, for example, we expect good public schools, decent roads, police and fire protections, and a functioning government funded by tax dollars to keep it all going. We expect as citizens that when we pay into Social Security and Medicare our entire lives, those systems will be maintained in a way that can keep us healthy, productive, and out of poverty when we retire.

While the “safety net” protects us from personal, family or community disasters, the “rights of citizenship” provide the foundation for society itself.

The physical infrastructure of a nation makes possible normal life, and the more sophisticated and functional that infrastructure is, the more vibrant a nation’s economy will be.

This was the core rationale for Republican President Dwight Eisenhower building the interstate highway system: it not only made it easier to visit grandpa and grandma, it also made it easier to transport goods and thus facilitated commerce leading to the economic boom of the 1950-1980 era.

Ditto for an advanced air traffic system, quality public transportation, and a national high-speed rail system like in every other advanced country.

The same is true for the “human infrastructure” of a nation.

The more citizens a country has who are college educated, the more competitive and prosperous that nation becomes. The better the health of a country, the more reliable and efficient its workforce. When government helps young parents care for their children, it frees them up to more fully participate in the commercial and civic life of the country.

Thus, infrastructure — be it physical or human — is not welfare. It doesn’t produce an “entitlement society.” Instead, it’s the core foundation on which a functional society rests, the soil in which business can root itself, and the launching pad for a horizon-free future.

Another way to think of it is through the lens of economics and accounting.

“Welfare” is an expense. It doesn’t make things better: when appropriately funded it simply keeps them from becoming worse. It pays dividends in that it keeps people alive and functional, but just barely. The “return on investment” to the government is minimal outside of its moral duty.

“Rights of citizenship” like infrastructure, on the other hand, are investments. They pay returns and dividends. Invest “x” and over years or decades you’ll get multiples of “x” in return. Even police and fire, when run right, keep neighborhoods crime-free and facilitate commerce, growing the local economy. New transportation, education, and healthcare infrastructure build prosperity and attract investment in the larger community.

Not understanding this simple distinction is the major failure of neoliberal and “conservative” politicians, guided, in large part, by so-called “think tanks” and pundits funded by rightwing billionaires who, frankly, don’t care about either “welfare” or “rights of citizenship/infrastructure.”

After all, being morbidly rich billionaires, they don’t need either.

They can afford the best healthcare in the world with their pocket change; they travel on private jets outside of public airports (never even having to go through security); and they send their kids to the best private schools in the world regardless of the local tax base.

And since welfare and infrastructure are both are funded by tax dollars — which the morbidly rich go to great lengths to avoid paying — pushing politicians to reject both only adds more dollars to their money bins that otherwise would have gone to taxes.

While Joe Manchin’s understanding of these fundamental, high-school-civics differences in government programs is disappointing, it shouldn’t be surprising. He was born into wealth and is, himself, a multimillionaire coal baron, living on the largest yacht at my old home, the Capital Yacht Club (among his other homes).

But Joe Biden — who spent his life traveling home from DC to Delaware every weekend on public transportation via Amtrak — understands this at a gut level. New roads, bridges, and broadband infrastructure are investments that will return dividends to both society and our economy. He knows that strengthening our infrastructure strengthens our nation.

Biden understands that replacing fossil-fuel based energy infrastructure with made-in-America renewables like solar and wind both reduce our dependence on brutal foreign oligarchs like Saudi Arabia’s murderous MBS while producing power for generations with little more than simple maintenance.

He knows that sending young people to college at no or little cost — as is done in every other advanced democracy in the world — is a simple investment in our nation’s families and intellectual infrastructure that will pay dividends for generations into our future.

Progressives working on his legislative agenda realize that providing people with a robust and low-cost healthcare system is an investment in our ultimate infrastructure: our people. Without healthy workers there is no reliable economy; with healthy workers an economy becomes ever-more vibrant, which is why every other developed country in the world except the US provides free or low-cost universal healthcare and takes care of all their seniors’ medical needs.

Rightwing billionaire propaganda aside, these are not “welfare” or “entitlements,” and they don’t cause people to “become lazy” or “refuse to work.” As we strengthen and “Build Back Better” our physical and human infrastructure, we simultaneously strengthen our nation while moving us into a cleaner, safer, and more reliable future.

In every other developed country in the world, these things are simple rights of citizenship. They should be here, too, if we want to compete in the 21st century and improve our (slipping) status as a First World nation.

Paul Gosar complains colleagues have turned him into a victim of terrorism

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., is responding to critics who called him out for his tweet of a cartoon showing him assassinating Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and swinging swords preparing to kill President Joe Biden.

According to an email posted by Ben Jacobs, Gosar said that those attacking him are akin to the terrorists who opened fire on the French publication Charlie Hebdo in 2015.

“While the degree of punishment differs, this is the same sentiment expressed against the Charlie Hebdo magazine in France in 2015 that was punished for publishing a cartoon — resulting in a real-life massacre of 12 real live people,” wrote Gosar. “Indeed, the former deputy director of the CIA concluded that those who attacked Charlie Hebdo were ‘trying to shut down a media organization that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad.'”

“And now here, in the United States, six years later, the motive by some of my colleagues in Congress is the same: to shut down media that lampoons those who support the dangerous open border policies of the Biden administration,” Gosar closed.

Gosar wasn’t attacked for his opposition to the border, nor is he an example of the “media.” Gosar was posting assassination cartoons with no context. Twitter found it threatening enough to pull it down from their site.

Democrats have denounced Gosar and asked for his censure and, in some cases, expulsion from Congress. The only Republican to speak out against him was Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

Read the statement below:

Paul Gosar compares the effort to punish him for the video he posted on Twitter to the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in 2015 pic.twitter.com/34PLvmG9yU

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) November 15, 2021

Who needs “Jeopardy!”? LeVar Burton finally gets his piece of the game show hosting pie

After fans took to the internet to campaign for LeVar Burton’s succession as the new host of “Jeopardy!,” their collective efforts were ultimately unsuccessful when the position was jointly — but temporarily — granted to actress Mayim Bialik and former producer Mike Richards. When the latter’s term only lasted a week, former champ Ken Jennings stepped up to fill in.

No matter, Burton has landed on his feet elsewhere.

The former “Star Trek: The Next Generation” star is set to host a game show rendition of the classic trivia game “Trivial Pursuit,” reports Variety.

“‘Trivial Pursuit’ is one of the best-known brands in the gaming universe,” Burton said in the report. “I am thrilled to have partnered with Hasbro and eOne to bring this beloved game to market as a premium show for television.”

Trivial Pursuit became a pop culture phenomenon when it was introduced in the 1980s. In the original Hasbro board game, players are rewarded for their knowledge on different general and pop culture topics, winning pie pieces for each category. “Trivial Pursuit” is also the latest Hasbro game to receive its own onscreen feature with entertainment company Entertainment One Ltd (eOne).

Burton’s latest gig is a triumph for the fan favorite after the laborious and surprisingly disgraceful search for a new “Jeopardy!” host after the loss of Alex Trebek. The show found itself in a pit of scandal after previous lawsuits against Richards prompted the unearthing of a slew of sexist and racist comments he made on a 2014 podcast.

In a September interview with Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show,” Burton expressed his desire to pursue a hosting gig outside of “Jeopardy!” after he got a brief taste of the gig as guest host this past summer.

“The crazy thing is that when you set your sights on something, you know, they say be careful of what you wish for, because what I found out is that it wasn’t the thing that I wanted after all,” Burton said to Noah. “What I wanted was to compete. I mean, I wanted the job, right, but then, when I didn’t get it, it was, like, well, okay, what’s next?”

And as Noah phrased for Burton, “Jeopardy!” eventually became “the shipwreck that leads you to the magical island.”

Burton — who was the former host of “Reading Rainbow” and currently runs his own podcast, “LeVar Burton Reads” — seemed to be open to the idea of kickstarting a game show centered around books.

“We are working on creating exactly what that is,” Burton emphasized. “I never thought about hosting any other game show outside of ‘Jeopardy!.’ But now, they went in a different direction with their show, which is their right, and now I’m thinking, well, it does kind of make sense, let me see what I can do. So we’re trying to figure out what the right game show for LeVar Burton would be.”

With “Trivial Pursuit,” Burton has done exactly that.

The new gig flaunts an additional partnership between eOne and Burton’s LeVar Burton Entertainment (LBE). He’s slated to serve as the show’s executive producer alongside LBE’s Sangita Patel and eOne’s Tara Long and Geno McDermott. At this time, the show hasn’t been picked up by a specific network.

Paris Hilton is her own purse dog – why even the socialite struggles with her engineered image

If Paris Hilton’s recent comeback offensive has a purpose, it is to persuade the world that she is an adult. Not only that, but a human adult. One who talks in a baby voice and is obsessed with tiny dogs.

Hilton is as synonymous with her love of miniature canines as she is with being famous for doing nothing. For a time, she wasn’t seen in public without her teacup chihuahua Tinkerbell in the crook of her arm or peeking out of her designer bag. Tinkerbell was her constant companion until she became, ahem, too big. Then her mistress handed her off to her mother and began carting around her daintier public replacement, Bambi.

Then came, in no special chronological order, Diamond Baby, Prince, Peter Pan and many others. In her new Peacock series “Paris in Love” we meet Slivington, a Pomeranian-Husky mix (and, let’s not think too hard about the logistics that made that possible) fond of chewing on Hilton’s teddy bear slippers, gifted to Hilton by her husband Carter Reum, still her fiancé in the series.

Related: Paris Hilton: A retrospective

Slivington, named after her attempt to sew “slay” and “living” into slang nobody uses, is one of a pack Hilton keeps in their own air-conditioned mini-mansion. They trot out a few at a time for the public to view – or maybe as proof of life? – in her recent TV projects, including the 2020 documentary “This Is Paris” and her recent Netflix glitter bomb “Cooking with Paris.”

But they also remind us of why the larger public burned out on Hilton years ago, around the time purse dogs fell out of fashion. In the menagerie of American celebrity, she wants to be seen as Slivington but shares a lot more in common with tiny, too-adorable Tinkerbell, that avatar of mid-aughts materialism and ridiculousness.

“Paris in Love,” the reality show chronicle of Hilton’s engagement with Reum, will not change this perception any more than “Cooking with Paris” convinced us that she could identify a spatula in her own kitchen.

That show, and this one, are Hilton’s mid-existence attempts to lay claim to an image and a brand that she never entirely controlled, that shaped who she is instead of the other way around.

For whatever reason Hilton’s latest barrage of content asks us to simultaneously mourn her divorce from so-called normalcy and cheer her on as she reaches for the societally prescribed signposts of progress and happiness for the fairer sex. In “Cooking with Paris” she explains several times that her reason for making this show is to learn how to cook for the husband she plans to land and the babies she plans to have.

Her feigned interest in domesticity aside, “Paris in Love” shows she wasn’t kidding about the marriage or the babies. The part that makes it hard to buy is knowing that everything else about her image is engineered for the sole purpose of securing attention from the public that she claims not to want.

“What would my life have been like if I just became a veterinarian, like I wanted to when I was little?” Hilton wonders in her signature baby voice in the opening scene of “Paris in Love” as she slumped on the floor of her closet. “Maybe I wouldn’t have all these tiaras.”

There is no reason to care about what Paris Hilton is up to strictly for the sake of keeping up with her life. Let’s be clear about that. But since she keeps vying for views via multiple TV series that fail to land, it may be interesting to view why we don’t care.

After all, many millions of people care about the Kardashians. Many more don’t care but at the very least know what one or two of them are up to because the family is virtually inescapable.

This year we also began caring, as in deeply, about the injustices Britney Spears suffered under her conservatorship. There’s a 2004 episode of “South Park” that revolves around a ruthless parody of Hilton, painting her as a “stupid, spoiled whore” so unlovable that her pets, including a cartoon version of Tinkerbell, would rather kill themselves than remain with her.

That same half hour also painted Spears with the same brush by mention. The difference is that while nobody in South Park could explain what Hilton does to justify being famous, Spears’ music is inter-generationally iconic. She helmed a long-term residency in Las Vegas while also being ridiculed for her mental health struggles.

Revelations in the New York Times documentary “Framing Britney Spears” changed all that seemingly overnight. In reality this phenomenon was years in the making thanks to the #FreeBritney movement which went mainstream following the report. As more people watched the documentary, cultural analysts and celebrities reappraised Spears’ impact and meaning to popular culture and conversations about female agency.

On Nov. 12 a judge in Los Angeles terminated the conservatorship set up by Spears’ father Jamie in 2008, through which she said he controlled every aspect of the 39-year-old woman’s life, including her ability to have children.

That alone makes her a pop culture symbol of actual patriarchal resistance. Provided she plays her cards right, and it’s all but guaranteed that someone will coach her on doing that, Spears is guaranteed to rise again as a rebellious picture of independence, success and overcoming.

What do Americans love more than that?

Contrast this with Hilton, who is nearly the same age as Spears and tried to capitalize on the #MeToo movement by way of a thoroughly scripted media tour during which promoted herself as a survivor of childhood abuse she suffered as a facility for troubled teens. She even went to Capitol Hill to testify about the nightmare she lived, hoping to shut down practices at such congregate care facilities that she described in draconian terms.

Few rallied to her cause.

Then “Cooking with Paris” joined a parade of pandemic culinary how-to shows in which a star with zero kitchen skills commits to learning how to make basic dishes.

Once again, Hilton’s food flailing dropped too late. The subgenre was already conquered by “Selena + Chef,” the HBO Max charmer presenting Selena Gomez working with celebrity chefs to honestly celebrate the joy of cooking.

“Selena + Chef” is an accessible work about process; “Cooking with Paris” is a show pony when famous guests gush over how influential Hilton used to be while she overuses edible glitter.

But “Paris in Love” is the most direct contradiction to that biting “South Park” vanishing pet satire and the tabloid tut-tutting surrounding Tinkerbell’s demotion. The very premise proves the romantically unlucky socialite is worthy of being loved.

Not just any somebody but Reum, a multi-millionaire venture capitalist, son of a wealthy executive and a family friend. Reum, she explains, is the first businessman she’s ever dated. “He doesn’t need my money,” Hilton says. “He doesn’t need my fame.”

And he tells her, “I’m always happy to support you, because I love you so much.”

In “Paris in Love,” Reum positions himself as the lucky guy besotted by a woman who skips from room to room with what he calls a “neat unicorn trot.” Their unequal profile is the real reason her friends insist this engagement, Hilton’s third, might actually stick, since he’s content to remain in the shadows while she gallops around the world.

They’re right about the pair making it to the altar, which happened on Nov. 11 – one day before Britney’s freedom captured all the headlines. The Hilton-Reum wedding was widely covered, of course, but beyond glimpsing the dress – who doesn’t enjoy cooing over Oscar de la Renta couture? – there wasn’t much of a reason to care.

That also explains why each of Hilton’s TV projects has the staying power of cotton candy in the rain. It’s not simply due to her missing her moment, first losing the upper hand in the game of currency to the Kardashians who dominated the fame for its own sake racket and the E! channel long before people ignored Hilton’s 2011 reality series “The World According to Paris.”

It isn’t merely because her one-time friend Kim Kardashian went from being her plus-one to running her own fashion line and earnestly diving into passion projects like criminal justice reform.

And it probably has less to do with Hilton’s overlooked history of making bigoted jokes and statements when she believed no one who matters was listening, along with anti-feminist ones when people were.

It’s because Hilton hasn’t presented us with anything about her that’s believable.

During the monologue opening her recent appearance on “Saturday Night Life” Kim Kardashian reminded the audience that she is genuine in everything she does. Whether that’s true matters less than the fact that people believe her. She and her family spent 20 seasons of TV letting viewers into their lives and turning every potential PR disaster into dramatic fodder. Either they are real or stupendously committed to sustaining the longest of long-form performances, or both.

Whereas the unearthed core of “This is Paris” is that Hilton is a woman who has existed for so long as an artificial entity that she isn’t quite sure of who she is.

When Hilton ruefully says she’s never really felt alone with her thoughts – “I was going to say I feel like this animal in a zoo people are looking at, but that sounds weird,” she says – this ignores the obvious point that she is her own zookeeper. She bought the cameras. She wants you to observe the monitors.

When a scene in “Paris in Love” shows Reum proposing to Hilton during his recounting of the magic moment, which begins with, “We had rented a private island . . .” one can’t quite discern whether it’s a recreation or they hired a team to be on stand-by for the actual event. Either way, it’s not entirely believable.

And yet from all indicators Reum is genuinely devoted to Hilton, unlike her male co-stars featured in other TV projects.

Remember, one of her earliest boyfriends released a revenge porn video after they broke up – which is absolutely awful, but it also launched her entertainment career, such as it is. The scandal fed promotion for her Fox reality show “The Simple Life,” which far fewer people would have cared about otherwise. Viewers met other uniquely horrid male companions in her previous shows.

Reum, at least, has the look of a nice guy delighted to have been promoted from the friend zone. It’s also apt that he is Hilton’s co-star in the first project by her new production company 11:11 Media since up to this point, she’s played to the image of her that was originally shaped by terrible men.

But as a character Reum falls short. That’s bound to become a problem if his new bride insists on chasing trend narratives instead of figuring out how to spark her own. One wonders how well this relationship can weather the predictable family-focused squeakquels to this Peacock piece.

It’s not tough to picture a series showing Hilton as a mother bemoaning her lack of privacy, Hilton sliving her way through her mid-40s and saying “that’s hot” through the change. These stations of womanhood have already been constructed, interpreted and visited by Real Housewives and other trend-setting celebrities. But that merely underscores such retreads as must-have accessories to fame, the solid Pomsky replacements to the slighter Pomeranians and teacup chihuahuas that came before.

Slivington, like his predecessors, will likely recede from the spotlight, especially if he meets the expectations of his breed and tops out at 35 lbs. That’s simply too heavy for an owner whose image is too slight to handle anything that solid, who keeps trying to capitalize on an image bred for yesterday’s glitzy dog-and-pony show instead of breaking free of that old leash to make a run at being real.

New episodes of “Paris in Love” debut Thursdays on Peacock. Just an FYI.

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Sweet potato butter and cranberry-date relish belong on your Thanksgiving cheese plate

As the world begins to normalize just a little bit, I find myself really leaning into celebrating the changes of the seasons. After things felt like they were just absolutely stuck for so long, there’s something really beautiful about marking the passage of time — through decorations, through menus and through ingredients.

That’s why, for your next late autumn or early winter get-together, you should add a few seasonal updates to your cheese plate.

Cheeses

Start with the cheese, obviously. While in the spring you may gravitate towards lighter cheeses with grassy or floral notes, like young goat cheeses and soft-ripened Cottenbell, colder weather brings the opportunity for richer, more luxe options.

Pick two or three and use those as your centerpieces; I like a triple crème brie, a smoked Manchego and a really nice Parm. Your local cheesemonger can tell you what’s best and what they have that’s most in-season, but the accepted wisdom of picking a hard cheese, a soft cheese and a blue cheese works well, too.

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Nuts, fruit and seeds

Then come the seasonal add-ons like nuts, fruits and seeds. Here are a few suggestions:

Pomegranate seeds
Roasted pumpkin seeds (here are three of our favorite ways to dress them up)
Spiced pecans or walnuts
Halved figs
Sliced blood oranges
Dried cranberries
Dried apricots

Condiments

I have a few standards that I like to toss on cheese boards: good jam, interesting marmalades, hot (or not) honey, olive tapenade. However, in keeping with prioritizing seasonal ingredients, there are two easy condiments that really speak to the season and pair beautifully with cold-weather cheeses. The first is a tart cranberry-date relish, garnished with a heap of orange zest. I modeled this recipe after the cranberry-date bars that my grandmother made, and my mother now makes, every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The sweetness of this relish makes it feel like a festive choice for a holiday cheese board, while the acidity complements the richer cheeses quite nicely.

Like apple butter, this sweet potato butter has, as expected, a sweet and slightly caramelized flavor, while the bourbon imparts the flavors of vanilla and baking spices.

Both are easy to make and store nicely in the refrigerator in sealed containers for up to two weeks. Here are the recipes:

* * *

Recipe: Cranberry-Date Relish

Ingredients

½ pound of fresh cranberries
¼ cup of pitted and roughly chopped dates
1 tablespoon of honey
2 tablespoons of water
Juice of 1 orange (reserve zest for garnish)

Directions

1. In a food processor, pulse the cranberries and dates until they are finely-chopped and uniform in size.

2. Transfer to a small saucepan, along with the honey, water and the orange juice. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat, allowing the relish to simmer for about ten minutes. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

3. Ideally, you’d allow the relish to chill in the refrigerator in a covered container overnight so the flavors can meld together. When you are ready to serve, top with the reserved orange zest.

Recipe: Sweet Potato and Bourbon Butter

Ingredients

2 sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 apple, peeled and cubed
2 cups of water
1 cup of apple juice
3 tablespoons of bourbon
¼ cup brown sugar
1 cinnamon stick

Directions

1. In a heavy saucepan, combine all ingredients; mix well. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer, uncovered, for 2 hours or until mixture is thickened and about 1 cup of liquid remains, stirring occasionally. Remove the cinnamon stick.

2. In a blender, process mixture in batches until smooth. Transfer to jars or covered containers. Chill for at least two hours before serving. Store in the refrigerator.

More of our favorite holiday dishes:

The moon has carbon dioxide “traps” that astronauts could use to make fuel and grow plants

Though the moon was long considered a barren, inhospitable rocky world, researchers over the past few decades have found that the moon has many of the amenities that humans would need to build a self-sufficient habitat. Indeed, recent discoveries of plentiful water ice pockets on the moon tantalized scientists and space agencies. Now, a new finding suggests that there is plentiful carbon dioxide on the moon as well.

According to new research published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letter, scientists have confirmed the existence of lunar carbon dioxide “cold traps,” a geological anomaly in which carbon dioxide could collect for long periods and settle. This discovery will likely have a significant impact on future space exploration as humans — or robots — could use carbon dioxide or other organic materials in the cold traps as fuel, convert it to oxygen, or use it in lunar greenhouses for growing plants.

In astronomy, a cold trap refers to a pocket on the surface of a solid body in which volatile gases can accrue and remain still for long periods, often millions of years. Because many planets and bodies in the solar system, the moon included, lack a significant atmosphere, any unlit area can remain at frigid temperatures for thousands or even millions of years. In that span, gases like carbon dioxide can accumulate and sometimes freeze in sufficient quantities, hence the term “cold trap.” Carbon dioxide freezes at -109° Fahrenheit or -78° Celsius; the temperature on the Moon in the shade or at night is cooler than that, around -298° F (or -183° C) or even colder in some regions.

While the presence of carbon dioxide in these cold traps is confirmed, scientists are unclear as to whether the molecules are solid or gaseous. But the presence of the cold traps is telling, as carbon dioxide molecules are apt to freeze and remain in solid form even during high temperatures in the lunar summer.

The discovery comes amid decades of uncertainty and speculation in the scientific community around cold traps on the Moon.

“I think when I started this, the question was, ‘Can we confidently say there are carbon dioxide cold traps on the Moon or not?'” said Norbert Schörghofer, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and lead author on the study. “My surprise was that they’re actually, definitely there. It could have been that we can’t establish their existence, [they might have been] one pixel on a map… so I think the surprise was that we really found contiguous regions which are cold enough, beyond doubt.”

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The new report shows that there are several cold trap pockets scattered around the Moon’s south pole, in an area that totals 204 square kilometers. These carbon dioxide traps appear to be most concentrated in an area called the Amundsen Crater, which appears to host 82 square kilometers of cold traps. In these areas, temperatures remain at negative 352 degrees Fahrenheit.

“These should be high-priority sites to target for future landed missions,” said Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder who was not involved in the study. “This sort of pinpoints where you might go on the lunar surface to answer some of these big questions about volatiles on the Moon and their delivery from elsewhere in the solar system.”

Such cold traps are useful to engineers in a number of ways. If there is solid carbon dioxide in these cold traps, it could help with the production of fuel, steel and other biomaterials on the Moon. Nation-states like China and Russia are already planning to build a research station on the Moon, and taking advantage of the resources in these cold traps could be key to self-sufficiency.

Studying carbon dioxide on the moon could also help scientists better understand the origin of water on the Moon. In 2020, a pair of studies published in the journal Nature Astronomy confirmed that there is a large amount of water on the Moon’s sunlit regions.

“We had indications that H₂O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon,” Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, previously said in a statement. “Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration.”

NASA used the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), an infrared observatory mounted on a Boeing 747 airplane, to take air observations from the air and confirm the presence of water on the Moon’s southern polar region. One study estimated this region could hold nearly 40,000 square kilometers of lunar surface with water ice.

The presence of water ice caught NASA’s attention. In 2019, the space agency announced it was planning to send American astronauts to the surface of the Moon within five years, setting their sights on the southern pole.

“We know the South Pole region contains ice and may be rich in other resources based on our observations from orbit, but, otherwise, it’s a completely unexplored world,” said Steven Clarke, deputy associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The South Pole is far from the Apollo landing sites clustered around the equator, so it will offer us a new challenge and a new environment to explore as we build our capabilities to travel farther into space.”

GOP already has enough safe seats — through redistricting alone — to win back House in ’22

Republican-led states have already added enough safe seats through redistricting to flip control of the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections.

Only 12 states have completed the process of redrawing congressional district maps based on the 2020 census. But Republicans have already reconfigured enough districts to add five safe seats, which would be enough to flip the House majority if nothing else changes, according to a New York Times analysis. Though people of color drove most of the nation’s population growth in the last census, some Republican states have aggressively packed voters of colors into single districts or failed to draw a single minority-majority district at all. Many of the new maps have already been challenged by lawsuits, although a 2019 Supreme Court decision that allows federal courts to review gerrymanders that appear to be based on race — but not those designed simply for partisan advantage — is likely complicate the legal challenges.

Republicans have already added a net total of five seats, according to the Times, after completing redistricting in Texas, Iowa, North Carolina and Montana. Though Democrats are poised to add safe seats for themselves in states like New York, Illinois and Oregon, Republicans have total control of the redistricting process in states that represent 187 congressional districts while Democrats control just 75. Some of the new maps build on existing districts that were already heavily gerrymandered by Republicans following the 2010 census.

“They’re really taking a whack at competition,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Times. “The path back to a majority for Democrats if they lose in 2022 has to run through states like Texas, and they’re just taking that off the table.”

Other Republican-led states are expected to produce similarly gerrymandered maps. Ohio Republicans are pushing a map that would give them 13 of the state’s 15 seats in the House, giving them 86% of seats even though Donald Trump won just just 53% of the vote in Ohio last year.

“Fear is driving all of this,” former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper said at a redistricting hearing on Wednesday. “Fear of what would happen if we actually had a real democracy.”

Republicans in states like Georgia and New Hampshire have also proposed maps that would add Republican seats.

While some Republican-led states are looking to flip Democratic districts, lawmakers in Alabama, Indiana, Oklahoma and Utah have drawn maps that solidify Republican control over districts that have become more competitive. Utah and other states have moved to “crack” cities where Democrats have a competitive edge. Utah, for example, split Salt Lake County into four separate congressional districts, effectively eliminating political competition and dividing up a major community, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

Republicans have made no secret of their motivations. “The competitive Republican seats are off the board,” Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, told the Times.

“The floor for Republicans has been raised,” added Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee. “Our incumbents actually are getting stronger districts.”

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Fair map advocates had limited success in challenging the post-2010 maps. North Carolina was the only state forced to redraw its 2011 maps twice after courts ruled that they were obvious partisan gerrymanders. This year, North Carolina Republicans doubled down, drawing a map that gives them 10 out of 14 congressional districts in a state where Trump fell short of an outright majority. (He carried North Carolina with 49.9% of the vote.) Critics have argued that the map also constitutes a racial gerrymander after Republicans turned the minority-majority district represented by former Congressional Black Caucus Chairman G.K. Butterfield, a Democrat, into a majority-white district. Republican lawmakers deny that they used racial data, arguing that the map is “race-blind.”

“To pretend to be race-neutral and then draw these districts that are so harmful to Black voters flies in the face of why we even have federal law,” Allison Riggs, executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which sued over the map, told the Times. “The process is so broken.”

Legal challenges could also be complicated by the delayed release of census results, which were held up for months due to the pandemic.

“This is always in every decade a very accelerated process in the courts, but it is even more so this year because of the four months that were lost because of the delayed release,” Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has filed multiple redistricting lawsuits, told the Times. “The question is, will the courts run out of time and allow even maps that are legally flawed to be used for one election cycle in 2022?”

The new maps put Democrats at a significant disadvantage, on top of the fact that an incumbent president’s party typically loses seats in the midterms. But 2022 is already shaping up to be particularly painful for Democrats. Though Democrats still have a chance to hold their slim Senate majority, President Biden’s approval-disapproval split has fallen from 50-42 in June to 41-53 this month, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll. Across a group of crucial swing states – Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – his approval rating is down to just 33%.

That trend appears to have extended to the rest of the party. The poll found that 51% of voters would prefer a Republican House candidate compared to 41% who prefer a Democrat, the biggest edge the GOP has held in 110 ABC/Post polls going back 40 years. Democrats held a 51-40 advantage in 2017 before winning a House majority by flipping 41 seats in the “blue wave” of 2018, their biggest gain since the Nixon era.

More on redistricting, gerrymandering and the 2022 midterms:

The Rittenhouse effect: Republicans want a Stasi of their own

Despite the high-minded rhetoric from Republicans about the supposedly noble intentions behind bans on what they call “critical race theory,” progressives have suspected from the get-go that the whole thing is actually an exercise in censorship. This suspicion has been validated by the fact that the book targeted by Republican Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign in Virginia was the Pulitzer-winning classic “Beloved” by Toni Morrison. Or the fact that North Dakota’s law bans any materials suggesting “racism is not merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systemically embedded,” language that objectively bans teaching the history of slavery or Jim Crow. Or the fact that teachers in Texas took their own “critical race theory” law to mean that they had to teach “both sides” of the Holocaust.

One of the most prominent groups advocating for this heavy-handed censorship is the misleadingly named “Moms for Liberty,” which presents as a “parents rights” group, but is in fact a racist organization dedicated to banning books about Martin Luther King Jr. and replacing them with books that insist there was no racial component to American slavery. Now the New Hampshire branch of Moms for Liberty is taking it to the next level. As Insider reports, the group is offering a $500 bounty to any person who reports a teacher supposedly breaking the law banning “critical race theory.”

This bounty isn’t just about the letter of the law, which is already confusing and contradictory. Consider that Moms for Liberty’s list of books they want to be censored include those that teach that events like the March on Washington or Brown v. Board of Education. By offering this bounty, they send a strong signal to teachers of New Hampshire that, if they want to keep their jobs or at least not be harassed by right-wing activists, it would be wiser to simply avoid teaching any American history that touches on race or racism. So kids will get MLK Day off from school, but teachers will be afraid to tell them why.

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As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post writes, these poorly worded “critical race theory” laws “could chill the teaching of that full truth” by causing teachers to fear parents arguing that “recounting history itself creates heretical impressions.” Indeed, there’s no way around it, as Jim Crow and legal slavery are the very definition of the systems of racism now banned from being talked about in multiple states. It’s all very Stasi-like, right down to using the fear of being turned in by your neighbors to keep people from even talking about topics that the right wants to forbid.

Indeed, one of the main selling points of the Republican march towards fascism, for its base, is this fantasy of a society where people live in abject terror of their right-wing neighbors, afraid to express progressive opinions or even to admit historical facts about the United States. That much is evident in the GOP base rallying around Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been on trial for shooting three people at a Black Lives Matter protest last year, killing two of them.

The case itself is mired in of-the-moment debates about who started what violence with who at the protest. But that’s not really the reason that Rittenhouse has become a right-wing folk hero. He’s become a cipher for widespread anger on the right about the very existence of Black Lives Matter protests, and a desire to use violence to silence anti-racist speech. If Rittenhouse is acquitted, it sends a signal to all the gun nut right-wingers out there: It’s cool to show up at Black Lives Matter protests loaded down with guns, which is, of course, about scaring people out of showing up to protest racism in the first place.

“People cannot freely exercise their speech rights when they fear for their lives,” Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick write at the Atlantic. “The increased risk of violence from open carry is enough to have a meaningful ‘chilling effect’ on citizens’ willingness to participate in political protests.”

That silencing is the underlying intent is evident, as I noted in yesterday’s column, by the fact that a number of Republican legislatures have introduced and even passed laws that make it easy to get away with murdering left-leaning protesters, so long as you run them over with your car. There’s a lot of hand-waving about “self-defense” used to justify such awfulness, but the purpose is not exactly hard to see. This is about deputizing ordinary conservatives to suppress free speech — with violence — when the Constitution prevents the government from doing so directly.

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The connective tissue between the valorization of vigilante violence against progressive speech and the Texas “bounty hunter” abortion law is not hard to see. As Jill Filipovic argued in her newsletter, the law is “the codification of anti-abortion terrorist tactics” and rooted in the “same urge to publicly shame and humiliate women” and “the impulse toward vigilantism and violence” that drives anti-choice protesters to stake out abortion clinics to heckle the people going inside — or worse, as the long history of anti-choice violence demonstrates.

That longing from right-wingers to police and abuse their neighbors isn’t the only thing that abortion bans have in common with book banning to combat “critical race theory” and Rittenhouse-style intimidation tactics. The right has long used the touchy subject of abortion as a place to field test their ugliest ideas. That extends very much to the right-wing war on free speech.

Under Donald Trump, the Department of Health and Human Services banned doctors at clinics that receive federal funds from even mentioning abortion to patients. As with the “critical race theory” laws that intimidate teachers from even talking about slavery or Jim Crow, the abortion “gag rule” was about creating a Stasi-like environment at public health clinics, where doctors feared even mentioning abortion to patients — even when patients asked for it — out of fear that they might be ratted out to the government. President Joe Biden’s administration thankfully repealed the gag rule, allowing doctors to once again direct patients who want abortion to safe options — but the template for the right’s war on free speech has been fixed.

Republicans use the hot button issues of race and sexuality to create oppressive environments, where people like teachers or doctors refrain from speaking even basic truths. This makes ordinary people afraid to go to an anti-racism protest for fear of getting shot or run over by right-wingers, whose murderous impulses are being validated by the courts or state governments. The goal is a society where everyone is looking over their shoulder all the time, scared that a malicious right-winger will make their lives hell for thought crimes like “racism is real” or “women have a right to choose.” It’s the stuff of what is usually considered dystopian fiction. But for the Republicans, it is apparently what they hunger for America to look like.