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Biden plans to fight climate change in a way no U.S. president has done before

Joe Biden is preparing to deal with climate change in a way no U.S. president has done before – by mobilizing his entire administration to take on the challenge from every angle in a strategic, integrated way.

The strategy is evident in the people Biden has chosen for his Cabinet and senior leadership roles: Most have track records for incorporating climate change concerns into a wide range of policies, and they have experience partnering across agencies and levels of government.

Those skills are crucial, because slowing climate change will require a comprehensive and coordinated “all hands on deck” approach.

We did that with energy when I was governor of Colorado, and I can tell you it isn’t simple. Energy policy isn’t just about electricity. It’s about how homes are built, how they generate power and feed it into the grid and how the transportation, industrial and agriculture sectors evolve. It’s about regulations, trade rules, government purchases and funding for research for innovation. Coordination and collaboration among agencies and different levels of government is crucial.

A coordinated approach also helps ensure that vulnerable populations aren’t overlooked. Biden has committed to help disadvantaged communities that have too often borne the brunt of fossil fuel industry pollution, as well as those that have been losing fossil fuel jobs.

The Biden-Harris team’s depth of experience will be vital as they take over from a Trump administration that has been stripping government agencies of their expertise and eliminating environmental protections. With Democrats gaining control of both the House and Senate, the Biden administration may also have a better chance of overhauling laws, funding and tax incentives in ways that could fundamentally transform the U.S. approach to climate change.

Here are some of the biggest challenges ahead and what “all hands on deck” might mean.

Dealing with all those climate policy rollbacks

From its first days, the Trump administration began trying to nullify or weaken U.S. environmental regulations. It had rolled back 84 environmental rules by November 2020, including major climate policies, and more rollbacks were being pursued, according to a New York Times analysis of research from Harvard and Columbia law schools.

Many of these rules had been designed to reduce climate-warming pollution from power plants, cars and trucks. Several reduced emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas production. The Trump administration also moved to open more land to more drilling, mining and pipelines.

Some rollbacks have been challenged in court and the rules then reinstated. Others are still being litigated. Many will require going through government rule-making processes that take years to reverse.

Pressuring other countries to take action

Biden can quickly bring the U.S. back into the international Paris climate agreement, through which countries worldwide agreed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming. But reestablishing the nation’s leadership role with the international climate community is a much longer haul.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry will lead this effort as special envoy for climate change, a new Cabinet-level position with a seat on the National Security Council. Other parts of the government can also pressure countries to take action. International development funding can encourage climate-friendly actions, and trade agreements and tariffs can establish rules of conduct.

Cleaning up the power sector

The Biden-Harris climate plan aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector to net zero by 2035.

While 62 major utilities in the U.S. have set their own emission reduction goals, most leaders in that sector would argue that requiring net zero emissions by 2035 is too much too fast.

One problem is that states are often more involved in regulating the power sector than the federal government. And, when federal regulations are passed, they are often challenged in court, meaning they can take years to implement.

Reducing greenhouse gases also requires modernizing the electricity transmission grid. The federal government can streamline the permitting process to allow more clean energy, like wind and solar power, onto the grid. Without that intervention, it could take a decade or more to permit a single transmission line.

What to do about vehicles, buildings and ag

The power sector may be the easiest sector to “decarbonize.” The transportation sector is another story.

Transportation is now the nation’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide. Decarbonizing it will require a transition away from the internal combustion engine in a relatively short amount of time.

Again, this is a challenge that requires many parts and levels of government working toward the same goal. It will require expanding carbon-free transportation, including more electric vehicles, charging stations, better battery technology and clean energy. That involves regulations and funding for research and development from multiple departments, as well as trade agreements, tax incentives for electric vehicles and a shift in how government agencies buy vehicles. The EPA can facilitate these efforts or hamstring them, as happened when the Trump EPA revoked California’s ability to set higher emissions standards – something the Biden administration is likely to quickly restore.

The other “hard to decarbonize” sectors – buildings, industry and agriculture – will require sophistication and collaboration among all federal departments and agencies unlike any previous efforts across government.

A new comprehensive climate bill

The best way to tackle these sectors would be a comprehensive climate bill that uses some mechanism, like a clean energy standard, that sets a cap, or limit, on emissions and tightens it over time. Here, the problem lies more in the politics of the moment than anything else. Biden and his team will have to convince lawmakers from fossil fuel-producing states to work on these efforts.

Democratic control of the Senate raises the chances that Congress could pass comprehensive climate legislation, but that isn’t a given. Until that happens, Biden will have to rely on agencies issuing new rules, which are vulnerable to being revoked by future administrations. It’s a little like playing chess without a queen or rooks.

Years of delays have allowed global warming to progress so far that many of its impacts may soon become irreversible. To meet its ambitious goals, the administration will need everyone, progressives and conservatives, state and local leaders, and the private sector, to work with them.

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

Despite Parler backlash, Facebook played huge role in fueling Capitol riot, watchdogs say

The far-right social media platform Parler has shouldered much of the blame for last week’s Capitol riot — and may since have been rendered permanently defunct. But watchdog groups say much larger companies like Facebook carry more of the responsibility for the lead-up to the pro-Trump siege.

Amazon Web Services, which hosted Parler, took the platform offline last week after Apple and Google removed it from their app stores, arguing Parler was not doing enough to moderate content that could incite violence. Amazon in court documents detailed extensive violent threats on Parler that the company “systemically failed” to remove. Hacked GPS metadata analyzed by Gizmodo shows that “at least several” Parler users managed to penetrate deep inside the Capitol.

“From what I’ve seen, people were actually coordinating on Parler, logistics and tactics and things like that,” Kurt Braddock, an extremism expert at American University and the author of “Weaponized Words,” said in an interview with Salon. “That’s a step beyond the pale. So Parler, in terms of planning and coordination, probably was the biggest player in terms of the social media environment.”

Parler, which billed itself as a free-speech alternative to social networks that moderated posts and claims to have more than 12 million users, no doubt helped fuel last week’s violence. But its role pales in comparison to social media behemoths like Facebook, which is used by nearly 70% of American adults, said Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of the watchdog group Media Matters.

“If you took Parler out of the equation, you would still almost certainly have what happened at the Capitol,” he told Salon. “If you took Facebook out of the equation before that, you would not. To me, when Apple and Google sent their letter to Parler, I was a little bit confused why Facebook didn’t get one.”

Larger companies were eager to single out Parler to avoid the “potential legal implications” from “associating yourself with an app or platform that is encouraging and inviting actions that will lead to violence,” said Yosef Getachew, director of the media and democracy program at the watchdog group Common Cause.

Parler played a role in the “organizing” of the siege and amplified calls to violence but “it wasn’t just Parler, it was social media platforms across the board,” Getachew said. Facebook in particular has “done a poor job of consistently enforcing their content moderation policies,” he added.

This isn’t just a case of “one platform is a bad actor,” Getachew said. “All platforms have not done what they need to do to prohibit this type of disinformation and incitement of violence.”

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, has sought to deflect blame to other social networks following last week’s siege.

“We again took down QAnon, Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, anything that was talking about possible violence last week,” Sandberg said in an interview with Reuters on Monday. “Our enforcement is never perfect, so I’m sure there were still things on Facebook. I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency.”

But available data suggests that Facebook played a much larger role than Sandberg suggested. As many as 128,000 people used the #StoptheSteal hashtag promoted by Trump and his allies until Monday, Eric Feinberg, a vice president with the Coalition for a Safer Web, told The Washington Post. At least two dozen Republican officials and organizations in at least a dozen states used the social network to plan bus trips to the rally that preceded the riot, according to a Media Matters analysis. Media Matters also identified at least 70 active Facebook groups related to “Stop the Steal,” against which the platform could have acted long before the riot. Days after the siege, Facebook’s algorithm was still suggesting events hosted by some of the same groups that organized the Stop the Steal rally.

These groups didn’t just spread misinformation but actively “encouraged people to attend the riot last week and to potentially arm themselves and to potentially engage in other violent acts,” Getachew said. “These are the types of things from a public interest side that make it harder to monitor because the groups are closed, right? You need permission to enter and Facebook isn’t doing a good enough job of actually facilitating or moderating these groups to prohibit this type of content, or to ban these groups altogether.”

“To date, we’ve banned over 250 white supremacist groups and have been enforcing our rules that prohibit QAnon and militia groups from organizing on our platform,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to Salon. “We work with experts in global terrorism and cyber intelligence to identify calls for violence and remove harmful content that could lead to further violence. We are continuing all of these efforts and working with law enforcement to prevent direct threats to public safety.”

Conservatives have repeatedly accused Facebook of censorship even though leaked materials obtained by NBC News show that the company has gone out of its way to ease its false information policy for conservative pages over concerns about “bias” claims. An analysis by The Washington Post found that about 40% of the top 10 performing Facebook posts on any given day between the November election and the Jan. 6 riot were from right-wing personalities and media, and another 15% were from Trump, his campaign or his administration. National and local media outlets made up about a quarter of the top posts — and left-wing accounts barely made a blip.

Facebook’s algorithm has also placed ads for body armor, gun holsters and other military equipment next to content promoting election misinformation and the Capitol riot, according to BuzzFeed News.

Facebook previously came under fire for failing to crack down on extremist content ahead of the deadly 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist rally. It was used to organize numerous protests against coronavirus restrictions earlier this year, including an armed invasion of the Michigan state capitol. Facebook later removed certain pages linked to the Charlottesville rally and announced plans to remove thousands of QAnon-related accounts. These actions have all been “too little, too late,” Getachew says.

Braddock believes Parler’s role is different than that of Facebook, however, because “it went beyond just rhetoric.”

“The other social networks … have groups where people can go and discuss topics related to Trump and the election and things like that, but from what I’ve seen Parler was the key player in not only perpetuating the rhetoric … and serving as an amplifier for it but even planning the attack itself,” he said. “So if we’re developing a hierarchy of culpability for this, I think Parler is at the top of that list.”

Carusone argued that Facebook “had a much bigger role” in the riot, noting that Media Matters and others “brought to their attention” numerous “red flags” they spotted in the lead-up to the riot, but Facebook managers “still didn’t do anything about it.”

“Apple and Google were being extraordinarily myopic and, frankly, hypocritical in singling out Parler,” he said. “Not because I want to defend Parler, but the math is the math. Facebook was worse.”

Numerous social networks, including Twitter, have permanently banned President Trump in the wake of the riot. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would suspend the president at least until President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week.

Carusone called on Facebook to extend the ban permanently.

“Facebook has done all these performative things,” he said. “We’re giving Facebook far too much credit. We’re letting them play sleight of hand. Their ban for Trump wasn’t even a ban. They came out and issued a two-week suspension. … There’s still this open question of, if the temperature dials back, do they let Trump back on? I think that fight and that conversation is going to be very different when we’re three or six months removed from this event.”

Sandberg told Reuters that the network has “no plans to lift” Trump’s ban.

“This showed that even a president is not above the policies we have,” she said.

Carusone predicted that Facebook will likely “backslide” because “they’ve done it every time … when the heat is off.” He added that Facebook needs to expand its policies on moderating closed groups and expand their threat detection beyond content on its platform.

Getachew said that Facebook and others need to more consistently enforce their policies, and also expand them to more effectively combat disinformation and online voter suppression.

Braddock agreed that larger social networks like Facebook need to be better at “getting rid of disinformation on the platforms, because that’s kind of the tie that binds all these groups together.”

“The central theme in all this was ‘the election was stolen,’ and there’s no evidence for it. But you can go on any social media platform right now and find any amount of information on that,” he said. “So de-platforming is one thing … but I do think social media companies need to be better and faster at getting rid of disinformation that can have the kinds of effects we saw the other day.”

Twitter, which served as a megaphone of hate for the president for years, has also faced blame for helping Trump and his allies spread misinformation. But as with Parler, its user base is a fraction of Facebook’s or YouTube’s. While YouTube is used by more than 70% of American adults, just 22% use Twitter, a smaller proportion than social networks like Snapchat and Pinterest, according to Pew Research.

Advocates have criticized Apple and Google, which owns YouTube, for their own roles in fueling misinformation. Media Matters reported on Wednesday that Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts have failed to crack down on QAnon-related podcasts that celebrated the Capitol siege. And YouTube has long been criticized as a “radicalization engine” over its recommendation algorithm’s propensity to push users toward increasingly extreme content.

“Google’s role in all of this is … significant,” Carusone said. Even more than Facebook, he said, “YouTube had the worst election disinformation policy.”

A Media Matters analysis found that 47 of the top 100 YouTube videos about mail-in voting contained “misinformation” and “straight-up lies.”

Facebook management “basically let it be a free for all,” Carusone said. “They were very limited in terms of what they would enforce. They would demonetize some things, but their biggest problem was that they decided they were going to boost ‘authoritative’ content — but one of the sources they put in there as authoritative was Fox News.”

Despite officially recognizing Biden’s victory, Fox News has aired content suggesting that the election was stolen, undermined or involved in a conspiracy more than “600 times,” Carusone noted.

Ivy Choi, a spokesperson for YouTube, said in a statement to Salon that the company has cracked down on election misinformation.

“Over the last month, we’ve removed thousands of videos claiming that widespread voter fraud changed the result of the 2020 election,” Choi said. “In fact, many figures that were related to or participated in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol had their channels terminated months prior, for violating our policies. Additionally, we’re continuing to raise up authoritative news sources on our home page, in search results and in recommendations, and saw that the most viewed and recommended election-related channels and videos are from news channels like NBC and CBS.”

Carusone pointed to misinformation from the ardently pro-Trump propaganda shop One America News Network, which has repeatedly gone far beyond even Fox News in pushing Trump’s baseless election-fraud narrative.

“They didn’t take any action to neutralize the effect of the virality of One America News’ videos during that time period,” he added. “Because of the nature of the content, you were falling into these rabbit holes where … before long, you were getting the Lin Wood kind of crazy stuff.” (Wood is an Atlanta attorney who has consistently echoed or amplified the most far-fetched, delusional and conspiratorial claims of Trump and his supporters.)

Researchers at Cornell University published a study last year examining YouTube’s “right-wing echo chambers.”

The study found “evidence for a small but growing ‘echo chamber’ of far-right content consumption,” the researchers wrote. “Users in this community show higher engagement and greater ‘stickiness’ than users who consume any other category of content. Moreover, YouTube accounts for an increasing fraction of these users’ overall online news consumption. Finally, while the size, intensity, and growth of this echo chamber present real concerns, we find no evidence that they are caused by YouTube recommendations. Rather, consumption of radical content on YouTube appears to reflect broader patterns of news consumption across the web.”

YouTube says it has consistently removed videos from OAN that violate their policies, and OAN does not currently feature prominently in its recommendations nor does it appear in searches related to the election. All videos about the election now include a message noting that President-elect Joe Biden was the winner, and include a link to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s “Rumor Control” page.

YouTube also removed more than 1.8 million channels in the third quarter of last year for violating policies regarding hate speech, harassment, incitement to violence, harmful conspiracy theories and presidential election integrity, the company reports, as well as tens of thousands of videos and hundreds of channels related to the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Despite YouTube’s more proactive approach to dangerous material in recent months, it still needs greater “algorithmic transparency,” Getachew said.

“These are systems that are being developed in a black box. Oftentimes the individuals who are developing these algorithms are homogeneous in that they are white men,” he said. “They aren’t even diverse in terms of other perspectives, to actually create algorithms where they won’t lead you down these rabbit holes. We need diversity in developing these algorithms, but also we need transparency in how these algorithms are being developed, audits and other tests. … The company shouldn’t be looking for ways to maximize engagement by sending you more and more extreme content through algorithms.”

Braddock said that YouTube employees have told him they are “aware” of this problem and are trying “to counter that as best they can.”

“Something about YouTube that the other platforms don’t have is that organizations in the counter-radicalization space have kind of taken advantage of that algorithm,” he noted. “So if someone is looking at, say, ISIS videos, there are certain organizations that can embed videos that are counter-ISIS, that kind of hack the algorithm. So one benefit of the YouTube algorithm is that it can be used for the benefit of counter-radicalization. You don’t really have that on something like Parler.”

Carusone said it was striking that YouTube employees “themselves acknowledge” both the power and deficiencies of the recommendation engine, “because they felt the need to short-circuit it.”

“Don’t short-circuit it now. Fix it,” he said. “YouTube [is] the one platform that probably needs to do the least amount of active enforcement by comparison to others. When YouTube makes changes to how things are monetized, and they start demonetizing stuff or cracking down on channels a little bit, creators understand that. They may complain, they may gripe, they may tear it apart. But the one thing they do is to ensure that the next video they put out doesn’t fall victim to the new changes.”

The social network crackdowns and the takedown of Parler has led to an explosion of new users to encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram, sparking some concern that extremists will be able to now be able to hatch plots out of sight.

“Encrypted apps have their purpose in terms of protecting the privacy of users,” Getachew said. “But that should not absolve companies from taking steps that prohibit the spread of disinformation, or at the very least taking steps so their platforms aren’t being used to facilitate disinformation and other content that could lead to offline violence.” 

“Other terrorist groups from around the world have gone to these encrypted apps,” said Braddock. “None of this is good, but if there’s a good thing that comes from moving to Telegram it’s that it’s much more difficult to coordinate large-scale events like Jan. 6 on an app like that than on a domain where many thousands of people can discuss in the same thread. So it becomes more difficult logistically, but it’s problematic that there’s a way for individuals like this to be able to plan in any capacity.”

Capitol siege raises questions over extent of white supremacist infiltration of U.S. police

The apparent participation of off-duty officers in the rally that morphed into a siege on the U.S. Capitol building Jan. 6 has revived fears about white supremacists within police departments.

These concerns are not new. White supremacy, the belief that white people are superior to other races, has long tainted elements within law enforcement. As I testified before Congress just months before this assault, there is a long history of racism in U.S. policing – and this legacy may have contributed to the violence in the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Reports of officers involved in an attack in which the symbols and language of white supremacy were clearly on display are concerning.

But so too, I believe, is a policing culture that may have contributed to the downplaying of the risk of attack before it began and the apparent sympathetic response to attackers displayed by some police officers – they too hint at a wider problem.

As someone who has researched and written about the chilling problem of white supremacists in law enforcement, I believe the failure to confront the problem has had deadly consequences.

Blue, but white first?

Racism and white supremacy are problems in society, not just the police. Just after the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, 9% of Americans responding to an ABC News/Washington News poll said that it was acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views.

Meanwhile, a Reuters poll after the insurrection at the Capitol found that 12% of Americans supported the actions of those who took part in the attack.

But the percentage of police officers who hold views in support of white identity extremism may be at least as high or higher – white people are overrepresented on police forces cross the country. And surveys have found that police officers – especially white ones – diverge from the wider public on issues of race. A 2017 Pew poll found that 92% of white officers believe that the U.S. had made the reforms necessary for equal rights for Black Americans. This compared with just 29% of Black officers and 48% of the general public, including 57% of white Americans. This leads some to wonder whether police are more sympathetic to the rhetoric of Trump and others.

With their enormous power, department-issued weapons and access to sensitive information, police departments must be rid of officers with racist views for America’s security. But for the same reasons, police departments have become attractive recruiting grounds for white supremacist groups.

The FBI warned of the problem in 2006, noting: “Having personnel within law enforcement agencies has historically been and will continue to be a desired asset for white supremacist groups.”

Because of the secretive nature of such groups, it is hard to say how many officers are involved. But since 2009 police officers in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana have been identified as members of white supremacist groups. Meanwhile, more than 100 police departments in 49 different states have had to deal with scandals involving racist emails, texts or online comments sent or made by department staff. Just this week a high-ranking officer in the New York Police Department was found to be behind a string of racist posts online.

Misplaced sympathies

When it comes to the events of Jan. 6, there appear to be three main areas of concern about the action – or inaction – of police. First, there appears little doubt that Capitol Police did not prepare in a way to protect the Capitol for the threat lawmakers and the vice president faced. The U.S. Capitol Police Department is one of the best-funded police forces in the country; with a budget of more than $500 million and approximately 2,000 police officers, it is larger than the police force of the city of San Diego, yet the Capitol Police’s mission is to guard a few buildings and the members of Congress.

The rally and plan to attack the Capitol were discussed on public social media platforms such as Twitter, Parler, Reddit, Instagram and Facebook for law enforcement who cared to be prepared. Enrique Tarrio, a member of the far-right Proud Boys, was arrested a few days before the attack for the destruction of a Black Lives Matter flag belonging to a Black church in Washington, D.C. Tarrio had traveled to the District of Columbia for the Jan. 6 rally and was allegedly in possession of high-capacity magazines. This should have been an indication that the protesters planned violence.

Both the NYPD and FBI warned the Capitol police of the threats they were seeing online, with an FBI office in Virginia telling Capitol police that extremists were planning violence and “war” just one day before the attack.

Yet there were no phalanxes of heavily armed police officers as had been the case in protests in the capital against racism, in which many more Black Americans were involved.

As such, many are legitimately asking: Was the threat posed by the rioters on Jan. 6 underestimated by police because of their race?

There are also questions to be asked over whether Capitol police officers were more sympathetic to Trump supporters during the attack itself. One officer tasked with protecting the Capitol put on a red Make America Great Again cap during the attack, according to the Tim Ryan, the Democratic chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees funding for Capitol police. Another Capitol police officer was seen being friendly and taking photographs with rioters. Two Capitol police officers have been suspended and at least 10 others are under investigation for their behavior in the uprising.

Off duty, in crowd

Finally, there is concern that off-duty officers holding extreme views traveled from across the country to be part of the day’s events. Reports from Capitol police officers describe cops flashing their badges while attempting to enter the Capitol.

At least 28 sworn law enforcement officers attended the Jan. 6 rally, according to a tally kept by the publication The Appeal. They represent police departments from at least 12 different states. This number could grow.

Obviously there is a difference between merely attending the rally and taking part in the siege.

But domestic terrorism from far-right groups is a significant threat to America’s safety and security. And the actions of police on Jan. 6 – both as individuals and as a force – raise concerns. For all Americans to be truly safe, it is important to weed out far-right extremism, especially in the institution sworn to protect us all.

Vida Johnson, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University

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

Through her divisive rhetoric, Education Secretary DeVos leaves a troubled legacy of her own

Editor’s note: U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos resigned from her post effective Jan. 8, 2021, saying there was “no mistaking” the impact that President Donald Trump’s rhetoric had on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Here, five scholars offer their views on DeVos’ legacy at the federal agency she headed for four years.

Mark Hlavacik, associate professor of communication studies, University of North Texas:

In her resignation letter, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos explained that her sudden departure from the administration was motivated by President Donald Trump’s incendiary words to the crowd that went on to ransack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation,” she declared, “and it is the inflection point for me.”

Interestingly, DeVos has a history of using some rather caustic and divisive language herself. Although she never encouraged or condoned the use of force to achieve political ends, her insulting characterizations of public educators as “sycophant[s] of the ‘system’” and “Chicken Littles” will leave a troubled legacy of their own.

Much like democracy, public education is an enterprise that relies on a basic civic faith that Americans can come together as a nation and in their communities to do worthwhile things that benefit all. Traditionally, the secretary of education plays a key role as a rhetorical leader who brings the country together to face its educational challenges. But that has rarely been the case with DeVos.

As recently as October she used her position to warn that an “unholy mob” of young socialists who “hate freedom” are using a “Marxist playbook” to attack “the family.” Rhetoric like that in her speech to Hillsdale College reflects an affinity for blaming that DeVos shares with her former boss.

As I have warned elsewhere, such routine blaming leaves the impression that any meaningful conversation on an important issue like education will devolve into a war of accusations.

And that can leave not just the nation’s Capitol but also public education defenseless before a tide of extremism.

Stanley Litow, visting professor of the practice in public policy, Duke University:

Although college readiness, access and affordability are more important now than ever – particularly for people of color and those who are low-income – Betsy DeVos sadly did little to address these issues.

Expanding Pell Grants – the major source of federal aid in defraying tuition costs for low-income students – should have been the focus of the Department of Education to ensure more people can afford college. The same is true of the growing crisis of college debt, which now stands at a record US$1.7 trillion and counting.

While it was up to Congress to reauthorize the Higher Education Act – a federal law that regulates federal student aid, among other things, and effectively funds higher education – passage wasn’t a priority for the leadership in the department, and it didn’t happen. This was particularly troubling in light of the fact that state funding for higher education has declined by 18% in the last two decades.

Also, instead of a focus on the divisive issues of charter schools, choice schools and vouchers, the nation’s schools needed a laser-like focus on teaching. This is especially true when it comes to recruiting and retaining good teachers. But here, too, the Department of Education under DeVos’ leadership played little to no role. In fact, DeVos pushed back on efforts to provide teachers with needed professional development.

The Department of Education also fell short in terms of how it dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic. In spite of the escalating rate of hospitalizations and deaths, no issue was as important to America’s future – in my opinion – as its long-term impact on education. After months of school being largely online, K-12 students were projected to start the 2020-21 school year with significant losses in reading and math. I believe the Department of Education’s support for remote learning was minimal at best, based on conversations I’ve had with school superintendents throughout the nation.

It was a total disaster for poor children. More than 1 in 4 children experience food insecurity, and children in those homes similarly lack online access.

Kevin Welner, professor of education, University of Colorado Boulder

When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, there was little doubt that he would appoint a secretary of education who would support private school vouchers, oppose teacher unions and be reluctant to enforce civil rights statutes. That agenda is consistent with every Republican administration going back to Ronald Reagan. Why, then, did Betsy DeVos become “the most unpopular person in our government“?

What set her tenure apart was not what she did – it’s that she personified those policies.

Unlike her predecessors, DeVos had no relevant experience in public education. She was never a governor or state legislator like Lamar Alexander, or a legal scholar of education like Shirley Hufstedler, a K-12 teacher and school administrator like Terrel H. Bell or a university professor like William Bennett.

Also unlike her predecessors, she never attended public school herself, nor did she send her children to public schools.

Instead, she made her mark as a political donor and philanthropist. Her advocacy for private school vouchers culminated in her founding of the American Federation for Children in 2010.

Upon taking office, she embarked on a “Rethink Schools” tour. Almost 40% of the schools she visited were private. “Even when DeVos has visited public schools, she has tended to bypass traditional neighborhood schools, instead making stops at charter schools and other schools of choice,” The Washington Post noted in 2017.

In short, DeVos stood out because she embraced the role of privatization advocate – a role she never relinquished. She made no pretense about this advocacy. For her, all that’s required for schooling to be considered “public education” is public funding and use by the public, meaning that private schools can provide “public” education. DeVos, from the moment of her appointment, became a powerful symbol. That, more than any action she took while in office, set her apart.

Dustin Hornbeck, postdoctoral research fellow of educational leadership and policy, University of Texas at Arlington

Betsy DeVos made it clear in her confirmation hearings that she believed that public schools were not “working for the students that are assigned to them,” while she refused to answer direct questions about whether she intended to work to privatize public schools.

In her four-year tenure as secretary of education, it could be said that her biggest achievement was making the role of the U.S. Department of Education less prominent, and, similar to Donald Trump, undoing that which was done during Barack Obama’s tenure. DeVos made no bones about her dedication to school choice programs, attempting to include $400 million in the 2018 budget, which Congress rejected. She later argued that some of the funding in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act – better known as the CARES Act – intended for public schools should be designated for private schools.

Controversially, DeVos rolled back Obama-era Title IX guidance that gave victims of sexual assault additional recourse on college campuses. She also instituted a more complicated burden of proof. Additionally, she rescinded guidance to protect transgender students’ ability to use toilet facilities and locker rooms that correlate with their gender identity. In another incident, she rescinded education department guidance about student discipline tactics intended to curb school suspensions and overly harsh punishments that disparately impact students of color.

Her administration dramatically slowed the approval of Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which forgives federally subsidized student loans after a period of 10 years for public servants: that is, people who work for governmental agencies or for nonprofit organizations. As well, she curtailed borrower defense practices meant to protect consumers from predatory lending from for-profit colleges that might close before students earn a degree. She also scaled back the TEACH Grant program, which gave future teachers federal money for college if they agreed to teach for a length of time in a high-need area.

While many of these actions have noticeably impacted educational policy, almost all of them can be overturned quickly in a new administration through direct administrative action. Few, if any, of DeVos’ school choice plans were codified and passed into law, making her legacy one of controversy and little action.

Nicholas Tampio, professor of political science at Fordham University

One of the great questions at the start of Betsy Devos’ tenure was whether she would enforce the federal education law signed by President Barack Obama at the end of his second term. Four years later, we know the answer: She did not try to undermine the federal testing regime instituted by the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015.

At her contentious confirmation hearing in January 2017, Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, asked DeVos if she thought Congress took the right approach in preserving federal guardrails in education. One of these was the requirement that states test students annually in grades 3-8 and once in high school in reading and math. DeVos replied: “I believe that Congress made great strides in returning the responsibility for education primarily to states and localities, where it belongs.”

Former Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, for one, was not sure whether DeVos really supported or understood the testing requirements of the law. After listening to her apparently struggle to explain the difference between testing for proficiency or growth, Franken replied: “It surprises me that you don’t know this issue.” Every Democratic senator, and two Republicans, voted against her nomination. DeVos became secretary only because Vice President Mike Pence cast the deciding vote. Before the vote, Franken said: “It was the most embarrassing confirmation hearing that I have ever seen.”

Senate Democrats, it turns out, did not need to worry about DeVos’ commitment to federal testing requirements.

In the spring of 2019, the U.S. Department of Education warned Arizona that it could lose $340 million in federal education funds. Why? Because their state education plan did not use a single test for all high school students in the state. Arizona wanted to offer school districts a “menu of assessments,” but the Trump team rejected that plan.

Miguel Cardona, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of education, has reaffirmed his commitment to federally mandated standardized testing as a tool of equity. Ultimately, DeVos’ reign at the Department of Education will not have changed the testing regime between the Obama and Biden administrations.

Mark Hlavacik, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, University of North Texas; Dustin Hornbeck, Postdoctoral Research Fellow of Educational Leadership and Policy, University of Texas Arlington; Kevin Welner, Professor, Education Policy & Law; Director, National Education Policy Center, University of Colorado Boulder; Nicholas Tampio, Professor of Political Science, Fordham University, and Stanley S. Litow, Visting Professor of the Pratice, Public Policy, Duke University

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

Trump built a national debt so big (even before COVID) that it’ll weigh down the economy for years

One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.

The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.

The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.

The National Debt Increased Under Trump Despite His Promise to Reduce It

Daily total national debt from 2009 to present.

Source: U.S. Treasury (Lena V. Groeger/ProPublica)

Economists agree that we needed massive deficit spending during the COVID-19 crisis to ward off an economic cataclysm, but federal finances under Trump had become dire even before the pandemic. That happened even though the economy was booming and unemployment was at historically low levels. By the Trump administration’s own description, the pre-pandemic national debt level was already a “crisis” and a “grave threat.”

The combination of Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the lack of any serious spending restraint helped both the deficit and the debt soar. So when the once-in-a-lifetime viral disaster slammed our country and we threw more than $3 trillion into COVID-19-related stimulus, there was no longer any margin for error.

Our national debt has reached immense levels relative to our economy, nearly as high as it was at the end of World War II. But unlike 75 years ago, the massive financial overhang from Medicare and Social Security will make it dramatically more difficult to dig ourselves out of the debt ditch.

The Debt to GDP Ratio Is the Highest It’s Been Since World War II

Federal debt held by the public as a percentage of gross domestic product since 1900.

Source: Congressional Budget Office (Lena V. Groeger/ProPublica)

Falling deeper into the red is the opposite of what Trump, the self-styled “King of Debt,” said would happen if he became president. In a March 31, 2016, interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post, Trump said he could pay down the national debt, then about $19 trillion, “over a period of eight years” by renegotiating trade deals and spurring economic growth.

After he took office, Trump predicted that economic growth created by the 2017 tax cut, combined with the proceeds from the tariffs he imposed on a wide range of goods from numerous countries, would help eliminate the budget deficit and let the U.S. begin to pay down its debt. On July 27, 2018, he told Sean Hannityof Fox News: “We have $21 trillion in debt. When this [the 2017 tax cut] really kicks in, we’ll start paying off that debt like it’s water.”

Nine days later, he tweeted, “Because of Tariffs we will be able to start paying down large amounts of the $21 trillion in debt that has been accumulated, much by the Obama Administration.”

That’s not how it played out. When Trump took office in January 2017, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was projecting that federal budget deficits would be 2% to 3% of our gross domestic product during Trump’s term. Instead, the deficit reached nearly 4% of gross domestic product in 2018 and 4.6% in 2019.

There were multiple culprits. Trump’s tax cuts, especially the sharp reduction in the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%, took a big bite out of federal revenue. The CBO estimated in 2018 that the tax cut would increase deficits by about $1.9 trillion over 11 years.

Meanwhile, Trump’s claim that increased revenue from the tariffs would help eliminate (or at least reduce) our national debt hasn’t panned out. In 2018, Trump’s administration began hiking tariffs on aluminum, steel and many other products, launching what became a global trade war with China, the European Union and other countries.

The tariffs did bring in additional revenue. In fiscal 2019, they netted about $71 billion, up about $36 billion from President Barack Obama’s last year in office. But although $36 billion is a lot of money, it’s less than 1/750th of the national debt. That $36 billion could have covered a bit more than three weeks of interest on the national debt — that is, had Trump not unilaterally decided to send a chunk of the tariff revenue to farmers affected by his trade wars. Businesses that struggled as a result of the tariffs also paid fewer taxes, offsetting some of the increased tariff revenue.

By early 2019, the national debt had climbed to $22 trillion. Trump’s budget proposal for 2020 called it a “grave threat to our economic and societal prosperity” and asserted that the U.S. was experiencing a “national debt crisis.” However, that same budget proposal included substantial growth in the national debt.

By the end of 2019, the debt had risen to $23.2 trillion and more federal officials were sounding the alarm. “Not since World War II has the country seen deficits during times of low unemployment that are as large as those that we project — nor, in the past century, has it experienced large deficits for as long as we project,” Phillip Swagel, director of the CBO, said in January 2020.

Weeks later, COVID-19 erupted and made the financial situation far worse. As of Dec. 31, 2020, the national debt had jumped to $27.75 trillion, up 39% from $19.95 trillion when Trump was sworn in. The government ended its 2020 fiscal year with the portion of the national debt owed to investors, the metric favored by the CBO, at around 100% of GDP. The CBO had predicted less than a year earlier that it would take until 2030 to reach that approximate level of debt. Including the trillions owed to various governmental trust funds, the total debt is now about 130% of GDP.

Normally, this is where we’d give you Trump’s version of events. But we couldn’t get anyone to give us Trump’s side. Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, referred us to the Office of Management and Budget, which is a branch of the White House.

OMB didn’t respond to our requests. The Treasury directed us to comments made by OMB director Russell Vought in October, in which he predicted that as the pandemic eases and economic growth rebounds, the “fiscal picture” will improve. The OMB blamed legislators for deficits when Trump submitted his proposed 2021 budget: “Unfortunately, the Congress continues to reject any efforts to restrain spending. Instead, they have greatly contributed to the continued ballooning of Federal debt and deficits, putting the Nation’s fiscal future at risk.”

Still, the deficit growth under Trump has been historic. Steuerle, of the Tax Policy Center, has done a comparison of every American president using a metric called the “primary deficit.” It’s defined as the deficit minus interest costs, because interest is the only budget expense that presidents and Congress can’t control unless they want to do the unthinkable and default on the debt. Steuerle examined the records of 45 presidents to see how the primary deficit had shrunk or grown relative to the size of the economy between the first and final years of each president’s administration.

Trump had the third-biggest primary deficit growth, 5.2% of GDP, behind only George W. Bush (11.7%) and Abraham Lincoln (9.4%). Bush, of course, not only passed a big tax cut, as Trump has, but also launched two wars, which greatly inflated the defense budget. Lincoln had to pay for the Civil War. By contrast, Trump’s wars have been almost entirely of the political variety.

Our national debt is now at its highest level relative to our economy since the end of World War II. After the war ended, the extraordinary military expenses disappeared, a postwar recovery began and the debt began to fall rapidly relative to the size of the economy.

But that’s not going to happen this time. When World War II ended 75 years ago, Social Security was in its infancy and Medicare didn’t exist. Today, many of our biggest and most rapidly growing expenses, especially Social Security and Medicare, are baked into the budget because of our nation’s aging population. These outlays are slated to rise sharply. Steuerle recently calculated that Social Security, health care and interest costs are projected to absorb 122% of the total growth in federal revenues from 2019 to 2030.

What’s more, our investment in the future — things like research and development, education, infrastructure, workforce training and such — is declining as a proportion of the budget. OMB data shows that in 1970, mandatory spending (such as Social Security and Medicare, but not including interest on the debt) and investment each made up around 30% of total federal spending. But as of 2019, the most recent available year, mandatory spending had doubled to around 61% of total federal spending while investment fell by more than half, to around 12.5%.

Mandatory Spending Outstrips Investment in the Future

Mandatory and investment spending as a percentage of total U.S. government spending from 1970 to 2019. Mandatory (also known as nondiscretionary) spending includes programs such as Social Security and Medicare, while investment includes infrastructure, research and development, education and training.

Source: Office of Management and Budget (Lena V. Groeger/ProPublica)

Spending more and more on past promises and shrinking the proportion of spending for the future doesn’t bode well for our kids and grandkids. Had Trump done what he said he’d do and paid off part of the national debt before COVID-19 struck rather than adding significantly to the debt, the situation would be considerably less dire. And had Trump done a better job of coping with COVID-19, the economic and human costs would’ve been greatly reduced.

In addition to forcing us to reduce the proportion of the budget spent on the future to help pay for the past, there’s a second reason that huge and growing budget deficits matter: interest costs.

Bigger debt ultimately means bigger interest costs, even in an era when the Federal Reserve has forced down Treasury rates to ultralow levels. The government’s interest cost (including interest paid to government trust funds) was around $523 billion in the 2020 fiscal year. That outstrips all spending on education, employment training, research and social services, Treasury data shows.

Interest costs are way below where they’d be if the Fed hadn’t forced rates down to try to stimulate the economy and mitigate the impact of the pandemic. One-year Treasury securities cost taxpayers a minuscule 0.10% in interest at year-end, down from 1.59% at the end of 2019. The 10-year Treasury rate was 0.93%, down from 1.92%.

In late December, the Fed reported boosting its Treasury holdings by more than $2 trillion from a year earlier. The increase is primarily in longer-term securities. That has kept the federal government from having to raise trillions of dollars in the capital markets, and therefore has kept longer-term interest rates way below where they would otherwise be.

But unless something changes, even the Fed’s promise to keep interest rates near current levels for several years won’t fend off future problems. Most of the government’s borrowing to fund pandemic relief has been shorter-term borrowing that will have to be refinanced in the coming years. If rates rise, so will the government’s interest expense.

Even with rates where they are, interest on the debt is already going to be the fastest-growing budget category this decade, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which tracks the issue. Annual net interest costs are projected to double in 10 years and grow so large beyond 2030 that interest will become a driving factor in annual deficit growth, according to Peterson estimates.

Listen to what CBO Director Swagel had to say on the subject in a report to congressional Republicans in December: “Although the current low interest rates indicate that the debt is manageable for now and that the United States is not facing an immediate fiscal crisis, in which interest rates abruptly escalated or other disruptions occurred, the risk and potential budgetary consequences of such a crisis become greater over time.”

Trump was asked about this risk during a virtual discussion with the Economic Club of New York last October. “If we have another stimulus bill out of Congress, are you worried that the entire amount of federal debt will be too large for us to pay off in a sensible way?” asked David Rubenstein, a private equity executive.

Trump answered by falsely claiming that the U.S. was starting to pay off the national debt before the pandemic, and he claimed that future economic growth would let it do so. “I think you’re going to see tremendous growth, David, and the growth is going to get it done,” Trump said.

Two months later, when Congress finally approved $900 billion of economic stimulus that is being financed with debt, Trump challenged Congress to spend — and borrow — even more. Then he went golfing.

This story was co-published with The Washington Post.

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How to deal with the social media monster: Biden should revoke Section 230

Strategic Intervention Paper. Direction of Intervention: US Into US.

The beautiful dream of an open and free internet, serving as a global agora of unlimited free speech to provide for more popular participation in U.S. democracy, just crashed and burned one more time. 

The gripping images of a mob ransacking the U.S. Capitol are evidence enough of the destructive potential when you hand to a callous, egomaniacal demagogue unlimited access to what has been nobly called “social media.”

Let’s drop the outdated warm, friendly-sounding misnomer of “social” media. 

Not “social media”: But “Big Tech” media

But there is little that is “social” about it. In reality, this new media, which relies on hyper-monetized digital portals that deliver a gushing firehose of misinformation and disinformation, represent Big Tech media 

And the companies that operate them — Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube and more — have stood by haplessly for years as President Donald Trump and others have abused their services. 

Of course, those companies were quite happy to rake in advertising dollars, as their users stayed glued to the train wreck that has become U.S. politics.

Playing with Democracy

Since the birth of Big Tech Media ten years ago, the 240-year-old American republic has been subjected to a grand experiment. 

Can a nation’s news and information infrastructure, which is a lifeblood of any democracy, be dependent on digital technologies that allow unlimited audience size — combined with frictionless “virality” and algorithmic (non-human) curation of massive volumes of mis- and disinformation?

Digital Frankensteins

The world has never before seen media and communication technologies like those used by Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter and all their kin. 

The evidence of the damage to the social, economic, political and cultural fabric that they systematically trigger has become frighteningly clear. This grand experiment has veered off course, like a Frankenstein monster marauding across the landscape. 

High time for a reset

As to the hot-button issue at hand, revoking of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, it is more than ironic that this law — contrary to its official name — has allowed the Big Tech Media platforms to have near blanket immunity — even as they acted in a very corrosive fashion. 

To his credit, President-elect Joe Biden previously called for a crackdown on Big Tech — including revoking Section 230. But the Democrats should have acted much earlier, say in 2009, when Hillary Clinton — then the new U.S. Secretary of State — called for a “reset” to improve Russia relations.

The United States of today would be in far better shape if we as a nation had focused back then instead on a great reset with the Big Tech companies.

But that was impossible at the time — not least because the Democratic Party had discovered the deep coffers of the Silicon Valley moguls as a great source of campaign cash, as well as a revolving door for highly lucrative employment for their own political staffers. 

Facebook as the main culprit and target

So hopefully the Biden administration has more clarity than the Obama team, because it is time to hit reset in a major way. 

Not only to save our republic, but also to provide the best chance to redesign these digital media technologies — so that we rediscover the promise and decrease the dangers.

Facebook is no longer simply a “social networking” website, it is the largest media giant in the history of the world — a combination publisher and broadcaster — with approximately 2.6 billion regular users, and billions more on the Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram. 

That’s a huge chunk of humanity’s global population of 8 billion. 

COVID 19 misinformation

As the world has been coping with a global pandemic, a mere 100 pieces of COVID 19 misinformation on Facebook were shared 1.7 million times and had 117 million views.

That is far more viewers than the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, ABC News, Fox News and CNN combined.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg excels in appearing both clueless and doe-like in his appearances before the U.S. Congress. 

Yet, as the Wall Street Journal reports that in 2018, Facebook executives scaled back a successful effort to make the site less divisive. Why? Because it was decreasing their audience share.

De facto media, but without any regulation or liability

Traditional media are subject to certain laws and regulations — including a degree of liability over what they push into the world. 

While there is much to criticize about mainstream media and corporate broadcasters, at least they use humans to curate the news, and pick and choose what’s in and out of the news stream. 

That results in a degree of accountability — including potentially libel lawsuits and other forms of Madisonian-like checks and balances. 

Algorithm curators are on automatic pilot

But with Big Tech Media, it’s the wild wild West. In order to make the most out of their advertising-on-steroids machine, Facebook, Google and Twitter use robot algorithm curators that are on automatic pilot. 

That is eerily like killer drones for which no human bears responsibility or liability — and is dangerous in a democracy. 

Non-human curation, when combined with unlimited audience size and frictionless amplification, has completely failed as a foundation for a democratic republic’s media infrastructure. It is time for a major reset.

Revoke Section 230 now, as a first step…

President Biden should start with revoking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. 

There are many pros and cons to this strategy — endlessly debated by leaders and organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (con) and long-time Biden advisor Bruce Reed (pro). 

Revoking Section 230 is not a perfect solution, but it would make Big Tech Media more responsible, more deliberative and potentially liable for the worst of the toxic content — including illegal content — that is published, broadcast and promoted by their media platforms. 

… but more needs to be done

Yet let’s be clear: Some of the worst outrages that we have seen would likely not be impacted by 230’s revocation. 

For example, even as invaders dressed like Viking barbarians were ransacking the House Speaker’s office, President Donald Trump encouraged his quasi-storm troopers by tweeting:

These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots. 

He posted that on Twitter and his Facebook pages. 

False and provocative

While that statement about a stolen election is false and provocative, other media outlets publish untrue nonsense all the time. 

It would be difficult to legally prove that any particular individuals or institutions were harmed or incited by this or many of the president’s other outrageous statements. 

The same goes for President Trump’s inflammatory speech given the morning before the riots, in which he stated “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength,” as he encouraged protesters to march to the Capitol. 

That incitement was broadcast over YouTube to over a million viewers, but revoking 230 wouldn’t have made Google liable. 

Facebook: Worshipping money, always late to act

Revoking 230 probably would not have impacted Facebook’s outrageous non-decision — yet another one — to wait until the day of the terrorist attack to ban a pro-Trump page, called Red-State Secession, with 8,000 followers, that was used to organize and incite violence at the demonstrations. 

Group members shared home addresses of perceived “enemies” in Washington, D.C. — including federal judges and members of Congress — with comments featuring photos of assault rifles and other weapons, violent emojis and cajoling people to occupy the Capitol and be “prepared to use force to defend civilization.” 

Global carnage from fanning the flames of racism

We have seen other outrages which probably would not have been impacted by revocation of Section 230. 

Big Tech Media has been used for disinformation campaigns in over 70 countries to undermine elections — even helping elect a quasi-dictator in the Philippines— to widely amplify extremism, such as child abusers and pornographers livestreaming the most despicable acts perpetrated against victims. 

There was also the Christchurch mass murderer of Muslims livestreaming his carnage over Facebook, that then was seen on YouTube by millions. 

Losing Section 230 immunity wouldn’t impact the fact that a majority of YouTube climate change videos denies the science, and 70% of what YouTube’s 2 billion userswatch comes from its recommendation algorithm. 

Devilishly irresponsible, but hyper-effective

Nor would it change that a mere $42,000 worth of Facebook ads promoting disinformation about climate change reached approximately 8 million people, especially targeted at older men in rural areas. 

Let’s be clear: Facebook, Google and Twitter’s “engagement algorithms” recommend and amplify sensationalized “crazy town” user content for one reason — to maximize profits by increasing users’ screen time and exposure to more ads. 

Audience share above all else

The recent use of warning labels are weak substitutes for actual curation. These greedy companies — which are ostensibly liberal to progressive politically — exhibit an authoritarian tendency to destroy not just the social and political order, but the rationality of Western societies. 

All their fake noble pretensions about an “open and free internet” notwithstanding, their primary business strategy has resulted in the dividing, distracting and outraging of people to the point where society is now plagued by a fractured basis for shared truths, sensemaking and common ground. 

And yet, the Big Tech companies still refuse to de-weaponize their platforms. Ejecting Donald Trump from their services does nothing to change their destructive business model. 

All it does is to remove the most visible evidence of it. And in that sense, it is a self-serving act that should fool no one. 

A better model: Investor-owned utilities

So revoking Section 230 is just a first step toward reining in these dangerous technologies. What else needs to be done? 

To answer this, we have to realize that these businesses are creating the new public infrastructure of the digital age. So the federal government should require a whole new business model: Treat these companies more like investor-owned utilities.

Historically, that has been the approach used by the government in other industries — such as telephone, railroad and power generation — which were either monopolies or oligopolies. 

Ironically, even Mark Zuckerberg himself has suggested such an approach.

Digital licenses to establish new rules

As utilities, they would be guided by a digital license — just like traditional brick-and-mortar companies must apply for various licenses and permits — that defines the rules and regulations of the new business model.

For example, these companies never asked for permission to start sucking up our private data — or to track our physical locations. 

Nor did they ask if they could mass collect the data behind every “like,” “share” and “follow” into psychographic profiles that can be used to target each user. 

They simply started this data grab secretly — forging their destructive brand of “surveillance capitalism.” 

They know what you like, what you think, where you go, which church, restaurants and clubs you frequent — they know you better than your spouse or therapist. And that is pretty alarming. 

Fight surveillance capitalism

Now that we know, should society continue to allow this? Shouldn’t the default regulation require platforms to obtain users’ permission to collect any of our personal data, i.e., opt-in rather than opt-out? 

It seems clear that the status quo’s dangers outweigh any benefits — such as hyper-targeted advertising that allegedly caters to our individual desires. 

A Biden alliance with Europe

To strengthen the United States’ defenses in that critical regard, it should help the incoming Biden Administration that the European Union — through its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — has shifted the playing field.

But the EU is making a mistake with its recently proposed Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act — which rely too much on a “competition and consumers” frame.

This approach is not at all well-suited to dealing with the extreme toxicity of the digital media platform business model. 

Both the EU and the Biden administration need to incorporate other frames, besides a utility model, such as a “product liability” or a fiduciary “duty of care” frame. 

This is a kind of Hippocratic oath and precautionary principle that entails a legal responsibility to “first, do no harm.” British authorities have been trying to erect the foundations of this approach.

Promoting competition and innovation

As was the case, for example, with AT&T and the telecom industry, the new model should bring about competition by limiting the mega-scale audience size of these Big Tech media machines. 

A number of lead organizations have called for an anti-monopoly break-up of these companies — like AT&T once was split into the Baby Bells. 

This is a useful approach to take, but let’s be clear: If Facebook is forced to spin off WhatsApp and its two billion users, and nothing else about the business model changes, that will just result in another new media behemoth. 

More competition is good, but far less so if the newly emerged (still quite) Big Tech firms are competing according to the same market rules upon which the companies themselves have decided. 

Beyond reducing the size, the new utility model also should restrain the use of specific “engagement” techniques that are contributing to social isolation, teen depression and suicide, as well as damaging U.S. democracy.

These techniques include hyper-targeting of content, automated recommendations, addictive behavioral nudges (like autoplay and pop-up screens), as well as the dark design patterns and filter bubbles that allow manipulation. 

A Digital Decency Act

The United States should also update its laws to ensure they apply to the online world. 

For example, the United States has laws like the Children’s Television Act that since 1990 has restricted violence and advertising for Saturday morning cartoons and other children’s programming. 

Yet Google’s YouTube/YouTubeKids has violated these — and other — rules for many years, resulting in online lawlessness. 

The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees children’s programming, should examine how to apply existing law to the online digital platforms.

Similarly, the Federal Elections Commission should rein in the quasi-lawless world of online political ads and donor reporting — which has far fewer rules and less transparency than ads in broadcasting and traditional media sources. 

How subversive Big Tech media really are

These frequent outrages against our democracy — and humanity — are supposedly the price we must pay for being able to post our summer vacation and new puppy pics to our “friends.” 

Or for the neighbor’s kid’s dance video going viral, or for political dissidents and whistleblowers to alert the world to their just causes. 

Those are all important uses — but the price being paid is very high. We can do better. 

Ultimately, these companies have pursued a business model that, soon after the end of Soviet-style communism, have caused our Western societies to be transformed into a model of electronic surveillance that had always been the dream of totalitarian dictators. 

Choosing naivete or realism?

These “Soviet Valley” businesses are creating the new infrastructure of the digital age — including search engines, global portals for news and networking, web-based movies, music and live streaming, GPS-based navigation apps, online commercial marketplaces and digital labor market platforms. 

They tell us that they are providing all of this for free, that all we have to do is give them unlimited access to our private data. But that has turned out to be a very high price indeed. 

Especially as people increase the use of these services and technologies in their daily lives, which are being interwoven ever deeper into the very fabric of our societies.

Toward a new business model

A new business model for this digital infrastructure — guided by the right guardrails — would be able to retain the valuable uses while reducing the danger. 

Like the promise of the internet itself, Facebook, Google and Twitter started out small — and then blew up into monopolistic giants. 

They have established their own toxic and greedy rules that are a threat to our democracy — as well as to free market competition. This is one of the gravest oversights in the history of American democracy. 

For societies long allied with the United States — especially Europe — willful American ignorance about these firms’ hyper-intrusive practices has become part of a growing transatlantic rift. 

The European Union has earned a reputation as the world’s foremost regulator of Big Tech companies. Now, it’s time for the United States to do its part. 

It is time for the days when these monopoly companies self-regulate themselves to come to an end.

Author’s note: Thanks to Stephan-Götz Richter for his invaluable editorial input and his shaping of the broader global argument.

This article is republished from The Globalist: On a daily basis, we rethink globalization and how the world really hangs together.  Thought-provoking cross-country comparisons and insights from contributors from all continents. Exploring what unites and what divides us in politics and culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  And sign up for our highlights email here.

DC’s top prosecutor calls Donald Trump Jr. for questioning in inauguration probe

The D.C. attorney general’s office has notified the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr., that he is wanted for questioning over alleged mishandling of his father’s inauguration funds from 2017.

The probe comes off the back of a lawsuit leveled in January of last year, in which D.C.’s Attorney General Karl Racine accused the Trump Organization of mishandling over $1 million raised by the Presidential Inauguration Committee. In the 18-page lawsuit, Racine claimed the Trump Organization “grossly overpaid” for President Trump’s inauguration in D.C.’s Trump Hotel back in 2017, spending $175,000 per day for ballroom space and $300,000 in total for food and drinks. 

Last year, Racine reportedly interviewed the chairman of the Inaugural Committee Tom Barrack, as well as the President’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who called the investigation “another politically motivated demonstration of vindictiveness & waste of taxpayer dollars.”

Now, after finding a new piece of evidence for the case, Racine is requesting an interview with Don Jr., who the attorney general claims “improperly wasted” nearly $50,000 of the Inaugural Committee’s fund to cover a block of hotel rooms for his college friend, Gentry Beach. According to Racine, this expenditure should have been paid for by the Trump Organization as opposed to the Committee, a tax-exempt non-profit. 

“That’s why the presidential inauguration commission paid so much money for rooms and event space that were far above market rate during the inauguration,” explained Racine, “And that’s why we just amended our complaint to include that Donald Trump Jr‘s good friend essentially had a free set of rooms for a period of time during the inauguration for no good not-for-profit purpose.”

Racine details that the transaction occurred by way of a contractual agreement facilitated by Donald Trump Jr.’s personal assistant. However, the Inaugural Committee was never a part of the contract. So, when a collection agency contacted Committee official Rick Gates after the Trump Organization failed to pay an invoice for the hotel expenses, Gates passed the invoice along to people working in the inaugural’s finances, sounding alarms for what are likely to be more financial improprieties. 

Racine is demanding that the Trump Organization refund the benefits it received from the Inaugural Committee since there are laws barring charity leaders from enriching themselves through their own organization.

“We’re before a court and at the end of the day the court will decide,” Mr. Racine stated, “But the evidence is clear. The Trump business and the Trump family used the not-for-profit to profit themselves.”

 

“No one took us seriously”: Black cops warned about racist Capitol Police officers for years

When Kim Dine took over as the new chief of the U.S. Capitol Police in 2012, he knew he had a serious problem.

Since 2001, hundreds of Black officers had sued the department for racial discrimination. They alleged that white officers called Black colleagues slurs like the N-word and that one officer found a hangman’s noose on his locker. White officers were called “huk lovers” or “FOGs” — short for “friends of gangsters” — if they were friendly with their Black colleagues. Black officers faced “unprovoked traffic stops” from fellow Capitol Police officers. One Black officer claimed he heard a colleague say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.”

In case after case, agency lawyers denied wrongdoing. But in an interview, Dine said it was clear he had to address the department’s charged racial climate. He said he promoted a Black officer to assistant chief, a first for the agency, and tried to increase diversity by changing the force’s hiring practices. He also said he hired a Black woman to lead a diversity office and created a new disciplinary body within the department, promoting a Black woman to lead it.

“There is a problem with racism in this country, in pretty much every establishment that exists,” said Dine, who left the agency in 2016. “You can always do more in retrospect.”

Whether the Capitol Police managed to root out racist officers will be one of many issues raised as Congress investigates the agency’s failure to prevent a mob of Trump supporters from attacking the Capitol while lawmakers inside voted to formalize the electoral victory of President-elect Joe Biden.

Already, officials have suspended several police officers for possible complicity with insurrectionists, one of whom was pictured waving a Confederate battle flag as he occupied the building. One cop was captured on tape seeming to take selfies with protesters, while another allegedly wore a red “Make America Great Again” hat as he directed protesters around the Capitol building. While many officers were filmed fighting off rioters, at least 12 others are under investigation for possibly assisting them.

Two current Black Capitol Police officers told BuzzFeed News that they were angered by leadership failures that they said put them at risk as racist members of the mob stormed the building. The Capitol Police force is only 29% Black in a city that’s 46% Black. By contrast, as of 2018, 52% of Washington Metropolitan police officers were Black. The Capitol Police are comparable to the Metropolitan force in spending, employing more than 2,300 people and boasting an annual budget of about a half-billion dollars.

The Capitol Police did not immediately respond to questions for this story.

Sharon Blackmon-Malloy, a former Capitol Police officer who was the lead plaintiff in the 2001 discrimination lawsuit filed against the department, said she was not surprised that pro-Trump rioters burst into the Capitol last week.

In her 25 years with the Capitol Police, Blackmon-Malloy spent decades trying to raise the alarm about what she saw as endemic racism within the force, even organizing demonstrations where Black officers would return to the Capitol off-duty, protesting outside the building they usually protect.

The 2001 case, which started with more than 250 plaintiffs, remains pending. As recently as 2016, a Black female officer filed a racial discrimination complaint against the department.

“Nothing ever really was resolved. Congress turned a blind eye to racism on the Hill,” Blackmon-Malloy, who retired as a lieutenant in 2007, told ProPublica. She is now vice president of the U.S. Capitol Black Police Association, which held 16 demonstrations protesting alleged discrimination between 2013 and 2018. “We got Jan. 6 because no one took us seriously.”

Retired Lt. Frank Adams sued the department in 2001 and again in 2012 for racial discrimination. A Black, 20-year veteran of the force, Adams supervised mostly white officers in the patrol division. He told ProPublica he endured or witnessed racism and sexism constantly. He said that before he joined the division, there was a policy he referred to as “meet and greet,” where officers were directed to stop any Black person on the Hill. He also said that in another unit, he once found a cartoon on his desk of a Black man ascending to heaven only to be greeted by a Ku Klux Klan wizard. When he complained to his superior officers, he said he was denied promotions and training opportunities, and suffered other forms of retaliation.

In an interview, he drew a direct line between racism in the Capitol Police and the events that unfolded last week. He blamed Congress for not listening to Black members of the force years ago.

“They only become involved in oversight when it’s in the news cycle,” said Adams, who retired in 2011. “They ignored the racism happening in the department. They ignored the hate.”

The department’s record in other areas of policing have drawn criticism as well.

In 2015, a man landed a gyrocopter on the Capitol lawn — top officials didn’t know the airborne activist was coming until minutes before he touched down. In 2013, when a lone gunman opened fire at the nearby Navy Yard, killing 12 people, the Capitol Police were criticized for standing on the sidelines. The force’s leadership board later determined its actions were justified.

Last month, days after a bloody clash on Dec. 12 between militant Trump supporters and counterprotesters, Melissa Byrne and Chibundu Nnake were entering the Capitol when they saw a strangely dressed man just outside the building, carrying a spear.

He was a figure they would come to recognize — Jacob Chansley, the QAnon follower in a Viking outfit who was photographed last week shouting from the dais of the Senate chamber.

They alerted the Capitol Police at the time, as the spear seemed to violate the complex’s weapons ban, but officers dismissed their concern, they said.

One officer told them that Chansley had been stopped earlier in the day, but that police “higher ups” had decided not to do anything about him.

We don’t “perceive it as a weapon,” Nnake recalled the officer saying of the spear.

Chansley told the Globe and Mail’s Adrian Morrow that Capitol Police had allowed him in the building on Jan. 6, which would normally include passing through a metal detector, although he was later charged with entering a restricted building without lawful authority, violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. As of Tuesday, he had not yet entered a plea.

For Byrne and Nnake, their interactions with the “QAnon Shaman” on Dec. 14 highlighted what they perceive as double standards in how the Capitol Police interact with the public.

Like many people who regularly encounter the force, Nnake and Byrne said they were accustomed to Capitol officers enforcing rules aggressively — later that day, Nnake was told that he would be tackled if he tried to advance beyond a certain point. “As a Black man, when I worked on the Hill, if I forgot a badge, I couldn’t get access anywhere,” he told ProPublica.

Congress, which controls the agency and its budget, has a mixed record of oversight. For the most part, Congress has been deferential toward the force, paying attention to its workings only after serious security failures, and even then, failing to meaningfully hold its leaders accountable.

Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat from D.C. who is a nonvoting member of Congress, told ProPublica she believes a national commission should be formed to investigate what occurred at the Capitol on Jan. 6, similar to what followed 9/11.

“Congress deserves some of the blame,” she told ProPublica. “We have complete control over the Capitol Police. … Long-term concerns with security have been raised, and they’ve not been dealt with in the past.”

The force has also suffered a spate of recent, internal scandals that may prove pertinent as Congress conducts its investigation.

Capitol Police officers accidently left several guns in bathrooms throughout the building in 2015 and 2019; in one instance, the loaded firearm was discovered by a small child.

The agency has been criticized for a lack of transparency for years. Capitol Police communications and documents are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act and, unlike many local law enforcement agencies, it has no external watchdog specifically assigned to investigate and respond to community complaints. The force has not formally addressed the public since the riot last week.

“All law enforcement is opaque,” said Jonathan M. Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. “At least most local police departments are subject to some kind of civilian oversight, but federal police agencies are left to operate in the shadows.”

The agency’s past troubles have rarely resulted in reform, critics said.

After the April 2015 gyrocopter incident, Congress held a hearing to examine how 61-year-old postal worker and activist Doug Hughes managed to land his aircraft after he livestreamed his flight. Dozens of reporters and news cameras assembled in front of the Capitol to watch the stunt, which was designed to draw attention to the influence of money in politics. Capitol Police did not learn of the incoming flight until a reporter reached out to them for comment, minutes before Hughes landed.

Dine defended the force’s response to the incident, pointing out that Hughes was promptly arrested and no one was hurt.

Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, then the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, harshly criticized the department and other federal agencies for what he perceived as an intelligence failure.

“The Capitol Police is terrible and pathetic when it comes to threat assessment,” Chaffetz told ProPublica in an interview. “They have a couple people dedicated to it, but they’re overwhelmed. Which drives me nuts. … It’s not been a priority for leadership, on both sides of the aisle.” He said he is not aware of any serious changes to the force’s intelligence gathering following the debacle.

Norton, who also pressed Dine at the hearing, told ProPublica the intelligence lapses surrounding the gyrocopter landing should be considered a “forerunner” to last week’s riot.

“For weeks, these people had been talking about coming to the Capitol to do as much harm as they can,” Norton said. “Everyone knew it. Except the Capitol Police.” Reports show the force had no contingency plan to deal with an escalation of violence and mayhem at last week’s rally, even though the FBI and the New York Police Department had warned them it could happen.

Law enforcement experts said that the agency is in a difficult position. While it has sole responsibility for protecting the Capitol, it must work with other nearby federal law enforcement agencies, Washington’s Metropolitan Police and the National Guard in case of emergencies.

In an interview, Nick Zotos, a former D.C. National Guard commander who now works for the Department of Homeland Security, said that the roughly two dozen agencies responsible for public safety in Washington can cause territorial disputes, finger-pointing and poor communication.

“This is not a D.C. thing, necessarily, although it’s probably the worst in D.C.,” Zotos said. “Police departments just don’t play with each other nicely.”

Blackmon-Malloy told ProPublica that divisions within the Capitol Police could be just as dangerous, not only for Congress but for Black officers themselves. “Now you got to go to work on the 20th,” she told ProPublica, alluding to the inauguration. “And stand next to someone who you don’t even know if they have your back.”

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Climate change could take weather patterns back to the Pliocene

The West Coast drinks from the wind. When westerly gales carry humid air from the Pacific Ocean into the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade mountain ranges, the West turns green, orchards blossom, and reservoirs swell. When those westerlies deflect to the north, hills turn brown, cities ban sprinklers, and forest fires flare.

There are consistent bands of westerly winds at about 40 degrees latitude in both hemispheres — near San Francisco in the northern hemisphere, and near Concepción, Chile, in the south. Over the past few decades scientists have seen these westerlies creeping toward the poles. If this shift is a result of climate change and continues, it could have profound implications: Over the next century, Seattle might become as dry as Los Angeles, and California could settle into an era of unending drought.

So are the westerlies going to keep drifting away from the equator? Well, if you want to know how the climate-changed future will unfold, look at the past: In the Pliocene, 2.6 to 5 million years ago, carbon dioxide levels were about what they are today but with warmer temperatures. And a new paper, just published in the journal Nature, provides evidence that back then the westerlies were closer to the poles.

The scientists didn’t intend to chart the paths of ancient winds. They started off by studying the dust blown off the steppes of Asia that has swirled down for millenia to form the muddy bottom of the Pacific Ocean. While examining the layers of sediment on the ocean floor, they realized they were able to spot a change in the prehistoric winds.

“As we are looking at these dust records, we saw that the dust goes up a lot 2.7 million years ago,” as the Pliocene climate was cooling, said Jordan Abell, the paper’s lead author and a doctoral candidate in earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Back then, the climate took a cold turn. As temperatures cooled and ice-caps grew over the north pole, the winds began dumping a lot more dust into a previously windless site closer to the equator.

This makes some intuitive sense. Weather tends to happen in the spots where warm air meets cold. “The weather is more intense where the temperature gradient is steep,” Abell said. “When you have ice over your poles it’s going to cool the air and move that gradient toward the equator.”

Now we may be witnessing the phenomenon in reverse: As ice caps dwindle, prevailing winds could slide away from the equator. That doesn’t guarantee it’s going to happen in the near future. This paper isn’t about how the weather patterns will shift in the next generation, it’s about how things are likely to change over the next century. In the long term, the trajectory is not back to the future, but forward toward the Pliocene.

“One Night in Miami,” Regina King’s stunning directorial debut, makes icons human

In "One Night in Miami," director Regina King's imagined version of the February 25, 1964 encounter between four icons, Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) and soul legend Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) head out to a local liquor store to grab a bottle. It's a clear night, and they encounter a pair of young men who first ogle Cooke's stunning sports car before exploding with glee at recognizing the boxer off of his first world championship win.

Cooke sends the boys off with cash to buy something for themselves, and the pair sit for a moment in Cooke's fancy ride and process what waits for them back in the hotel room where their two other companions Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) are waiting.

Malcolm and Cooke are fresh off of an intense argument, with the firebrand accusing the crossover singer of failing to use his success to help the civil rights cause. The liquor store run is Cooke's way of retreating; back in his car expresses his frustration to Clay.

Playing the role of a wise corner man to Cooke's fighter, Clay tells the singer to shrug it off. "We have to be there for each other. Because can't nobody else understand what it's like being one of us," Clay says, "You know: Young, Black, righteous, famous, unapologetic."

Scenes and moments like these make it easy to understand why Regina King chose Kemp Powers' stage play as her directorial debut. King might as well be the embodiment of that truth, a multiple Emmy, Golden Globe and Oscar winner who found her wings by way of projects that tell the world about itself past, present and future.

Here King lets narrative ingenuity permeate each frame as she remains behind the camera, drawing us inside this circle of legends, each of whom represents distinct aspects of Black identity and struggle.

"One Night in Miami" is expressly about these men, and it is not the first work about three out of four of them. But it may be the first one that lets us know them in ways previously not revealed both despite and because Kemp stakes his vision between entry and exit points that are confirmed history.

The story is based on the night following Clay's unexpected victory over reigning heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in February 1964, a bout that drew Brown, Cooke and Malcolm to Miami, Florida to cheer him on. The next morning Clay confirmed his conversation to Islam at a press conference, reintroducing himself as Cassius X. (He wouldn't officially be known as Muhammad Ali until some time later.) As for what transpired during the time they spent together in the interim, no recordings exist.

But Kemp's conjecture comes from a place of profound understanding about the burden of greatness and the unique exertion bearing it presents to a Black man, even legends in the making like them. Kemp writes this thesis for their individual personalities, and King shapes them for the screen not as icons but as men.

Cassius Clay's win is only one significant moment linked to that gathering, which Kemp presents as an unsung point where multiple histories converge.

With the majority of the action in its 114 minute runtime taking place in a modest motel room, King and cinematographer Tami Reiker cannot help but emphasize the physical and spiritual closeness of these men, with Malcolm's passion serving as a binding, strengthening tie in some scenes and divider in others. Simple though the setting may be, Reiker films the interior with a glow and the exterior with a buoyancy to which the figures escape, as Clay and Cooke do, or regroup.

Malcolm would make his pilgrimage to Mecca and publish his memoirs shortly afterward, and a year after their meeting he'd be assassinated. Jim Brown's first starring role in a movie happened that same year, launching an acting career that carried him through several decades during and after his professional football career ended. Sam Cooke was already a successful hitmaker who would release "A Change Is Gonna Come" that same year 1964 . . . and sadly, be killed by a motel manager in December.

Kemp uses the fact that Brown's movie debut and Cooke's stirring social justice piece also came out in 1964 to inspire the tense direction in which several conversations head.

Malcolm knows he's being followed. Sam is wealthy and famous, and can't even book his own room at the fancy hotel where he's staying. Brown is a record holder in the NFL and the pride of his hometown, according to a white supposed friend of the family who he visits as the film starts. The man, played by Beau Bridges, is gracious and smiles broadly as he showers the athlete with laurels, and he sounds equally polite when he refuses to let him in his home, using a dehumanizing epithet that rolls of his tongue sweetly as peach nectar.

Hodge, it must be said, showcases his astonishing talent for blaring his character's emotion through his eyes and face even as he's quietly speaking his lines. That silent expressiveness consistently powers all of best performances, and he pours a heat and a stoic fortitude into it that draws your attention whenever he's featured.

The personal nature of these talks, even at their harshest, always return to the timeless question of what the successful and famous owe to those who are struggling without the benefit of fame. This is a film that's careful to point out that celebrity only liberates Black stars to a limited degree and, in some cases, makes the target on their backs even brighter.

By virtue of its premise, "One Night in Miami" is a showcase for its cast. Where most historical fictions tend to expand upon documentation to tell a story, and where the actors might consult photos or video footage to sculpt their portrayals, this film finds life in guesswork at what transpires away from the public, from cameras, where there's no need to put on a show.

In doing this the actors, writer and director prioritize the humanity in these men as opposed to presenting yet another impersonation of an icon.

This approach is most apparent in Goree's take on Clay and Ben-Adir's recreation of Malcolm, two figures that have been played by two of Hollywood's biggest Black stars. The actors retain enough of each man's distinct idiolect for us to recognize their individual manners of speaking, but they also expand upon the familiar curves and edges in common impersonations to convey a sense of who they were and how they may have behaved in quieter moments.

Goree is playing a version of the boxing legend that is newly famous yet still humorously devoid of humility. Ben-Adir, who recently played Barack Obama in Showtime's "The Comey Rule," contrasts this with a version of Malcolm aware of his mortality and the danger he has courted by speaking the truth to white America. This lends a gentle approach to his performance, showing Malcolm as a father and a husband worried about the direction the struggle is headed in and the danger it poses.

But here the actor steers into the gentle passion of Malcolm instead of drawing inspiration from the grim-set face popularized by history book photos, and this enriches the character in fresh ways.

Odom, however, steals the spotlight in a moment when it seems as if Malcolm is set on pounding him into the dirt. When Malcolm follows up a blistering dismissal of his greatest hits by playing Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In the Wind" and asking him why a white man is writing lyrics that do a better job of speaking to Black folks than he does, Odom launches Cooke out of the chair where he's been taking it and turns it around: Why can't Malcolm respect his focus on business investment, ownership and expansion? And isn't that as crucial to uplifting Black Americans as words and songs? Odom recites this with the energy of a swordsman dueling to the death, and it's incredible to watch.

Conflict makes up only a small part of "One Night in Miami," yet another blessing King gives us in making this film. There are so many Black movies inspired by history that are colored by pain and so few that rest easily and securely in celebration, leaving the viewer with a sense of blossoming joy and pride.

At one point, one of them observes that Black power, a phrase white Americans grow to fear, is not offensive or aggressive. Power just means a world where we're safe to be ourselves, he says. This is King tapping into her power as a director for the first time, and what we've seen makes us excited to plug in to future efforts.

"One Night in Miami" is currently streaming on Amazon.

NRA files for bankruptcy after New York state attorney general seeks to divide gun group

The National Rifle Association on Friday announced that it was declaring bankruptcy.

The NRA is incorporated in New York, and the state’s attorney general, Letitia James is seeking to dissolve the group. In response, the NRA is trying to restructure the organization as part of a move to Texas, where the apparently believe they will receive less scrutiny of potential lawbreaking.

Here’s some of what people where saying about the situation:

Why physicist Avi Loeb thinks there’s a “serious possibility” that ‘Oumuamua was an alien spacecraft

Are we alone in the universe?

It’s a question humans have been asking for thousands of years—but when a bizarrely fast, cigar-shaped interstellar object jetted past Earth on its trip through our solar system, Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes scientists weren’t ready to seriously consider that it was of artificial origin. But Loeb is beyond consideration — he says it’s very possible that ‘Oumuamua (pronounced “oh moo ah moo ah”) was an interstellar spacecraft. 

Back in October 2017, a postdoctoral researcher named Robert Weryk at the University of Hawaii was sifting through the usual data stream from the Pan-STARRS astronomical survey of the sky when he noticed an unexpected object. It appeared to be highly elongated, like a stick, with a long axis 10 times longer than its short axis — unprecedented for an asteroid. Some hypothesized that ‘Oumuamua swung towards our solar system as a result of a gravitational slingshot of a binary star system; others, that it might be an odd comet, though no tail was evident. Thus the search began to collect and analyze as much data as possible before it left our solar system.

Immediately upon discovering its physical properties, researchers realized its shape — which would minimize abrasions from interstellar gas and dust — would be ideal for an interstellar spacecraft. The idea understandably sent shockwaves through the scientific community and stoked controversy. Ultimately, scientists coalesced behind the idea that it was of natural origin, rather than artificial.  But Loeb, who is the former chair of astronomy at Harvard University, remains certain that it was something akin to a light sail — a form of interstellar propulsion — spacecraft created by an extraterrestrial civilization. So much so that he wrote a whole book about it.

That book would be “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” in which Loeb argues that the scientific community’s resistance to discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life has hindered taking seriously his hypothesis that ‘Oumuamua was an alien light sail. Loeb reflects on how what happened with ‘Oumuamua was a bit of a missed opportunity, and that academia must invest more in the search for life in our universe to better prepare us for another interstellar visitor. But perhaps, most importantly, in a time when Earth faces an urgent global warming crisis, Loeb says that it could be finding extraterrestrial life that saves us from ourselves.

As always, this interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What makes you think that ‘Omuamua was a light sail spacecraft created by an extraterrestrial civilization?

At first, astronomers assumed it must be a comet, because these are the objects that are most loosely bound to stars. We have mostly comets in the outer parts of the solar system. These are rocks covered with ice, and when they get close to a star they warm up, and the ice evaporates into a cometary tail.

It was natural to assume that about ‘Oumuamua, because it came from outside the solar system, so the assumption was it must be a comet. The problem with that was there was no cometary tail. Some people say, “okay it’s not a comet, maybe it’s just a rock.” But the problem is, about half a year later, it was reported that there was an excess push in addition to the force of gravity acting on it by the sun. It exhibited some additional force. Usually that force comes from the rocket effect of the cometary tail, but there was no cometary tail. So the question was, what produces this excess push?

Moreover, during the time that it was observed, the reflected sunlight [off of ‘Oumuamua] varied by a factor of 10. So, that implied that it has an extreme geometry. Even if you consider a razor-thin piece of paper tumbling in the wind, the amount of area that is projected in your direction is not varying by more than a factor of 10, because the chance of seeing it edge on is really small. It is tumbling in the wind. So it looked like this object has an extreme geometry. The most likely model that explains the reflective sunlight as a function of time — as it was doubling every eight hours — was that it has a flat, pancake-like geometry, not cigar-shaped the way it was depicted in some cartoons.

On top of that, it was on the shinier end of all the objects we have seen from the solar system. It also came from a special frame of reference that is called the Local Standard of Rest. That is sort of the galactic parking lot where, if you find a car, you don’t know what house it came from, because this is the frame of reference where you operate with the motion of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun. Only one in 500 stars is so much addressed relative to that frame as ‘Oumuamua was. So it was just like a buoy sitting on the surface of the ocean and then the solar system is like a giant ship bumping into it.

So there were many peculiar facts. I tried to explain the excess push, especially. The only thing I could think of is it comes from the reflection of sunlight.  Then it needed to be very thin, sort of like a sail on a boat that is pushed by wind. I couldn’t imagine a natural process that would make a lightsail, a sail that’s pushed by light. In fact, our civilization is currently pursuing this technology in space exploration.

If this object came from an artificial origin, the question is who sent it? I should say that in September of this year, 2020, there was another object discovered that exhibited an excess push. It was called 2020-SO by the Minor Planets Center that gives names to celestial objects. It turned out that this one ended up being a rocket booster from a failed mission of lunar lander, Surveyor II, that was launched in 1966. So astronomers figured out that it intercepted the Earth if you go back in time to 1966.

But this object actually also showed an excessive push, because it’s a hollow rocket booster that is very thin and pushed by sunlight. We know that it’s artificially made. It had no cometary tail. We know that we made it. So that provides evidence that we can tell the difference between a rock and an object that is pushed by sunlight. To me, it demonstrated the case that perhaps ‘Oumuamua was artificial, definitely not made by us. because it’s been only a few months close to us. We couldn’t even chase it with our best rockets.

That’s fascinating. Can you explain to our readers what is a light sail?

So a light sail is just like a sail on a boat that reflects the wind, the wind is pushing it. In the case of a light sail, it’s the light reflected off its surface that gives it the kick, the push. Light is made of particles called photons. Just like billiard balls bouncing off a wall, they exert some push on it. So the particles of light — photons — reflect off the surface and push and give it a kick.

The advantage of this technology is that you don’t need to carry the fuel with the spacecraft [as you do with rockets]. Rockets carry the fuel and they expel gas from the exhaust, and that’s how they get pushed forward, just like a jet plane. In the case of a light sail, it is light that is being reflected. That’s why you don’t carry your fuel. You can have a lightweight spacecraft. In principle, you can even reach the speed of light with this technology.

So, as you know, after your paper was published, another one was published in 2019 in Nature Astronomy. That paper proposed a natural origin, that ‘Oumuamua could have been a small asteroid that came from a solar system with a gas giant orbiting a star, and that it could have been fragmented and ejected into our solar system. Is there any part of you that thinks that’s still a possibility— why or why not?

No. And that is one out of three suggestions that were made by astronomers about the astral origin, and I’ll mention all three.

Great. 

The [theory] that you mentioned has to do with a disruption of an object that passes close to a star. There are problems with that scenario. First of all, the chance of coming close enough to a star to be disrupted like that is small. Most of [these] kinds of objects do not pass close to the star. So you need a huge population of objects to account for those that pass close to the star and fragment. The more important problem is that if you make shrapnel or fragments as the result of the destruction near a star, they would be elongated — like cigar shaped. The best model for ‘Oumuamua was that it was pancake-shaped. You can’t get that from the destruction of a bigger object. It’s not natural to get that.

So that’s my caveat about this scenario — that first, it’s unlikely that you would get so many — I mean, you need a lot of objects to explain that we detected ‘Oumuamua. More than one, you would expect naturally, given all the rocks that exist in planetary systems. Yet, this model even wants ‘Oumuamua-like objects to be produced very close to the host star. So that makes it even less likely to happen.

More importantly, the shape is the issue. How do you get pancake shape?

Then there is another suggestion of a natural origin which is that it’s a “dust bunny,” of the type that you find in a household. But it needs to be like a football size. The dust bunny, the collection of particles, is sort of like a cloud that then is 100 times less dense than air, more rarefied than air, so that sunlight can push it around. To me, that sounds not so plausible. This object was the size of a football field and it was tumbling around every eight hours. So making that out of a dust bunny, a cloud of dust particles, and imagining that this dust bunny would survive for millions of years in interstellar space — I find that hard to believe.

Then the third possibility that was suggested is that it’s frozen hydrogen; that it’s a hydrogen iceberg. We’ve never seen anything like it before. We didn’t see a dust bunny, we didn’t see a hydrogen iceberg. The idea was that if it’s made of hydrogen, then when the hydrogen evaporates, it’s transparent so you can’t see it. So there is a cometary tail you just can’t see. But the problem with this scenario is that we showed in the paper that a hydrogen iceberg would evaporate very quickly in interstellar space because of starlight hitting it. Therefore, it would not survive the journey.

So all together, I find these possibilities less appealing. All of them talk about it being something we have never seen before. So I’m saying, if we discuss it as a natural origin, and it involves something that we have never seen before—then why not also consider an artificial origin? That’s also something we’ve never seen before? That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying it’s definitely of artificial origin, but that it’s one of the serious possibilities that we should contemplate.

How certain are you that ‘Oumuamua was an object with artificial origin?

I would say, given everything we know, I would give a high likelihood that it could have been artificially made. The only way to know for sure, for certain, of course, is to take an image of something like that or get more data on something like that. We can’t do it with ‘Oumuamua because it’s already too far away. It’s now a million times fainter than it was when it was close to us. So we missed the opportunity. It’s like having a guest for dinner, by the time you realize it’s weird, it’s already out of the front door into the dark street. That was the first guest, and we should look for more.

I definitely get the sense from your book how this was a missed opportunity to collect data. I thought about how, in your book, you described if cave dwellers were to find a modern cell phone, they would dismiss it as, like you said, as a shiny rock.

Exactly.

Is that what we did with ‘Oumuamua?

Exactly. We tend to explain anything new that we see in terms of what we already saw. That’s very natural but it also suppresses innovation, it doesn’t allow us to see new things. As scientists, we should be open-minded.

Your book is about ‘Oumuamua, but it’s also about encouraging people to think differently about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, to be more open to it. I think it’s interesting how you compare the hefty investments made by the scientific community to exploring dark matter to those invested in finding extraterrestrial life. Why do you think the idea of finding dark matter is more publicly acceptable and more interesting to scientists than searching for extraterrestrial life?

I think the reason is because it’s less relevant to our lives. When something is close to home and affects you emotionally, that causes some distress. People prefer not to have that. They prefer to live in peace and be happy.

The point about reality is that it doesn’t care about how uneasy you are with the notion. Reality is whatever it is. By ignoring it, you maintain your ignorance.

When the philosophers didn’t look through Galileo’s telescope, they were happy, because they thought the sun surrounded the Earth and they maintained their philosophical and religious beliefs that we are at the center of the universe. But that was temporary. It only maintained their ignorance for a little while. Eventually we realized that the Earth moves around the sun. The fact that they put Galileo in house arrest didn’t change anything. The number of likes on Twitter or whatever we give each other, awards, or put someone in house arrest or anything, that only affects our relation with each other. Reality is whatever it is. By ignoring it, we don’t gain anything, we just lose because we are more ignorant.

So my point is, the way to make progress is not to stick to your notions and maintain a prejudice. Of course that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you say I don’t need to search, I know the answer, I don’t need to look through Galileo’s telescope, of course it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You will never find that you’re wrong because you bully people that will do this kind of search, and you don’t fund the research in that direction. It’s like stepping on the grass and saying look it doesn’t grow. Science is not about that, science is about finding the truth.

In the book you emphasize how great the reward would be if we were to discover extraterrestrial life. I’m wondering if you could share more about that with our readers. I think people think that there would be a negative impact on our life, but you argue that it could have a positive impact on human life and on Earth.

First of all, it gives us a better perspective about ourselves. I think astronomy as a whole teaches us modesty. We are occupying one planet out of 10 to the power of 20 planets in the observable universe. We are really responsible for a tiny real estate piece out of the big landscape. Also, we live for a short time relative to the age of the universe. So this immediately tells us that we are not very significant.

Previously, people thought that an Earth-like planet around a sun-like star was something rare. Now, with the Kepler data, half of the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly at the same separation. Therefore, if you arrange for similar circumstances, I think that you would get similar outcomes.

It would be arrogant to assume that we are unique and special. You know, I think we are as common as ants are on a sidewalk. They are out there and we need to look for clues. Of course if we maintain the idea that we are special and we are unique we will never find the evidence.

On the other hand, if we have the instruments to examine this — we have the telescopes — and the public is so interested in us finding the answer, I think it would be a crime for scientists not to address this interest from the public. Moreover, the public is funding science, so we should attend to the interests of the public. There are examples from history that on many occasions when we thought we knew the truth and we ended up being wrong.

What kind of evidence would the scientific community need to have incontrovertible proof that there is extraterrestrial life, or more ‘Oumuamua-like light sails, in our universe?

That’s an excellent question. One approach is, of course, to find objects like ‘Oumuamua that we can take a photograph of. By the way, we don’t necessarily need to chase them in space, because every now and then one of them may collide with the Earth. We see those as meteors. One of the meteors that comes from interstellar space may be space junk from another civilization. That offers us the possibility of putting our hands around it. If there is a meteor that lands on the ground, we can tell from its speed that it came from outside the solar system and it looks suspicious in terms of its composition, we can examine it. So there are ways to continue this search, even just on the ground rather than going to space.

Beyond that, we can look for industrial pollution in the atmospheres of other planets around other stars as a technological signature, rather than looking for oxygen from microbes. That would be one way of definitely finding evidence for life, industrial life, because the molecules like [CFCs] that contaminate the atmosphere of Earth cannot be produced naturally. These are complex molecules. If we find evidence for them on other planets, that would indicate that there is definitely life out there.

I think it’s interesting that this book has been published in a time when there’s a lot of anti-scientist sentiment. With the coronavirus pandemic, science has become politicized. Do you think that harms legitimizing the search for extraterrestrial life?

No, I would think the other way around. Because the way I see science is that it could be unifying, rather than divisive. As long as the scientific community attends to the interests of the public, and is honest about how much evidence it has for every statement. Right now what happens in the academic world is that the scientists say we should never approach the public until we are absolutely sure about something, because otherwise they might not believe us when we say there is global warming. I don’t think that’s the right approach.

I think the public should see how science is done in the sense that most of the time there is not enough evidence — and we collect more evidence, more data, and eventually we become convinced that one interpretation is correct. If the public sees that process in motion, then it won’t suspect that there is a hidden agenda behind it because it’s transparent. You look at the evidence and everyone that looks that has enough evidence and believes the evidence would agree on the conclusions.

It should be understandable by anyone, and it should be something that anyone can pursue. And by collecting evidence and therefore it’s not an occupation of the elite. It should not be suspicious. It should not have any political agenda. It should also be independent of which nation conducts it. Indeed, we can bring different nations together. 

I’m wondering what do you think really needs to happen for there to be a shift in the scientific community to take the search for extraterrestrial life more seriously?

Well, more people speaking like me. And I hope eventually it will shift also the funding agencies, the federal funding agencies, to go in that direction. I think that what astronomers need to realize is it’s not speculative given what we know right now, it’s one of the most conservative ideas to fall on. It’s much more conservative than dark matter, where we are in the dark, so to speak, because there are so many possibilities. People speculate that we invested hundreds of millions of dollars in experiments without much success yet. We don’t know what the “darkness” is made of.

Of course, science is a learning experience and nobody regrets trying those experiments, because we rule out possibilities. That is much more speculative because we’ve never seen any evidence for dark matter yet or direct evidence for the nature of dark matter. It’s part of science to search for the unknown. I would regard the search for extraterrestrial civilization — it should be a mainstream activity especially given the interest of the public.

You’ve already received a lot of media attention regarding this book and it hasn’t even been published yet. I’m wondering what you hope people will get from this book and what you hope comes out of it?

I have two messages and you already mentioned them. One is that ‘Oumuamua was unusual. It showed a lot of anomalies that could indicate that it was some technological equipment and we should explore and look for other objects that appear anomalous like it and get more data on them. It’s sort of like looking for plastic bottles on the beach.

The second message is that the scientific culture should change and be more open minded to change. I’m sorry to say, but the commercial sector — companies have had much more open-mindedness, much more blue sky research than the academic world these days.

There are companies like Google or SpaceX or Blue Origins — originally it was IBM — that had a lot of innovations in them. That is surprising to me. It should be the academic world that carries the torch of innovation because it has, in principle, the tenure system that allows people to explore without any risk for their jobs. Unfortunately, many practitioners in academia worry more about their image and their honors, and so forth, and engage much less in risk-taking and in thinking independently and looking for evidence than intellectual gymnastics that demonstrate how smart they are.

Avi Loeb’s book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” is slated to be released on January 26, 2021 from Houghton Mifflin. 

In the search for answers on Capitol riots, officials and Congress begin looking in the mirror

The Justice Department’s internal investigator announced on Friday that it will look into how the DOJ and its various agencies handled last week’s attack on the U.S. Capitol. That was only the latest in a growing number of inward-looking probes in the wake of the riots that left six people dead, including two Capitol Police officers.

The DOJ Office of Inspector General, the department’s independent watchdog, says its investigation will examine whether and how information was shared in advance among authorities, and will sniff out any procedural or policy “weaknesses” that hamstrung agency responses. It will also likely examine any possible intelligence failures, including the FBI’s admission this week that its field office in Norfolk, Virginia, distributed an intelligence bulletin warning that Trump supporters had been making “calls for violence” and preparations for “war” the day before the siege.

“As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington, D.C.,” says the document, first published by The Washington Post. “An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.'”

The head of the agency’s Washington field office told reporters last Friday it had not received intelligence suggesting that Trump’s supporters would act unlawfully. But after the Post published the memo, the agency chief acknowledged that it had been shared among the members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, including D.C. police, the Capitol Police and other federal authorities. He suggested, however, that the information was not readily actionable: “That was a thread on a message board that was not attributable to an individual person.”

As the chaos of the day slowly clears, several inspectors general have announced internal investigations into the events surrounding the attempted insurrection, including those at Homeland Security, the Pentagon and the Department of the Interior, which oversees the U.S. Park Police. Critics have assailed the disastrous security collapse under pressure from the rioters, many of whom, spurred by President Trump and a number of Republican lawmakers, had made their insurrectionist intent clear for weeks.

Elected officials are also looking inward for explanations. On Wednesday, more than 30 House Democrats sent a letter to the chamber’s acting sergeant-at-arms calling for an investigation into “suspicious” groups of visitors they say were seen inside the Capitol the day before the attack. Some signees were military veterans “trained to recognize suspicious activity,” who claim they alerted the former sergeant-at-arms on Jan. 5 after noticing “an extremely high number of outside groups” in the building, even though public tours have been suspended since last March due to the pandemic.

“The visitors encountered by some of the Members of Congress on this letter appeared to be associated with the rally at the White House the following day,” the members wrote, adding: “Members of the group that attacked the Capitol seemed to have an unusually detailed knowledge of the layout of the Capitol Complex. The presence of these groups within the Capitol Complex was indeed suspicious.”

The letter also requests a review of logbooks for names of visitors admitted by their colleagues — who are not specified but assumed to be Republicans — and asks whether closed-circuit video logs are available. Pointedly, the group also asks whether law enforcement agencies have tried to access visitor information.

Before that letter was sent, several Democrats had previously, albeit cryptically, raised the possibility that advance preparations for the Capitol assault had included some of their fellow members, without offering any names or clear evidence of collaboration.

On Thursday, newly-seated Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican and gun-rights zealot who last May had expressed admiration for the QAnon movement, shot back at remarks made earlier that day by Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, a Democrat, which Boebert understood as implicating her personally.

“You said that you could ‘confirm’ a Member of Congress gave Capitol tours to ‘insurrectionists’ and implied I was that Member of Congress,” Boebert’s letter said. “Your comments are extremely offensive, shameful and dangerous.”

Maloney, who said in the interview that Democrats had raised concerns about some of their “new colleagues” who “believe in conspiracy theories and who want to carry guns into the House chamber,” responded to Boebert on Twitter, pointing out that he had not mentioned her.

Maloney wrote: “Um, I’ve never said your name in public, @RepBoebert. Never. Not once. (If you’re going to be a gun nut, you probably shouldn’t go off half cocked.)” He added he would post a transcript except that it “might be like ‘a fact,'” which “might not help you.”

“A thousand apologies @RepSeanMaloney,” Boebert, whose tweets about the location of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others during the attack have led to calls for her arrest, posted in reply. “I’m glad you clarified you were not making any remarks about me whatsoever.”

However, 68 elected officials from Boebert’s Colorado district, including mayors and town council members, have indeed sent a letter to Pelosi requesting an investigation into Boebert’s actions surrounding the insurrection.

“We have heard overwhelmingly from our constituents, therefore her constituents, that there is deep concern about her actions leading up to and during the protests that turned into a violent deadly mob,” reads the letter.

“Representative Boebert’s speech and tweets encouraged the mob mentality of her social media followers and the people who directly participated in the destructive violence that disrupted a lawful democratic process from taking place as scheduled,” the officials wrote.

The letter points to Boebert’s social media posts as well as statements she made on the House floor the day of the attack.

“I have constituents outside this building right now, and I promised my voters to be their voice,” Boebert said. “They know that this election is not right, and as their representative, I am sent here to represent them.”

“WandaVision” is a bewitching, bizarre marriage between classic TV and Marvel superhero movies

Artifice is the classic sitcom’s defining characteristic, especially in shows made in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Each of those decades marked by tumultuous change or, speaking of the ’50s, a determined recovery from a world war, inspiring producers to create family-friendly escapes. In these secure TV bubbles, no problem was too massive to surmount within half an hour, and gales of laughter buoyed the onscreen action like gentle ocean waves on a clear sunny day.  

And every week, no matter what, the story ends on a happy, feel-good note.

This is not the environment one expects to meet Marvel Cinematic Universe heroes Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) or Vision (Paul Bettany), last seen in “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame” – and in movie theaters, not on TV.

This is only the beginning of what makes “WandaVision” such a strange, creatively adventurous pastiche: it takes a pair of technicolor superhumans capable of felling titans and drops them into an assortment of half-hour comedies. And their first mission sets them down inside of a merry black-and-white paradise that is a dead ringer for Rob and Laura Petrie’s place on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

Where Van Dyke’s Rob Petrie trips over a piece of furniture as he comes home in that old show’s opening credits Vision, being able to pass through walls, avoids the stumble and phases right through. A subsequent ode to “Bewitched” shows Wanda, aka Scarlet Witch, wiggling her fingers, not her nose, to lift a kitchen’s worth of pots and pans in the air.

Like her great love Vision, Wanda’s power originate from the Mind Stone, one of the Infinity Stones containing god-level powers that drove The Infinity Saga. Vision gained full sentience and life by way of the Mind Stone, which was embedded in his forehead until . . . well. All that matters now, at least to Wanda, is that they’re living the script of a perfect romance.

Those MCU movies pitted the lovers against foes of enormous power and, at times, each other. Now their greatest challenges are to fit in with the rest of the neighbors and impress Vision’s boss.

The Infinity Saga is the collection of related films than begins with 2008’s “Iron Man” and ends with “Endgame.”  The next stage of this trip, referred to as Phase 4, officially kicks off this year with “Black Widow.”

That said, the two-episode launch of “WandaVision” feels like a worthy bridge between the past and the MCU’s future. 

For a while Marvel was expanding every which way on TV while tacitly conveying the impression that its smaller screen titles were somehow lesser projects than its theatrical giants. ABC’s recently departed “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” occupies in the same universe as the films while operating under its own narrative power, as does Hulu’s “Runaways.” The Netflix series  – “Daredevil,” “Luke Cage,” “Jessica Jones” and “Iron Fist” – were distinct efforts to build a franchise around The Defenders. Each ranged in quality and watchability from the culturally significant, as “Jessica Jones” proved to be,  to . . . “Iron Fist.” 

Then in 2019 Marvel cut ties with Netflix, ceasing production on all Defenders-related titles.

Recalling the most basic outline of this business history matters, you see, because “WandaVision” puts to rest any questions as to whether the company actually values television not merely as a medium, but an artform. The two-episode debut is a resounding answer in the affirmative, adroitly drawing from small screen history with the same level of reverence and wonder as its elaborate superhero mythology.

“WandaVision” is banquet for fervid TV viewers and moviegoers alike, and its ambition doesn’t stop there. Each episode is also made to please comic book readers who want to see more of the worlds and characters explored on the page receive screen time.

Possessing some baseline of knowledge about old TV shows is probably more important in the opening episodes, especially when it comes to the distinct tips-of-the-hat director Matt Shakman and writer Jac Schaeffer direct toward those TV icons. Their dedication to replicating and tweaking recognizable details from these shows and TV in general is strewn throughout all the episodes with admirable precision.

Then again, looking at the talent bringing this big swing to fruition, we shouldn’t be surprised that it works so well. Olsen’s prodigious talent and versatility has never been in question, particularly to anyone who saw her nuanced performance in the too-short-lived Facebook series “Sorry For Your Loss.” Fortunately for both viewer and actor this show does away with the unfortunate faux eastern European accent her character was strapped with in her movie introduction. (Wanda is a native of a non-existent country called Sokovia.)

Bettany’s physical comedy skills will be more of a pleasant surprise given his drama and action film-heavy filmography, and they steal the spotlight in the second episode when Vision, a synthetic sentient being (or synthezoid) accidentally takes his playacting as a human one step too far.

Placing Kathryn Hahn high on the credits clues the viewer into her importance to the story, and she’s also magnificent as Agnes, the obligatory neighbor who seems helpful but we suspect also has a touch of Gladys Kravitz hiding behind her smile. Hahn rarely disappoints, and that’s even true when the show around her is failing the grade – and in a winning project like this, she’s bright as a daystar.

But as much credit for the success of “WandaVision” is owed to the aesthetic choices as the acting. Shakman is a longtime producer on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” a series built to lampoon TV fakery. Here, he gets to use its tropes and practices to tell a story that only seems light on its face but is plainly masking something sinister. The “Dick Van Dyke” homage is presented in the good old 4:3 aspect ratio that is a hallmark of early TV; coupled with the story’s context, the effect makes it appear as if we’re watching Wanda and Vision cavorting inside of a living diorama, or a terrarium as opposed to a neighborhood.

The second episode gives them their own version of “Bewitched” right down to the animated opening, an icon of TV Americana doubling as a wink at Wanda’s superhero moniker Scarlet Witch. Disney+ is wise to present the first two episodes as something of a matched set because that establishes the show as meant to be binged, and the structure as something that’s deceptively cozy, recognizable but untrustworthy.

As the show progresses the TV tributes become more universally recognizable, starting with third episode’s a funhouse mirror reflection of “The Brady Bunch” – the set design nails the look of that iconic split-level living room down the smallest nook. But this also is where the plot’s weirdness begins to bear fruit with increasing fullness and speed.

No detail about the shows imitated in “WandaVision” has been overlooked including, and quite crucially, the canned laughter. Watch one of the early vintage series that inspires this adventure and you may notice that while they’re long on charm, the quantity of knee-slapping punchlines is actually fewer that you may remember. In lesser shows they’re a cover for mediocrity, but even in the best ones the track functions as Pavlovian cue letting us know where and when to giggle.

When we watch Wanda and Vision trip along happily the recorded laughter fits for a while until it doesn’t; as do the heightened reactions from their TV neighbors and co-workers.

Other familiar faces for consistent TV viewers only increase the meta nature of the show, including guest star appearances by Debra Jo Rupp from “That ’70s Show” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” alumnus Emma Caulfield. Teyonah Parris (of “Mad Men”) also sparks as another of Wanda and Vision’s helpful neighbors who, like everyone else, probably isn’t what she seems to be.

Maybe the familiarity of these faces is a subtle nod at a deeper meaning; for example, if you recognize Caulfield you may also know that “Buffy” creator Joss Whedon co-created a crucial addition to the Marvel Universe. And that might matter.

But then again, maybe it doesn’t. (Who am I trying to fool here – of course it does.)

Whether you picked up the implications of that hint or it flew right by does not matter, although the episode made available to critics might as well be baskets of Easter eggs. Sharp-eyed MCU devotees accustomed to scouring the scenery’s fringes for the smallest details will consider themselves well served, in that regard.

Even if you don’t possess an encyclopedic knowledge of this franchise, or if you don’t have time to watch the final “Avengers” films to remind you of where the MCU left Wanda and Vision’s story, don’t let that put you off from watching “WandaVision” now and checking out the films later. There are many guides to the couples’ section of the Marvel galaxy online, including official Marvel summaries like this one, and this one.

And assuming that you’re interested in this title at all, you only need to keep a few key things in mind.

First, comic books constantly play around with alternate existences and parallel universes. Second, Wanda has the power to bend reality, making her one of the most powerful characters in this universe – also potentially the most dangerous, since she’s still learning the extent of her capabilities.

The final unavoidable truth that whatever type of program “WandaVision” turns out to be, the conclusion of this love story ins’t likely to offer simplistic comfort. But we simply don’t know enough about anything for going on here except for the fact that we like what we see and that we’re profoundly curious to find out if the finale flies these characters toward some kind happily ever after or into a torrent of tears and explosions.

Either way this is soaring, original unreality worth seeing through to the finale, be it bitter or sitcom sweet.

The two-episode premiere of “WandaVision” is now streaming on Disney+ with subsequent episodes arriving weekly on Fridays.

Tucker Carlson faces backlash after mocking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s fears during Capitol riot

Fox News host Tucker Carlson met Twitter’s wrath when he decided to mock Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) grim experience inside the U.S. Capitol. She and other members of Congress hid for their lives on Jan. 6 as angry Trump supporters stormed the federal building to prevent lawmakers from certifying the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joe Biden.

On Thursday, Jan. 14, Carlson tried to manipulate and twist the facts about the siege as he downplayed the disturbing incident that led to the deaths of five people, including one Capitol Police officer.

“It was not an act of racism. It was not an insurrection. It wasn’t an armed invasion by a brigade of dangerous white supremacists. It wasn’t. Those are lies,” Carlson falsely exclaimed.

After diminishing the severity of the angry mob’s actions, Carlson went on to mock Ocasio-Cortez. Describing the lawmaker as a “vacuous little totalitarian moron,” the conservative host criticized Ocasio-Cortez’s praise of officers for their efforts to combat the violent mob at the Capitol. In a video clip posted to Instagram, the Democratic lawmaker offered details about the harrowing series of events that took place inside the U.S. Capitol. At one point in the video clip, she revealed she “narrowly escaped death.”

“I had a pretty traumatizing event happen to me,” Ocasio-Cortez described. “And I do not know if I can even disclose the full details of that event, due to security concerns. But I can tell you that I had a very close encounter where I thought I was going to die.”

That portion of her video is what Carlson sarcastically aimed to mock. “Narrowly escaped death,” Carlson sarcastically declared. “When the most harrowing thing you’ve done in life is pass freshman sociology at Boston University, every day is a brand new drama! Sandy’s heart is still beating fast!”

“But she likes the cops now despite the fact they’re white supremacists,” he smirked. “What a difference a day makes.”

Twitter users were not pleased with Carlson’s attack on the Democratic lawmaker. John Iadarola, host of the progressive show “The Damage Report,” slammed Tucker’s remarks describing his words as “despicable.”

“Tucker Carlson and Fox have spent 2 years whipping their viewers into a murderous frenzy against anything [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] or [Ilhan Omar] say or do,” Iadarola tweeted, “Then, when the inevitable happens and the mob tries to attack them, Tucker mocks them for fearing the violence he sent their way. Despicable.”

Another Twitter user wrote, “Ah [Tucker Carlson], someday I’ll tell the whole story of what you said to me that night — what was that low-rent White House/Capitol dinner we went to? You didn’t see yourself going to Fox back then. Keep persecuting @AOC and others. It won’t end well for you.”

David Folkenflik, NPR media correspondent also tweeted, “Deflection, disparagement, diversion – Fox’s Tucker Carlson has moved on to mocking lawmakers for fears of a mob howling for blood on their corridors, especially if it’s AOC.”

Carlson has yet to respond to the criticism he is facing for his remarks.

 

 

 

Yellow Gadsden flag, prominent in Capitol takeover, carries a long and shifting history

Flown by many protesters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the Gadsden flag has a design that is simple and graphic: a coiled rattlesnake on a yellow field with the text “Don’t Tread On Me.” But that simple design hides some important complexities, both historically and today, as it appears in rallies demanding President Donald Trump be allowed to remain in office.

The flag originated well before the American Revolution, and in recent years it has been used by the tea party movement and, at times, members of the militia movement. But it has also been used to represent the U.S. Marine Corps, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. men’s national soccer team and a Major League Soccer franchise.

As a scholar of graphic design, I find flags interesting as symbols as they take on deeper meanings for those who display them. Often, people use a flag not because of what is explicitly displayed, but because of what the person believes it represents – though that meaning can change through time, and with one’s perspective, as has happened with the Gadsden flag.

The beginning of a myth

The flag’s origin isn’t entirely clear. It seems to begin with a simple illustration accompanying an essay by Benjamin Franklin in 1754, 20 years before American independence. The image, possibly drawn by Franklin himself, portrays the American Colonies as parts of a divided snake, simply stating “Join, or Die.” The essay it accompanied addressed the major current issue for British colonists in North America: the threat of the French and their Native American allies.

Later, as the American Revolution took shape, the image took on a new meaning. Colonists hoisted various flags, including ones depicting rattlesnakes, a distinctly American creature believed to strike only in self-defense. The flag commonly known as the “First Navy Jack” had 13 red and white stripes, and possibly a timber rattlesnake with 13 rattles, above the words “Don’t Tread On Me.”

In 1775, as the American Revolution began, South Carolina politician Christopher Gadsden expanded on Franklin’s idea, and possibly the red-and-white flag as well, when he created the yellow flag with a coiled rattler and the same phrase: “Don’t Tread On Me.”

Gadsden was a slave owner and trader, who built Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina, which was a major slave-trading site. As many as 40% of enslaved Africans who were brought to the U.S. first arrived there. The site is slated to be the home of the International African American Museum, which estimates that 150,000 captured Africans came through the wharf, and that between 60% and 80% of today’s African Americans can trace an ancestor to the trade there.

A symbol awoken

For most of U.S. history, this flag was all but forgotten, though it had some cachet in libertarian circles.

The First Navy Jack version resurfaced in 1976 on U.S. Navy ships to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial, and again after 9/11, though today that flag is reserved for the longest active-status warship. Its use remained largely apolitical.

In 2006 the slogan and the coiled snake saw some commercial use by Nike and the Philadelphia Union, a Major League Soccer team.

Around the same time, though, the flag took on a new political meaning: The tea party, a hard-line Republican anti-tax movement, began using it. The implication was that the U.S. government had become the oppressor threatening the liberties of its own citizens.

Perhaps as a result of the tea party movement, several state governments around the country offer a Gadsden flag license plate design. At least some of those plates charge additional fees for the special plate, sending proceeds to nonprofit organizations.

The Gadsden flag has appeared at other political protests, too, such as those opposing restrictions on gun ownership and objecting to rules imposed in 2020 to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Most recently the flag has been flown and displayed at some post-election protests, including events where demonstrators called for officials to stop counting votes – and both inside and outside the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., during the counting of the electoral votes on Jan. 6.

Because of its creator’s history and because it is commonly flown alongside “Trump 2020” flags, the Confederate battle flag and other white-supremacist flags, some may now see the Gadsden flag as a symbol of intolerance and hate – or even racism. If so, its original meaning is then forever lost, but one theme remains.

At its core, the flag is a simple warning – but to whom, and from whom, has clearly changed. Gone is the original intent to unite the states to fight an outside oppressor. Instead, for those who fly it today, the government is the oppressor.

Editor’s note: This article was updated Jan. 7, 2021, to include additional information about Christopher Gadsden, the flag’s original designer.

Paul Bruski, Associate Professor of Graphic Design, Iowa State University

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

Rudy Giuliani’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week

On Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department placed sanctions on seven foreign members of Rudy Giuliani’s inner circle who sought to interfere in the U.S. election and sway the results in Trump’s favor. The president has also reportedly dropped his reliance on Giuliani for his second impeachment trial, refusing to pay Giuliani for his unsuccessful post-election campaign to overturn November’s results. Meanwhile, the New York State Bar Association has moved to disbar Giuliani this week. Needless to say, the week after he told thousands of Trump supporters to hold “trial by combat” before many of them violently stormed the U.S. Capitol with aims to halt the Constitutionally mandated certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for Rudy Giuliani. 

The Treasury’s targets include Russian-linked Ukrainians Konstantin Kulyk, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, Andriy Telizhenko, Oleksandr Dubinsky, and –– most principally –– Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker sanctioned just last year, who played a key role in orchestrating the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory. It was with the help of these actors that Giuliani spearheaded a failed campaign to smear President-elect Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, with false claims of past corruption. Trump’s call to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky –– in which the President pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden on his behalf –– would become the impetus for the President’s own impeachment. 

“Since at least 2019,” said the Treasury in a statement on Wednesday, “Derkach and his associates have leveraged U.S. media, U.S.-based social media platforms, and influential U.S. persons to spread misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former U.S. officials engaged in corruption, money laundering, and unlawful political influence in Ukraine.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a steadfast Trump loyalist, also attempted to add distance between his agency and Giuliani and his goons. “Russian disinformation campaigns targeting American citizens are a threat to our democracy […] The United States will continue to aggressively defend the integrity of our election systems and processes.”

“Trump has been blaming his longtime personal attorney and many others for the predicament he now finds himself in, though he has not accepted any responsibility in public or in private,” CNN reported this week. “Giuliani is still expected to play a role in Trump’s impeachment defense but has been left out of most conversations thus far.”

The New York State Bar Association has also made moves to disavow Giuliani in light of last Wednesday’s chaos. The Bar announced on Monday that it has launched an inquiry into Giuliani’s role in Trump’s months-long crusade to undermine the election. The group’s bylaws make explicit reference to anyone “who advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States, or of any state, territory or possession thereof, or of any political subdivision therein, by force or other illegal means” and disowns anyone who has engaged in such activity.

The Association stated, “Mr. Giuliani’s words quite clearly were intended to encourage Trump supporters unhappy with the election’s outcome to take matters into their own hands,” adding, “Their subsequent attack on the Capitol was nothing short of an attempted coup, intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power.”

Giuliani, who called for “a trial by combat” in the rally leading up the riot on Capitol Hill, now faces the threat of permanent expulsion from the Bar, which would render him unlicensed to practice law in the state of New York. “We cannot stand idly by,” said the Association, “and allow those intent on rending the fabric of our democracy to go unchecked.”

 

Joe Biden wants to use coronavirus relief to raise federal minimum wage to $15

President-elect Joe Biden called on Congress to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 as part of his $1.9 billion coronavirus relief proposal unveiled on Thursday.

Biden outlined his plan in a speech in Delaware, calling for Congress to approve $1,400 direct payments on top of the $600 checks in the last stimulus bill, extending of enhanced federal unemployment benefits at $400 per week and extending the federal eviction moratorium through September, a major expansion of child tax credits, $350 billion to help state and local governments, and more than $400 billion for schools and vaccinations.

The plan also calls for Congress to raise the minimum wage to $15 and scrap lower minimum wages for tipped workers and people with disabilities.

“No one working 40 hours a week should live below the poverty line,” Biden said Thursday.

Though raising the federal minimum wage has long been opposed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and a broad swath of the Republican Party, Biden pointed to Florida, which voted for a $15 minimum wage in November despite backing President Donald Trump.

“People tell me that’s going to be hard to pass. Florida just passed it — as divided as that state is — they just passed it,” Biden said. “The rest of the country is ready to move as well.”

Though some Republicans have already signaled opposition to the plan, the package drew praise from an unusual combination of progressive lawmakers and business groups. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who will chair the Senate Budget Committee, called the plan a “very strong first installment.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it “welcomes” the plan, particularly Biden’s “focus on vaccinations and on economic sectors and families that continue to suffer.”

Republicans have generally opposed federal minimum wage increases for decades, most recently rejecting an increase to $15 per hour that passed the Democratic-led House in 2019. The current minimum wage is $7.25, well below the rate it has historically been when adjusted for inflation. Congress has voted to increase the minimum wage just once in the last two decades.

Biden would need support from at least 10 Republicans to pass the bill unless Democrats decide to use the budget reconciliation process, which allows votes on certain budgetary measures without a 60-vote threshold to end a filibuster. That tactic was used by Republicans to push through tax cuts in 2017 that largely benefited corporations and the richest Americans. Democrats will control 50 seats in the Senate once newly-elected Georgia senators Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock are sworn in this month, leaving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as a crucial tiebreaking vote. Biden has said that he hopes to garner Republican support, but Sanders has said he is working on a plan that would allow the Senate to pass the bill with just 51 votes, according to The Washington Post.

Biden’s proposal calls for an additional $1,400 in stimulus for most Americans after Congress approved a second round of $600 payments in December. The plan would also expand stimulus checks to adult dependents and people related to undocumented immigrants, who were shut out of the last relief package. Some progressives balked at the number, arguing that Biden had promised $2,000 payments while campaigning for Democrats in Georgia. Others have argued that Biden always intended to increase the $600 payment to $2,000, rather than approve an additional $2,000 payment on top of the December checks.

“$2,000 means $2,000. $2,000 does not mean $1,400,″ Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told The Washington Post.

The plan would also increase enhanced federal unemployment benefits from $300 per week to $400 per week, which Ocasio-Cortez argued should be “retroactive.” 

Biden’s outline also called for more than $500 billion in aid to state and local governments, schools and universities as well as $50 billion for coronavirus testing and $20 billion to expand the national vaccine program. The plan would also make the child tax credit fully refundable for the year and increase the credit to $3,600 for children under age 6 and $3,000 for children over 6. The earned income tax credit would also grow from $530 to $1,500, according to the Post. Biden’s initiative also includes 14 weeks of paid sick and family leave for most workers, grants for over 1 million small businesses, and $35 billion in low-interest loans for small businesses. It also includes tens of billions for rental aid, food assistance and aid to U.S. territories and commonwealths, including Puerto Rico.

Biden highlighted a “growing hunger crisis” during his speech, which has particularly affected communities of color.

“More than one in five Black and Latino households in America report that they do not have enough food to eat,” he said. “It’s wrong. It’s tragic. It’s unacceptable.”

Biden said his goal is to deliver 100 million vaccine doses in his first 100 days in office and reopen the majority of public schools by spring.

“I know what I just described will not come cheaply,” Biden said Thursday night. “But failure to do so will cost us dearly.”

Biden plans to announce next month another larger spending proposal aimed at funding an infrastructure and jobs-creation package, fighting climate change and addressing racial inequality. The president-elect said the plan would be financed by taxing those “at the very top who are doing quite well in this economy.”

“Just since this pandemic began, the wealth of the top 1 percent has grown by roughly $1.5 trillion since the end of last year — four times the amount for the entire bottom 50 percent,” he said.

Biden officials are also working on a plan that would include $10,000 per person in student loan forgiveness.

“The crisis of human suffering is in plain sight, and there’s no time to waste,” Biden said. “We have to act, and we have to act now.”

Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the new administration “is moving swiftly to deliver that help and to meet the needs of the American people.”

“The emergency relief framework announced by the incoming Biden-Harris administration tonight is the right approach,” they said in a joint statement. “It shows that Democrats will finally have a partner at the White House that understands the need to take swift action to address the needs of struggling communities.”

California GOP leader forced to resign after bragging on video about breaking into Pelosi’s office

A man from Sacramento, California, has resigned his position in the California Republican Assembly (CRA) after he was discovered to have participated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, ABC10 reports.

The CRA confirmed to ABC10 that Jorge Riley was the Corresponding Secretary for the State Board of the California Republican Assembly and President of the Sacramento Chapter. Riley was forced to resign both positions after he posted images and video on his Facebook page showing him taking part in the riot. In one video, Riley can be seen explaining his actions inside the Capitol.

“We breached over there I think. We broke windows. We went into the door. We pushed our way in,” he said, adding that he pushed his way into Nancy Pelosi’s office.

Video of man describing in detail breaking into the Capitol Building from r/CapitolConsequences

The CRA released a statement condemning Riley’s actions, and said the organization played no part in the riot.

“Specifically, we denounce the lawlessness that took place at our nation’s capital on January 6, 2021. The perpetrators should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. CRA was not involved with the event and any participation by individual CRA members was in their capacity as private citizens,” the statement read.

Watch ABC10’s report on the story below:

How long will the ghost of Trumpism haunt the GOP?

During the House of Representatives’ impeachment debate on Wednesday, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., turned to the Republican side of the aisle and asked, “Is there any depravity too low? Is there any outrage too far? Is there any blood and violence too much to turn hearts and minds in this body?” 

For 197 House Republicans, the answer, apparently, is no — at least when it comes to President Donald Trump and his rabid supporters. After all, just one week before Trump sent an angry, deluded mob, which he had summoned to gather on that day, to storm the U.S. Capitol and stop a joint session of Congress from certifying the Electoral College votes for Joe Biden. The violence that ensued targeted the elected representatives who were in the building, including Republican Vice President Mike Pence.

“This is a moment of truth, my friends,” Connolley asked his Republican colleagues this week. “Are you on the side of chaos and the mob? Or on the side of constitutional democracy and our freedom?”

Only ten GOP House members defended their colleagues, their institution, the democratic process and the Constitution by voting to impeach Donald Trump for a second time. Only ten. So yes, Congressman Connolly was right to ask the question. As we’ve seen over the past five years of the Trump nightmare, one that has featured everything from sexual assault to national security betrayal to massive corruption and now incitement of a violent insurrection, there is no outrage too far nor depravity too low.

Sure, these Republican officials sometimes grumble anonymously to the press and many of them privately assure their congressional comrades that they disapprove, but the base loves Trump so there’s nothing much they can do about it if they want to keep their jobs — which many are apparently willing to sell their souls to do.

Polling done after the assault on Congress shows that Trump has lost a little support from Republicans but not much. According to a Politico–Morning Consult poll, 75 percent of Republican voters said they still approve of the job Trump is doing, which is 8 points less than it was a month ago. A Reuters–Ipsos showed a steeper decline of 18 points since August, bringing Trump down to 70 percent approval among Republicans. That’s right. He’s lost some support but you’ll notice that in both polls the vast majority of Republican voters still approve of Donald Trump.

And it appears that they don’t find the violence that was perpetrated on police officers or the vandalism and threats to Vice President Pence’s life to be deal-breakers. As this New York Times article illustrates, many local and state Republican officials across the country either believes the violence was perpetrated by people other than Trump supporters or was something they didn’t have a problem with in the first place. The report quotes one Oklahoma County GOP chairman wondering on Facebook just hours before the riotous mob took over the Capitol why violence is unacceptable. He wrote, “What the crap do you think the American revolution was? A game of friggin pattycake?”

According to The Times, “the opposition to [Trump] emerging among some Republicans has only bolstered their support of him.” That’s the support that turned into ugly mob violence on Jan. 6th.

When Trump boasted that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any voters, he may have been right. And this does present something of a dilemma for the Republican establishment which looks at his national record and sees someone who lost the popular vote twice, the electoral college once and put both the House and Senate back in Democratic hands over the course of his single term. And yet his blatant white nationalism, lies and conspiracy-mongering has proven to be catnip to the hardcore base of the party, rendering any attempt to purge him very difficult.

Nonetheless, they are testing the waters. While it’s true that Trump maintains a large majority of support among GOP voters, it’s not as large as it used to be and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was not pleased by the losses in Georgia which he reportedly lays at Trump’s feet. For his part, McConnell got what he wanted from Trump and no longer has any reason to put up with him. And neither does Corporate America which, unlike Trump’s cult followers, is not immersed in conspiracy theories and doesn’t want to see the country descend into violence and chaos. That’s bad for business. (Of course, it’s just a total coincidence that they are taking this “principled stand” against Trump at the moment when Democrats are a week away from taking total control of the government.)

On the House side, you have a national security hawk and a member of the House Leadership, Liz Cheney, R-Wy, coming out strong against Trump to see if there are any remnants of the old flag waving Republican Party that can be reached with calls to traditional America patriotism. So far, it isn’t looking good. The Trump followers may chant “USA!, USA!” and babble about “Communist China” but their real enemies are already within the U.S. borders and it appears that Liz Cheney may be one of them.

I don’t think anyone knows yet whether Trump will survive this or if Trumpism survives without Trump. He’s dominated our political culture for five years, with his desperate need for attention and our compulsion to give it to him. Obviously, tens of millions came to worship him as a cult leader — the QAnon believers among them, and they are legion, even think he is “a messianic warrior battling ‘deep state’ Satanists.” But he deeply invaded the consciousness of the rest of the country as well, even those who hate him with the same passion as those who adore him. From the moment he came down that golden escalator in 2015, we haven’t been able to take our eyes off of him, even when we desperately wanted to.

But after Jan. 20 he will not be able to command that level of attention, even if he decides to announce his run for 2024 that same day. There is no novelty in anything he might do, he will no longer wield real power and without access to his social media following, he simply will not be particularly accessible, at least on the level he has been for the past five years. He still has his supporters, of course, but without the grandeur of the office and the ability to dominate the political stage, you have to wonder if he will be able to maintain their attention much longer.

I have no doubt that “Trumpism,” if it’s defined as the right-wing extremism that let fly at the U.S. Capitol last week, will continue to be a threat. It existed before Trump came along. He just grew it and brought it mainstream. But I’m afraid it now has a life of its own and I’m not sure that Corporate America, Mitch McConnell, or even Donald Trump can snap some fingers and make it go away. The problem really isn’t Trump. It’s all those people who said over and over again, “he says what I’m thinking.”

Cori Bush booed by House GOP for denouncing white supremacy

Freshman Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri, who is black, was openly booed by Republican lawmakers Wednesday after she denounced white supremacy on the House floor while explaining why she would vote in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump for inciting a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol building last week.

Watch:

Before being booed on the House floor, Bush said, “If we fail to remove a white supremacist president who incited a white supremacist insurrection, it’s communities like Missouri’s 1st District that suffer the most. The 117th Congress must understand that we have a mandate to legislate in defense of black lives.”

“The first step in that process,” Bush continued, “is to root out white supremacy, starting with impeaching the white supremacist-in-chief.”

Republicans responded harshly with boos and loud moans, leading Bush to question the underlying significance of the GOP lawmakers’ outrage.

“What does it mean when they boo the Black congresswoman denouncing white supremacy?” Bush tweeted moments later.

The Democratic lawmaker—a nurse and activist who participated in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Ferguson following the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014—is a proponent of Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and criminal justice reform, progressive policies that would reduce racial and economic inequality.

The Sunrise Movement pointed out that “condemning white supremacy should not be partisan.”

“There should be no place in our government,” the climate justice advocates added, “for anybody who stands for the values of the Confederacy.”

 

Media suddenly shifts its tone on Trump — but that’s not courage, it’s cowardice

Donald Trump has made history again.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted to impeach him a second time because of his role in inciting violence before the coup attempt last Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol. Trump is now the only president to have been impeached twice, and could easily have been impeached on other occasions for his many other crimes against democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law.  

All 222 House Democrats, along with 10 Republicans, voted to impeach Trump. The Senate must now hold a trial, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he will not reconvene the chamber before next Tuesday, one day before Joe Biden’s inauguration next Tuesday. So it appears likely that the incoming Democratic-controlled Senate will hold Trump’s second impeachment trial. Some Republican senators appear likely to vote for conviction, but 17 would be required — along with all 50 Democrats and affiliated independents — to reach a verdict that might bar Trump from holding future federal office. No president has ever been tried after leaving office, and no president has ever been convicted by the Senate.

By largely refusing to join Democrats in voting to impeach Donald Trump, House Republicans sent several messages to their followers, the American people and the world more generally. These include:

  • Right-wing political violence is acceptable in the United States — as long as it advances the goals and objectives of the Republican Party and right-wing movement.
  • Coup attempts and other efforts to subvert elections or usurp democratic outcomes are now acceptable — if pursued by Republicans and members of the far right against their enemies.
  • The United States is no longer the world’s leading democracy. If American fascism continues to thrive — Trump won at least 10 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016 — the country’s liberal democracy (however imperfect) is in danger of degenerating into what political scientists have described as “competitive authoritarianism,” “inverted totalitarianism” or “managed democracy.”

In all, the Republican Party has shown once again that it is the most dangerous political organization in the United States and the world.

In a recent essay for New Left Review, social theorist Mike Davis describes America’s current state of crisis and what it portends:

Tomorrow liberal pundits may reassure us that the Republicans have committed suicide, that the age of Trump is over, and that Democrats are on the verge of reclaiming hegemony. Similar declarations, of course, were made during vicious Republican primaries in 2015. They seemed very convincing at the time. But an open civil war amongst Republicans may only provide short-term advantages to Democrats, whose own divisions have been rubbed raw by Biden’s refusal to share power with progressives. Freed from Trump’s electronic fatwas, moreover, some of the younger Republican senators may prove to be much more formidable competitors for the white college-educated suburban vote than centrist Democrats realize. In any event, the only future that we can reliably foresee — a continuation of extreme socio-economic turbulence — renders political crystal balls useless.

History is being rewritten in real time during this tumultuous and in many ways unprecedented moment in American history. Within two weeks this nation will witness a coup attempt, an impeachment and a presidential inauguration — all during a plague and under a fascistic authoritarian regime.

Many leading voices among the mainstream American news media have spent the last few weeks and months (and for that matter years) downplaying the obvious threat of a coup and other political violence by Donald Trump and his followers.

When the Trump-inspired coup plot was put into action last Wednesday, those same voices in the mainstream news media suddenly shifted their language and tone, emulating those writers, thinkers and activists they had previously — and in some instances very recently — mocked, marginalized, denounced and sought to silence.

Watching this happen is like hearing a movie soundtrack being changed, without interruption, from the wistful chords of a romantic comedy to the thunderous crescendos of an action spectacle.

During last week’s siege of the U.S. Capitol, the “hope peddlers” and other professional centrists abruptly appropriated the language of “the Resistance,” spontaneously finding last-minute courage to tell the truth about Trump’s presidency and his movement. Now those same public voices are pretending they never denied the real dangers of Trumpism and American fascism, playing their new role as imposter defenders of democracy. 

Such a shift in speech, tone and thought is patently insincere: it is the worst sort of cowardice and self-serving behavior, driven by the fear that history will remember one’s errors. There are also great financial and reputational incentives in pretending to have been correct all along, when in fact those public voices were repeatedly and fabulously wrong.

As part of this sudden rewrite of history, those in the mainstream news media who denied the obvious reality of Trump’s imminent coup (which could have been foretold before he took office in 2017) are also claiming that “we” were all victims of a “failure of imagination” and that “it was impossible to think such a thing could happen” in America.

With such claims, mainstream journalists are adopting a version of the royal first-person plural, speaking of how “we” have finally woken up to the dangers of Donald Trump, or saying that “we” have ignored” the dangers of right-wing extremism in the United States for too long.

In the world as it actually exists, Black and brown Americans have long understood that Donald Trump and his movement are an existential threat to the United States. Because of their personal or historical experience there are other individuals and groups, such as Muslims, Jewish people and recent immigrants and refugees, who also possess similar insights and instincts.

Many liberals, and progressives of all races, are also aware that Trumpism represents an extreme threat to democracy and American society. And of course, there are a select few public voices who, at considerable personal risk, have spent the last few years sounding the alarm about the rise of American fascism.

When prominent pundits, journalists and others in that sphere make the specious claim that Trump’s coup attack and other examples of right-wing terrorism are “unthinkable,” they are really pursuing a reclamation project for the reputation and authority of the mainstream media, in an era when that institution has consistently failed to defend democracy.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media is not likely to learn from its errors, or to consider how it enabled, normalized and empowered Donald Trump and his neofascist movement. What should of course happen in the aftermath of Trump’s presidency is an ambitious recommitment to advocacy journalism and to holding government accountable, as well as a commitment to diversify America’s newsrooms in terms of race, class, geography, professional and educational backgrounds and other meaningful criteria. In that world, the mainstream media would also come to grips with the principle that neutrality is not the same as objectivity.

To wit: It is objectively true that Donald Trump is a public menace. But the hope peddlers, professional centrists and stenographers of current events will inevitably present such facts as opinions demanding “balance” from “both sides” in an equation built on false equivalence.

Such obsolete rules and norms will also inevitably be used as cudgels by the mainstream news media against Joe Biden’s administration and the Democratic Party. This will only further embolden the Republican Party and its anti-human and anti-democratic agenda.

Ultimately, because the mainstream news media failed so dramatically in its response to Donald Trump, it will overcompensate through Janus-faced vigilance toward the Biden administration and the liberal or progressive agenda more generally. When this happens — and it is happening already: see Lesley Stahl’s interview with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” — American democracy will suffer more damage, succumbing still further to the poison of authoritarianism.

One big mystery remains unsolved: Why was the Capitol left unguarded?

There is so much going on these days. But what I keep coming back to is that if the Capitol Police had been anything close to properly mobilized, none of it would have happened.

There would have been a protest on January 6, not an insurrection. Five people wouldn’t be dead. Members of Congress and Capitol staff wouldn’t have been terrorized. Donald Trump wouldn’t be impeached.

All but for a still inexplicable decision made by who-knows-who.

Because we still don’t know how it was allowed to happen.

The other failures after the mob broke through the shoddy Capitol Police lines are hugely significant — including the long delay in help from federal law enforcement and the National Guard. But the Capitol Police, with its 2,100 sworn officers and staggering half-billion-dollar budget, could easily have contained the mob if it had actually tried.

That’s a force bigger than the entire Atlanta Police Department, and with more than twice the budget. They could have defended the Capitol if they wanted to.

Reporting on this topic has been highly unsatisfactory. The only article I’ve seen that gets close to indicating the depths of that failure was by Colleen Long, Michael Balsamo and Lisa Mascaro of the Associated Press, who wrote on Monday:

Despite ample warnings about pro-Trump demonstrations in Washington, U.S. Capitol Police did not bolster staffing on Wednesday and made no preparations for the possibility that the planned protests could escalate into massive violent riots, according to several people briefed on law enforcement’s response.

Consider:

The department had the same number of officers in place as on a routine day. While some of those officers were outfitted with equipment for a protest, they were not staffed or equipped for a riot….

No fencing was erected outside the Capitol and no contingency plans were prepared in case the situation escalated, according to people briefed.

And officers were told not to shoot:

Once the mob began to move on the Capitol, a police lieutenant issued an order not to use deadly force, which explains why officers outside the building did not draw their weapons as the crowd closed in. Officers are sometimes ordered against escalating a situation by drawing their weapons if superiors believe doing so could lead to a stampede or a shootout.

It’s dead wrong to call this an “intelligence failure.” The FBI may not have felt it had enough evidence before Jan. 6 to arrest people, but it was common knowledge — amply supported by multiple, widely-shared intelligence reports — that Trump supporters would head to the Capitol after his rally, that those supporters expressed an intention to “stop” what Congress was doing, and that some of them had a history of violence.

It was a colossal policing failure. But why?

Speaks to motive

I have tried to consider the possibility that it was just gross incompetence. But no one could really be that incompetent.

So at this point, in the absence of any other plausible explanations, it is more than reasonable to assume that the people making decisions about Capitol Police deployment that day felt kinship with the Trump mob, and either were too racist to see the threat posed by Trump supporters or looked the other way on purpose.

We need to know which it was.

Although no one has come forth with first-hand knowledge, it is abundantly obvious — and has been, from the first few minutes of the siege — that the Capitol Police as a whole enjoyed a comfort level with this mob that they wouldn’t have felt with any other — or, more specifically, with the “other.”

As Masha Gessen wrote for the New Yorker, just a day later:

Black Lives Matter protesters are other to the Capitol Police. So are survivors of sexual assault or women who protest for the right to choose. But an armed mob storming the Capitol, and their Instigator-in-Chief, are, apparently, familiar enough to be dismissed as clowns.

As newly-elected Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. — a veteran of many Black Lives Matter protests — put it on MSNBC: “Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and brown, we wouldn’t have made it up those steps. … We would have been shot, we would have been tear-gassed.”

So did the Capitol Police leadership simply not believe that a group of white Trump supporters was capable of violence? Or did they think that even if they got inside the building, they wouldn’t do any harm?

And most importantly: Was there any collusion? Did anyone suggest they look the other way?

Reporters should be trying to get hold of communications between Capitol Police leadership, including the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, and any other party, in which Jan. 6 was mentioned.

Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who has since resigned, has said he held a video conference with the FBI to discuss security planning in the days before the siege. We deserve to know exactly what was said.

The FBI had a command center set up in its Washington field office before and during the siege. We know that FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich was there, among probably dozens of others from all over the government. What did they know and when did they know it? Did anyone there understand why the Capitol was left so unguarded? When did they realize it was a problem? When did they realize they had to do something about it? (Eventually, several hundred FBI, ATF and U.S. marshals were sent to the scene, as well as the National Guard.)

At any point, when decisions were made to underreact, were political appointees involved?

Reporters should ask every Capitol Police officer they can find: What did you think your orders were, and why? And what were communications like during the siege?

One of the few data points we have is from a BuzzFeed article by Emmanuel Felton, who interviewed two Black Capitol Police officers. One told him: “Our chief was nowhere to be found, I didn’t hear him on the radio. One of our other deputy chiefs was not there. You don’t think it’s all hands on deck?”

The officers said that “upper management” had told them to prepare as they would for any other protest.

The officers, Felton wrote, “said they were wrong-footed, fighting off an invading force that their managers had downplayed and not prepared them for.”

A huge error of judgment was made. But how high — and low — did it go?

Depends what you mean by “intelligence”

Official Washington has certainly not been making it easy for reporters to get answers to their questions, which is cause for suspicion all on its own.

Senior officials like FBI Director Chris Wray, and acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen appear to be in hiding. Rosen released what looked like a hostage video of himself at midnight Tuesday on YouTube, in which he mouthed platitudes.

To this day, the federal government has not held a single real briefing — by which I mean a briefing of any substance, with a chance for reporters to ask multiple questions and follow-ups.

The public face of the FBI is now Steven D’Antuono, who heads the Washington field office. He profoundly muddled the narrative last week when he told reporters that “there was no indication” of anything planned for Jan. 6 “other than First-Amendment protected activity.”

That simply wasn’t true. And in what the Justice Department attempted to pass off as a briefing on Tuesday, D’Antuono described plenty of what normal people would consider such indications — maybe not enough to arrest specific individuals, but more than enough to warn other agencies about what was coming.

And warn they did.

Here’s what D’Antuono said:

The FBI receives enormous amounts of information and intelligence. And our job is to determine the credibility and viability of it under the laws and policies that govern FBI investigations. We have to separate the aspirational from the intentional and determine which of the individuals saying despicable things on the internet are just practicing keyboard bravado, or they actually have the intent to do harm. In the latter, we work diligently to identify them and prevent them from doing so. As offensive as a statement can be, the FBI cannot open an investigation without a threat of violence or alleged criminal activity.

However, when that language does turn to a call of violence or criminal activity, the FBI is able to undertake investigative action. And in this case, we had no indication information was linked to any specific person, but this is a matter of an online discussion. This information was immediately disseminated through a written product and briefed through our command post operations to all levels of law enforcement.

So even though it was raw and sometimes unspecific intelligence, they shared it. Everyone knew.

(Please note his use of the term “keyboard bravado.” Apparently, when white guys discuss plans to attack the Capitol, that’s not a terrorist threat, that’s “keyboard bravado”. When brown or Black people do it, the FBI goes into hysterics: Far too often, costly attempted stings, complete with entrapment by undercover informants, ensue.)

NBC’s Pete Williams, to his great credit, started off the brief, no-follow-ups-allowed Q&A with exactly the right question:

So can you clarify for us, what intelligence did the FBI gather before the assault on the Capitol about the potential for violence, and how did it share it — and did it share it — to the Capitol Police?

D’Antuono dodged, saying generally that the FBI had received “a lot of intelligence and information” through social media and confidential informants, and that the information had been shared through the city’s “very robust” joint terrorism task force, which of course includes the Capitol Police.

Reporters need to see that information.

A few days earlier, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Michael Sherwin, had been a tad more forthcoming in an interview with NPR’s Martin Kaste:

Q. I’m sure you have many sources of intel before an event like this. Did you get warnings about the possibility of violence?

A. Of course, there were warnings. I mean, look, you scrub social media, there is all types of intelligence indications. So, of course, there were warnings on social media, the different platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and we were cognizant of those. There’s always outliers but, yeah, there were warnings that people were going to coalesce and protest, and some individuals said, “Yeah, we’re going to take back our house.” So, yeah, those warnings were out there.

ProPublica’s Sebastian Rotella reported that the FBI had actually acted on some of that intelligence:

FBI officials managed to dissuade people in several places from their suspected plans, a senior FBI official said — but there was not enough evidence to issue arrest warrants.

“Prior to this event, the FBI obtained information about individuals who were planning on potentially traveling to the protests, individuals who were planning to engage in violence,” said the senior FBI official. “The FBI was able to discourage those individuals from traveling to D.C.”

Rotella noted:

The FBI shared intelligence about potential threats with the Capitol Police, which has been part of the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington since 1995. But for reasons that remain unclear, a much-criticized security deployment by the police was unable to prevent the storming of the Capitol on Wednesday.

So everybody with half a brain knew what might be coming. The only question is whether they cared.

Who made the call?

It seems like the only person in Capitol Police leadership who’s been talking to reporters is the former chief, Steven Sund, who has given only two interviews, both to the Washington Post.

Although he is the single person most clearly responsible for what may be the most historic police failure in American history, he has accepted no blame, while using the Post to spread the blame to others.

In Sund’s telling, for instance, it was the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms who blocked his attempt to request help from the National Guard. While that technically may have an element of truth to it, it certainly doesn’t explain why Sund didn’t even mobilize his own officers, choosing instead to leave them as sitting ducks behind tiny fences. He denied knowing about one particular FBI warning, but that means nothing.

House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving, appointed by John Boehner in 2012, quickly resigned and hasn’t been heard from since.

Michael Stenger, a former Secret Service agent whom Mitch McConnell installed as Senate sergeant-at-arms in 2018 (and who also resigned on Jan. 7) certainly comes off as a pathetic figure.

The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian, Carol D. Leonnig, Paul Kane and Aaron C. Davis described a scene during the siege when “a large group of senators were secretly led to a room in a Senate office building. Stenger was with them, and the furious lawmakers peppered him with questions”:

“How does this happen? How does this happen?” demanded Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.)

Stenger could not muster much of an answer, practically inaudible as he dispiritedly debriefed the senators. “He was talking in circles,” Graham thought to himself.

Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., called Stenger’s attempt to field that question “absolutely pathetic” and further reduced confidence in the room. As Graham pressed for a better explanation, Stenger’s voice got weaker and smaller. …

Finally, the Senate sergeant at arms sat down amid the others in the room, saying to no one in particular: “I wish I had just retired last week.”

We need much more reporting about what these and other top officials did and why.

Judgment must come

Although initial reports appropriately focused on the Capitol Police’s incompetent — and, in some cases, downright affable — response to the mob, we’ve learned since that some officers behaved admirably.

Videos shows dozens of them trying to push back the invaders. One officer, Eugene Goodman, may have saved the lives of many senators by single-handedly blocking and then luring away from the Senate chamber a group of angry rioters.

If it weren’t important enough already to know how this massive, historic failure took place — and what we can learn from it — distinguishing between the heroes, on one hand, and the cowards and appeasers, on the other, is essential journalism.

Alt-right media personality Nick DeCarlo admits raiding Capitol, says “maybe” he spat on police

The night after the siege on the U.S. Capitol, alt-right personality Nick DeCarlo (aka Dick Necarlo) recounted in great detail in a live-streamed interview posted to Facebook that he had raided the home of American democracy alongside Nick Ochs, leader of the Hawaii branch of the Proud Boys, who would be arrested by Department of Homeland Security agents in Honolulu the next day. At the time of his interview, DeCarlo said that Ochs was doing “great” and “riding this high just like me,” and offered a number of anecdotes from the raid that appeared to involve vandalism of federal property, promising forthcoming “hilarious” footage and a video “tour” of their raid on the Capitol.

He also said that he spat on a police officer.

Both Nicks are members of the live-streaming cohort called Murder the Media (MT Media), whose dlive.com account was suspended after the attack. They posed together at the Capitol building beside a set of double doors with “Murder the Media” intaglioed on one side. Later, a law enforcement officer would hold the opposite door open for rioters as they exited the building, creating an irresistible photo op.

DeCarlo traveled to D.C. to meet up with Ochs, and they shared a hotel room at the Fairfield Inn in Alexandria, Virginia, the night before the attack. That night, DeCarlo said that he and Ochs would meet up the next morning with Proud Boys chairman (and chief of staff for Latinos for Trump) Enrique Tarrio, who was arrested and banned from Washington that very night on weapons and vandalism charges relating to an earlier incident when he stole a Black Lives Matter banner from a church and burned it.

“Tomorrow we’ll be going to [Tarrio]. We’ll get a nice early, early interview with him,” DeCarlo said in a video he streamed the night before the attack, adding: “We got a lot of good shit planned for tomorrow. There are so many fucking people here.”

The next day, on Jan. 6, DeCarlo and Ochs stormed the Capitol together. At one point Ochs shared what would become a self-incriminating selfie of them smoking cigarettes inside the building, captioned “Hello from the Capital lol,” which was submitted as evidence in the indictment filed against Ochs the following day. The FBI’s supporting affidavit in support of that indictment exclusively cited Ochs’ own social media posts and public statements, as well as a CNN interview he gave after the siege.

That night, DeCarlo gave an interview to another MT Media host who goes by the name “Vill Nomerly,” in which DeCarlo discussed the raid and appears to confess to various legal violations.

“Dick, you went there for one sole purpose and you accomplished that,” Nomerly says. “Would you like to tell everybody what you accomplished, what you went there for?”

“Me and Nick Ochs went there specifically to stop the steal. It happened,” DeCarlo claims. (Since there was no “steal” and Joe Biden’s electoral victory was eventually confirmed, this is dubious.) He added, “It felt great and I did a lot of shit I shouldn’t have — maybe I did, maybe I didn’t — in the Capitol. Maybe I smoked some cigarettes, maybe I spat on a riot officer. Maybe I didn’t.” He claimed that he and Ochs spent “an hour and half, two hours” in the building and “got pretty far.”

“I would like to say congratulations to America and you’re welcome,” DeCarlo added.

In an email exchange with Salon after this story published, DeCarlo insisted that his real name was his alias, Dick NeCarlo, adding: “Everything you know about the Capitol riot is A LIE! YOU’VE ALL BEEN FOOLED, AMERICA HAS BEEN DUPED!”

For “proof” of this ridiculous claim, DeCarlo attached an image of aspiring insurrectionist Jacob Chansley inside the Capitol, in his absurd coyote-skin hat and red, white and blue face paint, the surroundings replaced with a soundstage and green screen in an intentionally poorly photoshopped troll. (Murder the Media, incidentally, had published an image of DeCarlo and Ochs posing for a selfie with Chansley on the Capitol steps.)

DeCarlo also beseeched Salon to “take Alt Right out of describing me you sack of shit,” and offered an official statement. The conversation is ongoing and this story will be updated with further information.

Neither DeCarlo nor Ochs paid for their entire travel to the Stop the Steal event; both raised money on the fundraising site GiveSendGo.

(GiveSendGo is a Christian fundraising platform that now doubles as a safe harbor for extremists who have been banned from mainstream services. Right-wing agitator Ali Alexander, for instance — an organizer of Stop the Steal — has recently been banned from PayPal, Venmo and CashApp, but still maintains a GiveSendGo account. However, PayPal recently cut ties with GiveSendGo in an effort to distance itself from the site’s clientele, part of an ongoing wave of corporate deplatforming directly stemming from the Capitol riots.)

“Ochs and DIck Lambaste are going to DC because the president asked and it said was gonna be ‘wild’ and that people should wear body cameras,” Ochs wrote on the fundraising page. “Our sweet boys wouldn’t miss it and promise to deliver the heinous, ugly truth to a heinous, ugly city.”

He added that while the pair would travel “as cheaply as possible,” they were still going to D.C. from Hawaii and Texas and “100% losing money on this,” and felt free to “ask for a little help without getting exiled to the MEGA-GRIFT HALL OF FAME.” The ploy raised $300 from six people — including someone using the handle “Big Papí” — and appears to have garnered one “prayer” click. Ochs also posted on Telegram that someone offered him a “buddy pass” to help offset the cost of his flight from Hawaii.

DeCarlo wrote on his own fundraiser that “it’s up to one man with the help of Nick Ochs to expose those ‘tolerant’ leftists and teach them a lesson they’ll NEVER forget: The MAGA TRAIN will KEEP ON A ROLLIN’!” In a livestream video broadcast from the parking lot of the Fairfield Inn, DeCarlo proffers a “big thanks” to his benefactors for “all the donations I already spent through them.”

“It’s fucking great,” he added.

Following Ochs’ arrest on Thursday, a Proud Boy member named Fred Swink set up a new GiveSendGo page to help cover the Hawaii leader’s legal fees. It has so far raised more than $18,000 and collected more than 430 “prayer” clicks.

Aside from the selfie, DeCarlo’s face seems to be visible in footage of the siege broadcast on Fox News. While he has been identified posing with Ochs, his name has so far not appeared in mainstream press accounts. In what is in all likelihood a joke, the Thunderdome TV/MT Media Facebook page lists its address as the Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, California, a campsite that hosts an all-male, members-only annual summer retreat for some of the most wealthy and influential men in the world.

The Trump supporters who launched the failed insurrection last Wednesday, at the outgoing president’s repeated calls, terrorized federal elected officials and caused the deaths of five people, including a police officer. There was a sixth casualty on Sunday, when a second officer reportedly took his own life in what the former Capitol Police chief characterized as a “line of duty” death no different than the other officer’s murder. The rioters committed wanton vandalism and stole federal property, taking a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and leaving human waste and random debris in an iconic landmark of democratic self-government.

DeCarlo is mentioned in the affidavit against Ochs as “another individual” smoking in the selfie, but has not been arrested as of this writing.