A toxic conception of masculinity is correlated with support for Trump

Trump’s rise as a political outsider has been variously attributed to discontent with elites, a populist appeal, or his celebrity status. Yet a new psychological study that surveyed cultural views of thousands of people concluded that one’s support for Trump is directly correlated to the extent with which one endorses stereotypically toxic “masculine” traits.

In other words, if you want to understand how politics has changed, you should start by studying masculinity.

The psychological study, which was published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, was titled “Hegemonic masculinity predicts 2016 and 2020 voting and candidate evaluations.” The authors point to the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” as a major factor in Trump’s political success.

As Dr. Theresa Vescio, a co-author who teaches psychology at Penn State University, told Inverse, hegemonic masculinity is “the idealized and typically racialized form of masculinity in a culture.”

Vescio and her co-author — a graduate student at Penn State named Nathaniel Schermerhorn — write in their article that while conducting seven studies involving more than 2,000 participants, they learned that both men and women’s “endorsement” of hegemonic masculinity predicted support for Trump — more so than other factors like antiestablishment sentiment, anti-elitist sentiment, nativist populism, or even sexism, racism, homophobia or xenophobia. This remained true even after the results were controlled for party affiliation.

“Trump strategically used rhetoric in both his 2016 presidential campaign and during his presidency that evoked elements of hegemonic masculinity and attempted to position him as the ‘ideal man,'” Schermerhorn wrote to Salon. Schermerhorn cited as examples the fact that Trump was perceived as being tough, having a high amount of power and status and lacking personality traits associated with femininity. Trump reinforced these impressions by giving emasculating nicknames to political opponents — for instance, referring to then-former Vice President Joe Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as “Crying Chuck Schumer” and California Rep. Adam Schiff as “Little Adam Schiff.”

“Importantly, he was also able to disparage women and engage in complete misogyny without losing support from his base — from the leaked Access Hollywood video to his comments about Megyn Kelly among many other instances,” Schermerhorn added. “Most men – including Trump – cannot live up to the ideals of hegemonic masculinity, but he was able to talk about himself in relation to others (men and women) that helped to characterize him as masculine.”

Because hegemonic masculinity is “the culturally exalted form of masculinity in a given culture at a given time,” Schermerhorn argued that it is inevitable that some people outside the groups it would naturally benefit — in the case of modern America, straight white men — would wind up endorsing it. “And to keep others endorsing it, there is a ‘carrot and stick’ type process where certain rewards and benefits are extended to those who may be complicit in upholding these standards of masculinity,” Schermerhorn wrote. “For example, gay men might adopt misogynistic attitudes and behaviors in order to gain higher status in a culture that is built on a hierarchy of masculinities.”

Although Vescio and Schermerhorn conducted their study before Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election and egged on his supporters to riot at the Capitol, Schermerhorn told Salon — after emphasizing “we don’t have any data that can examine the endorsement of hegemonic masculinity and the incidents that occurred after the 2020 election” — that the response was consistent with their findings.

“Success (and winning) is central to the current construction of hegemonic masculinity and so losing the election is a direct assault on Trump’s embodiment of masculinity — especially losing to a Democratic ticket that ran on a platform that would upend current gender, race, and class-based status quos,” Schermerhorn explained.

This is not the first study to link Trump’s political success to perceptions about masculinity. In October a study in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin revealed that “men who are likely to doubt their masculinity may support aggressive policies, politicians, and parties, possibly as a means of affirming their manhood.” The paper, which was co-authored by Dr. Eric D. Knowles and graduate student Sarah DiMuccio of New York University, rooted their conclusions in precarious manhood theory, or the idea that men “are expected to actively maintain their reputations as ‘real men'” and alter their behavior accordingly.

“Lots of previous research suggests that the GOP is the more stereotypically masculine—and thus aggressive—of the two major American political parties,” Knowles wrote to Salon. “Consequently, we felt justified in predicting that insecure males would seek to affirm their manhood by supporting Republicans generally — just as they did in the 2018 House elections.”

He added that Trump displayed these traits to an even more pronounced degree than the average Republican politician, however, citing instances of Trump “going on Dr. Oz to talk about his testosterone levels, sparring with [Florida Sen.] Marco Rubio about the size of his penis, exhorting his crowds to beat up hecklers, and supporting ‘tough’ foreign and domestic policies.”

Although their study also preceded the 2020 election and its aftermath, Knowles told Salon that “not giving in and not giving up — even when one should — is a textbook attribute of traditional American masculinity. Losing is seen as sign of weakness, and admitting you lost is too.” He argued that this helped explain why Trump could not handle being defeated and “the same goes for those of his supporters who were drawn to him out of precarious masculinity.”

He added, “We haven’t studied extreme groups like the Proud Boys, but I don’t think it’s a stretch that lots of them might feel a bit insecure about their manhood as well.”

Six degrees of sedition: Was master trickster Roger Stone behind the Capitol riot?

The night before a mob of Donald Trump’s diehard supporters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, longtime Trump confidant and presidential-pardon recipient Roger Stone made his first public appearance in Washington since his trial, giving a pump-up speech at a Freedom Plaza rally organized by a group called Stop the Steal. In a helpful moment of clarity, the emcee for the evening, Stone associate and fellow convicted felon Ali Alexander (formerly Ali Akbar), a driving force behind the events that led to the attack the following afternoon, noted that “It was Roger Stone who coined the term first: Stop the Steal.”

Stone did more than coin the term. He registered it with the federal government as a political nonprofit more than four years earlier, in 2016, and appears to have a hand in its successor, which was created less than a month before the 2020 election.

But while Alexander went on to claim to be the “father of the movement,” that too traces to Stone, who had organized not just the 2016 effort, but another one two years later. All of this traces back deep in Republican dirty-trick history, all the way to the “Brooks Brothers Riot” orchestrated by Stone to interfere with the 2000 Miami-Dade County recount and help make George W. Bush president.

When Stone, escorted by bodyguards from the Oath Keepers anti-government militia group, delivered the keynote speech at the Freedom Plaza rally on Jan. 5, after showing off his dance moves, in his pinstripe suit and fedora hat, to a hip-hop remix of a song honoring his innocence, he made clear that Alexander had only “revived the Stop the Steal movement.” In other words, all of this was, at its root, a Roger Stone production.

It appears that Stone bears as much responsibility as anyone — and quite a bit more than most — for the deadly riot that unfolded the next day, though the extent of his influence has not yet come into public focus.

Roger Stone created the first Stop the Steal organization in April 2016, raising and spending tens of thousands of dollars for the anticipated mission of defending Trump through the contested Republican primary and later challenging an apparent Hillary Clinton general election win, neither of which proved necessary. That group was shuttered in 2017, but Stone, a Florida resident, reactivated the movement after the 2018 midterms — specifically to protect then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s narrow victory in a U.S. Senate race over Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Stone even got help from Alexander, an itinerant provocateur who came aboard to help recruit for the effort, laying out his vision in a Periscope video, as reported in Right Wing Watch, in which Alexander said he hoped to motivate not just Republicans, but QAnon followers, Democrats and “homeless people in all the adjacent counties” to monitor the vote count.

That mission appears to have been something of an ad hoc project, and Stone didn’t create an official organization around it. Two years later, though — and three weeks ahead of the 2020 election — a new nonprofit called “Committee to Stop the Steal” was created by a woman named Ashley Maderos, who according to her LinkedIn page works for Jensen & Associates, a personal injury firm in Southern California headed up by Paul Rolf Jensen, who has represented Stone for at least two decades. Jensen was also on the payroll for Stone’s Committee to Restore American Greatness, which became a target of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In September 2020, just a few weeks before Maderos registered the Committee to Stop the Steal, Ali Alexander posted a Periscope video saying he wanted to revive Stop the Steal for 2020, as reported by Jared Holt for Right Wing Watch. The vision he articulated would create a text-messaging database to deploy Trump supporters to ballot-counts and “bad secretary of state” offices across the country, and would provide volunteers with the food, shelter, vitamins and “electrolytes” they would need to stop the proverbial steal. Where the funding for this would come from was unclear.

“In the next coming days, we’re going to build the infrastructure to stop the steal,” Alexander said in the video. “What we are going to do is we’re going to bypass all of social media. In the coming days, we will launch an effort concentrating on the swing states, and we will map out where the votes are being counted and the secretary of states. We will map all of this out for everyone publicly and we will collect cell phone numbers so that way if you are within 100-mile radius of a bad secretary of state or someone who’s counting votes after the deadline or if there’s a federal court hearing, we will alert you of where to go. We’re going to bypass all of Twitter, all of Facebook, all of Instagram, OK? We’re going to bypass it all.”

“We will camp out if we need to,” Alexander added. ”We will have tents. We will have water. We will have electrolytes. We will have vitamin D, C and A. We will have zinc. We will have sandwiches. We will have everything so that patriots can oversee the supposed people in our republic who are tasked with counting our votes, not making it. Counting our votes, not making new votes.”

About a month later, the Committee to Stop the Steal was launched by Stone’s associates. By November, Stone was posting disinformation about Trump’s defeat.

Alexander spearheaded the grassroots and political dimensions of the protests that he eventually carried to the Capitol on Jan. 6, even launching a Stop The Steal super PAC in November, as first reported by Salon. In December, amid escalating violent rhetoric, Alexander boasted that the movement had attracted the cooperation of three far-right Republican members of Congress — Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama — who were helping him exert a “maximum pressure” campaign on Capitol Hill.

But the political and publicity efforts were just one arm of Stone’s influence on the riot. His other contribution appears to have been brute force — the aforementioned Oath Keepers, as well as the neofascist Proud Boys.

After the insurrection, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Proud Boys played a major role in the violence on Jan. 6, and a number of group members and affiliates have since then been arrested and named in federal indictments. The Proud Boys also have longstanding ties to Stone, in recent years acting as a personal security detail during his trial and his public appearances. In November 2019, self-described Proud Boy “organizer” Joe Biggs traveled to Washington to support Stone at his trial, and in a video interview ahead of the trip said that he would be joined by current Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio and founder Gavin McInnes. Biggs can be seen in a number of videos from the Capitol riots, including images shot inside the building, and was arrested last week on charges of impeding Congress, illegal entry and disorderly conduct.

A video recorded outside the Capitol grounds just before the attack shows a group of Proud Boys psyching themselves up ahead of confrontations with police. The videographer can be heard hawking “Enrique did nothing wrong” shirts — a Proud Boy spin on the “Roger Stone did nothing wrong” catchphrase.

At this writing, no clear digital trail connecting the Capitol violence to Stone has yet emerged, although it would shock exactly no one of the ongoing investigations revealed a direct link. The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have appeared in numerous photographs and videos providing security to Stone, including on the night of Jan. 5. Law enforcement officials are currently sorting through countless photographs and hours of video pulled from social media, showing who exactly was in or near the Capitol complex the next day. Hackers who exploited an absurdly simple vulnerability in the alternative social media platform Parler, now at least temporarily defunct, have uploaded dozens of terabytes of data to the web, some of which has already been put to use. Facial recognition software has also yielded results, such as the massive Faces of the Riot open-source database.

On the night before the rally, Stone surrounded himself with symbols of potential violence in the form of his Oath Keeper security detail, who also chauffeured him around in a golf cart. When he spoke, he made clear that he knew exactly what would drive the masses over the police barricades the following afternoon, casting the futile fight in the common language of the QAnon fantasy movement, of a struggle between “dark and light, between the godly and godless, between good and evil.”

Reached for comment for this article, Stone told Salon to “have a nice day.”

Rita Moreno reflects on tenacity, her career and Latinx representation: “Where is our ‘Moonlight’?”

Rita Moreno is a living legend. The Puerto Rican-born actress, singer, dancer, and television star came to America as a child and wanted to be a movie star since she saw her first film. Not only did Moreno become one — winning an Oscar in 1962 for “West Side Story” — but now a documentary, “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It,” directed by Mariem Pérez Riera, chronicles her life and career.

The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this week, traces Moreno’s life, starting with her 87th birthday party, and flashing back to her childhood in Puerto Rico, her arrival in New York, and her experience meeting Louis B. Mayer at the Waldorf Astoria for a Hollywood contract. Moving to Los Angeles, Moreno takes a series of “dusky maiden” roles in films that play on stereotypes about race, ethnicity and gender. She was miserable, treated like a sex object — or just an object on one production.

Eventually, she become a trailblazer; Moreno is the only Latinx EGOT winner.

“Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” features interviews with the actress’s costars, including Justina Machado (“One Day at a Time“) and Morgan Freeman (“The Electric Company”), as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Eva Longoria, Whoopi Goldberg, and Gloria Estefan, among others. Pérez Riera addresses Moreno’s abusive relationship with Marlon Brando, her abortion, her suicide attempt, and her marriage with Leonard Gordon, which was not as picture perfect as folks believed.

Pérez Riera’ heartfelt documentary is also a love letter, emphasizing the inspiring performer being unfiltered. (In the first few minutes, Moreno likens a banana to an elephant’s penis.) “Rita Moreno” details her activism as well as her candor speaking out about women’s issues, and the filmmaker peppers these moments with clips from various performances as well as acceptance speeches.

Pérez Riera and Moreno spoke with Salon about their fabulous documentary.

Mariem, we all have stories about watching Rita. What can you say about forming your interest in Rita’s life and career?

Mariem Pérez Riera: I’m from Puerto Rico, and Rita is an icon on our island. I knew she was the first Puerto Rican to win an Oscar. Every Puerto Rican wanted a piece of her. She was an inspiration and what I — and many people — aspire to. When I became a filmmaker, I wrote a film, “Maldeamores,” [“Lovesickness”] and we wanted Rita to play one of the characters. We wrote it for her. We weren’t able to reach her, but she’s been an inspiration for a long time.

Can you talk about choosing the interview subjects you did to contextualize Rita’s experiences? I love one interviewee’s observation that Rita has “authority and honesty,” but also that Justina Machado playfully calls Rita a “diva,” and Eva Longoria shouts, “Hey you, guys!” [Moreno’s famous shout from “Electric Company”]

Pérez Riera: I wanted those interviewees to talk not about Rita, or experiences with Rita, but their own experiences. Eva talks about how in her career, she was also asked to play roles with an accent or “spice.” When I approached Eva, she said, “Of course, I want to be part of the documentary, but I don’t know Rita that well.” I said, “It’s more about your experience and what you have gone through, which shows me what Rita went through is the same thing happening nowadays.” Justina knows Rita well, and it’s great that she talks about her as a diva and someone who likes to shock people.

Rita, I love that you are so raucous!

Rita Moreno: Just ask Justina! She says I don’t have a filter and never knows what I am going to say. She makes me laugh. One of our favorite things on “One Day” is when Lydia and Penelope have a fight. We get so Puerto Rican — eyes flashing, hands going! I love that Lydia is religious when it suits her. It’s hilarious when she talks about sex with her husband and has the picture of the Pope in her tiny room. It’s such a Catholic thing!

The most poignant and inspiring aspect of the doc is watching you develop your self-worth. Rita, can you talk about your outlook on life and how you self-motivate?

Moreno: I don’t have to bring that out. It’s so much a part of me and in my DNA. I’m one of those people who always sees a glass half full. It’s who I am. The moment I was born, that’s who I was. It would be nice to take credit, but it’s just there. I’m an energetic, funny person. I love to make people laugh. I feel comfortable with people. It’s something I’ve had since I was a little baby girl. I used to dance for grandpa. He would put on records — rhumba or salsa — and say, “Dance Rosinita!” I loved it. Because I loved moving and jumping around. But I also loved the attention and praise. I remember thinking, “This is good! I like this!”

That’s why coming to America was such a jolt — it was so tough for so long. I couldn’t understand why my mother thought this was the land of opportunity. I didn’t see any of that. I saw her slaving away at two jobs at once. We had a hard time. When I started going to school, neighborhood gangs were forming, and they were the kids I was running into on the way to school. So, I had to find a new route, so they wouldn’t attack me. Here’s the rub — children are very tender creatures, no matter how noisy, bratty, or sweet they are. If you are told often as a child that you don’t have value or worth or that you’re a “spic,” you believe it. And the problem is I didn’t go to my mom, because I instinctively knew there was nothing that she could do about it. If I cried, I cried on the sly.

Rita, you talk candidly in the film about difficult moments in your life, including your abusive relationship with Brando, as well as the discrimination you faced on set, yet your struggles seem to have empowered you. Can you talk about that?

Moreno: You either sink or swim, and instinctively I chose to swim no matter how hard or painful it was. That’s part of my DNA. When I was working, I wasn’t happy because I was playing stock character parts. I didn’t work much at all, and it was really depressing not to get the jobs. I’d ask my agent to submit me for different kinds of parts, but unless it was Native, or an Egyptian girl, they wouldn’t even see me. That was so heartbreaking. I felt so helpless. And after feeling that for such a long time, you get depressed angry and hurt. You don’t start out to be a role model. You fight the bad parts of your life the best you can, and sometimes, the best is not enough. I had a hard time. I’m proud of myself. Somehow, some way, the gods were in alignment, and when I thought everything was over, Norman Lear steps into the picture.

Mariem, you include some terrific clips in the film from Rita’s film work to behind the scenes at her TV show, “One Day,” to her performances, activism, and speeches. Can you talk about assembling the film and finding its heart?

Pérez Riera: It wasn’t easy. We had so much material. It took us many months to do it, and I am so happy I share my credit as an editor with Kevin Klauber, who helped me find the balance. I wanted the documentary to have those up and down moments, because her career and her life are like that. You see her winning an award, but she was also dealing with a suicide attempt. I wanted to show clips with the notion of what she went through. When you see her clip with Marlon Brando, or the gang trying to rape her character in “West Side Story” — you know what was on her mind at the time. I wanted every clip to have some connection with her personal life.

I love the personal moments of Rita at home. Can you describe how you captured Rita in interviews, observational footage, and private moments?

Pérez Riera: I wanted to show her being so beautiful in the interviews, but also see the contrast of her waking up and preparing her own breakfast, or talking to her grandson, to see how she really is. She gave us her house keys so we could go early in the morning and set up everything before she woke up, so we were there when she would go into her kitchen in her pajamas. I always wanted the documentary to show Rita the star who has all these awards, but to show Rita the human being, a woman, who like everybody else, fights so many wars inside of her. I wanted to show her vulnerabilities and the fragile Rita that I could see on the set of “One Day” walking without makeup to work, or the woman after 15 hours of work would drive home and do it again the next day. To see an icon “normal” in a way. When I started to do the documentary, I realized it was important to show her as a woman, because she represented every woman and what we all go through — in terms of sexual harassment, and abuse and having to working three times more to show we are capable.

There is a growing movement for Latinx representation and having the community tell their stories. Can you talk about being a Puerto Rican filmmaker making a film about a Puerto Rican?

Pérez Riera: I am lucky and honored to be able to make this documentary, and I hope it opens more doors for me. I am so glad [producer] Brent Miller decided this documentary should be told by a Latinx woman. But I hope to I get opportunities to make any documentary and any movie. Not just because I am Puerto Rican, or a woman, or Latinx, but because of my talent. That goes with every woman and every Latinx. We are still put in a box. But there are so many white men who make movies about women. Why can white men make movies about other cultures? We should be open to Latinx stories other than about Mexicans crossing the border. There should be movies about Latinx who are successful and educated.

Rita, you easily became a role model for women, the Latinx community, and many others. What observations do you have about that?

Moreno: We still have to do our movie. Where’s is our “Moonlight“? It’s a mystery to me.

Gloria [Calderon Kellett, the creator of “One Day at a Time”] once posited that one problem that the Hispanic community has is that we all come from different countries — Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina and so forth. And in an interesting and depressing way, we have siloed ourselves. We don’t have the support from each other that we need. I don’t know how that will change, and it certainly won’t change in my lifetime. It’s really depressing.

Did you ever have the opportunity to create your own projects?

Moreno: It’s so frustrating. I’m 89 — which shows how long I’ve been living with this. It was not happening then. I don’t know that anybody got to do that [create projects]. Truly, I felt so hopeless. I’m not a writer. I’m an actor. Writing something never occurred to me. I had wonderful ideas. I have one left and I’m going to submit it to Norman [Lear] soon. Being 89, I have one foot on a banana peel.

Louise Linton, wife of Steven Mnuchin, is a cannibalistic killer in a trailer for her campy new film

The trailer for Louise Linton‘s new movie “Me You Madness” dropped on Thursday, and well, it’s a lot.

I’m here to offer a description of a film that, while real, feels more like an insane game of GOP-adjacent “Mad Libs.” “Me You Madness” stars Linton, the wife of former Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, as a sociopathic bisexual woman who, per IMDB, “hunts down and kills men with crossbows, martini glasses, and kitchen knives in order to eat them.”

Catherine Black (Linton) is a 1980s Malibu hedge fund manager who is addicted to fashion, money and sex. “You may think that I’m a materialistic, narcissistic, self-absorbed misanthrope,” Black muses in a voiceover in the trailer below. “I don’t deny it.”

Her life is an endless parade of stacks of cash, spin classes and metallic boots — that is until Tyler, played by infamous “Gossip Girl” star Ed Westwick, answers her ad for a roommate. Tyler, a petty criminal, thinks he’s struck gold when he rolls up to her beachside mansion; Catherine thinks she’s found her next meal. It’s a love story for the modern ages (made all the weirder by the recent allegations that actor Armie Hammer allegedly identifies as “100% a cannibal”).

Linton is not primarily known as an actress, though she’s had several small roles in low-budget horror movies and on shows like “CSI: NY”; she did, however, write, direct and finance “Me You Madness” through her production company Stormchaser Films.

Rather, she rose to a certain level of infamy in 2017 when she Instagrammed a photo of herself and Mnuchin disembarking a military jet following a trip to Fort Knox. She added hashtags that nodded to her designer apparel #rolandmouret, #hermesscarf, #tomford and #valentino. A woman responded with the comment, “Glad we could pay for your little getaway. #deplorable,” which incensed Linton.

“Aw!!! Did you think this was a personal trip?! Adorable!” Linton responded. “Do you think the US govt paid for our honeymoon or personal travel?! Lololol. Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband? Either as an individual earner in taxes OR in self sacrifice to your country?”

Three months later, Linton accompanied her husband to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington. Someone took a photo of her holding up a sheet of freshly printed dollar bills while wearing elbow-length black leather gloves. The image went viral — as did the frequent comparisons to Cruella de Vil — and cemented her status as a real-life cartoon villain.

With that in mind, perhaps Linton’s lines in the trailer that detail her obsession with “the accumulation of money” are a self-aware nod to the public’s perception of her? Perhaps. In interviews, Linton has expressed that the movie is an attempt to subvert the femme fatale steretotype, with a little “American Psycho” thrown in for good measure.

But according to the New York Times, the weirdest parts of the camp-fest aren’t revealed in the trailer.

“In one sequence that plays like an MTV video, Catherine caresses frozen, severed male body parts while dancing to ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy’ in stiletto-heeled boots.” writes Brooke Barnes. “There is a drug-fueled poolside orgy. Please, pretty please, stay around for the madly spinning nunchaku, thong leotard and choreographed ‘tomayto-tomahto’ conga.”

“Me You Madness” debuts on demand on Friday, Feb. 12.

Republicans are using Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to deflect from controversy over QAnon congresswoman

House Republicans, facing increasing pressure to condemn the conspiratorially-minded newest members of their caucus, have largely ignored the growing extremism amongst their ranks — with some instead deflecting outrage towards prefered Democratic boogeymen like progressive Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, took Sen. Ted Cruz, R-TX, to task on Twitter Thursday, when Cruz expressed support of Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a congressional hearing to investigate Robinhood’s trading freeze of GameStop –– a decisive victory for Wall Street and a loss for retail traders.

“I am happy to work with Republicans on this issue where there’s common ground,” she replied, “but you almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago so you can sit this one out. Ocasio-Cortez added, “Happy to work w/ almost any other GOP that aren’t trying to get me killed. In the meantime if you want to help, you can resign.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet comes just weeks after Cruz joined Trump’s congressional cabal of acolytes hoping to challenge the certification of the 2020 election. It was this group’s opposition to the certification that eventually sparked a violent rampage at the Capitol building, in which several members of Congress, including Ocasio-Cortez, were nearly killed.

“There are no consequences in the Republican caucus for violence. No consequences for racism. No consequences for misogyny. No consequences for insurrection. And no consequences means that they condone it. It means that that silence is acceptance," says @AOC. pic.twitter.com/4jkKfb718K

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) January 28, 2021

Cruz –– who received $35 million in campaign donations from fracking billionaires and whose wife is Managing Director at Goldman Sachs –– is perhaps one of the least likely members of Congress to take a stand against Wall Street, making him an easy target for the Ocasio-Cortez, whose tweet sparked outrage from Sen. Chip Roy, R-TX.

“It is completely unacceptable behavior for a Member of Congress to make this kind of scurrilous charge against another member in the House or Senate for simply engaging in speech and debate regarding electors as they interpreted the Constitution,” wrote Roy to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA.

He continued ominously: “If Representative Ocasio-Cortez does not apologize immediately, we will be forced to find alternative means to condemn this regrettable statement.”

Roy was one of the Senators who initially pledged to back the GOP-led effort to defy the election certification but backed down shortly after the Capitol was raided.

Right-wing media followed suit and feigned outrage over AOC’s tweet just as House Democrats ramped up a pressure campaign on House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to remove Greene, who stalked a teenage school shooting survivor and repeatedly endorsed violence against her Democratic colleagues, from her plum committee assignments.

I support @tedcruz filing a lawsuit for this libel.

I support Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be investigated for incitement against Senator Cruz and irresponsibly spreading conspiracy and hateful rhetoric.

This behavior should not be tolerated in Congress. https://t.co/cGxe7truDQ

— Chad Felix Greene 🇮🇱 (@chadfelixg) January 28, 2021

My first fact check for @birdwatch. This is a valuable tool and am relieved Twitter is taking initiative to combat rampant misinformation on it's platform. pic.twitter.com/FyvRFyGmKU

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) January 28, 2021

“Twitter silent as AOC accuses Ted Cruz of attempted ‘murder’ on its platform,” Fox News reported.

New Education Committee member Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed wildfires on secret space laser

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the newest Republican member of the House Education and Labor Committee, has scrubbed posts calling for violence against Democrats and pushing conspiracy theories from her Facebook page amid a push to expel her from Congress.

Greene, a longtime QAnon conspiracy theorist, removed dozens of Facebook posts from 2018 and 2019 after CNN and Media Matters flagged numerous videos, posts, comments and likes seemingly endorsing the assassination of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and FBI agents who investigated former President Donald Trump, according to CNN. She also alleged that the Parkland school shooting was a fake “false flag” event, and harassed David Hogg, a survivor of the shooting, before he testified to Congress. She also claimed that Sandy Hook and other school shootings were not “real or done by the ones supposedly arrested for them” and suggested that the 2017 Las Vegas massacre may have been a conspiracy intended to pass gun control measures. Greene has also suggested that 9/11 was an inside job and that the Obama administration may have used MS-13 gang members to kill former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. In another post, she discussed a fake video that sparked the baseless “Frazzledrip” conspiracy theory, claiming to show Clinton and former aide Huma Abedin killing a child in a satanic ritual and wearing her face as a mask.

In another 2018 Facebook post flagged by Media Matters on Thursday, Greene theorized that the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history, may have been caused by a secret space laser linked to the energy company PG&E, California officials and the Rothschild family, a wealthy Jewish family at the heart of many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

“There are too many coincidences to ignore,” Greene wrote while sharing an article about the company Solaren planning to launch solar panels into orbit.

“There are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires, and pictures and videos,” she wrote, adding that she found it “really curious” that PG&E partnered with Solaren on the project and that the “Vice Chairman of Rothschild Inc.” is somehow involved.

“Space solar generators collect the suns energy and then beam it back to Earth to a transmitter to convert to electricity. … If they are beaming the suns energy back to Earth, I’m sure they wouldn’t ever miss a transmitter receiving station right??!!” Greene wrote. “What would that look like anyway? A laser beam or light beam coming to Earth, I guess. Could that cause a fire? Hmmm, I don’t know. I hope not! That wouldn’t look so good for PG&E, Rothschild Inc., Solaren, or [former California Gov.] Jerry Brown.”

In another recently discovered FB post, Marjorie Taylor Greene penned a conspiracy theory claiming that a space laser started the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in California. https://t.co/erp7UhN1AL pic.twitter.com/3TEFcSyVZb

— Eric Hananoki (@ehananoki) January 28, 2021

Though Solaren and PG&E partnered on the project, the deal never actually happened. A state investigation did blame PG&E for causing the fire, but not by laser beams from outer space. Rather, the utility company’sc aging power lines and faulty maintenance were the likely cause.

Democrats have denounced Greene’s social media posts and Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., introduced a resolution to expel her from Congress over threats against her new colleagues.

“Such advocacy for extremism and sedition not only demands her immediate expulsion from Congress, but it also merits strong and clear condemnation from all of her Republican colleagues,” Gomez said in a statement on Wednesday.

A spokesman for House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told Axios that the comments were “deeply disturbing” and that McCarthy would “have a conversation” with the freshman congresswoman. But GOP leadership has assigned her to the House Education and Labor Committee and its Budget Committee anyway. McCarthy previously stripped former Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, of his committee assignments after he made comments defending white nationalism and white supremacy.

Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott, D-Va., said Thursday that McCarthy “must explain how someone with this background represents the Republican party on education issues.”

Scott noted that Greene “claimed that that the killing of 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax” and claimed that the “killing of 14 students and three teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was staged.”

“House Republicans have appointed someone to this Committee who chased and berated a 17-year-old survivor of a mass school shooting, and then celebrated this behavior by posting it on social media,” he said. “House Republicans have appointed someone to this Committee who has publicly endorsed violence against elected officials. … [McCarthy] is sending a clear message to students, parents, and educators about the views of the Republican party.”

Pelosi agreed on Thursday that Greene should be removed from the committee.

“What could they be thinking? Or is thinking too generous of a word for what they might be doing?” she said. “It’s absolutely appalling, and I think the focus has to be on the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives for the disregard they have for the deaths of those children.”

Democrats plan to vote on Gomez’s measure to expel Greene. Though it is unlikely to pass, since a two-thirds supermajority is required to expel a member, Republicans will be forced to go on record as to whether they think Greene should remain in the House.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., is also planning to introduce legislation to kick Greene off the committees if she is allowed to remain in Congress, according to Politico.

When a reporter tried to question Greene about her past comments on Wednesday, she was thrown out of a town hall and threatened with arrest.

Hogg, whom Greene has described as “little Hitler” and a “paid little pawn,” said in an interview with CNN that McCarthy should “take all of her committee assignments away … also, don’t support her when she runs for re-election again and try to get her primaried.”

Axios reported on Thursday that Republican leaders met last summer during Greene’s campaign to express their concerns about Greene. Former Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., reportedly described the then-candidate as “crazy,” but “McCarthy and others ultimately did little to stop her.”

John Cowan, who lost to Greene in the Republican primary, told the outlet that McCarthy and House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., “acknowledged that Greene was a serious problem for the party” and while both men condemned Greene during the primary, McCarthy ultimately defended her after she won.

“I mean, at some point, you have to say, ‘No shoes, no shirt, no service,'” Cowan said.

The parents of children killed in the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings have also condemned Greene and called for McCarthy to remove her.

“She is a depraved person who ran for Congress on a lie,” Fred Guttenberg, the father of slain Parkland student Jaime Guttenberg, told MSNBC. He went on to cite McCarthy’s trip to Florida on Thursday to make nice with Trump, telling him, “When you’re done having drinks and cake with the bully in Palm Beach, you need to come back and you need to remove her. She has no place in Congress.”

Mark Barden and Nicole Hockley, the parents of seven-year-old Sandy Hook victim Daniel Barden, also issued a statement condemning Greene’s new role on the Education Committee.

“Having a Sandy Hook and Parkland denier on the House Education and Labor Committee is an attack on any and every family whose loved ones were murdered in mass shootings that have now become fodder for hoaxers,” they said.

Pelosi also cited the investigation into whether members of Congress assisted in the deadly Capitol riot as another cause for concern after Greene called for her execution.

“The enemy is within the House of Representatives,” Pelosi said. “We have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence against other members.”

Media tries to “both sides” an insurrection: No, anger over the Capitol riot isn’t “partisan rancor”

The endless mainstream media urge to cast any and every partisan conflict in “both sides do it” terms — no matter how one-sided any conflict actually is — hit a shocking new low on Friday morning when the Washington Post ran this front-page headline: “Congress hits new levels of partisan rancor.”

The Post’s appalling headline really underscores the mainstream media’s slavish dedication to false equivalence. It minimizes the growing Republican support for the violent insurrection of January 6 and the continued Democratic anger over those events as merely a partisan spat. Readers who clicked the story saw more of the casual equation between the intended victims of the mob Donald Trump sent to the Capitol and Trump’s supporters with the internal headline: “Hostility between congressional Republicans and Democrats reaches new lows amid growing fears of violence.” The headline manages to insinuate that both parties are rolling out the welcome mat for violence — when truly, it’s only the Republicans.

The story itself, written by Colby Itkowitz and Mike DeBonis, largely avoids the both-siderism of the headlines. The opening paragraph does describe “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leveling an extraordinary allegation that dangers lurk among the membership itself,” but Itkowitz and DeBonis swiftly demonstrate that Pelosi’s concerns are justified.

“The enemy is within the House of Representatives, a threat that members are concerned about, in addition to what is happening outside,” Pelosi warned Thursday morning.

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She is right, and not just because of a few boldly conspiratorial Republican congressional members — like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who have fantasized about killing Democrats and who demanded the right to display weapons around colleagues whose lives were imperiled by violent Trump supporters, respectively. She’s right, as Itkowitz and DeBonis show, because House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is embracing the insurrectionist wing of the GOP, and proudly working with Trump, who was impeached for inciting the mob.

That is the real story here: Instead of shunning Trump and his fellow travelers for stoking an insurrection, congressional Republican leadership is supporting and encouraging the very people who are most responsible for the attempted overthrow of the government.

McCarthy, in particular, as the article makes clear, has been kowtowing to the extremist element, giving Taylor Greene plum committee assignments and making a big show out of meeting with Trump at his home in Palm Beach, Florida. The message being sent by McCarthy isn’t subtle: Insurrections are alright with him. He may have made milquetoast condemnations of the violence, which led to five deaths in real-time and is tied to two suicides of Capitol police after the fact. Still, that’s irrelevant in the face of what McCarthy is communicating with his open embrace of Trump, who both instigated the insurrection and refused to listen when McCarthy personally begged Trump to call the riot off.

And yet, the Washington Post headline misleadingly attributes the situation to “partisan rancor,” even as the story shows that the problem is 100% with the Republicans accepting and encouraging violence.

For an article that’s really about how bad of a leader Kevin McCarthy is and how his actions fomented both the insurrection and the tension between members right now, this headline is……… a choice, @washingtonpost pic.twitter.com/6WBfXWYYq9

— Brendan Welch (@bd_welch) January 29, 2021

Why so much fuss over a headline? Well, part of the problem is that a lot of readers don’t read much further than headlines, as anyone who has seen folks react to articles shared on social media can attest. Instead, readers often just glance over headlines, hoping to get the gist of the news without spending much time actually reading it. Those readers are being misled into believing that the situation is of two equivalently unreasonable sides, when in fact it’s a story of Republicans becoming increasingly fascistic and Democrats reacting entirely reasonably.

The Washington Post’s “both sides” coverage only continues with an even grimmer second article, by Paul Kane, that irresponsibly frames the violent insurrection and subsequent impeachment as a “horse race” story. This time, the fault isn’t with the headline writers, but with Kane himself.

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“The Senate is hurtling toward an impeachment trial that will accomplish almost nothing by design and likely leave everyone with a bitter aftertaste,” Kane writes, complaining that it will not satisfy Democratic voters, who “will be furious that GOP senators refused to hold former president Donald Trump accountable,” or Republican voters, who mostly agree with the insurrection and “will be upset that congressional Democrats went through with an impeachment trial.”

“And independent voters, more focused on the health and economic crises fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, will wonder why Congress prioritized an impeachment process at all,” Kane asserts.

This analysis is wrong-headed in many ways, starting with the fact that it’s a myth that there are many “independent voters” who are ruled by “kitchen table” issues. Most “independent” voters are partisan Democrats or Republicans but simply declare themselves as “independent” as a form of self-flattery. Truly, this myth should have been killed off completely by the 2020 election, where it appears Trump didn’t lose a single ounce of support — he actually gained 11 million new voters — despite his complete and total failure on the much-ballyhooed “kitchen table” issues of the economy and the pandemic.

But really, the deeper issue is a moral vacuity of framing a violent attempt to overthrow the government as if it’s an everyday horse race story. The disagreement between Democratic and Republican voters about the wisdom of armed insurrection isn’t mere partisan bickering. American democracy is in very real danger of collapse, especially as one party continues to conspire with the president who leveraged violence in his effort to stage a coup. Addressing this as if it were the equivalent to a partisan spat over tax rates is a dereliction of journalistic duty.

In a surprising twist, it was the New York Times — which tends more often to fall victim to the false equivalence urge — that kicked off Friday morning with a responsible, accurate headline: “Republican Ties to Extremist Groups Are Under Scrutiny.”

The Times’ report bluntly addresses the extremism of the GOP, noting that the majority of “House Republicans supported President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims that the election had been stolen from him,” and that many other members have “deeper ties to extremist groups who pushed violent ideas and conspiracy theories.”

Trump’s insurrection efforts failed, but this is not an excuse to minimize the situation. On the contrary, failure to take it seriously makes it that much easier for Republican leadership to continue conspiring with the people — especially Trump — most responsible for the insurrection. The more support from Republican leaders that Trump and others with fascist tendencies get, the likelier it is that the next attempt to overthrow the government will succeed. Only one side, the Republicans, has insurrectionists and leaders who support them. Media outlets need to not mince words when saying so.

McConnell repeats the same obstructionist playbook from Obama era: Can Biden ignore the trolling?

It stands to reason that in a politically divided country like the U.S., presidential hopefuls would run for office promising to bridge the divide and “bring people together.” Polling always shows that if there’s one thing the people want, it’s for the two parties to stop fighting and “get things done.” They may say they want compromise and bipartisanship as well. But when you drill down to what they actually mean by that, it’s pretty clear that they really want their team to dictate the terms and by “compromise” they really mean they want the other side to capitulate. Bipartisanship is just another word for “my way or the highway.”

All of this has gotten demonstrably worse in the last few years with the rise of social media and right-wing media. For Republicans to compromise with the Democrats today it would signal to a whole lot of their constituents that they are giving in to pedophile cannibals who wear the skinned faces of dead children as masks. They’ve left themselves very little room for good faith negotiations.

On the other side of the table, you have Democrats who have a hard time finding common ground with people who call for their execution, incite insurrection and stand by as a violent mob of supporters storms the Capitol and marauds through the hallways, yelling “I’m coming for you!”

These are things that make “compromise” difficult in today’s political climate.

Still, presidential candidates continue to promise to do it. Barack Obama came to national attention four years before he ran with a famous speech at the Democratic National Convention in which he proclaimed that we are not divided by Blue states or Red states. His 2008 campaign was built on the idea of “hope and change” but a big part of that was hope that the country could change and come together in a common purpose.

He really tried to do it too.

Obama’s Grand Bargain was designed to bring the Republicans on board with some of his big ideas by getting together with them on cutting social security, Medicare and Medicaid in exchange for limits on carbon emissions and an agreement to raise taxes to help pay down the deficit. I think we know how that went. Rush Limbaugh came out of the box saying he didn’t want Obama to succeed and would press Republicans to oppose him every step of the way. Later, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., made it known that his primary goal was to make Obama a one-term president.

And what did all that obstruction add up to? Obama “failing” to live up to his promise to bring the country together. How convenient?

When he left office, Obama had a 57% approval rating, but only 27% saw the country as more unified. At his final State of the Union address, he admitted it was the greatest regret of his presidency. No doubt Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh felt proud as punch, however.

Obama’s so-called failure to unify the nation was followed by the election of the crude demagogue Donald Trump who ran on the most obnoxious, divisive agenda in modern memory. But even he promised unity in his own very special way. On January 15, 2017, just days before he was inaugurated he tweeted:

“For many years our country has been divided, angry and untrusting. Many say it will never change, the hatred is too deep. IT WILL CHANGE!!!!”

That was a day after he had posted that then-Congressman John Lewis, D-GA, a Civil Rights Movement icon, was all talk and no action, advising him to clean up his allegedly crime-infested district in the Atlanta suburbs. I don’t think anyone ever did anything but chortle at the idea Trump wanted to unite the country and the many ways in which he ended up exacerbating our divisions would take days to recite.

In fact, when Joe Biden announced his run for president it was explicitly based upon the idea that he wanted to “heal the soul of America” which he said Trump had wounded grievously, particularly with respect to his encouragement of white supremacy and racial division. Days after Donald Trump sicced an angry mob on Congress to try to overturn his election, Biden stood before the country and said, “It is time to end our “uncivil war.”‘

Of course, the minute he set about enacting the agenda he ran on the Republicans called for the smelling salts, shrieking that he isn’t unifying the country, presumably because he isn’t enacting their agenda instead. Take for instance the minority whip of the Senate, John Cornyn of Texas, who has apparently been assigned the role of chief GOP unity concern troll:

Another "unifying" move by the new Administration?

Biden Ends Partial Ban on Transgender Soldiers in U.S. Military https://t.co/DiVXdFnEQ8

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) January 25, 2021

Note to Joe Biden: Unity is more than just words https://t.co/jiBKkghvpm

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) January 27, 2021

Actually, Donald Trump only won 46.8% of the vote, but who’s counting?

The point is that while McConnell has been holding the Senate hostage, demanding that he be allowed to have veto power over the agenda, and Republicans are planning to stage yet another Trump fealty pageant at his second impeachment trial, they have done exactly nothing to meet the new administration halfway. In fact, quite a few of them refused to accept the election results at all and most of the rest stood silent for weeks as Trump perpetrated the Big Lie that Biden had stolen the election.

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte says, “the Republicans have become radicalized against democracy itself” and any hopes of bipartisanship are whistling past the graveyard.

That should be obvious to anyone paying attention but it didn’t stop the New York Times Editorial Board from hand wringing over Biden’s use of executive orders, most of which have been reversals of Trump’s odious attempts to destroy what was left of the country’s international reputation and make the lives of Americans as miserable as possible — a fact curiously unmentioned by the Times. They say legislation is a more durable way to make policy and they are right. But when you have to get it through people whose power depends on constituents who are now convinced Trump is going to be inaugurated on March 4th, I’m afraid it’s going to be a waste of time.

And it leads to absurd moments like this:

“Does it suggest that President Biden perhaps sees himself as a benevolent dictator?” pic.twitter.com/HKEa1K88k8

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 28, 2021

Biden will not be able to win over Trump voters or his Republican opponents in Congress who are beholden to them. But he can unify a majority of the country around an agenda that materially improves their lives and makes them feel as if they are living in a civilized country.

According to a new Crooked Media/Change Research poll, “there is an appetite for bold action, and little tolerance for obstruction” among the public and the Democrats have much more to lose by trying to appease the other side than by moving fast and going big, whether it takes Executive Orders, changing the Senate rules or passing legislation through reconciliation.

It’s a big job. We haven’t ever been truly civilized and we have some very urgent problems facing us. Worrying about the obstructionist Republicans’ unity concern trolling isn’t one of them.

Why Trump’s challenges to democracy will be a big problem for Biden

When a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and stopped Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the nation’s next president, it was scary – and fatal for at least five people.

But it did not pose a serious threat to the nation’s democracy.

An attempt at an illegal power grab somehow keeping Donald Trump in the Oval Office was never likely to happen, let alone succeed. Trump always lacked the authority, and the mass support, required to steal an election he overwhelmingly lost. He didn’t control state election officials or have enough influence over the rest of the process to achieve that goal.

Nevertheless, over his term as president, he repeatedly violated democratic norms, like brazenly promoting his own business interests, interfering in the Justice Department, rejecting congressional oversight, insulting judges, harassing the media and failing to concede his election loss.

However, as scholars who study democracy historically and comparatively, we predict that the biggest threats to democracy Trump poses won’t emerge until after he exits the White House – when Biden will have to face the Trump presidency’s most serious challenges.

It wasn’t a coup

Trump never really threatened a coup, which is a swift and irregular transfer of power from one executive to another, where force or the threat of force installs a new leader with the support of the military. Coups are the typical manner in which one dictator succeeds another.

A coup displacing a legitimately elected government is quite rare; prominent examples from the past 100 years across the world include Spain in 1923, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Greece in 1967, Chile in 1973, Pakistan in 1999 and Thailand in 2006.

A military-backed takeover was not going to happen in the U.S. Its armed forces are extremely unlikely to intervene in domestic politics for regime change, especially not in favor of a president who is historically unpopular among its ranks.

Even if Trump’s most ardent supporters believe he won, there aren’t enough of them to credibly threaten a civil war. Despite their ability to breach a thinly defended Capitol, a sustained insurrection would be easily quashed by law enforcement.

Trump couldn’t even stage an “auto-coup,” which happens when an elected executive declares a state of emergency and suspends the legislature and judiciary, or restricts civil liberties, to seize more power. There have also been very few of those perpetrated against democratically elected governments over the last 100 years. The most prominent examples are Hitler’s Germany in 1933, Bordaberry in Uruguay (1972), Fujimori in Peru (1992), Erdoğan in Turkey (2015), Maduro in Venezuela (2017), Morales in Bolivia (2019) and Orbán in Hungary (2020).

A U.S. president can’t dismiss the legislative or judicial branches, and elections are not under his control: The Constitution declares that they are run by the states. And the declaration of election results is also well outside the power of the president (or vice president). It doesn’t matter whether the losing side formally concedes; the new president’s term begins at noon on Jan. 20.

The attack on the Capitol may have threatened the lives of federal legislators and Capitol police officers, but the most it achieved was to interrupt, briefly, a ministerial procedure. Within hours, both the House and Senate were back in session in the Capitol, carrying on their certification of the electoral votes cast in 2020.

Still a threat to democracy

By objecting to the outcome of the election, Trump highlighted aspects of the process that many Americans were previously unaware of, ironically ensuring the public is better informed about the mechanics and details of American elections. In that way, he may have, paradoxically, made American democracy stronger.

And it was fairly strong already. There was no evidence of any sort of widespread fraud or other irregularities. Major media organizations continue to explain and document the facts regarding the election, contradicting the president’s disinformation campaign. In 2020, voter turnout was higher than it has been for a century. Despite the pandemic, Trump’s rhetoric and threats of foreign tampering, the 2020 elections were the most secure in living memory.

But beyond elections, Trump has threatened America’s other bedrock political institutions. While there are many seemingly disparate examples of his disregard for the Constitution, what unites them is impunity and contempt for the rule of law. He has committed numerous impeachable acts – including potentially the incitement-to-riot on Jan. 6. He is facing a criminal investigation in New York state, and may be looking at federal inquiries both about possible misdeeds he committed in office and from before he became president.

The framers of the Constitution feared many things they designed the U.S. government to defend against, but perhaps one anxiety eclipsed all others: a lawless president who never faces justice, and was never held accountable during or even after leaving office. As Alexander Hamilton wrote, “if the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution.”

There’s very little time left to hold Trump to account during his term. After the events of Jan. 6, he now faces public backlash from longtime congressional allies and resignations from his Cabinet. He has also been locked out of Facebook and Twitter.

But the question of real, lasting – and legal – accountability will fall to Biden, and his nominee for attorney general, Merrick Garland. They will decide whether to continue existing investigations and potentially start new ones. State attorneys general and local prosecutors will have similar powers for the laws they enforce.

The aftermath

Newly elected leaders can often face strong incentives – and encouragement – to prosecute their predecessors, as Biden does now. But that approach, often called restorative justice, can also destabilize democracy’s prospects if lame-duck executives anticipate this and decide to hunker down and fight instead of conceding defeat. Consider Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, toppled by Western military intervention and killed by his people in 2011. He refused to flee or seek asylum for fear that both foreign governments and his own successors would prosecute him for human rights violations.

Perhaps counterintuitively, it is when outgoing presidents in transitioning democracies enshrine protections against their prosecution directly before leaving office that the democratic system is more likely to endure. This was the case in Chile with dictator Augusto Pinochet, who left power in 1989 under the aegis of a constitution he foisted on the country on his way out.

By contrast, after-the-fact pardoning of crimes – as Gerald Ford did of Richard Nixon – runs the risk of creating a larger threat to democracy: the idea that rogue leaders and their henchmen are above the law. If Trump finds a way to pardon himself, he may reduce his legal vulnerability, but he can’t erase it entirely.

If prosecutors or Congress let Trump off the hook, they may be the ones breaking new and dangerous ground, truly shattering the rule of law that underpins American democracy.

James D. Long, Associate Professor of Political Science, Co-founder of the Political Economy Forum, Host of “Neither Free Nor Fair?” podcast, University of Washington and Victor Menaldo, Professor of Political Science, Co-founder of the Political Economy Forum, University of Washington

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

“One more check is not enough”: Progressives push Joe Biden to do more to help working families

Progressive lawmakers and activists are encouraged by President Joe Biden’s first week, and his surprisingly aggressive policy rollout. But they intend to keep the pressure on his administration to go bigger while Democrats have control of both chambers of Congress and the White House.

Many of Biden’s former progressive primary foes have praised him for getting off to a running start but hope it’s just the beginning. “I think we’re headed in the right direction,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said after last week’s inauguration. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has praised some of Biden’s administration picks and called his coronavirus relief plan a “very strong first installment.”

Biden’s first major legislative proposal is a $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package that includes $1,400 direct payments to most Americans, an increase of the federal minimum wage to $15, and hundreds of billions to help unemployed people, state and local governments, schools, and small businesses.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., the former co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, told Salon the plan was a “strong start” and that the minimum wage increase would be “foundational to improving conditions for the working class.” He noted that several aspects of the bill that have not gotten as much news coverage could dramatically slash child poverty and help working families.

Lawmakers are drafting a bill that would expand the child tax credit, which currently tops out at $2,000 per child at the end of the year, to $3,600 for children under 6 and $3,000 for older kids, The Washington Post reported last week. Unlike the current credit, these benefits would be delivered in monthly payments and would be fully refundable.

Biden’s proposal would also expand the earned income tax credit and provide up to 14 weeks of paid sick and family leave for nearly all American workers.

The child tax credit expansion “would cut child poverty in half,” Khanna said in an interview. “Paid family leave is something progressives have been fighting for for a long time. … So I am optimistic with the progressive priorities that have been included. Now we have to fight to make sure they’re passed.”

Khanna and other progressives, however, have bristled at Biden’s proposal to send $1,400 checks on top of the $600 direct payments that Congress approved in December. The direct payments in Biden’s plan are the same as those in the bill approved by the House last month before it was rejected by Senate Republicans.

“$2,000 means $2,000. $2,000 does not mean $1,400,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Washington Post. She has also called for the enhanced $400 unemployment benefits in the bill to be retroactive.

A group of 54 progressive lawmakers on Thursday urged Biden to consider making the payments monthly, though they did not specify an amount.

“When that money runs out, families will once again struggle to pay for basic necessities,” the letter said. “One more check is not enough.”

Khanna, who signed the letter, says Biden should “do more” and send $2,000 checks monthly. But he said he doesn’t expect that progressive lawmakers will torpedo the relief plan over the differences between the two sides.

“My sense is where the progressive fight will be is to get this passed, to get this through without compromising and losing parts of the agenda,” he said.

Khanna has also joined with a growing number of Democrats in calling to scrap the filibuster in the Senate, which would allow the new Democratic majority — actually, a 50-50 tie, with Vice President Kamala Harris available as a tiebreaking vote — to pass legislation with a simple majority. Those calls may have hit a roadblock this week when moderate Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., vowed to preserve the filibuster. Despite Biden’s optimism about building bipartisan support for legislation, many Republicans have already balked at large parts of his relief proposal.

“I appreciate Joe Biden trying, and he is doing the right thing by trying, but it has to be reciprocated,” Khanna said.

In the absence of filibuster reform, Democrats have signaled that they intend to pass the relief bill and other legislation through the budget reconciliation process, which was used by Republicans to push through a massive tax cut in 2017 that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and corporations.

“We should do this [through] reconciliation, and if we have to amend the Byrd rule, we amend the Byrd rule,” Khanna said, referring to a 1985 Senate rule that limits the types of provisions that can be included in reconciliation bills to only budgetary items, which could stand in the way of boosting the minimum wage.

Khanna predicted that Congress could pass a large infrastructure bill through the reconciliation process as well. He added that statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico could also be approved by simple majority vote.

“That is absolutely critical,” he said. “Two things that we should ask ourselves every day: Are we getting our agenda to move to help working people? And are we getting our agenda to move to secure voting rights? That should be the prism through which we will get our policy.”

Biden has also kicked off his presidency with a slew of executive orders largely aimed at rolling back Donald Trump’s executive actions, like the travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries and the ban on transgender people serving in the military.

“A big thing that he could do right away” is to sign an executive order canceling student debt, Khanna said. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., previously led calls for Biden to immediately cancel up to $50,000 in student debt per person. Biden has called on Congress to pass legislation to cancel up to $10,000 in debt per person. Some economists have pushed back on this particular policy, arguing that student debt forgiveness would overwhelmingly favor the top 20% of earners.

Progressive groups have also urged Biden to go further in tackling climate change. On Wednesday, Biden announced a series of executive actions aimed at addressing the “climate crisis” — a term never previously used by an American president — creating a commission to focus on creating a “civilian climate corps” modeled after a similar proposal in the Green New Deal, suspending new leases for oil and gas drilling on federal land, and elevating climate change to a national security priority. He has already canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and rejoined the Paris climate accord.

The Sunrise Movement, a climate-focused progressive group, said in a statement that the actions make clear that Biden is serious about delivering on his campaign promises, while calling on him to go further.

“Now is the moment to deliver transformative change for the American people, and our generation will not accept any excuses for delay or inaction on delivering historic legislation to build back better, creating millions of good jobs investing in clean energy, communities, and sustainable infrastructure,” Varshini Prakash, the group’s executive director, said in a statement.

The group has called for Biden to require 100% clean, renewable electricity by 2035, 100% zero-emission vehicles by 2030, and 100% clean buildings by 2025, among a host of other proposals. In a sign of synchronicity, General Motors announced Thursday it would phase out all production of gasoline-powered vehicles by the 2035 model year.

“The Sunrise Movement demands that President Biden follow through on the bold, progressive climate agenda he ran on through executive actions and by passing the first pillars of a Green New Deal,” Ellen Sciales, a spokesperson for the group, said in a statement to Salon.

One area where Biden has received significant pushback from the left is in his selection of White House and Cabinet officials, a number of whom have corporate ties.

Prior to Biden’s inauguration, many progressives were concerned about the number of Biden administration picks with links to corporate interests, while largely praising many of his choices. Former Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., who now heads the White House Office of Public Engagement, came under criticism for being a top recipient of donations from big oil and gas firms and said he would be a conduit for corporations in Biden’s White House. Steve Ricchetti, who serves as a counselor to Biden, is a longtime corporate lobbyist.

“It’s a mixed bag,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, a progressive group that scrutinizes administration appointments. While Biden ran as the most conservative option in the Democratic primary race, Hauser said, “There’s no instance in which a Biden nominee is worse from a progressive standpoint than their Obama counterpart. And there are several instances in which they are noticeably better, and even some of the weaker Biden people are making outreach steps to progressives.”

Khanna said that Richmond has been “extraordinary” in his outreach efforts to his former progressive House colleagues and that Ricchetti “has also outreached to many of us and has welcomed our comments and welcomed our feedback.”

“The sense I’ve gotten with Biden’s inner circle at the White House is that they have actually done a very good job of outreach to progressives on the Hill,” he added. “Now, would Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders have had different picks in some of these positions? Of course. But Biden won the election, and he won the election on his platform. So given that, I think that the outreach to progressive wings of the party so far is sincere.”

Hauser said he is still concerned about the influence of Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, Biden’s deputy chief of staff, who has been criticized by progressives as a deficit hawk. Some Cabinet appointments, like Commerce Secretary-designate Gina Raimondo, the Rhode Island governor and former venture capitalist who has come under criticism for a perceived history of siding with corporations over working families, are downright “terrible,” he said. But there are a lot of bright spots among Biden’s picks, particularly in lesser-seen roles.

Biden staffed the Office of Management and Budget with people like Sharon Block, the acting head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, who come from the labor movement and back corporate regulations, Hauser said. His group is also “encouraged” by Biden’s regulatory-minded picks at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Labor Department, Department of the Interior, and some key positions at both the Treasury and Justice departments.

“Right now, there are a lot of very important wins happening, but I have some questions about the Department of Treasury and the Department of Justice,” Hauser said. “Obviously, those are two extremely important departments.”

Biden has fired several Trump appointees since taking office, but some progressives want him to go further. Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., and others have called for Biden to fire the entire U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors over their “complicity” in Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s “sabotage” that led to a nationwide mail slowdown. Biden has no power to directly fire DeJoy, but the USPS board does.

Hauser said the process of firing the USPS board is complicated but noted that Biden could quickly fire IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig and holdover U.S. attorneys. He also called for Biden to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray, who he said “did nothing to prevent” the Capitol riot. Biden may wish to observe the formerly-existing norm, in which FBI directors were appointed to 10-year terms and seen as independent from politics. Those days may well be gone, Hauser suggested.

“If you survived a Trump administration loyalty purge, then you should be presumptively disloyal to the rule of law in this country, because Trump opposed the rule of law,” Hauser said. “He acted upon that. You were neither fired nor quit, which means you just don’t have a very active conscience.”

Khanna said he is optimistic that Biden’s rollout could pave the way for Congress to pass a large infrastructure package, strengthen union protections, address racial equity and pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Hauser said that Biden’s first days in office, on the other hand, have made clear that progressives will have to fight to have significant influence over the administration.

“The Biden administration is largely run by political professionals who are constantly taking the temperature of the [Democratic] party and trying to be at the center of the party. To the extent to which activists succeed in shifting the party’s views, be it on the $15 minimum wage or ethics in government or clean energy and the Green New Deal and those sorts of principles, they’re going to influence the Biden administration. So I think people should definitely, objectively be encouraged that activism matters.”

Khanna acknowledged that things will likely get “tougher” in two years when Democrats have to defend their narrow congressional majorities in a midterm election, which historically have not been kind to the incumbent president’s party, while facing another round of Republican gerrymandering.

“I think anytime you have both chambers and the White House, you have to get as much of your agenda through as possible,” he said. “I mean history shows this is not something that lasts that long. It’s a very fortunate thing to have, and we have to make the most of the opportunity.”

Florida man’s arrest on 2016 election charges suggests Russia probe may have survived Bill Barr

Florida man Douglass Mackey, a notorious white nationalist and right-wing social media troll, was arrested this week on charges of conspiring with others to deprive citizens of their right to vote ahead of the 2016 election, the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.

“According to the allegations in the complaint, the defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one of the most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution: the right to vote,” Nicholas McQuaid, acting Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division, said in a press release. “This complaint underscores the department’s commitment to investigating and prosecuting those who would undermine citizens’ voting rights.”

It also suggests that the Russia investigation, at least in part, survived the tenure of former Attorney General Bill Barr.

According to the complaint, Mackey’s Twitter account had nearly 60,000 followers, and in February 2016 the MIT Media Lab ranked him 107th in its list of the most influential personalities ahead of the election, higher than NBC News and Stephen Colbert. Prosecutors say that in the months before the election, Mackey collaborated with unnamed co-conspirators to encourage Hillary Clinton supporters to cast votes via text messages or social media — which are not viable or legal voting methods in any state.

The conspiracy charge against Mackey, who was arrested in West Palm Beach, could indicate that the Justice Department has been probing a broader network. Three of his co-conspirators were identified by HuffPost reporter Luke O’Brien, who wrote an in-depth 2018 profile of Mackey: white nationalist financier Jeff Giesea; conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, who has ties to onetime national security adviser turned QAnon hero Michael Flynn; and Jack Posobiec, a far-right provocateur with ties to neo-Nazi groups and longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone. The pro-Trump group, who called themselves “MAGA3X,” fueled the Pizzagate social media campaign that smeared Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Notably, both Stone and Flynn came under the focus of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the weaponization of social media in 2016. Flynn had repeatedly shared content from the Russian-linked account @TEN_GOP, which shared disinformation to tens of thousands of followers under the auspices of the Tennessee Republican Party. Stone, a misinformation mastermind, also imprinted on the Trump campaign the importance of social media. Just this summer, Facebook wiped more than 100 Facebook and Instagram accounts and pages that Stone and unnamed associates had used to push disinformation related to the 2016 election, as well as to Stone’s criminal trial.

One arm of Stone’s social media work in 2016 was an effort to suppress the Black vote, which is also specified in the charges against Mackey. Mueller had questioned and subpoenad Stone’s associates who helped orchestrate his social media campaigns.

Former President Trump’s efforts to block Mueller — or even fire him — have been well documented. In anticipation of possible acts of executive sabotage, the special counsel’s office in the course of its work spun off a number of investigations to other divisions, primarily the Southern District of New York. As one of Barr’s first acts in office, he appointed his own special prosecutor, Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham, to investigate the origins of the Russia probe — and potentially pursue charges against FBI agents and Obama administration officials. Barr has long been suspected of spearheading a secret effort to suppress evidence and snuff out ancillary investigations, and after Mueller submitted his final report, congressional Democrats requested the attorney general’s communications regarding the spinoff cases.

Considering all this, it seems possible, even likely, that the Mackey indictment indicates that some Russia-related inquiries have survived Barr’s efforts to uproot them. Investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler proposed another, deeply ironic possibility: The charges could have stemmed from Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election and reverse his defeat.

About a week after the election, Barr, under pressure from Trump, took the unprecedented step of authorizing prosecutors to pursue election fraud cases ahead of the Electoral College vote. It’s possible, Wheeler suggests, that if one of those prosecutors had ahold of evidence from prior investigations, Barr’s authorization could have allowed that prosecutor to prioritize the Mackey case and bring an indictment — which would be a prodigious case of cosmic payback.

America’s overlooked crime: Will Joe Biden end the U.S. global war on children?

Most people regard Donald Trump’s treatment of immigrant children as among his most shocking crimes as president. Images of hundreds of children stolen from their families and imprisoned in chain-link cages are an unforgettable disgrace that President Biden must move quickly to remedy, with humane immigration policies and a program to find the children’s families and reunite them, wherever they may be.

A less publicized Trump policy that actually killed children was the fulfillment of his campaign promises to “bomb the shit out of” America’s enemies and “take out their families.” Trump escalated Obama’s bombing campaigns against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and loosened U.S. rules of engagement regarding airstrikes that were predictably going to kill civilians.

After devastating U.S. bombardments that killed tens of thousands of civilians and left major cities in ruins, the United States’ Iraqi allies fulfilled the most shocking of Trump’s threats and massacred the survivors — men, women and children — in Mosul.

But the killing of civilians in America’s post-9/11 wars did not begin with Trump. And it will not end, or even diminish, under Biden, unless the public demands that America’s systematic slaughter of children and other civilians must end.

The Stop the War on Children campaign, run by the British charity Save the Children, publishes graphic reports on the harms that the United States and other warring parties inflict on children around the world.

Its 2020 report, “Killed and Maimed: A Generation of Violations Against Children in Conflict,” reported 250,000 UN-documented human rights violations against children in war zones since 2005, including more than 100,000 incidents in which children were killed or maimed. It found that a staggering 426 million children now live in conflict zones, the second highest number ever, and that “the trends over recent years are of increasing violations, increasing numbers of children affected by conflict and increasingly protracted crises.”

Many of the injuries to children come from explosive weapons such as bombs, missiles, grenades, mortars and IEDs. In 2019, another Stop the War on Children study, on explosive blast injuries, found that these weapons designed to inflict maximum damage on military targets are especially destructive to the small bodies of children, and inflict more devastating injuries on children than on adults. Among pediatric blast patients, 80% suffer penetrating head injuries, compared with only 31% of adult blast patients, and wounded children are 10 times more likely to suffer traumatic brain injuries than adults.

In the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, U.S. and allied forces are armed with highly destructive explosive weapons and rely heavily on airstrikes, with the result that blast injuries account for nearly three-quarters of injuries to children, double the proportion found in other wars. The U.S. reliance on airstrikes also leads to widespread destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure, leaving children more exposed to all the humanitarian impacts of war, from hunger and starvation to otherwise preventable or curable diseases.

The immediate solution to this international crisis is for the United States to end its current wars and stop selling weapons to allies who wage war on their neighbors or kill civilians. Withdrawing U.S. occupation forces and ending U.S. airstrikes will allow the UN and the rest of the world to mobilize legitimate, impartial support programs to help America’s victims rebuild their lives and their societies. President Biden should offer generous U.S. war reparations to finance these programs, including the rebuilding of Mosul, Raqqa and other cities destroyed by American bombardment.

To prevent new U.S. wars, the Biden administration should commit to participate and comply with the rules of international law, which are supposed to be binding on all countries, even the most wealthy and powerful.

While paying lip service to the rule of law and a “rules-based international order,” the United States has in practice been recognizing only the law of the jungle and “might makes right,” as if the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of force did not exist and the protected status of civilians under the Geneva Conventions were subject to the discretion of unaccountable U.S. government lawyers. This murderous charade must end.

Despite U.S. non-participation and disdain, the rest of the world has continued to develop effective treaties to strengthen the rules of international law. For instance, treaties to ban land mines and cluster munitions have successfully ended their use by the countries that have ratified them.

Banning land mines has saved tens of thousands of children’s lives, and no country that is a party to the cluster munitions treaty has used them since its adoption in 2008, reducing the number of unexploded bomblets lying in wait to kill and maim unsuspecting children. The Biden administration should sign, ratify and comply with these treaties, along with more than 40 other multilateral treaties the U.S. has failed to ratify.

Americans should also support the International Network on Explosive Weapons (INEW), which is calling for a UN declaration to outlaw the use of heavy explosive weapons in urban areas, where 90% of casualties are civilians and many are children. As Save the Children’s Blast Injuries report says, “Explosive weapons, including aircraft bombs, rockets and artillery, were designed for use in open battlefields, and are completely inappropriate for use in towns and cities and among the civilian population.”

A global initiative with tremendous grassroots support and potential to save the world from mass extinction is the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which just came into force on Jan. 22 after Honduras became the 50th nation to ratify it. The growing international consensus that these suicide weapons must simply be abolished and prohibited will put pressure on the U.S. and other nuclear weapons states at the August 2021 review conference of the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty).

Since the U.S. and Russia still possess 90% of the nuclear weapons in the world, the main onus for their elimination lies on Presidents Biden and Putin. The five-year extension to the New START treaty that Biden and Putin have agreed on is welcome news. The U.S. and Russia should use the treaty extension and the NPT review as catalysts for further reductions in their stockpiles and real diplomacy to explicitly move forward on abolition.

The United States doesn’t just wage war on children with bombs, missiles and bullets. It also wages economic war in ways that disproportionately affect children, preventing countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea from importing essential food and medicines or obtaining the resources they need to buy them.

These sanctions are a brutal form of economic warfare and collective punishment that leave children dying from hunger and preventable diseases, especially during this pandemic. UN officials have called for the International Criminal Court to investigate unilateral U.S. sanctions as crimes against humanity. The Biden administration should immediately lift all unilateral economic sanctions.

Will America’s new president act to protect the children of the world from America’s most tragic and indefensible war crimes? Nothing in Joe Biden’s long record in public life suggests that he will, unless the American public and the rest of the world act collectively and effectively to insist that the U.S. must end its war on children and finally become a responsible, law-abiding member of the human family.

The government Donald Trump left behind

Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 following a campaign of pledges to build a wall along the border with Mexico, repeal and replace his predecessor’s signature health care legislation, “drain the swamp” of special interests in Washington, D.C., and cut through the federal government’s bureaucracy, all to “Make America Great Again.”

Trump ultimately fell short on many of his signature promises, but his administration’s successes in cutting taxes, rolling back regulations and reshaping the judiciary will cast a long shadow, with the national debt reaching historic highs, weakened federal agencies and conservative judges who will remain in position for decades.

President Joe Biden has begun undoing some inherited policies via executive orders, yet much of what the new administration ultimately hopes to achieve cannot be accomplished by presidential fiat. Like Trump when he was reversing Obama-era regulations, Biden will need cooperation from Congress, including compromises with at least some Republicans in the Senate, to enact significant swaths of his agenda, and he faces a ticking clock to undo some of Trump’s “midnight” rules.

Here are some of the most important ways Trump changed Washington and the federal government:

Renovating the Swamp

From the start of his term, Trump staffed his administration with lobbyists — hundreds of them, by our count — some of whom remain in career positions. He signed an executive order on ethics that was supposed to bar his political appointees from lobbying their former agencies for five years after they left government, though ProPublica found in 2018 that the order was not being enforced. Then, one of his final acts as president was to rescind that order, calling into question whether the swamp was drained or if Trump had built a yacht club along its murky waters.

Trump’s deregulatory successes left some federal agencies understaffed, underfunded and unable to function properly, as demonstrated by his administration’s botched response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Even if Biden is able to restaff and Congress allocates the money to restore slashed budgets, it will take years to reverse rules put in place by Trump.

Biden has set about trying to reverse at least some of Trump’s actions that rolled back the rights of LGBTQ Americans, like the military’s ban on transgender service members, and a 2020 “conscience rule” that helped to shield federally funded health care providers who refused to provide services on religious or moral grounds.

The new administration will almost certainly have to employ one of the tools Trump used to halt or undo former President Barack Obama’s regulations: a little-known law called the Congressional Review Act.

The law, passed in 1996 by a GOP majority in the House, which was led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, gave Congress the ability to pass a simple resolution of disapproval and thereby reject any new major regulation implemented by a president. It also permanently prevents these voided regulations from being resurrected in any similar form without a subsequent act of Congress. In the two decades after it was enacted, the CRA was only used successfully once.

Then came Trump.

His 2016 election resulted in a flood of regulatory rollbacks — 15 in the first year of his term alone.

Now that the Congressional Review Act has been established as a political power tool, Biden and a Democratic-led House and Senate will likely use it to repeal as many of the Trump administration’s midnight regulations as they possibly can in the limited window of time available to them.

ProPublica tracked more than 75 such regulations from Trump’s final months in office, at least 50 of which were finalized before Biden’s inauguration.

Remaking the Court

Among federal institutions, the judicial branch will remain in Trump’s shadow the longest. The one-term president was responsible for installing more than 225 federal judges and three Supreme Court justices to lifetime appointments. A ProPublica analysis highlighted the relative youth of Trump’s judicial appointments. Given the age of many of these judges, they are likely to remain in their positions for 30 years or more before retiring.

The Senate’s then-majority leader, Mitch McConnell, handed Trump a gift by refusing to hold hearings in 2016 for Obama’s nominee to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. In April 2017, that seat was filled by Neil Gorsuch, who, at age 49, was the youngest justice on the court.

The subsequent appointments of Brett Kavanaugh (53 when confirmed) and Amy Coney Barrett (47 when confirmed) made clear Trump’s goal of placing young, deeply conservative justices into lifetime appointments.

According to a ProPublica analysis, all three Trump-appointed justices could remain with the court until 2050 or beyond by simply staying through or slightly beyond the average age of retirement for the court.

Trump’s relative success with Supreme Court nominations was only part of the GOP strategy to remake the federal courts. McConnell and Republican leadership deliberately held back on confirming Obama’s judge nominations in hopes of the White House changing parties after 2016. In his last two years in office, Obama only saw two of his appellate nominees confirmed to the bench. By contrast, Trump seated a cavalcade of judges during his term — 19 appeals court spots and nearly 50 U.S. district court judges in 2018 alone.

In one four-year term, Trump placed 54 judges in federal appellate courts, and seated 174 district court judges. By contrast, Obama and former President George W. Bush seated 55 and 62 appellate judges, respectively, over the course of their eight-year stays in office.

Following the death of liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, the issue of “packing the court” by adding more justices became a talking point for both progressives who supported the idea and for Trump, who claimed Biden would use the strategy to change the court’s ideological balance. However, Biden has not publicly supported this idea, and it would be unlikely to succeed in Congress.

The Constitution prescribes no specific number of justices for the Supreme Court, which over the years has had as few as six justices and as many as 10. The current nine-justice court was established in 1869, though there have been multiple proposals to expand the court, most notably in 1937, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a failed plan to expand the Supreme Court to as many as 15 justices.

The Democrats’ win of both Georgia Senate seats in January means Biden should be able to fill vacancies in the judiciary, with Republicans unable to block hearings and Vice President Kamala Harris acting as the tiebreaker for any 50-50 confirmation votes. However, finding nominees that satisfy all 48 Democrats and the 2 independents who caucus with them may prove to be a challenge.

There is also the question of how many Supreme Court seats Biden will have the opportunity to fill. Stephen Breyer is the only justice currently above the typical retirement age. Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest tenured of the nine, is 72. According to the ProPublica analysis, if he stays on the bench through typical retirement age, he would remain in place through 2029.

Long-tenured district and appellate court judges who meet specific age and experience requirements can declare “senior” status, which allows for their seats to be filled by the president while they continue working. There are currently dozens of judges eligible for this designation. On Inauguration Day, District Court Judge Victoria Roberts of Michigan’s Eastern District announced her intention to transition into senior status. It remains to be seen how many others will choose this path.

A Win for the Wealthy, a Loss for the Uninsured

Even though Trump began his term with Republicans in control of both chambers, the GOP was unable to pass major bills on issues like immigration and abortion because it couldn’t get the 60 votes it needed to end debate in the Senate and get to a final vote. The two signature Trump legislative efforts — on health care and tax cuts — were expedited by using the budget reconciliation process, which limits what can be put into the legislation but means the bill is not subject to a cloture vote.

In his public remarks, Trump sold the Republicans’ 2017 tax reforms as mainly benefiting the middle class and creating jobs.

Yet the new tax law’s cap on deductions for state and local taxes, along with the elimination of some mortgage deductions, resulted in a trillion-dollar drop in overall home values nationwide — “a very big deal to families whose biggest financial asset is the equity they have in their homes,” wrote ProPublica’s Allan Sloan.

ProPublica has reported on a number of ways in which the 2017 tax cuts benefited America’s wealthiest, including some Trump appointees. Similarly, the plan’s Opportunity Zone tax breaks, which were purportedly intended to spur investment in lower-income neighborhoods, have repeatedly gone to billionaire investors and developers for projects that were not new or are of dubious value, like a Florida superyacht marina.

Critics warned the cuts would raise the national debt, which then stood at around $20 trillion. Trump insisted otherwise, telling Fox News’ Sean Hannity in 2018 that when the bill “really kicks in, we’ll start paying off that debt like it’s water.”

Despite Trump’s pledge that the revenue lost from the tax cuts would be recouped by tariffs and increased productivity, the national debt continued to rise, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. The $1.563 trillion budget deficit from 2019 was higher than it had been in all but one year under the Obama administration, which spent $1.652 trillion in 2010 in an effort to end the economic downturn that resulted from the crash of the housing market. More than a year after signing the tax law, Trump’s own White House referred to the then-$22 trillion national debt as a “grave threat to our economic and societal prosperity.”

Then the coronavirus hit, requiring trillions of additional dollars in spending to keep Americans working, fed and in their homes. As of Dec. 31, 2020, the national debt stood at $27.75 trillion, up 39% from $19.95 trillion four years earlier and at its highest level relative to our economy since the end of World War II.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden proposed income tax increases on individuals earning more than $400,000 annually, repealing the cap on state and local tax deductions, and raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, splitting the difference between Trump’s level and the 35% rate that was in place before 2017.

As experts have noted, the new president may face an uphill battle trying to sell any tax hike while the economy remains troubled. While the Democratic Party now controls both chambers of Congress, Biden cannot afford even a single defector in the Senate if he hopes to succeed there. Additionally, Biden hopes to push through a $1.9 trillion stimulus package in the early part of 2021, which will further inflate the debt.

Undoing Obamacare

On the day of his inauguration in 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13765, instructing the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the heads of other relevant federal bodies to try to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation” of any part of the Affordable Care Act if they deemed that it “would impose a fiscal burden on any State or a cost, fee, tax, penalty, or regulatory burden on individuals, families, healthcare providers, health insurers, patients, recipients of healthcare services, purchasers of health insurance, or makers of medical devices, products, or medications.”

The order was a clear indication of the administration’s determination to undermine Obamacare, which had helped an estimated 20 million people get health insurance during its first two years.

While the House passed its version of a health care plan, dubbed the American Health Care Act, in May 2017, what followed was a series of failed attempts to craft a Senate version of the bill. The process came to an end in July 2017 with the Health Care Freedom Act, dubbed a “skinny repeal” bill with no real replacement plan. That too failed in the Senate, when Sen. John McCain of Arizona, with a now-famous thumbs-down gesture, joined fellow Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine and all Democrats in voting “no.”

The closest Trump would come to repealing the ACA came later in 2017, when — as part of the Republican tax bill — he effectively negated the individual mandate, which required individuals to carry a minimum level of healthcare coverage or face an annual penalty of up to $695; the tax bill reduced the amount of that penalty to $0. The Trump administration also cut back on marketing for the ACA’s open enrollment periods and expanded the availability of short-term limited-duration insurance policies, which are generally less expensive than those that meet ACA requirements but offer fewer protections, particularly for preexisting conditions. Despite repeated promises from the president that a true ACA replacement was in the offing, it never materialized.

Though Obama’s legislation remains on the books, its initial surge in coverage numbers began to reverse itself after 2017. According to a 2020 Kaiser Family Foundation report, there were 28.9 million uninsured nonelderly Americans by the end of 2019, an increase of 2.2 million since the beginning of 2017, with the number expected to continue rising in 2020 due to the historic levels of unemployment resulting from pandemic-related layoffs and closings.

In addition to resulting in more uninsured Americans, the Obamacare repeal campaign set the tone of bluster, partisanship and misinformation that would come to define many aspects of the Trump years. As ProPublica reported in May 2017, backers of the repeal legislation had engaged in a campaign of inaccurate information, misleading euphemisms and a curated online discussion bubble in which members of Congress blocked critical comments from their constituents.

Biden and the new Democratic-led Congress could reinstate the individual mandate, but financial penalties for uninsured Americans will be difficult for the White House and legislators to sell to a public living through mass unemployment. Rather, as part of his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the new president hopes to maintain insurance rolls by increasing the value of the Premium Tax Credit — a refundable credit that helps eligible taxpayers afford insurance coverage — so that their net cost of insurance premiums is no more than 8.5% of an individual’s yearly income.

The new White House will face pressure from within its own party as progressive Democrats push to replace traditional insurance plans with a single-payer “Medicare for All” plan. Support for this concept is increasing among the general public. According to a September 2020 report from Pew Research, 63% of Americans support at least some mix of government and private insurance plans, up 4 percentage points from the previous year. Support for a single national government program was up 6 percentage points year-over-year, rising from 30% to 36%. During the campaign, Biden did not push for a Medicare for All plan, but rather for expansion of the ACA marketplace via the “public option,” meaning government-run insurance plans that would compete with private insurers.

The Wall

In early 2018, with nothing to show for his campaign promises and no indication that Mexico wanted any involvement in funding the border wall, Trump floated to then-Defense Secretary James Mattis the idea of using money earmarked for the armed forces to build it.

It would be nearly a year before Trump moved forward with this plan, setting off a slew of legal challenges, some involving the Supreme Court. Opponents said Trump did not have the authority to reallocate billions of congressionally appropriated military funds. The standoff over money for the wall resulted in the longest shutdown in U.S. government history. Congress, now with a Democratic majority in the House, eventually agreed to give Trump part of what he requested, but with some restrictions. The president was also allowed to use billions that had previously been allocated for the military’s counter-narcotics efforts.

After construction on the wall finally began in earnest, a ProPublica/Texas Tribune investigation found that costs for the structure were running significantly higher than expected. For example, the Army Corps of Engineers issued two contracts worth $788 million for construction of one 83-mile stretch of wall. In less than a year, the value of those contracts increased by more than $1 billion. Within a year, after the length of the wall segments in those contracts was extended by 63% to 135 miles, the total cost more than tripled to $3 billion. ProPublica and the Tribune found multiple instances where the value of border wall contracts was increased through the use of supplemental contracts without any competitive bidding.

While more than 400 miles of wall were constructed by the end of Trump’s term, only about 80 miles involved building a barrier where none had existed before, according to news reports. The Washington Post reported that Biden may be obligated to build more than 200 additional miles of wall.

On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order describing the wall as a “waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.” The order pauses construction and spending on the wall “to the extent permitted by law,” leaving open the possibility that construction could continue or that money will continue to be spent on the project. Our investigation confirmed that some wall contracts come with hefty termination fees. One agreement stipulates a cancellation fee of nearly $15 million.

The Erosion of Trust

The legacy of the Trump administration will be one of erosion, both of norms and of trust in government. Arguably the strongest example is Trump’s yearslong campaign to convince the American people that their elections are not secure.

Trump became president by winning the electoral college in 2016, but he repeatedly insisted without evidence that he’d only lost the popular vote to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton because of widespread election fraud.

“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted on Nov. 27, 2016, despite all evidence to the contrary. The next day, he added, “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!” Again, his claims were not backed up by the facts.

His zeal for the voter fraud myth did not cool after taking office. A May 11, 2017, executive order created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to investigate, among other things, issues “that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.”

In the end, the commission only met three times before Trump summarily dissolved it in January 2018, amid internecine legal squabbles and other troubles. Though the administration said the Department of Homeland Security would continue the commission’s work, the Trump White House never unearthed any actual evidence of substantial voter fraud.

The commission was a failure, but it thrust members like Hans von Spakovsky into the spotlight. Von Spakovsky, a prominent purveyor of discredited voter fraud claims, would go on to become a central figure in some Republican efforts to restrict mail-in and early voting during the 2020 election.

As Trump and his surrogates stoked unfounded fears of dead people and undocumented migrants voting, Americans grew concerned about interference in elections. A Gallup poll released in early 2020 found that nearly 3 in 5 Americans no longer had confidence in the election process, an inversion from only a decade earlier when that same poll found that almost 3 in 5 Americans were confident in the integrity of their elections.

With the 2020 election drawing near, Trump preemptively claimed that if he lost on Election Day it would have to be the result of fraud.

“The Democrats are also trying to rig the election by sending tens of millions of ballots using the China virus as the excuse for allowing people not to go to the polls,” Trump said during a June 2020 campaign event in Phoenix, Arizona. He later predicted, “This will be, in my opinion, the most corrupt election in the history of our country, and we cannot let this happen.”

The volume of ominous statements from Trump soared in the weeks leading up to the November election. According to The Washington Post’s tally of Trump’s false and misleading claims, the president made more than 1,500 such statements about the election between July 1 and Nov. 2, 2020.

Even after Trump’s legal team and his unofficial legal supporters failed more than 60 times to convince courts to overturn election results in multiple states, and after the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally escalated into an insurrection at the Capitol that left at least five people dead, a large number of Americans still believe in the fiction of a stolen election.

According to a CNN/SSRS poll taken after the violence at the Capitol, 32% of Americans said they think Biden did not legitimately win the election. Nearly one-quarter of all respondents believe there is “solid evidence” that Biden actually lost. Three-quarters of Republican respondents said they had little or no confidence that elections reflect the will of American voters.

The 2020 election will not be the end of outrageous voter fraud myths. The longer-term effect is only just being seen, as state legislatures around the country reconvene for their new sessions, with a number of Republican-led assemblies already moving to restrict or repeal efforts to make voting easier.

In Pennsylvania, where most Republican lawmakers supported expanded mail-in voting even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the state Senate voted on its first day back to create a special committee to investigate election reforms.

“Far too many residents of Pennsylvania are questioning the validity of their votes or have doubt that the process was conducted fairly, securely and produced accurate results,” state Sen. Jake Corman, who had voted for the 2019 election reforms, said about the commission in December. His statement echoed an argument similar to that made by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz on Jan. 6, only minutes before insurrectionists breached the Capitol.

Similarly, Minnesota state Sen. Scott Newman, a Republican, recently introduced a bill to require photo identification from voters. Like Corman, he did not cite any evidence of specific fraud that would merit ID checks, just stated that “millions of American citizens believe there was widespread fraud during the last election, and their loss of faith in the integrity of our election system alone justifies incorporating photo ID into our voting system.”

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QAnon and evangelicals: Republicans baptized in crazy

Donald Trump is out, but parts of the Republican Party warmly embrace his dark legacy of white supremacy, the crazy QAnon conspiracy and civil war wrapped in faux Christianity.

Like Trump, these fake Christians reject turning the other cheek in favor of threatening or promoting violence.

The problem here isn’t partisan politics, but public mental health. DCReport has covered extensively the mental-health debacle thanks to Dr. Bandy X. Lee, Harper West and other experts on how delusions spread like viruses, with Trump being a carrier.

The evidence of craziness seems to be found entirely in the Republican Party. We looked for, but have yet to discover any Democratic Party leaders pushing baseless conspiracy theories or urging civil war.

Readers who have found such material, please send links via our DCReport Tipline.

Here are some of the ways that Republican leaders reveal their affinity for the anti-democratic nature of Trumpism and QAnon, its attendant conspiracy theory:

In California, the Sacramento County Republican Party elected to its Central Committee a Proud Boys member who has advocated violence.

“Illegal immigrants should have their heads smashed into the concrete,” a 2018 post by an antifascist group quotes Perrine as saying.

Perrine didn’t deny this call to violence, he only insisted that he’s not a racist.

He told the newspaper, “They can call me a Nazi all they want, and I know I have plenty of friends of all races that don’t always agree with me, but they still love me.

“The Proud Boys that I affiliate with are all working men, all married men, they all have good jobs, they all believe in God.”

Only after The Bee reported this did some Republicans in the California capital come to their senses and demand Perrine’s ouster.

Oregon’s Republican Party this month aligned itself with conspiracy theories as well as denouncing all 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the murderous attack on our Capitol.
Texas’ GOP uses a QAnon conspiracy phrase—We Are The Storm—in its new logo.

The slogan comes from a poem, not crazies, according to the Texas party chairman, Alan West. He is the former congressman from Florida and retired military officer known for making bizarre statements. In 2011, he wrote, “When I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool.”

Arizona GOP for Trump, Still

Arizona’s GOP retweeted messages in December asking if people were ready to die for Trump and his baseless claim that he really won in 2020. The original Stop The Steal tweet was deleted, but the party’s official Twitter account still refers to a person who says he’s ready to die for Trump. It states: “He is. Are you?”
You might think that the party leadership in the Grand Canyon state, long a bright red jurisdiction, would examine its position after Democrats won both U.S. Senate seats and Joe Biden beat Trump in Arizona.

While the GOP added registered voters in 2020, it lost in ballots cast. Instead of reassessing, however, Arizona’s Republican leaders decided to enforce Trumpian purity. On Jan. 23 the Arizona GOP censured three leading Republicans for not embracing Trumpian madness: Gov. Doug Ducey, former U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain. The widow of Sen. John McCain said she considers the censure a badge of honor.

Party leaders also re-elected the erratic and autocratic Kelli Ward as the Arizona GOP leader. She said her party suffers from “people who have been namby-pamby, lie down and allow the Democrats to walk all over them.”

The party retweeted a menacing message. It is one of many from a Republican who holds himself out as a Christian despite tweets that are aggressively contrary to New Testament teachings about love, doing good to others and turning the other cheek:

“The Arizona Republican Party is still Trump country in all districts. Weak self-righteous sanctimonious Rs are on notice.”

“Satan-Worshipping Pedophiles”

Arizona state Sen. David Farnsworth acknowledged last fall to the Arizona Mirror, a news website, that he believes the QAnon conspiracy theory but with a twist.

He said some Republicans have joined the top Democrats who, he imagines, run a global Satan worshipping cabal of pedophiles Trump is singlehandedly trying to bring down. Farnsworth told audiences that Arizona’s Department of Child Safety is covering up, or complicit, in child sex trafficking.

Meanwhile, the FBI says QAnon is a domestic terror threat.

Other delusional beliefs so deeply and broadly infect the Arizona GOP that its leaders blame antifascists for joining in when our national Capitol was violently invaded by a murderous mob of Trumpers on Jan. 6.

Mentioned earlier, the Oregon Republican Party went further. It adopted a resolution asserting, “The violence at the Capitol was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans; this provided the sham motivation to impeach President Trump in order to advance the Democratic goal of seizing total power.”

That’s as crazy as QAnon.

Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who riled up the Capitol mob, and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida also falsely blame the Capitol attack on antifascists.

Antifascist Nonsense

The FBI calls that nonsense, but you don’t need law enforcement to know that the idea is ridiculous.

Saying Trumpers and Antifa jointly attacked our Capitol is like saying Trump is in league with Bernie Sanders. Believing, as the Oregon GOP leadership does, that the insurgents were lefties posing as Trumpers moves the party well into the realm of delusion.

In Hawaii, the official Republican Twitter account claims war is being waged against its members’ values. And its relentless attacks on news organizations that check facts and correct mistakes include many fabrications.

Witness this Inauguration Day tweet: “Will you be joining PBS in calling for internment and re-education camps also?”

Nothing in the news clips it tweeted came close to substantiating the tweet, nor did the full PBS report.

There is a glimmer of hope that reality plays a role in the Hawaii GOP. On Sunday, Jan. 24, the state party’s communications vice-chair, Edwin Boyette, resigned after sane Republicans complained about his tweets supporting QAnon.

Building a Theocracy

It’s not just Trump purity that many GOP influencers are pushing. There is also their brand of Christianity, which promotes racial animosity, hatred of Democrats, intolerance and would subvert our Constitution to create a theocracy.

Consider Jenna Ellis, one of Trump’s television lawyers who was paid at least $173,900 by his campaign. Ellis has met with GOP leaders in several states making fact-free claims that Trump won in November.

Ellis has a long and well-documented history of just making self-aggrandizing claims. She has a checkered career and her accomplishments are negligible, but Trump got one look at her on television and was enchanted.

Some principled Republicans see no future in a party swaddled in craziness. On Monday Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, a conservative with a level head, announced that he won’t seek a third term in 2022 because of what he called partisan gridlock.

While it’s true that compromise is rare on Capitol Hill, intransigence traces back to anti-taxer Grover Norquist declaring, “Bipartisanship is just another name for date rape” and Trump repeatedly retweeting QAnon-supporting craziness.

Like Flake, a Libertarian whose family founded Arizona, Portman would face a primary challenge from the crazy wing of the GOP if he seeks third term.

War of the (financial) worlds

Sometimes things only make sense when seen through a magnifying lens. As it happens, I’m thinking about reality, the very American and global reality clearly repeating itself as 2021 begins.

We all know, of course, that we’re living through a once-in-a-century-style pandemic; that millions of people have lost their jobs, a portion of which will never return; that the poorest among us, who can withstand such acute economic hardship the least, have been slammed the hardest; and that the global economy has been kneecapped, thanks to a battery of lockdowns, shutdowns, restrictions of various sorts, and health-related concerns. More sobering than all of this: more than 360,000 Americans (and counting) have already lost their lives as a result of Covid-19 with, according to public health experts, far more to come.

And yet, as if in some galaxy far, far away, there also turns out to be another, so much more upbeat side to this equation. As Covid-19 grew ever worse while 2020 ended, the stock market reached heights that hadn’t been seen before. Ever.

Meanwhile, again in the thoroughly cheery news column, banks in 2021 will be able to resume their march toward billions of dollars in share buybacks, courtesy of the Federal Reserve opting to support such a bank-and-stock-market stimulus. The Fed’s green light for this activity on December 18th will allow mega-banks to return to those share buybacks (which constitute 70% of the capital payout that they provide shareholders). In June 2020, the Fed had banned the practice ostensibly to help them better navigate risks caused by the pandemic.

Those very financial institutions can now pour money into purchasing their own stocks again rather than, say, into loans to struggling small businesses endangered by pandemic-instigated economic disaster. As soon as Wall Street got the good news from the Fed as 2020 ended, JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, wasted no time in announcing its intent to buy a staggering $30 billion of its own shares in the new year. And as if by magic, those shares leapt 5% that very day. Other mega-banks followed suit, as did their share prices.

Now, for reasons you’ll soon understand, take a little trip back in history with me to the eve of Halloween, 1938, when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre dramatized his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 sci-fi-meets-dystopia-meets-imperialism novel, The War of the Worlds, on the radio. As Martians “invaded” New Jersey (it had been London in the novel) with mayhem in mind, panic evidently ensued among some radio listeners who thought they were hearing perfectly real reports about an alien invasion of Planet Earth. Later accounts suggest that the media blew that reaction out of proportion (“fake news,” 1938-style?), yet people who tuned in late and missed the set-up about the fictitious nature of the program did indeed panic.

And it’s not hard to understand why they might have done so at that moment. There had already been surprises galore. The world, after all, had barely recovered from the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. It was also still reeling from the fiery Hin denburg disaster of 1937 in which a German airship blew up in New Jersey, as well as from the escalation of tensions and hostilities in both Asia and Europe that would lead to World War II. Perhaps people already equated or conflated the Martian invasion on the radio with fantasies about a potential German invasion of this country. In some papers, after all, reports on the reaction to Welles’s performance were set right next to news of war clouds brewing in Europe and Asia. With or without Welles, people were on edge.

Whatever the case, fear has been both a great motivator and an anxiety provoker when it comes to the media, whether in 1938 or today. At the moment, the focus is on economic and health-related fears in all-too-ample supply. It is also on the disconnect that exists between the real economic world that most of us live in and turbo-boosted stock markets. These distorted markets are the result of wealth inequality that once would have been unimaginable in this country. In a way, economically speaking, you might say that today we’re suffering the equivalent of an invasion from Mars.

From the Financial Crisis to the Pandemic

It’s not hard these days to imagine the chaos people would feel if their lives or livelihoods were threatened by an external, uncontrollable force like those Martians. After all, we’re in a pandemic age in which the gaps between the rich, the poor, and the middle class are being reinforced in endlessly stunning ways, a world in which some people have the means to remain remarkably safe, secure, and alive, while others have no means at all.

Covid-19 is not, of course, from Mars or sent by aliens, but in terms of its impact, it’s as if it were. And the pandemic is, in the end, only exacerbating, sometimes in radical ways, problems that already were bad enough, particularly economic inequality.

Remember that, long before Covid-19 hit, the financial crisis of 2008 was met by a multi-trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout. At the same time, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero, while purchasing U.S. Treasury and mortgage bonds from the very banks that had sparked the disaster. Its own assets then rose from $870 billion to $4.5 trillion between August 2007 and August 2015. On the other hand, the U.S. economy never quite reached a growth level of, on average, more than 2% annually in the years after that near collapse, even as the stock market regained all its losses and so much more. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, aided by an ultra-loose monetary policy, steadily rose from a financial-crisis low of 6,926 on March 5, 2009 to 27,090 by March 4, 2020, which was when Covid-19 briefly trashed its rally.

However, within a month of the market dip that followed widespread shutdowns, its climb was refortified by similar but larger maneuvers, as Federal Reserve policy was once again deployed to save the rich under the auspices of saving the economy. Rally 2.0 took the Dow to a new record of 30,606.48 as 2020 closed.

On the other side of reality, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to recent Federal Reserve reports, the U.S. wealth gap continued to widen dramatically as economic inequality increased yet again in 2020 thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. That’s because the health and economic devastation it inflicted affected low-wage service workers, low-income earners, and people of color so much more than the upper-middle class and elite upper class.

Meanwhile, as 2020 ended, the richest 10% of Americans owned more than 88% of the outstanding shares of companies and mutual funds in the U.S. The top 1% also controlled more than 88 times the wealth of the bottom 50% of Americans. Simply put, the less you had, the less you could afford to lose any of it. Indeed, the combined net worth of the top 1% of Americans was $34.2 trillion (about one-third of all U.S. household wealth), while the total for the bottom half was $2.1 trillion (or 1.9% of that wealth).

And yet, American billionaires scored monumentally during the pandemic, due particularly to their lofty position in the stock market. The planet’s 2,200 or so billionaires got wealthier by $1.9 trillion in 2020 alone and were worth about $11.4 trillion in mid-December 2020 (up from $9.5 trillion a year earlier). Twenty-first-century tycoons like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos raked it in specifically because of all the money pouring into shares of their stock. Even bipartisan congressional stimulus measures meant for necessary relief turned into a chance to elevate fortunes at the highest echelons of society.

If you want to grasp inequality in the pandemic moment, consider this: while the market soared, more than 25.5 million Americans were the recipients of federal unemployment benefits. The S&P 500 stock market index added a total of $14 trillionin market value in 2020. In essentially another universe, the number of people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic and didn’t regain them was about 10 million. And that figure doesn’t even count people who can’t go to work because they have to take care of others, their workplace is restricted, or they’re home-schooling their kids.

The Martians and the Inequality Gap

In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells evokes a species — humanity — rendered helpless in the face of a force greater than itself and beyond its control. His depiction of the grim relationship between the Martians and the humans they were suppressing (meant to remind readers of the relationship between British imperialists and those they suppressed in distant lands) cast an eerie light on the power and wealth gap in Great Britain and around the world at the turn of the twentieth century.

The book was written in the Gilded Age, when rapid economic growth, particularly in the United States, bred a new class of “robber barons.” Like the twenty-first-century version of such beings, they, too, made money from their money, while the economic status of workers slipped ever lower. It was an early version of a zero-sum game in which the spoils of the system were increasingly beyond the reach of so many. Those at the top ferociously accumulated wealth, while the majority of the rest of the population barely got by or drowned.

A crisis of inequality had been sparked by the Industrial Revolution itself, which started in England and then crossed the Atlantic. By the late nineteenth century, America’s “robber barons” were insanely wealthy. As economist Thomas Piketty wrote, there was a steeper increase in wealth inequality during the Gilded Age than ever before in American history. In 1810, the top 1% of Americans held 25% of the country’s total wealth; between 1870 and 1910 that share leapt to 45%.

Today, the top 1% of Americans possess more wealth than the whole of the middle class, a phenomenon first true in 2010 and still the reality of our moment. By 2018, about 75% of the $113 trillion in aggregate U.S. household assets were financial ones; that is, tied up in stocks, ETF’s, 401Ks, IRAs, mutual funds, and similar investments. The majority of nonfinancial assets in that mix was in real estate.

Even before the pandemic, only the richest 20% of American households had recovered fully (or, in the case of the truly wealthy, more than fully) from the financial crisis. That’s mostly because since that crisis, fewer households had participated in the stock market or owned real estate and so had no chance to capitalize on increases in the values of either.

Much of the appreciation in stock market and real-estate values has been directly or indirectly related to the Fed’s actions. By the end of December 2020, its balance sheet had increased by $3.164 trillion, reaching a total of $7.35 trillion, 63% more than its book at the height of the decade following the 2008 disaster.

Its ultra-loose policies made it cheaper to borrow money, but not as attractive to invest it in low-interest-rate, less risky securities like Treasury bonds. As a result, the Fed incentivized those with extra money to grow it through quicker, often riskier investments in the stock market or real estate. By 2020, there were bidding wars for suburban houses by urbanites seeking refuge from coronavirus-stricken cities with all-cash offers, something beyond the reach of most traditional buyers.

Though Congress passed two much-needed Covid-related stimulus packages that extended unemployment benefits, while offering two one-off payments and a Paycheck Protection Program support for smaller businesses, the impact of those acts paled in comparison to the tax breaks and power of investment the stock market provided the well-off and corporate kingpins.

While markets leapt to record highs, poverty in the United States also rose last year from 9.3% in June to 11.7% in November 2020. That added nearly eight million Americans to the ranks of the poor, even as America’s 659 billionaires held double the wealth of the 165 million poorest Americans.

The Martians Are Here

The gap between incoming and outgoing federal funds rose, too. The U.S. deficit increased by $3.3 trillion during 2020. The size of the public debt issued by the Treasury Department reached $27.5 trillion. Total federal revenue was $3.45 trillion, while the corporate tax part of that was just $221 billion, or a paltry 6.4%. What that means is that in an ever more unequal America, 93.6% of the money flowing into the government’s till comes from individuals, not corporations.

And though many larger and mid-size corporations filed for bankruptcy protection due to coronavirus related shutdowns, the brunt of absolute closures hit smaller local businesses — from restaurants to hair salons to health-and-wellness shops — much harder, only exacerbating economic disparity at the community level.

In other words, the real problem when it comes to inequality isn’t the total amount of taxes received versus money spent in a time of crisis, but the composition of federal revenue that’s wildly out of whack (something the pandemic has only made worse). Take the defense sector, for example. The U.S. government doled out $738 billion to the Pentagon for fiscal year 2020. The contracts to defense-related private companies in the last year for which data was available, fiscal year 2018, totaled roughly 62% of a full defense budget of $579 billion, or $358 billion. Now imagine this: that amount alone dwarfed the total of all corporate taxes flowing into the U.S. Treasury in 2019.

Inequality is about the disparity between people and countries with respect to income, wealth, or power. The more that corporations keep relative to their bottom line when compared with ordinary citizens, the more the stock market rises relative to the real economy. The more that individuals, rather than corporations, shoulder the burden of tax revenues, the greater the inherent inequality in society. The more that financial assets appreciate on money seeking to multiply itself in the quickest way possible (think of it as like a virus), the greater the distortion created.

The Fed can focus on its inflation-versus-full-employment dual-mandate all it wants, while pushing policies that distort the value of the real economy compared to financial assets. But the reality is that the more those Fed-inflated assets grow relative to real ones, the greater the inequality gap. That’s plain math and it’s the ugly essence of the United States of America as 2021 begins.

The market doesn’t care about politics. It’s a creature that acts in accordance with the goals of its largest participants. The real economy, on the other hand, requires far more effort — planning, prioritizing, and executing programs and projects that can produce tangible profits. We’re a long way from a world that puts investment in the real economy ahead of those soaring financial markets. That gap, in fact, might as well be like the distance between Earth and Mars. In the midst of a pandemic, as billionaires only grow richer and the markets soar, can there be any question that we’re experiencing a Martian invasion?

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How capitalism’s dogged defenders and propagandists defend it from criticism

The more victims and critics of capitalism coalesce and thereby strengthen one another, the more that economic system is questioned and challenged. That in turn provokes capitalism’s defenders. They increasingly resort to attaching qualifying adjectives to capitalism and deflecting criticisms onto them. They say that the capitalism they support is a particular kind of capitalism. Their support depends on whether or not certain adjectives are attached to capitalism. For example, is it “free market” capitalism (minimum or no government intervention)? Similarly, is it perfectly competitive, conscious, compassionate, socially responsible, progressive, or still other qualifying adjectives? Defenders of capitalism criticize kinds of capitalism that lack the particular adjectives that matter most to them. Many defenders go a step further: kinds of capitalism lacking those adjectives are not “really” capitalism at all.

The placing of qualifying adjectives to differentiate among kinds of capitalism allows defenders to accept some of the rising chorus of criticisms of capitalism. Those criticisms, defenders say, apply only to certain kinds of capitalism that defenders also reject in favor of some other, preferred kind of capitalism. The flaws cited by capitalism’s critics become flaws not of capitalism per se but rather of its (unfortunately) currently existing kind. Such defenders can then focus our attention on changing from one kind of capitalism to another. By changing to a different kind of capitalism—one designated by a different adjective—the criticized flaws will vanish.

With such reasoning, for example, “free market” capitalism’s devotees can accept all sorts of criticisms of actually existing capitalism. They too can denounce its inequalities, instabilities, and injustices. But, they explain, that actually existing kind lacks a fully “free” market. They urge policies that change the economy from a government-regulated kind of capitalism to their preferred “free market” kind. Similarly, champions of a “competitive” kind of capitalism can join critics of the monopoly kind. They attribute monopoly capitalism’s social ills to the adjective—monopoly—not to the noun, capitalism, itself. The solution follows: take anti-trust steps to establish a competitive capitalism, their preferred kind. Progressive or “social responsibility” advocates are also included among capitalism’s defenders using adjectives. They find narrowly profit-driven capitalism to be a kind that causes all sorts of social ills. A different kind of capitalism could rectify those ills by adding social responsibility to the goals and standards of success for capitalists. Such a “compassionate” kind of capitalism represents the better world they seek.

For defenders, placing adjectives before the word “capitalism” removes its core “relations of production” from criticism. The focus of analytical attention becomes the adjective, not the noun. That noun, capitalism, is the employer-employee relationship that structures the enterprises producing the goods and services sustaining the economy and thus the society. Capitalism, per se, is defined by how it organizes production. The employer-employee relationship is what differentiates it from the master-slave relationship in slave systems of production, the lord-serf relationship in feudal economies, the economic structure of individual self-employment, and so on.

Qualifying adjectives for capitalism can be combined, a la Donald Trump, with a reversion to economic nationalism around the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Trump could and did criticize kinds of capitalism (e.g., as “globalized” or “unpatriotic”) that outsourced production beyond U.S. borders or that promoted immigration. He advocated, instead, a kind of capitalism that positioned “America First” as its qualifying adjective. Criticizing capitalism per se never entered his mind.

Qualifying adjectives can alternatively be combined with libertarianism. Then, criticism of a currently existing kind of capitalism (e.g., as “welfare or nanny statist”) blames its faults or flaws on the government’s intrusions (taxes, regulations, mandates, etc.). Libertarians’ policy proposals focus on reducing or, better, eliminating government intrusion into a capitalist economy. Their goal is the aforementioned “free market” kind of capitalism.

Opposite the libertarians, Keynesians and certain kinds of “socialists” also focus on capitalism’s alternative adjectives. Their critiques of currently existing kinds of capitalism often attribute their income and wealth inequalities, cyclical instabilities, and so on to inadequate governmental management of the economic system: too few and too constrained governmental intrusions. Keynesians therefore promote a more intrusive system of governmental monetary and fiscal policies, a state-macro-managed kind of capitalism. That, they believe, will overcome its central, cyclical problems (Keynes’ key work was published in the depths of the 1930s depression).

Further-left Keynesians want government intrusions to also reduce income and wealth inequalities. They often call themselves socialists. But in fact they put the adjectives “welfare state” or “social democratic” or “Scandinavian style” in front of the word capitalist. Many do not question or oppose the employer-employee organization of the workplace that defines capitalism. Neither do many “communists” who want the state to own and operate enterprises internally organized around the employer-employee division. If an economy’s enterprises, public and private, retain the basic capitalist organization of production—the employer-employee split described above—then that economy is a kind of capitalism even if and when its advocates call it “socialism” or “communism.”

It is important to note that the socialists and communists mentioned above, like the libertarians, Keynesians, and so on, all generally accept—often implicitly without comment or criticism—that workplaces must be organized around the distinctively capitalist division between employers and employees. When they advocate for more state-regulated or state-owned-and-operated enterprises as better economic systems than capitalism, they rarely question the internal organization of those enterprises. It is as if nature or technology or history mandates no other possible modern workplace organization than the employer-employee division and relationship. Their socialisms and communisms are then less nouns differentiated from capitalism and more adjectives distinguishing different kinds of capitalism. Such is the ideological power of the long tradition of defending capitalism with adjectives. Ironically, that tradition also captured many of capitalism’s critics.

As traditions, socialism and communism also include advocates who define those terms as entailing radically different organizations of enterprises. Instead of the capitalist division into employers and employees, such socialists and communists seek the democratization of enterprises’ internal organization. That means all participants in the enterprise’s work have equal votes in deciding what, how, and where production occurs and what is done with the output. Interestingly, the practical “going beyond” capitalism already exists in enterprises and has for a long time and around the globe. Sometimes socialists and communists helped establish such worker cooperatives, but often individuals outside those traditions did so as well.

Our current debates about our society’s problems and prospects need to refocus beyond the different adjectives for a common noun they qualify. It is time to expose and challenge capitalism’s core: that employer-employee organization of enterprises, private and state. We need to drop the taboo on debating how we ought to organize the workplaces where most adults spend most of their lives. Workplace organization shapes society in many ways. Different workplace organizations have always existed. Changing from the prevalence of one to the prevalence of another can help solve social problems. To that end, we need to challenge capitalism’s workplace organization, not presume its inevitability as the unacknowledged prison of our politics.

Parallel debates over “free markets” versus “state-regulated markets” in slavery were finally resolved by abolishing slavery. So too were debates over harsh versus compassionate slavery. Masters tried to save slavery by focusing people on choosing among its different kinds. However, people eventually grasped that the problem was not what kind of slavery existed; the problem was slavery itself. It had to end. Likewise, debates over monarchy contrasted those with parliamentary advisers and those without them, harsh versus popular kings and queens. Monarchs tried to hold on by offering alternative kinds of monarchy. But eventually, people decided that what was needed was not this or that kind of monarchy but rather monarchy’s abolition. Capitalism now faces that same historic resolution.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Death threats and intimidation of public officials signal Trump’s autocratic legacy

As the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump approaches, federal officials are investigating threats to attack or kill members of Congress. This comes in the wake of the Capitol riot, when a mob stormed the building where members of the House and Senate were preparing to certify the presidential election. Some rioters reportedly threatened the lives of elected officials in both parties.

When the House took up impeachment proceedings, Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives reportedly felt afraid to vote to impeach Trump – even fearing for their lives. A video also captured a group accosting Republican Lindsey Graham, a U.S. senator from South Carolina, screaming that he was a “traitor” after he declared that Joe Biden had been lawfully elected president.

These threats do not simply reflect increased levels of anger and depravity among individual Americans. Rather, they appear to be evidence of a more systemic use of fear and intimidation in U.S. politics, seeking to force fealty from Republicans and reinforce the authoritarian turn that defined Donald Trump’s leadership.

Engagement in public life in the U.S. has always carried risk, with public officials of both parties, journalists and even movie stars often the target of death threats and intimidation.

With the advent of social media and the Trump presidency, however, the risks for public officials have grown substantially. As a professor of human rights and a practitioner of democracy-building and the rule of law, this trend symbolizes the depth of deterioration of democracy in the U.S.

Political violence

Before the insurrection, experts tracked current trends as part of a broader cycle of political violence in the U.S. that one analysis said “has occurred approximately every fifty years for the past two centuries.”

Even with a transfer of power, the question remains whether America will finally break this cycle or whether Trump has just planted the seeds for the next time.

Over the past few years, scholars and experts have warned that the U.S. is at risk of widespread political violence and democratic instability.

They identify four interconnected factors that make a society vulnerable to violence that aims to affect political systems and decision-making:

“Elite factionalization,” in which political parties engage in winner-take-all competition to promote their own interests at almost any cost.
A high level of societal polarization.
Weakening democratic institutions, such as electoral processes and law enforcement, due in part to the erosion of public trust and bipartisan support.
A rise in hate speech and militant rhetoric.

All of these are happening in the U.S. in significant measure.

Before the November 2020 election, a group of scholars called attention to the fact that a large number of Americans said they would accept violence to advance their parties’ political goals. By the end of 2020, experts were raising the alarm that the country was spinning toward political violence.

Radicalization of the right

Trump’s claims of massive election fraud, intimidation of opponents and his own party members, attacks on free media and support for right-wing groups generated an extremist Make America Great Again movement. Observing a toxic mix of the president’s fabrications, the right-wing media ecosystem, conspiracy theories and increased isolation and insecurity due to COVID-19, former national security officials in late 2020 noted signs of “mass radicalization” in the U.S.

This sequence of events fits with research showing how hate and radicalization progress toward extreme beliefs and behaviors, including participation in collective violence.

Humans identify in groups and prioritize their own group. If there’s a threat of or competition between groups, some leaders will encourage followers to hate and dehumanize the other group – usually by painting their own group as a victim – and even to engage in violence or intimidation as self-defense. Group members who act in response, in turn, feel they’re contributing to their group’s survival.

Trump altered the norms of acceptable rhetoric and behavior within the Republican Party. He increased the tolerance for intimidation, hate and bullying, and demonized the Democratic Party and social justice movements, like Black Lives Matter, as unpatriotic dangers to America.

Before the 2020 election, evidence showed that the Republican Party had fewer democratic traits than almost all governing parties in the world’s democracies and “its rhetoric was closer to authoritarian parties, such as AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary.” These parties seek to build power by undermining democratic institutions, such as fair elections, independent judiciaries and media, and by using threatening rhetoric and being disrespectful of opponents.

Trump also legitimized preexisting extremist groups that use violence and intimidation. The mob that stormed the Capitol consisted of a range of groups and individuals with diverse ideologies – including the ultra-nationalist Proud Boys, white supremacists, anti-government and pro-gun militias such as the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, QAnon conspiracy followers, and common Trump supporters and Republican officials.

They all came together as elements of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort to overturn the election of the actual winner, Joe Biden. The unifying narrative for them was the false idea that American democracy is under attack by Democrats and traitors, and that violence could be justified as part of patriotic self-defense.

What happens to moderation?

The Republican Party – with a few notable exceptions – embraced Donald Trump’s post-election rhetoric and the massive lie about election fraud. This is as a result of Trump’s control throughout the party, from its general members up through party leadership and affiliated media outlets – who felt obligated to support Trump no matter what he said or did.

Even though many Republicans have denounced the use of violence on Jan. 6, most officials continue to validate their voters’ concerns about election integrity, which are rooted in the “Stop the Steal” effort. Republican Party members defend their actions by claiming they are legitimate efforts to protect democracy.

As extremism rises, moderates who are willing to challenge the group’s direction are the first to be intimidated or silenced. Party leaders who have now called out the “Stop the Steal” lie and voted for impeachment are facing repercussions.

A legacy

Though Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has repudiated the “Stop the Steal” lie, early indications are that the Republican Party overall remains entrenched in the defense of Trump and partisan rhetoric at any cost. Nearly 9 out of 10 Republicans approved of Trump’s job performance even after the Capitol attack.

The climate in government continues to be fearful. Death threats against public officials of both parties are part of the justification for and opposition by Republicans to weapons checks required before entering the House floor.

Research shows that political violence can reinforce a group’s existence, solidify members’ interconnections and beget more violence. Even if Trump remains out of power and off Twitter, the events leading up and including Jan. 6 may reinforce his supporters’ feelings of affiliation to a highly distorted narrative of patriotism within the Republican Party, and could deepen polarization and elite factionalism. This adds to the difficulty of reversing the party’s autocratic turn.

The aim of authoritarian parties is control or cooptation of law enforcement and the military, which are often seen as the last line of defense of democracy. This is why the potential that significant levels of sympathy, affiliation or even complicity with the MAGA movement exists within American police and the armed forces is so disturbing.

As a new president takes office, the resilience of U.S. democracy is on display. President Biden has already declared his intention to combat domestic extremism and radicalization. Even though Democrats are now in power, what happens next with the Republican Party, and its financial backers and supporters, will remake or break America’s democracy.

Shelley Inglis, Executive Director, University of Dayton Human Rights Center, University of Dayton

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

Despite attempts at equity, white Americans are being vaccinated at higher rate than Blacks, Latinos

Since the start of the coronavirus vaccine roll-out, political and health care leaders have been laser-focused on the concept of equity in vaccine distribution. The “phased” rollout that states adopted, in which medical workers, seniors and those at higher risk were vaccinated first, was planned to ensure equitable distribution.

Yet those efforts appear to have been insufficient, as a disconcerting trend has emerged in the racial makeup of the vaccinated. Current reports show that white Americans are getting vaccinated at a higher proportional rate than Black and Latino Americans.

The news is especially troubling given that Black and Latino Americans are dying of COVID-19 at three times the rate of white Americans, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analysis. The discrepancy in people who are dying of COVID-19 and who is receiving the vaccine, which is limited in supply, is raising questions around ethics — and ways in which the gap can be bridged immediately to save lives.

“What’s happening now is unethical,” said Dr. William Parker, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago.

According to a CNN analysis published this week, white Americans in Pennsylvania are being vaccinated at four times the rate of Black Americans. Pennsylvania is one of 14 states in the analysis in which vaccine coverage is twice as high among white people on average than it is among Black and Latino people. In Illinois, The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Black Chicagoans account for 15 percent of the more than 100,000 vaccinations administered so far. City officials said 17 percent were Latino, and 14 percent were Asian. Parker analyzed data highlighting how communities with the most deaths in Chicago have the fewest people vaccinated.

I wrote a simple #Rstats shiny app to display deaths vs. vaccination side-by-side for Chicago, would love to expand to other cities. Please DM me with links to data. Vaccine counts by small geographic units are most needed.https://t.co/efiM4msL2N pic.twitter.com/Tki8QT9p3a

— William F Parker, MD, PhD (@WF_Parker) January 21, 2021

The first phase of vaccinations went largely to health care workers in Chicago, but like many parts of the country, the city is gearing up to enter the next round which will offer shots to those 65 or older and to many essential workers. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is pushing for more outreach in South and West side communities, which have been hit the hardest and are predominantly diverse.

Parker suggested that communities across the country can stop racial disparities from growing by implementing two strategies: first, allocating more vaccines to the zip codes that have been hit the hardest.

“Send the firefighters to where the fire is, direct vaccine to areas where the virus is raging and communities that have been hit the hardest,” Parker said, adding that even if rates have plateaued in communities of color, they haven’t reached herd immunity and the virus could rage again. “And then, within an area that’s diverse, use a lottery, not a first-come, first-serve system.”

Indeed, there have been multiple reports of vaccine sign-up websites crashing, forcing people to refresh and be in virtual waiting rooms for hours. A lottery, he said, could be a good starting point to reach people in the community who might, say, not have access to a computer or have the time to wait hours in front of their computer to sign up because they’re an essential worker.

“If you think about it, it’s harder for these healthcare systems to do it the way they’re doing it now, they have to create a website, yet these health systems have all these patient medical record numbers and a pretty good sample of the local community,” he said. “It’s almost like they’re deliberately designing it to prioritize their well-insured and rich friends and patients.”

“Maybe that’s going a little bit too far,” Parker reflected, though he reiterated that the way states and cities are approaching vaccination plans “doesn’t make any sense.”

The CDC created its guidelines on vaccination priority first based on recommendations made by medical and public health experts on a panel called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The recommendations had three goals in mind: decrease death and serious disease, preserve the functions of society, and reduce the burden COVID-19 is having on people already facing disparities.

In phase 1a, the CDC recommended that healthcare personnel and residents of long-term care facilities receive the vaccine first. In Phase 1b, essential workers such as fire fighters, police officers, corrections officers, food and agricultural workers, United States Postal Service workers, manufacturing workers, grocery store workers, public transit workers, teachers, daycare workers and support staff should be inoculated— in addition to people aged 75 years and older. Supply in many states hasn’t allowed for the state to vaccinate everyone in these occupations at the same time.

In Phase 1c, CDC recommends vaccinating people between 65 and 74 years old, anyone over the age of 16 with an underlying condition, and then essential workers who are in transportation, logistics, food service, housing construction, finance, information technology, communications, energy, law, media, public safety, and public health fields.

But states and counties are the ultimate deciders. In Oregon, Democratic Governor Kate Brown is vaccinating teachers before other groups of non-medical frontline workers, including the elderly and people with pre-existing health conditions. The move has been criticized, but Brown and her team believe it is a more equitable decision.

“There are also equity-centered reasons to prioritize vaccinating teachers, educators, and child care providers,” Charles Boyle, a spokesperson in the governor’s office, told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “Working parents from low-income families are particularly burdened when school buildings are closed by the need to find safe and reliable child care for students learning from home.”

In the state of California, the phases were initially tiered by job type. But a recent change at the state level has the distribution plan based mostly on age for later tiers. The plan could move up older adults and push back younger essential workers. Govind Persad, an assistant professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, whose research focuses on legal and ethical parts of healthcare, said that age alone though could create inequity.

“When you set the age cutoff, say we’ll prioritize everybody above 75, you’re missing the fact that people’s risk at 75 isn’t the same,” Persad said. “There are real differences and if you set it at 75, you’re missing quite a big portion of the sort of potentially preventable deaths in minority populations as opposed to others.”

Medical ethicists have previously supported prioritizing vaccine allocation by racial preference, but have expressed fears of legal objections. Persad said legally, one way to prioritize marginalized communities receiving the vaccine first is to focus on zip codes, like Parker suggested.

“I think the focus has to be legally on using approaches that get it at overlapping disadvantages,” Persad said. “I think the idea — for instance, looking at the hardest hit or the most vulnerable zip codes using these deprivation or vulnerability indices — that’s an approach that’s on much sounder ground, legally.”

Bridging the racial gap in vaccination is a high priority for President Joe Biden’s administration.

“We have to make vaccination easy and accessible,” said Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, the chair of Biden’s COVID-19 Equity Task Force, in an interview with CNN this week. “That’s a key priority that’s built into President Biden’s national plan.”

Can we exit this dystopian train already? Alas, “Snowpiercer” & apocalyptic fare keep chugging along

If you watched the second season premiere of “Snowpiercer” you would have been treated to the sight of a failed insurrection and the first glimpse of a charismatic despot threatening the train’s freshly won and newly formed democracy. Said autocrat loves cruelty, mind games and thrives on worship. He’s also played by the charismatic Sean Bean.

For some of us Bean’s addition to the “Snowpiercer” mix may be enough reason to clench our jaws through a second season that launches with more surety and narrative clarity than the first while somehow feeling less watchable because . . . look around.

Depending on your living circumstances you may have felt like you’ve mainly been existing inside of closed-in spaces for almost a year now, almost as if our world has shrunken to the space of a few connected cars. The good news is that we have access to delivery, takeout and the grocery store while these poor schlubs have to exist on whatever they can grow in the agriculture cars.

The bad news is that our winter may feel just as bleak, or worse, for reasons other than a manmade ice age. Our real world and this fictional one share a few familiar beats, though. The massive railway ark that went through a class revolution at the end of Season 1 now finds itself stuck to another set of cars ruled by the eternal engine’s inventor Mr. Wilford (Bean) and full of people he abuses but who worship him unconditionally.

Plenty of Wilford sympathizers lurk within the ranks of the larger train too. Now that their leader is back they’re less likely than before to support the new government forged by a truce between revolutionary hero Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs) and Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly), the engineer who posed as Wilford for seven years to keep the train’s social and ecological systems in balance.

When the real Wilford walks among the people some view him with suspicion, but may express joy – they fully expect he’ll restore the social order as he originally envisioned it. Behind the scenes he’s a ruthless and petty man eager to extract every bit of power out of this ship in a bottle he’s created and is intent on controlling completely.

In the way of so many coincidentally on-the-nose dramas, “Snowpiercer” feels too close to actual living to fully provide us with escape let alone much comfort. But then, this also was true in May when the first season premiered. TNT picked up the show’s second season long before the series opener aired or was even scheduled – and the show’s third season is already a go.

Behold TV’s future, whether you enjoy its relevance to the moment or shun it. Although that factor makes it hard to fathom how or why jumping on a weekly journey through a super-train at the end of the world would be worthwhile or even desirable right now, “Snowpiercer” is an investment in tomorrow.

Aversion to a show like this is natural in this moment, when we’re experiencing the reality of what plagues us, psychological and viral. But this is a series made for streaming, with a title that has a comic book pedigree and is based on a film by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho. The bet is that if we don’t act now we may be moved or bored enough to give it a go down the road when bad times are a memory. (The first season of “Snowpiercer” is available to stream on HBO Max.)

But this still brings me back to the question of when networks and studios will finally stop mining dour apocalypticism for creative inspiration, especially now that we’re living closely to the train passengers’ experience. A major subplot of this season involves a version of climate change denialism and a disbelief in science, and kudos to the writers for gaming out the world’s end so accurately.

Meanwhile, the numbers hint that people are more interested in watching a young adult series on fae magicians and “Bridgerton” over on Netflix, while broadcast and cable TV are still ruled by the likes of “The Masked Singer” and “90 Day Fiancé.” People are craving sweet froth and silliness right now; this show is going against that grain, and not in a good way.

“Snowpiercer” has a stalwart cast cranking out quality performances, and with the addition of Melanie’s estranged daughter Alexandra (Rowan Blanchard) to the story these new episodes have more moments that engage the humanity of this situation alongside its political precariousness.

Bean is clocking plenty of overtime working his nefarious side for the fans, but none of the hard work going into this production is enough to counteract the grim depression saturating this endless trip. Round and round the world the train goes while also moving further into downer territory.

Mind you, this could look entirely different once we’ve passed into that light at the end of the tunnel so many claim to see – or it could provide a reminder of a place and time to which we never want to return. “Snowpiercer” may well be part of the tail end of an age that equated prestige dramas with bleakness, or at least we hope so. It’s past time for TV to move us toward brighter destinations.

New episodes of “Snowpiercer” air Mondays at 9 p.m.. on TNT.

Robinhood received bipartisan rebuke from Congress for ending Gamestop sales. Why that’s concerning

After putting a trading freeze on Gamestop’s stock amid the short squeeze suffered by Wall Street hedge funds like Melvin Capital and Maplelane Capital, Robinhood is being raked through the mud by lawmakers across both aisles for bending the knee to Wall Street, according to CNBC.

The restriction comes on the heels of a buying frenzy led by Redditors on the 4.6 million-strong subreddit, “r/WallStreetBets,” who rallied against Wall Street’s effort to drive the Gamestop’s share price down by short selling the stock. These online investors –– many of whom are retail investors using commission-free trading apps like Robinhood –– managed to catapult Gamestop’s stock price by 1,500%, confounding market analysts and enraging institutional investors who bet on the company’s downfall.

However, on Thursday, in a move that seemed like a far cry from its mission of “financial democratization,” Robinhood announced that it would be restricting trading on GameStop, as well as a whole host of other companies whose stock has been shorted and subsequently short squeezed. Robinhood’s announcement comes after the Nasdaq’s CEO threatened to halt trading on Wednesday in the case of “increased social media chatter.”

Immediately following Robinhood’s trading freeze, Gamestop’s share price plummeted from $469 to $129 in one day, leaving many users feeling betrayed. Robinhood maintained in its press release that it imposed Thursday’s restrictions to protect and “help customers stay informed” amid the market volatility. However, the move seemed to do just the opposite by driving Gamestop’s stock price down, stripping users of their unrealized gains.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-CA, a lawmaker representing Silicon Valley, condemned Robinhood’s actions, calling for “more regulation and equality” between different classes of investors.

“While retail trading in some cases, like on Robinhood, blocked the purchasing of GameStop,” Khanna said, “hedge funds were still allowed to trade the stock.”

Khana continued, “Instead of investing in future technologies to help America win the 21st Century, Wall Street poured billions into shorting this stock to crush this company and put workers out of business.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, called for a Congressional hearing to address Robinhood’s shady termination of what some have painted as a populist movement that has hit Wall Street where it hurts.

Fully agree. 👇 https://t.co/rW38zfLYGh

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) January 28, 2021

Her swift call for congressional action was echoed by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., a frequent Twitter troll of the New York congresswoman. Ocasio-Cortez, however, responded to Cruz’s post, “You almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago so you can sit this one out.”

I am happy to work with Republicans on this issue where there’s common ground, but you almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago so you can sit this one out.

Happy to work w/ almost any other GOP that aren’t trying to get me killed.

In the meantime if you want to help, you can resign. https://t.co/4mVREbaqqm

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 28, 2021

Fellow insurrectionist Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, tweeted, “Free the traders on @RobinhoodApp.”

While Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, a notorious critic of Wall Street’s avarice, wrote on Twitter, “It’s long past time for the SEC and other financial regulators to wake up and do their jobs,” adding, “With a new administration and Democrats running Congress, I intend to make sure they do.”

Promising a hearing, House Financial Services chair Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said in a statement: “We must deal with the hedge funds whose unethical conduct directly led to the recent market volatility and we must examine the market in general and how it has been manipulated by hedge funds and their financial partners to benefit themselves while others pay the price.”

Federal regulators, however, have been less forthcoming about this week’s market mania. The Securities and Exchange Commission said on Wednesday that it was “working with our fellow regulators to assess the situation.”

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell dismissed claims that the Central Bank is responsible for any asset price anomalies. Powell said in a press conference, “I think the connection between low interest rates and asset values is probably something that’s not as tight as people think because a lot of different factors are driving asset prices at any given time.”

According to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Biden’s economic team is “monitoring” GameStop’s stock. She later told reporters that she has “no comment” on the matter. New York Attorney General Letticia James, however, said on Thursday: “We are aware of concerns raised regarding activity on the Robinhood app, including trading related to the GameStop stock. We are reviewing this matter.”

While mainstream news outlets and the Robinhood CEO himself have framed the chaos as a “David vs. Goliath” showdown, many industry goliaths such as Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, and Chamath Palihapitiya have curiously taken the side of the WallStreetBets investors –– or “degenerates,” as they like to call themselves. Notably, Mark Cuban is a well-known proponent of short selling, casting doubt over the approbation of the group.

It’s also unclear just what class of investor would have benefited most from a Reddit-led buy-up.

According to Reuters, BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset firms, may have pulled in $2.4 billion from GameStop’s recent trading activity. GameStop’s biggest individual shareholder is Donald Foss, the billionaire inventor of subprime auto finance.

With Robinhood’s users unable to trade any more shares of GameStop and the high finance establishment consoled, for the time being, it may now lie in large part with the federal government to decide who will gain the upper hand. It’s of little surprise, in that case, that some in financial media — incredibly influential amongst regulators and lawmakers alike —have already begun to point to this episode as a reason to pull back on any interventions meant to buoy the larger economy, like another round of coronavirus relief spending or continued lower interest rates.

WHO says Moderna, Pfizer coronavirus vaccines should not be given to pregnant women. Here’s why

The World Health Organization (WHO) released a new guidance on Monday advising pregnant women to avoid taking the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine unless they are at a high risk of exposure or otherwise fall into a heightened risk category for the disease. The guidance was not issued due to any observations of pregnant women falling ill after receiving the vaccine, but rather due to a lack of data on the vaccine’s effects on pregnant women, who were not part of test trials.

Ultimately, the WHO argued that there is not enough information about how the Moderna vaccine (known as mRNA-1273) will affect pregnant women, particularly when it comes to any potential risks to the women themselves or their fetuses. The WHO noted that pregnant women are at a higher risk of developing severe COVID-19 and that the disease is associated with an increased likelihood of premature births.

Although studies on pregnant animals have not yielded any ominous results, the WHO believes that further research on pregnant women will need to be performed over the coming months for definitive conclusions to be reached.

“In the interim, WHO recommends not to use mRNA-1273 [Moderna’s vaccine] in pregnancy, unless the benefit of vaccinating a pregnant woman outweighs the potential vaccine risks, such as in health workers,” the WHO writes. “Information and, if possible, counselling on the lack of safety and efficacy data for pregnant women should be provided.”

The guidance added, “WHO does not recommend pregnancy testing prior to vaccination. WHO does not recommend delaying pregnancy following vaccination.”

This guidance is similar to one issued by the WHO earlier this month about the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, which is known as BNT162b2.

The guidance is not meant to be applied universally. The WHO added that the Moderna vaccine could still be administered to pregnant women if they “are at risk of high exposure (e.g. health workers).” It made a similar point in its guidance about the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine earlier this month, explaining that if “a pregnant woman has an unavoidable risk high of exposure (e.g. a health worker), vaccination may be considered in discussion with their healthcare provider.”

As Salon’s Nicole Karlis covered last month, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine trials up to that point — as well as other major vaccine trials — did not include pregnant women, continuing a long-standing trend in the American healthcare system in which pregnant women are actively kept out of clinical vaccine trials and other critical research. This practice is criticized by many experts on maternal and reproductive healthcare because it means that pregnant women might need certain medicines but will not have complete information about the potential benefits and risks involved in utilizing them.

Both the Modern and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines are mRNA vaccines, meaning that they use a single-stranded RNA molecule and inject it into the body. These vaccines cause the body’s own cells to produce a protein known as Spike that is associated with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which the immune system then learns to identify and protect against. Spike is the protein that causes the little pins which stick out around the sphere of the virus like spines on a sea urchin, allowing it to attach itself to human cells.

The WHO did note that because the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines do not include live viruses, and because the mRNA degrades quickly, there may be less cause for concern.

Mark Meadows’ money woes: He liquidated as much as $200,000 in stock after election

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows liquidated as much as $200,000 in stocks a week after the election, according to financial disclosures obtained Wednesday by Salon. As a whole, the filings suggest that Meadows, who was one of the 15 wealthiest new members of Congress when he first came to Washington, continues to see his net worth dwindle as he re-enters private life for the first time in eight years.

Disclosures show that Meadows unloaded anywhere between $80,000 and $200,000 in stock on Nov. 9, ditching shares in two BlackRock iShares funds — Exponential Technologies and US Technology — as well as the tech company Trimble Inc. At the time, President Trump’s chief of staff was in isolation, having announced that he had contracted the coronavirus just two days before, likely at the White House election night event that appears to have spread infections among several of the former president’s top aides and friends.

On Monday, Politico reported that Meadows’ job prospects upon leaving the administration were so thin that he considered taking work with the Trump Organization. A day later, news broke that Meadows — who until last Wednesday was near the pinnacle of power — had accepted a position with a little-known group called the Conservative Partnership Institute, a “networking hub” for conservatives helmed by former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint.

Meadows, who before joining the White House was elected four times as a Republican congressman from western North Carolina, has come under scrutiny for a number of transactions and reporting violations. For example, the onetime House Freedom Caucus leader has since at least 2018 apparently failed to disclose a loan and $11,000 in monthly income related to his sale of a deed to a fossil park in Dinosaur, Colorado, dedicated to promoting the creationist myth that humans coexisted with prehistoric lizards. Meadows also continued to pay a top staffer for months after he cut him loose for sexual harassment in 2015, a lapse for which he was cited and fined $40,000 by the House Ethics Committee in 2018.

Furthermore, in 2019 Meadows failed to file a House financial disclosure altogether, and still has offered no public accounting for that year, submitting only a termination notice when he departed for the White House last March.

In October, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a criminal complaint with the Federal Elections Commission, based on Salon’s reporting that Meadows appears to have committed a number of campaign finance crimes. The alleged violations include spending thousands of dollars on personal expenses, such as gourmet cupcakes, clubs and lodging at Trump’s Washington hotel.

The November stock sell-off came 10 days after CREW filed its complaint. Subsequent FEC filings from Meadows show restrained expenditures and a hike in legitimate disbursements to other political committees.

According to data compiled by OpenSecrets, Meadows, who worked as a real estate salesman and restaurateur before running for federal office, has seen his net worth plummet since joining Congress in 2013, from an estimated $7 million to possibly less than $1 million, according to his most recent 2020 filing. In that time he has engaged in real estate and stock transactions, and even bought a billboard in Jackson County, North Carolina, that pays him between $1,000 and $2,500 in rent per annum, according to filings.

Still, it is not obvious why Meadows’ net worth has declined by millions of dollars, as available data suggests. He apparently felt a need to access more financial liquidity last year, taking out a line of credit of up to $50,000.

On the day Meadows formally resigned from Congress, March 30, 2020, his campaign reported spending $2,650 on “printed materials” from Ann Hand jewelry, though an Ann Hand representative told Salon the store does not sell anything that could be characterized as such. The following day, his first in the Trump administration’s employ, Meadows sold up to $60,000 in stock. Ten days later, he dumped up to $50,000 more.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article reported that Roger Cawthorn, the father of Rep. Madison Cawthorn, was a financial adviser to Mark Meadows’ family. Although Roger Cawthorn works at Edward Jones, the investment firm where the Meadows family holds investment accounts, additional reporting has clarified that he does not serve as their adviser. The story has been updated.

Niksen, the Dutch art of doing nothing, is a wellness trend needed now when you’re stuck at home

First there was “hygge,” the Danish term for cozy contentment that rose to international prominence in 2016, conjuring images of sheepskin rugs, moody reading nooks and cashmere socks. Then came “ikigai,” a notably more energetic Japanese concept that centers on, as the 2017 book “Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life” put it, “doing something —and doing it with supreme focus and joy.”

Now, there’s another global wellness concept that’s making its way to the United States that feels fitting for these unprecedented times. It’s called “niksen,” a Dutch term for doing nothing. Sounds simple, right?

Well, as author Olga Mecking writes in her new book, “Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing,” it’s something with which many adults struggle amid pressures to maximize all of our waking hours. Many children, Mecking said, are more clearly wired to enjoy daydreaming and getting lost in their thoughts than their elders are.

“I think what happens is we grow up, and we start having responsibilities and duties in chores and work,” Mecking told Salon. “And, you know, we kind of feel all sorts of expectations from society and ourselves as well.”

Mecking said that niksen can be hard to quantify, because while we know when we are actively doing things, what does nothing actually look like in comparison?

“I like to kind of compare it to negative space,” she said. “It’s there and it affects the whole design. But it’s hard to define what it really is because we focus on the logo or on the writing. So, in real life, we focus on activity.”

The best way to define it, Mecking said, is “doing nothing on purpose, without a purpose.” This separates it from self-care activities that seem to populate many people’s days and Instagram feeds: training for a 5K, perfecting their sourdough skills, adding another book club to their reading rotation. These things are fun and (sometimes) relaxing, but niksen centers on giving yourself permission to truly take a break from activity.

While you’re waiting for a virtual appointment or a Zoom call, get up and look out the window for a few minutes instead of feeling like you have to maximize that time by answering emails. Instead of capping off the day by scrolling through social media, lounge on the couch and relax. When cafés reopen, grab a cup of coffee and simply people-watch.

It’s an alternative to feeling like every moment of your day has to be scheduled for maximum productivity (though Mecking said some people may find it easier to schedule time to “niks,” depending on their personality). This is especially true as lengthy to-do lists and “I’m just so busy!!” texts have come to serve as a stand-in for communicating, “My life is exciting and important.”

Author Celeste Headlee, who released her book “Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Under Living” in March 2020, told Salon that the pressure to be “always on” is deeply ingrained in our society.

“They have research studies showing that we think someone is more important if they have earbuds in versus headphones, because we associate the headphones with music and the earbuds with, ‘I have to be on a conference call,'” Headlee said. “That’s how granular this gets. ‘Fetishize’ is a really good word for it, because this goes back literally centuries, this emphasis that began in the Industrial Revolution that hard work is what makes you a good person.”

Niksen is a tonic for that toxic productivity culture.

That’s not to say, however, that there aren’t scientifically backed benefits associated with taking some time for nothingness during your day. Mecking interviewed a wide-ranging variety of experts — who study everything from boredom to our relationship with digital technology — who all agree that “niksing” can lead to feeling less mentally depleted and increase creativity and problem-solving skills. It’s as simple letting your mind just wander.

Mecking said that now, during the pandemic, is an ideal time to try it out. People are more stressed than ever and many have turned to copious new hobbies in order to de-stress and fill the increased amount of time spent at home. Start with a few minutes next time you’re feeling hazy during the workday; take a break to zone out instead of jumping into the project.

Unlike many wellness trends, there’s a low barrier to entry.

“I certainly hope that it’s going to be soothing,” Mecking said. “I want people to feel much less pressure, because each time there’s a new trend coming on, people begin to say ‘Oh, I want to try to do it, but what if I do it wrong?’ And what I like about niksn is that it wasn’t something you could do right or wrong, it was just something.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported “hygge” as a Dutch term.

How to make a perfect French 75, the gin cocktail with the welcome effervescence of sparkling wine

In her book “How to Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle,” poet and friend of the Oracle Molly Peacock writes, “I first fell in love with the word ‘joy’ because it had a circle inside.” She points out how the embedded O in the middle of the word mirrors the O of the mouth: shape of surprise, delight, awe. All things that have been scarce in recent times, and for some of us even longer. It is to be expected. We have had to take refuge in our own little chambers, cut off from the rest of the heart.

We have entered the endless scroll in search of it and found at best, with apologies to the headline writers, flashes of passing pleasure: “Brad Pitt’s Tremendous, Low-Key Fit Is Exactly What We Need Right Now.” Or maybe it is all we can absorb in the moment, given our atmosphere of sinister glooms, ambient and activated.

True surprise with the power to jolt us into the present has been elbowed aside by the cynical, nerve-jangling jump scare; sincere expressions of delight first atrophied, then cramped into timid grimace: What is this sensation? And when will it be taken away?

I wish I could tell you that an era of joy is just around a corner we’re close to clearing: New year, new you, new us, new world. But that’s not how it works. Our laggardly renewal will sidle up to us on its own time, sleepy and shy, still clad in the scrubs it slept in, unable to remember which syllable in party gets the stress. It will need to re-learn whether it prefers, when holding hands, to be the palm facing up or down. You would like to get it a drink — anything it likes — what will it be? Oh, it will say, at a loss when faced with all the possibilities the world can offer, as it leans back and contemplates the ceiling, savoring this moment of connection, knowing it might pass as quickly as it arrived and that the memory of it might have to sustain it through much darker times than that from which it just emerged, with a momentarily satisfied wave of its hand, surprise me.

That moment’s not here yet, but we can practice with the delightful French 75 in the meantime.

Said to have been created circa 1915 by Harry McElhone at the New York Bar in Paris (McElhone was Scottish, go figure), the French 75 is an easy cocktail for home toasts to the resolution of complex situations that have turned out, despite the odds, to be less horrible than presumed.

A bartender once told a friend of mine that the French 75 is “the quintessential girl drink,” and while I have good reason to believe this particular man meant it for it to land as a neg, I will suggest that if you have avoided this drink because some mixologist got his misogyny on it, you might consider rejecting his imposed narrative and embracing its feminine energy instead. Tart but never cloying, the French 75 mixes the medicinal clarity of a London Dry gin with the welcome effervescence of sparkling wine and lemonade — like that dear friend who has a knack for telling you exactly what it is you need right now.

There are many ways to remix a French 75, but here is the straightforward, simple version.

Ingredients:

Serving size: one beverage

1 oz. Gin
1/2 oz. Lemon juice
1/2 oz. Simple syrup (add 1 cup of sugar to 1 cup boiling water, simmer until dissolved, cool)
Chilled champagne
Cracked ice

Gear:

You don’t need any specialty equipment to mix a simple cocktail. Improvise with what you have; take a hammer to a baggie of ice if you want. But here’s what I keep at hand:

Highball, fizz or other tall thin glass
Cocktail shaker
Strainer
Jigger or measuring device (a standard shot glass holds 1.5 oz, if you’re eyeballing it)
Handheld citrus press
Hand-crank countertop ice crusher (If you’re willing to scout, vintage Ice-O-Mats are stylish and virtually indestructible; I see the white model I use on resale sites all the time)
Champagne bottle stopper (I swear by this Winco model; it keeps opened bottles fresh for days)

Instructions:

Fill a highball or other tall and skinny glass with cracked ice. (You can also skip the cracked ice if you prefer a less bracing chill, or want to serve in a champagne flute.) Shake the gin, lemon juice and simple syrup with ice. Strain into the glass, and top with champagne.

Variations:

Swap the lemon juice for another citrus like blood orange, or use vodka as your base spirit to make a French 76. For a hint of cottagecore, make a lavender simple syrup: Add 2-3 tablespoons of dried culinary lavender buds to the water, then boil. Add the sugar, then simmer for 15 minutes. Turn off the heat and let steep for an hour, then strain the lavender out before cooling.

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