How to tell if your non–medical grade “fashion mask” is really working

It didn’t take long after the pandemic started for facemasks to evolve into a fashion accessory, with retailers offering a variety of fashion-forward, utilitarian, or even custom-silkscreened facemasks. But with many masks being produced by textile companies rather than highly-regulated medical industry manufacturers, how do we know for sure how well that mask is working? For instance, do filters really help? Should masks be cotton, or silk, or nylon, or something else? Ear loops or behind-the-head elastic or ties? Bandanas or gaiters or surgical masks or KN95s or DIYs or Amazon bestsellers? Of these endless options, which masks will keep us, and the people around us, safest?

Researchers have pivoted from their usual projects to look into these questions. The answers they’ve found are both simpler and more complicated than we might expect.

First, to know what makes a mask work, it’s vital to understand at what it’s physically supposed to be doing. We all know the basics of that answer: masks block virus particles, both from entering the mouth and nose, and from scattering into the air. But it turns out that up close, this gets much more complicated.

Northeastern researchers Loretta Fernandez and Amy Mueller studied the efficacy of various masks, specifically for the wearer—meaning, how many virus particles can get into a particular mask. “Masks don’t really act as a sieve,” Fernandez explains. “We’re not asking them to be like a strainer.” Instead, masks need to slow down airflow. “If the air paths [into the mask] can be made to have twists and turns, that increases the chance of particles coming into contact with the fibers in the mask, [where they’ll] stick and get trapped.”

That’s why more layers of fabric tend to make masks more effective. Additional layers mean that air has to travel through more convoluted pathways, and virus particles have additional chances to catch on the mask’s fibers, instead of reaching the wearer’s mouth and nose. The same for exhalation, and protecting others: more layers “certainly help the filtering efficiency” in terms of particles escaping into the air, says Martin Fischer. Fischer researched a low-cost mechanism to measure face mask efficacy for expelling virus particles.

But that doesn’t mean you should go buy or make a mask with as many layers as possible. Fischer, Fernandez, and Mueller all reference a “tradeoff”: the more layers a mask has, the more particles it will catch, but the less breathable it will become. Past a certain point, you get diminishing returns. “You can have a 12 layer mask that removes 99.9% of particles [for the wearer], but it’s almost entirely impossible to breathe through, and nobody is going to adopt that habit,” Fernandez says. Fischer agrees: “a mask that is superthick—not transmissive at all to air—you probably wouldn’t even wear, because it would feel so uncomfortable.”

And the fabric of your mask isn’t the only variable affecting its efficacy—fit is just as important, if not more so. Fernandez and Mueller found a wide variation in efficacy of masks they tested, and, Mueller explains, “we found that the variation was often more related to the seal of the mask, rather than the material itself. A very large fraction of the base efficacy of any mask comes from having a good seal around it. Within the range above that efficacy, different materials have different properties, but we found that a very wide range of materials could achieve a decent level of filtration.”

By “fit,” Fernandez and Mueller don’t mean that an effective mask ought to press against the mouth and nose. They mean that the edges of the mask should form an effective seal with the face, so that the breath has to go through the mask, rather than past it. Fernandez says, “If you want to improve the fit, you have to get rid of all those routes that air could take to bypass the mask—around the nose, or around the cheeks.”

What about filters? “You can probably intuit what’s going to happen when you stick a filter inside of a mask,” says Fernandez. “If it doesn’t cover the whole area, then the air you breathe in is going to find the easiest path across, which is not through the filter. It’s around the filter.”

Some of the masks Mueller and Fernandez tested performed better than expected; others didn’t do so well. They tested a DIY mask made with microfiber shop towels, a paperclip, hairbands, and staples, which they found blocked 86% of particles. On the other hand, they note, “we have tested out some masks that we did buy from clothing manufacturers, like Onzie and Reformation, and those didn’t perform particularly well—[they removed] 50% or so of particles [for the mask wearer], which is standard.”

How is the average person supposed to figure out which mask to get? “It’s so hard,” Mueller says, “and most people can’t go buy 25 different things and see what they think.” But, she says, it’s also simple: most fabric masks work well enough for most people. “We’re not comparing apples to apples” if we talk about fabric masks as equivalent to N95s, Mueller says. “They’re not. But we never claimed that they were. For what they’re being made to do, lots of them do a really good job.”

So can regular people make sure we’re at least getting into the range of 60% of all particles blocked — and ideally, higher? Researchers have shared some principles to keep in mind, in addition to fabric and fit.

Many people—and clothing companies—reference the “flashlight test,” where you shine a light on your mask, and the amount of light that you can see through it tells you how effectively it filters the air. Fischer cautions against relying on that test alone, as it involves too many tricky variables. “It gives you an idea, but if one person has a strong flashlight and another person has a weak one, or if the mask is black versus white, I’m sure that makes a difference” with how much light shows through. He prefers “the famous candle test, where you try to blow out a candle. If you can easily blow through the mask, that means that air easily goes through, and of course, with air come particles.”

Mueller points out, too, that as the pandemic wears on, our masks may wear out.

“I think everybody has an experience of watching fabric age. We all have that favorite tee shirt that we’ve washed 75 times, and it starts to get thinner and thinner. Nobody has really comprehensively measured how well [mask] materials will continue to [perform] over time. If you start with something that’s a fluffy cotton, that’s more like flannel, and over time you watch it get threadbare, that process is probably telling you that you’re losing efficacy. Know what your starting point is, and then see how [your mask] changes.” Indeed, vintage tees are comfier, and well-loved masks probably will be, too, but that doesn’t mean we should wear them.

Mueller also cautions people to avoid valve masks. “Those masks are protecting you, because when you breathe in, the air is still going through the mask, but when you breathe out, 100% of the air is going through that valve, so [valve masks] aren’t contributing anything to the public health effort.”

Researchers also suggest wearing different masks for different settings.

“If I’m walking around the city, and pretty far away from people, or if I’m standing in the classroom, and my students are 12 feet away from me, I’ll wear my regular cloth mask,” Fernandez says, “because it’s easier for them to understand me, and it’s easy for me to breathe in it.” On the train, where it’s impossible to socially distance, Fernandez wears a (non-N95) respirator with two filters.

“I’m not convinced that I’m doing myself any favors—it is a little hard to breathe through,” Fernandez says. “As soon as I get off the train, I take it off, and I put my regular cloth mask back on.” And, when she’s running, “I’ve got a bandana around my face.”

It’s frustrating not to have a clearer answer (“these masks from this company are best,” or “always use a mask with a filter,” or “three layers of cotton is most protective”). The answers we do have are less tidy. Mueller thinks that’s in part because masks serve a dual function. We wear life jackets and seatbelts, for example, only to protect ourselves, but they are also a social good – in that they’re protecting others, too.

“We’re looking at this one item to serve two purposes. In discussing how effective it is at protecting you, and how effective it is at protecting other people, the discussion becomes complex quickly, and it can be confusing to people,” Mueller told Salon.

Fernandez says that she isn’t as worried about specific mask efficacy, as long as people are actually wearing them.

“My dad’s in his 80s,” she says, and “he’s wearing a standard medical mask. I’m just glad he’s participating in putting something on his face. I’m satisfied with that, and as long as he’s socially distancing and washing his hands, I’m not too worried.”

How conservative groups will advance their agendas before a Supreme Court with Amy Coney Barrett

Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court has highlighted the ways interest groups use the legal system to pursue their goals. Barrett is closely tied to the conservative Federalist Society, whose members have played a major role in President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments. Organizations who support and oppose her confirmation are intensely lobbying senators and the public.

Like other justices, if confirmed, Barrett will continually face pressure campaigns from groups trying to shape the direction of American law.

I have extensively studied how special interests use the court as a public policy battleground, including in my book, “Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making.” Here’s what to expect from interest groups before a Supreme Court with a Justice Barrett.

Friends of the court

The main way special interests participate in the courts is by filing amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs in cases that intersect with their interests. In these legal documents, groups take positions to persuade the justices to endorse their economic, political and social interests.

Although amicus briefs are filed in almost all appellate courts in the United States, they are especially prevalent in the U.S. Supreme Court. Almost every case before the court has at least one amicus brief, and there is an average of about 12 briefs per case. High-profile disputes, such as those involving abortion, affirmative action, health care and same-sex marriage, have neared or topped 100 amicus briefs.

Amicus briefs are not cheap – they can cost up to US$100,000 because of the fees related to attorneys’ time and expenses to research and prepare them. And the court’s rules can be manipulated to obscure who pays for these briefs. This has led to allegations that groups are purposely hiding the wealthy donors who fund these briefs to further the donors’ political agendas in the court.

For example, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a charity that promotes conservative causes, funded many of the interest groups who filed amicus briefs in Janus v. AFSCME. This 2018 decision weakened the power of labor unions by severely limiting their ability to collect fees from nonunion members used for collective bargaining.

Amicus briefs work. Justices are more likely to decide to review cases accompanied by amicus briefs. Justices tend to decide in favor of the litigant with the most amicus briefs on its side when deciding cases. In their opinions, justices frequently cite and borrow language from amicus briefs.

Importantly, some organizations who file amicus briefs are more privileged than others. The justices are deferential to high-profile, elite interest groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Chamber of Commerce, particularly if those groups share their ideological preferences. The justices tend to vote in favor of the positions advocated by these organizations and adopt their legal arguments more often than lesser-known groups.

The conservative wishlist

If confirmed, the addition of Amy Coney Barrett will give conservative justices a 6-3 majority on the court. Although both liberal and conservative groups file amicus briefs in roughly equal numbers, this will motivate conservative interest groups to push their agendas before a sympathetic court. Liberal groups will be left trying to defend their past victories.

What does this conservative agenda look like? First up will be dismantling the Affordable Care Act and the Voting Rights Act, which are already on the court’s docket.

More long-term goals will include restricting access to abortion, limiting the rights of the criminally accused, halting the expansion of LGBTQ+ rights, increasing the power of business and expanding the scope of the Second Amendment, which protects an individual’s right to bear arms.

High-profile groups leading this conservative charge will include Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, the Cato Institute, the Chamber of Commerce, the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation and the Washington Legal Foundation.

What are the tactics?

The first step toward achieving these goals will be to influence the Supreme Court’s agenda.

Each year, the court receives petitions to review about 8,000 cases, but hears fewer than 80 cases. To shape the docket, interest and advocacy groups will orchestrate test cases by carefully selecting individuals to challenge policies they oppose. Once those cases are appealed to the Supreme Court, some groups file amicus briefs at the agenda-setting stage urging the justices to review a case.

Then these groups typically file a second brief at the decision-making stage. At this point, other organizations also file amicus briefs to lobby the justices to support the conservative outcome in the case, often working with the attorneys representing the conservative litigant. This provides the attorneys with the opportunity to coordinate their legal arguments to appeal to the conservative justices on the court.

For example, in District of Columbia v. Heller, which established the individual right to keep and bear arms in 2008, Heller’s lawyers coordinated with conservative interest groups on the content of their amicus briefs. These briefs contained arguments from historical, legal, linguistic and statistical perspectives, among others.

Liberals follow this playbook, too. One example: Before she was on the court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg filed an amicus brief on behalf of the liberal American Civil Liberties Union in Craig v. Boren and advised Craig’s attorneys. This led to the landmark 1976 precedent that established how the court evaluates claims of gender discrimination.

In their briefs, conservative groups will advance theories of judging known as textualism and originalism. These closely linked approaches hold that the best way to interpret the Constitution is according to how it was understood at the time of its ratification.

For example, a judge might ask herself: How would the informed public in 1791 understand what “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” means? With a majority of justices on the court sympathetic to these theories of constitutional interpretation, textualist and originalist amicus briefs are likely to be particularly effective.

If successful, this process will repeat itself over the years and in many different cases. This is necessary for interest groups because it takes a long time to achieve legal change, since the justices are generally reluctant to overturn their previous decisions. Instead, the justices tend to chip away at them over time.

For example, the American Civil Liberties Union was successful convincing the court to apply the exclusionary rule to the states in Mapp v. Ohio in 1961. This rule holds that evidence police gather illegally is inadmissible in a trial. Subsequently, conservative Supreme Court justices have followed conservative groups’ arguments by carving out numerous exceptions to the exclusionary rule. Although Mapp is still the law of the land, it is a shell of its former self.

With a 6-3 majority of conservative justices on the court – five of whom are 70 years old or younger – this strategy can be expected to continue for decades to come. This will give conservative groups and the justices who agree with them plenty of time to mold American law in their image.

Paul M. Collins, Jr., Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst

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

Scholar Larry Bartels: Trump has revealed that “truth and reason” don’t matter to politics

Public opinion polls and other data show that Joe Biden has a substantial lead over Donald Trump, with just over a week to go until the election. Biden’s campaign also has substantially more money. As judged by conventional standards, Biden won the two presidential debates. Nate Silver’s much-cited FiveThirtyEight site gives Joe Biden an 87 percent chance of defeating Trump.

If Biden and the Democrats win by a landslide — an outcome that seems increasingly likely — one of the dominant narratives will be that a multiracial coalition of Americans rose up against Donald Trump and did so loudly and bravely in a time of plague, when gathering in public could quite literally be a death sentence. Trump’s defeat will be heralded as true populism as compared to the authoritarian, white-supremacist faux-populism that won Trump his highly improbable Electoral College victory in 2016. Normalcy will have returned; the healing can begin. It will feel good, for a little while. Of course, matters in the real world are far more complicated.

What if that does not happen? What if Trump somehow manages to steal another implausible victory through both legal and illegal means, combining foreign interference, voter suppression and intimidation, and perhaps even a usurpation of the public’s will by the Supreme Court? America will slide further into the abyss of full-on fascism and an authoritarian “managed democracy.” A good many Americans, already afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder because of Donald Trump and his allies’ collective assaults, will come to feel that resistance is futile. Both “people power” and the normal operation of electoral politics will appear impotent against the Age of Trump.

With either outcome, dangerous myths about American political culture will remain unchallenged, left as assumed truths and conventional wisdom created by throwing uncomfortable facts down the memory hole.

These myths are numerous, but perhaps begin and end with American exceptionalism, the delusional idea that the United States is fundamentally different from all other nations, and not subject to the laws and patterns of history. Beneath that overarching belief, we find these dogmas: America’s democratic institutions, norms and values are strong and permanent; the free press serves as a resolute guardian of the country’s democracy; the American people are fundamentally decent and American society is healthy; Americans will always reject authoritarianism and fascism; large-scale political violence and terrorism are not “American values”; white supremacy, nativism, misogyny and other antisocial values are largely things of the past; our multiracial democracy, whatever its flaws, is a settled fact.

It is these myths that helped to create the disaster of American fascism in the form of Donald Trump and his movement. Even if Trumpism in its present form is defeated, these uninterrogated myths almost guarantee that American fascism will spring forth again.

These myths are tied together by an assumption on the part of American political elites and other influentials that the American people are reasonable, rational, politically engaged and at least somewhat ideologically consistent. There is no basis in fact for any of those assumptions.

How does this folk theory of democracy lead to incorrect understandings and conclusions about American politics in general, and about the Age of Trump and its aftermath? What is the role of “ethnic antagonism” and authoritarianism in voting and other political behavior in American politics? What does the data actually reveal about the fabled voters of the “white working class” and their support of Trump and the Republican Party? Do American voters actually factor in disasters such as the coronavirus in how they assess presidents?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with political scientist Larry Bartels, who holds the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. Bartels is the author of several books, including “Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age” and “Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government” (with Christopher Achen). His commentaries and other writing have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times and other leading publications. Bartels is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Toward the end of our conversation, Bartels shares his thoughts on the reliability of the various models offered by historians, political scientists and others who claim to be able to predict the outcome of presidential elections and the likely defeat of Donald Trump. (I will not spoil his remarks for you here.) As usual, this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are some of the major assumptions about American democracy that Donald Trump’s time in office has shattered?

Among people who think and write about politics for a living, there is a kind of assumption that truth and reason, especially in American democracy, are the driving forces of people’s behavior. These years with Donald Trump have stripped away some of those assumptions.

In 2016, I predicted that Trump would win the election. I argued that the average American voter is not rational or sophisticated. There was an incredulous response to my conclusion. In these four years of Trump, it took a long time for prominent people to state plainly that he is an authoritarian if not a fascist. Even as the facts reveal that to be true, there remains a deep anger and a profound denial among many in the commentariat and among the American people. Why the anger? It almost seems like a type of narcissistic injury.

I believe that we all have, in some way or another, an attachment to what my co-author Christopher Achen and I describe as the “folk theory of democracy.” That framework and narrative is a reassuring and comforting way of thinking about politics in this country. If we study the relationship between the political views that people espouse and then who they should vote for, there was this assumption that political views are causing political behavior, when in fact our research shows that it is probably more the reverse. Other variables are also involved in political decision-making as well, which are outside of many traditional rationalizations and explanations.

I was surprised by Donald Trump’s election, not because I expect voters to be ideological, but because I viewed the identities that he was appealing to as being too narrowly focused. I was also surprised by the extent of loyalty among everyday Republicans, for whom white identity may be an inclination to their behavior and decision-making but is not a part of their identity on a day-to-day basis. Sheer partisanship motivated many people to vote for Trump who otherwise might have been put off by him and what he stands for.

Why does Donald Trump have such a stable and deep level of unwavering support among Republicans? It endures to this late date, no matter what he does.

Partisanship is an identity in and of itself, one that has become increasingly important in the last 10 or 20 years in American politics. One reason that partisanship has become more important is that is it more strongly correlated with many other identities, of which race is an important one, but certainly not the only one.

In some new research, I examined attachment to democratic values. I included prompts such as “The president should take the law into their own hands,” “The results of elections can’t be trusted,” “Patriots may have to resort to force to save the American way of life” and other such items. We were surprised by how much agreement with those items there was among Republicans.

In trying to understand the data, I applied an index for “ethnic antagonism.” This consists of questions about immigrants having too much access to government resources, the political influence of black people, “discrimination” against whites and questions of a similar theme. Ethnic antagonism was by far the most powerful predictor of these anti-democratic attitudes.

The cutting edge of the strong emotions and enthusiasm in the Republican Party for Trump, although not all Republicans exhibit high levels of “ethnic antagonism,” is basically grounded in a kind of ethnic panic that some people have about the possibility that “their way of life” or “their America” may be swamped by demographic changes.

“White working-class” voters are still being obsessed over by the mainstream news media and too many Democratic political strategists. What do we know empirically about the white working class and its political behavior?

I think the first thing to figure out is what people mean by white working class. “Working class” is usually understood to be “people without college degrees,” which is the majority of white voters. They did disproportionately switch to Trump in 2016, but those numbers were pretty small. It is easy to exaggerate the numbers and to imagine that these people who made an important difference at the margins are representative of Trump’s supporters more generally. That is not the case. Donald Trump’s supporters were generally more upscale, for example, than Hillary Clinton’s supporters.

The typical Republican is someone who did not go to college but did pretty well in life despite that fact. He or she attributes that success to hard work and expects other people to be able to do the same thing. I believe that most such voters were already Republicans before 2016. But the people who switched to Trump in 2016 were disproportionately that person. Education has a role in Trump’s rise in another way as well. Donald Trump’s behavior is unappealing to those people who went to college and internalized a particular set of norms and values about American political culture.

The New York Times kept running these long pieces where they would explain to the readers how Donald Trump was violating some cultural and political norm, with the assumption that if readers understood that fact then the public would turn against Trump. For many people in the United States, those norms are not very salient. Their allegiance to what we understand to be “democratic norms” is pretty shallow. People who respected Donald Trump for “saying it like it is” and not being restrained by “political correctness” are disproportionately people who were less educated, although not less affluent.

What are some of your largest frustrations in terms of how supposed “political experts” in the news media analyze the country’s politics?

Many professional political observers in the news media and elsewhere want to interpret politics in terms of ideology. They also want to interpret politics in the country by focusing on the most intense people on each side, as though they are representative of the public as a whole. One of the main arguments about Trump’s voters and racism is that he appealed to a fragment of the American public that had been underserved by racism and related values, even as compared to Republican politicians, before he came along. There is evidence in support of that conclusion.

Prior to Trump there was a concerted effort among Republican elites to try to appeal to racism, but not in overt terms. They tried to appeal to anti-immigration sentiment, but not in a way that would cut off their chances to build support among immigrant communities.

One of the other common narratives is that Trump’s election is a function of some huge upswing in racism. But if you track these measures of racial resentment over time, the big shift in the last decade has been that the public as a whole has become less racist and racially resentful. But this is largely because Democrats have increasingly learned what they are supposed to say in response to questions from pollsters and other researchers about race and racial inequality. Republicans have not.

There are more major shifts in American politics in terms of media coverage than there are in reality. Every time there is some major announcement about shifts in attitudes, one should be skeptical. However, public attitudes and values do sometimes change fairly rapidly. In terms of race and politics, my intuition would be that what has changed in the Age of Trump is mostly a verbal attachment to one position or another, rather than people’s deep-seated feelings about race.

How ideological is the average American? And how does ideology relate to the folk theory of democracy?

The folk theory of democracy is a belief that America is a representative democracy, and that we the voters decide on who the political leaders are and basically giving them a mandate to pursue some set of policies. If these elected officials do not live up to expectations, then they are voted out and replaced by someone else.

There are some elements of that story which are true. But most Americans do not have a very well-developed or sophisticated political ideology. Their views about politics are shallower, more contingent on circumstances and more subject to self-contradiction than people who spend their careers thinking about politics would likely be able to to imagine.

Now, this does not mean that the average American is without meaningful attitudes about politics and related topics. They are not a blank slate. But the average American thinks about American politics sporadically, when they are forced to or when there is something happening in terms of political life that they cannot easily ignore. In all, journalists and scholars of politics think about politics much more than the average person.

What do we know about how the average American factors in calamities and disasters such as the coronavirus pandemic in terms of their voting behavior?

There are many debates about that question among political scientists and others who study politics. One view, which our book “Democracy for Realists” adopts, is that people are not very critical about assessing the responsibility of elected officials for certain kinds of calamities. In “Democracy for Realists”, Achen and I wrote about shark attacks in New Jersey and also how the public reacts to droughts and floods.

There is some existing and still in-progress research on the American people’s reaction to the Spanish flu pandemic [of 1918]. We examined that work and it was surprising, because one would imagine a large backlash. But we did not see that in the data. [President] Woodrow Wilson was not punished. State governors were also not being punished by the public. One of the explanations is that no one of public prominence at the time was constructing the Spanish flu as a political issue or attaching blame to elected officials.

By comparison, when the coronavirus pandemic was taking hold and people were asking me about the political implications, I told them there that there is no way that it is not going to be politicized, and that once it becomes politicized, people are going to associate it with Donald Trump.

The alternative view is that voters attempt to assess the quality of elected officials’ response, and that the backlash against Donald Trump is not simply a reaction to the pain of the pandemic and resulting economic collapse, but rather an assessment of Trump’s performance. Therefore, if Donald Trump were performing better than average in terms of his response to the coronavirus pandemic, then he would have been rewarded rather than punished for the pandemic. We will need to do more research in the future, of course, but my sense is that someone has to be blamed and held responsible for the failures of the pandemic response — and for the public that is Trump.

There are various models from historians, political scientists, economists and others which purport to predict the outcome of presidential elections in this country. Is there a consensus on how accurate these models are?

There are a number of these predictive models. My first observation is that if there are seven factors, for example, then the criticism could be made that the model is being constructed to fit the data which the researcher already has.

But there are in fact models that have a pretty good track record in terms of accounting for election outcomes over time. In these predictions and models, the two most important factors are the state of the economy in the election year and how long the incumbent party has been in power. Those two things appear to work well in terms of predictive power. In 2016 they predicted an outcome which was not much different from what happened.

Many of the people responsible for these models said at the time, “This is what the models predict, but it certainly will not apply to Donald Trump because he is such an unusual candidate.” Nevertheless, the models did turn out to apply to Donald Trump. I interpret that outcome to be a statement about the extent to which partisan behavior was shaped by the usual partisan factors, rather than by anything specific about Trump or the 2016 election. Those same models now predict that Donald Trump is going to lose substantially.

Here is a qualifier: There has been an increase in partisan polarization in this country. That probably means there are fewer people who are sufficiently undecided to be swayed by the state of the economy in the election year. Therefore, the magnitude of Donald Trump’s loss, if he does in fact lose, will be less than one would predict based on the historical record.

Justice Department has no legal authority to interfere in 2020 vote counts

Attorney General William Barr’s “slavish obedience” to President Trump, including attacking the validity of millions of absentee ballots now being cast in the 2020 general election, prompted a federal prosecutor, Phillip Halpern, to publicly resign on October 14. He is the third to publicly criticize Barr.

“This career bureaucrat [Barr] seems determined to turn our democracy into an autocracy,” wrote Halpern in a San Diego Union-Tribune column. “There is no other honest explanation for Barr’s parroting of the president’s wild and unsupported conspiracy theories regarding mail-in ballots (which have been contradicted by the president’s handpicked FBI director).”

Halpern’s resignation as an assistant U.S. attorney after 36 years at the Department of Justice (DOJ) raises the question of what a politicized DOJ could do to assist Trump’s re-election.

Barr’s “parroting” the false claim that mailed-out—or absentee—ballots are a pathway for large-scale voter fraud was akin to becoming one of the “super-spreaders of disinformation,” as Emily Bazelon discussed in the October 18 New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story. But could the Justice Department intervene in the process where returned absentee ballots are accepted or rejected by local and state election officials, or go further and disrupt the counting of votes? In short, it cannot.

“They really don’t have any authority,” said Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general who led the DOJ’s voting rights enforcement in the Obama administration, speaking of administering elections. “The actual disruption, if it is going to come, will come from campaigns or private parties, but not from the DOJ.”

“I know of no federal law that allows the federal government to intervene in a state-based process, under state law, of counting and certifying election results,” said David Becker, who was a senior trial attorney in the DOJ’s Voting Section for seven years, and now runs the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“There is a requirement under federal law that all [election] materials, including ballots, be maintained for 22 months,” Becker said, referring to a 1960s civil rights law that was intended to help prosecutors build voting rights cases. “That is largely for evidence gathering and after-the-fact review, if there might be some issue. That’s actually useful.”

No Authority to Interfere

The Justice Department has no legal authority to intervene in the process of accepting or rejecting any returned absentee ballot, the former DOJ attorneys explained. Nor does it have the authority to interrupt counting votes and certifying results. But what the attorney general and the department can do (and are doing) is issue statements containing misinformation or announce investigations in the campaign’s final days to cast doubts on the validity of the process in key states.

“That’s a media-based, press-based disruption, but not one that disrupts the count,” Levitt said. “What I have been saying of late is reminding people that a lawsuit without provable facts of a statutory constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee.”

For months, Trump has been baselessly attacking absentee ballots as a pathway for voter fraud, especially as many polls revealed that millions of Americans, including more Democrats than Republicans, were planning to vote by mail in response to the pandemic. Since mid-summer, Trump has said that local and federal law enforcement would be watching polls and election officials. In September, Barr amplified some of the false claims about absentee ballot fraud.

Nonetheless, Americans have been casting unprecedented numbers of absentee ballots from coast to coast, according to the U.S. Elections Project. As of October 19, more than 29 million people had already voted early or with mailed-out ballots, and more than 82 million people requested absentee ballots. In 2018’s general election, 31 million Americans voted absentee.

The ongoing response by the Trump campaign, assisted by the Republican National Committee and some GOP governors, has been to keep filing lawsuits and appeals to tighten the deadlines and rules surrounding absentee ballots. As Levitt noted, these were lawsuits filed by campaigns and political parties, not by the Justice Department, because, as he explained, the DOJ’s legal oversight of elections was limited and restricted to three spheres.

“They’ve got three things they do. One is they can file civil litigation,” he said, referring to civil rights laws that arose in the mid-20th century and were mostly concerned with protecting the rights of minorities and ensuring that their votes were counted.

“It’s the former statutes that I used to enforce… It’s a one-way ratchet,” Levitt said. “If you think of the 1950s and 1960s, it makes sense. What Congress was worried about was local election authorities, in fact, not counting the votes of people based on their race or their perceived party. So, the federal government has power to make sure that people aren’t improperly excluded.”

The second sphere is enforcing election-related criminal codes, such as prosecuting ballot box stuffing (which is very rare), or election-related threats or violence. Those investigations would not be allowed to interfere with the processing of ballots and counting votes after Election Day, Levitt said, because the evidence gathering could continue after the results were certified.

“When DOJ enforces the criminal law, that has no meaning for the actual count of ballots,” he said. “When they want to prosecute somebody for voter fraud, that’s about individual accountability. But the state and local governments still decide whether the ballots count. So even if DOJ says, ‘Yeah, these are fraudulent [ballots],’ that has no legal impact whatsoever on whether a state wants to count them or not.”

Under federal law, the DOJ has several years to investigate and prosecute, Levitt said, which means that they have no basis to immediately seize ballots or election records. Moreover, there is nothing unusual about federal agents observing elections, which has gone on for decades. Local officials also have protocols to let agents observe and make requests for records to be turned over as evidence, he said. But they cannot step in and reject or seize ballots.

“It’s not like having somebody in the room breaks a spell and the ballots are invalid,” Levitt said. “What local election officials will do is say, ‘Okay, you want to inspect them, great. Here’s a pile sitting over here. Come in and look, or I’ll go through them. But they stay in that pile.’ ‘You want to see who this one’s [return envelope] is opened for, let’s go through our process, and we’ll figure out whether a person is eligible or not. And we’ll make a decision whether to count it or not, and then you can see… [whose votes are] on the inside of this ballot.’ But DOJ sitting in the room is not going to affect if that ballot still has all of the indicators of eligibility.”

Where the Justice Department has authority to influence elections, however, is in the press—the third sphere cited by Levitt. But such information warfare is not the same as prosecuting a legal case in a courtroom.

“Will the Trump administration or President Trump be screaming about fraud in the days after the election? The answer obviously yes. Of course, yes,” Levitt said, referring to the potential for disinformation. “He was screaming about nonexistent fraud in the 2016 election, which he won. Three-to-five million noncitizen ballots, which is patent nonsense, and he’s been out screaming about fraud ever since, without any evidence to support it.”

“If you’re asking what’s the predicate for Trump to make up facts and claim that the election has been rigged, he’s never needed one,” he continued. “And unfortunately, we’ve seen the attorney general behave far more like Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in this administration than any other I can recall. And unfortunately, we’ve seen DOJ already [do likewise], with a couple of press releases that should never have gone out.”

Information Warfare

In late September, Barr and Trump tried to elevate a minor procedural mistake surrounding nine absentee ballots in central Pennsylvania—a state where 6 million people voted in 2016—into a scandal implying that the 2020 presidential election would not have valid results. This incident, where nine ballots were mistakenly thrown out, followed Barr saying in early September that federal prosecutors had indicted a Texas man for fabricating 1,700 absentee ballots in 2017. There was no Texas indictment, and Barr garbled that case’s facts, local officials said.

“I think the Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, case is a perfect example,” said Becker, who left the DOJ after then-President George W. Bush’s attorney general fired career prosecutors for failing to obtain voter fraud convictions—because alleged wide vote thefts had not occurred. In both instances, the department stepped away from its decades-old tradition of not interfering in elections.

“It is baffling to imagine that a relatively minor mistake that seems to have affected nine ballots, at the most, in a county like Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, would be somehow taken by the elected district attorney of that [county] and reported, not to the secretary of state, or the [state] attorney general, it’s reported to the FBI and the DOJ took it up,” Becker said. “Within three days, a press release was issued indicating, initially, that nine ballots were processed incorrectly. And also outing those voters as having voted for a particular candidate.”

The department’s actions were staged political theater, but not a real investigation, he said.

“First of all, three days is not sufficient for an investigation of that sort,” Becker said. “Two, I really don’t have any understanding about why a press release was issued about an incident where there is no crime and no criminal. By all accounts this was a mistake. It was a mistake that was fixable, because we knew who the voters were. They could have been contacted, and they could have been given another opportunity to vote, and those previous ballots spoiled.”

“It was inexcusable [for the department] to release information about who those individuals had voted for,” he continued. “And then, to make matters worse… this relatively minor mistake… was reported on the same day to the attorney general, who then communicated it to the president and used it in a campaign appearance that same evening.”

Becker, echoing Halpern’s resignation letter, said that the DOJ’s reputation was, in part, based on keeping out of elections. But the department under Trump was heading in the opposite direction, at least with respect to positioning itself to issue more statements to help Trump’s campaign.

“This is not the way the Department of Justice is supposed to work,” Becker said. “I have further concerns about recent revelations that the Department of Justice has rescinded guidelines about interfering with the election, about putting out press releases and other things about the election, in close proximity to the election. That was an absolute tenet of ours when we worked there. We were not to become an actor in an election process. We were to investigate. We were, in some cases, to litigate and report out, but not in the context of possibly interfering in an election.”

In his current role at the Center for Election Innovation and Research, Becker has been in contact with state officials—Democrats and Republicans—who are seeking to run a legitimate election this fall. Becker said that he has heard from top Republican election officials that Barr was not interested in the facts about absentee ballots.

“The attorney general is just wrong about the potential for fraud,” Becker said. “He clearly doesn’t understand how mail ballots work. Republican secretaries of state have offered to brief him on this and help him understand, and he has not returned their calls. He has been making claims about fraud that… have been rejected by federal courts. In some cases by judges appointed by President Trump. That is a concern.”

However, when it comes to the actual processing of returned absentee ballots or counting votes, the former DOJ attorneys emphasized that neither Trump, Barr nor the Department of Justice have the legal authority to step in and disrupt the state-run election process. But that doesn’t mean that Trump or Barr will cease reciting disinformation about the voting process—or that the DOJ will stop issuing press statements filled with innuendo.

“This has been this administration’s modus operandi for the past three and a half years,” Levitt said. “I think there will be plenty of made-for-media conflict that does not necessarily translate to any disruption of the count. But it is designed to freak people out.”

Behind the humble “I Voted” sticker’s enduring appeal — and whether you’ll get one this year

About two decades ago, the Jefferson County Board of Elections, the county that encompasses Louisville, Ky., did away with “I Voted” stickers in an effort to keep its buildings clean. Voters had taken to pasting the stickers on sidewalks, trash cans and water fountains at the churches, schools and community centers that were serving as temporary polling stations. The owners of those buildings were sick of scraping up the mess post-elections, so they threatened to stop providing their spaces to the county.

“People weren’t always responsible; it was causing problems,” Nore Ghibaudy, the spokesperson for the board, told The Courier-Journal. “We have enough going on the day after the election without sending people out to clean polling locations.”

But those same people who lost their sticker privileges seemed to miss having a tangible signifier that they performed their civic duty (especially in the age of the “I Voted” selfie). In the years since, some voters have simply ordered or printed their own roll of stickers online. Local businesses have offered election day discounts for people who voted, trusting that folks would abide by the honor system. Eventually, in 2019, the county adopted “I Voted” wristbands, following the lead of Chicago polling places.

Still, some people just want what other cities have. As a friend of mine told me on election day four years ago, “I just want someone to give me a damn sticker.”

The next day she sent a follow-up: “I guess we have more important things to worry about.”

Now we’re in the midst of an unprecedented election year, as clichéd as it is to say. Questions regarding early and mail-in voting abound amid postal service lags, and President Trump has yet to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election. But if Twitter is any indication, voters are curious if stickers are still in the cards — and it turns out that the promise of a badge, however small, that indicates you participated in democracy has long been a viable incentive for drawing potential voters to the polls.

Here’s what you need to know about “I Voted” stickers in 2020:

The origin of the “I Voted” sticker

The origin of the “I Voted” sticker is actually as hotly contested as any political race. A 1982 Miami Herald article says that Fort Lauderdale businesses gave a discount to customers donning an “I Voted” sticker, according to Time magazine, but the Phoenix Realtors Association (PRA) claims to have dreamed up an “I Voted Today” sticker in 1985.

Former Phoenix mayor Skip Ramsza, who was also the former PRA president, told The Arizona Republic in 2006, “We were absolutely the first ones in the country. Back in 1985-’86, I went to the national Realtors convention, [and] no one had heard of any stickers in their communities.”

But then, according to Vox, teachers unions offered them to members in 1984 to encourage coworkers to vote. The same year, Vice President George H. W. Bush got a sticker that said “I Voted Today — Have You?” in Houston when he cast his ballot in the presidential election in 1984, according to a report that day from the United Press International wire service.

Regardless, many civic organizations across the country began offering their versions of the stickers to voters to encourage voting, and since then, different lists exhaustively rank the individual state’s designs. Georgia’s peach-shaped sticker is always a favorite (as Elle put it in their round-up, “Butts for democracy!”), while California’s “I Voted” sticker features 13 different languages, a nod to the state’s diverse population.

They’re fun to receive, compare and post — but do the stickers actually make a difference?

The power of social pressure

“I Voted” stickers only cost about a penny apiece to produce, but their value to capture the attention of certain voters is priceless. In a 2012 article for “The Atlantic,” Derek Thompson wrote about a measure taken in Switzerland where elected officials, after noticing a dip in voter turnout, created a vote-by-mail system in an effort to raise participation.

Their thinking was simple: Voters likely had difficulty justifying spending many hours (or sometimes an entire day) at the polls to cast a single vote.

“The Swiss government thought about falling turnout like an economist,” Thompson wrote. “If the ‘time-cost’ of voting was discouraging people from visiting the polls, a simple vote-by-mail system should make voting feel more like a ‘bargain.'”

On paper it made sense, but voter participation slid even further in the areas where vote-by-mail was introduced compared to the rest of the country. “It’s social pressure, not economics, that motivates the marginal, or on-the-fence, voter,” Thompson wrote. “By creating the option to vote by mail, Switzerland got it backwards. They decreased the voting costs, but also removed the social pressure.”

And for some potential voters, that social pressure is necessary to prompt them to get to the polls — enough so that some stickers in the ’80s and ’90s were a little more, well, aggressive, some reading, “I Voted, Have You?”

“We live in a world of memes, of emojis, of visual content that expresses things — how we feel, what we do, who we are. And the ‘I Voted’ stickers reflect that as well,” said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a recent interview with the Boston Globe.

He continued: “For adults, they’re almost like captain’s wings you get as a little kid for flying on an airplane.”

But the overall picture of how or if stickers affect voter turnout is still a little fuzzier. In 2016, the National Bureau of Economic Research released a paper that found that the expectation “of being asked [if they voted] motivates turnout if individuals derive pride from telling others that they voted, or feel shame from admitting that they did not vote,” and that the majority of people didn’t like to lie about their voting record.

And the popularity for mail-in voting continues to grow, especially amid the pandemic. According to new research from the Brookings Institution, 59% of voters support holding elections by mail because it “saves people time and, at a time of a major pandemic, protects their health.” With that in mind, people may not receive their “I Voted” stickers in the way they typically do — but with the advent of social media, voters have other ways to signal to their peers that they did their civic duty.

The “I Voted Sticker” goes digital

As Mother Jones reported, since 2008, Facebook has offered some users profile buttons and filters with phrases like “I’m Voting” or “I’m a Voter.” According to reporter Micah L. Sifrey, company researchers tested two versions to determine how to optimize the tool’s impact. Users were broken into three groups: One saw the “I’m Voting” button and also saw if their friends voted; one saw the button, but not their friend’s behavior; the final group saw nothing related to voting at all.

Two years later, a team of academics and Facebook data scientists published their findings in Nature magazine.

“Their paper, with the astounding title ‘A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization,’ found that about 20 percent of the users who saw that their friends had voted also clicked on the ‘I Voted’ button, compared to 18 percent of the people who didn’t get the ‘I Voted’ message from their friends,” Sifrey wrote. “That is, positive social pressure caused more people to vote (or at least to tell their friends they were voting).”

This year, as more people are voting via mail before election day, it’s worth considering that the future of the “I Voted” sticker — at least for some voters — will be digital. But that hasn’t stopped potential voters from asking if their sticker is coming in the mail.

So, what’s happening with “I Voted” stickers this year?

Audrey Didier, a 19-year-old voter in Westborough, Mass., told the Boston Globe that she was excited to take part in a pivotal presidential election — and that she was equally excited to don her “I Voted” sticker.

Unfortunately, after fishing around in the envelope that contained her mail-in ballot, the sticker was absent. “Not seeing one when I opened [the envelope] was a little disappointing,” Didier said, “because I feel like it’s such a badge of honor.”

Though it varies from state-to-state, it’s typically up to individual counties or cities to handle the purchasing and distribution of “I Voted” stickers. In Los Angeles County for example, stickers are included in the envelope with the ballots pre-voting. But some municipalities are choosing to forgo them this year for mail-in voters; as Debra O’Malley, a spokeswoman for Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin’s office, told the Globe, “A lot of voters would have liked to have stickers included in their ballot packages, but everything you add to those packages slows down the mailing of ballots.”

Some communities where in-person voting is taking place have also forgone stickers as organizers say they want to maintain distance between voters and volunteers and prevent lingering at the polling locations.

But other communities have adapted the tradition for pandemic times. In Sacramento, voters can visit the county elections office and voting drop-box sites to receive a sticker, while individual companies and magazines, like 5280 Magazine in Denver, have created free downloadable stickers for voters. In a way, it’s a return to the civic organization-led “I Voted” initiatives of the 1980s.

Speaking of returns, this election also marks the year that Chicago is forgoing the “I Voted” wristbands and returning to stickers for the first time since 2012. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Board of Elections Chairwoman Marisel Hernandez said “the decision to dump the wristbands handed out in recent years was made to protect poll workers from coming into close contact with voters during the coronavirus pandemic.”

But the stickers, which celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, also serve as a symbol of civic pride, Hernandez said.

“It’s an acknowledgment to a lot of people not only that they voted, but possibly a lot of other things — that they contributed to this election, that they are a part of it,” she said. “With COVID and all of the other things going on, it is just a nice little gift to our voters.”

The stickers (which look to be about the size of my palm!) are also being sent to mail-in voters and have already generated a fair amount of excitement.

“This sticker is an ABSOLUTE UNIT,” one Twitter user wrote. “You could probably tell I voted from space.”

Which, if social pressure really does get folks to the polls, isn’t a bad thing.

Why Tom Steyer, hedge fund billionaire and Biden adviser, is disillusioned with the free market

One of Joe Biden’s top climate advisers has a message for people who oppose fighting climate change on the grounds that it would infringe on the free market:

“The whole idea of a free market, like God came down and in the state of nature created a free market? There’s no such thing.”

Salon has interviewed Tom Steyer on several occasions. The hedge fund manager and philanthropist was one of literally dozens of Democrats who sought that party’s presidential nomination in 2020 and pushed long before he entered the race for President Donald Trump to be impeached. In his primary campaign Steyer ran as a full-throated progressive, one who could point to years of environmental activism to give him credibility on the literal life-and-death issue of climate change.

Now that the Democrats have chosen former Vice President Joe Biden as their nominee, Steyer is co-chairing the candidate’s Climate Engagement Advisory Council. (In one of history’s great ironies, Trump was eventually impeached because of his allegedly illegal efforts to smear Biden during the primaries.)

Yet as Salon discussed with Steyer during our interview earlier this week, many on the left feel that capitalism itself is the underlying problem behind not just global warming, but many of the other ecological and economic woes facing humanity. While Biden has made it clear that he hopes to pattern his administration off of that of one of America’s most influential liberals, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, there are questions about whether his Build Back Better plan for creating jobs goes far enough.

Is it possible to be a capitalist and save the planet from its impending apocalypse? I asked Steyer about that, plus plenty of other things related to climate, consumerism, and economics. As usual, our interview has been condensed and edited for print.

I think you and I are going to agree that when it comes to the “choice” between [former Vice President Joe] Biden and President Donald Trump, it’s not a choice. But the question is, do you think Biden’s plan goes far enough? Because during the most recent debate, he did say he opposes a Green New Deal. So I’m curious, how aggressive do you think he needs to be in averting a climate crisis? Is he going far enough?

The Build Back Better plan is $2 trillion in the first four years of federal spending on clean infrastructure. That is by far the most amount of money anyone’s ever talked, ever, about clean infrastructure, and it is a reaction to our climate crisis, a reaction to the need for job creation of good middle-class union jobs. It’s a reaction to our need to address environmental injustice in terms of the concentration of air, water, and toxic pollution in underserved black and brown communities.

In addition, I mentioned that a hundred percent clean electricity generation by 2035, that is aggressive. A hundred percent net zero carbon emissions by 2050 economy-wide? That is aggressive. So I think that what we’re seeing here is a broad plan, a climate/jobs plan/environmental justice plan that deals with the series of crises that are affecting us as a country.

That shows that Joe Biden gets this issue, cares about it, sees it through the lens of the human beings — the Americans who are effected — and is providing real leadership. And that was my experience in talking to him while I was campaigning and talking to him subsequently. He really does care about and get this issue. He does it by caring about people. That’s his sort of entree into policy. This is appropriate for what he’s doing. He is making a real push here and he’s going to, as he said right off the bat, boom, “I’m going to do this.” And it’s really important that we do it. And he’s right.

I just want to again play a little bit of devil’s advocate. I’ve spoken to a lot of climate change experts and economists who have argued that free market economic structures require constant consumption of resources and are therefore inherently unsustainable, ecologically as well as economically. And they’ve argued that we need even more government regulation, more government control over large businesses and wealthy individuals in order to save the planet. What would your response be to that?

I think if you look at where we’re going — and I promise you, Matt, I have thought about this a lot — we’re going to have to rely on a lot of innovation, research, entrepreneurship, new ways of thinking. People always want to say “free market.” I mean, those were the words you used, “free market economic structures.” There are no free markets! Every market has rules. And so do we need to change the rules in the market? Heck yes! The whole idea of a free market, like God came down and in the state of nature created a free market? There’s no such thing. And just think about the labor market: Once upon a time, I could have hired a 12-year-old kid for 25 cents a day and worked him for 14 hours a day. Can’t do it now.

You know why? Because they changed the rules. Because all markets are driven by rules. I will say this: unchecked capitalism in this respect has failed and will fail. The way that we’re going has failed and will fail. Do we need government to stand in and put in rules that will protect us and will control corporations from doing exactly what you’re saying, which is destroying the natural world? Absolutely! Do we also need innovation and new products so that we can do it in a way so that we can power right through it in terms of the way we live? Absolutely! So I’ve never felt there was this conflict about whether the government should act. We absolutely need the government to act! If you look at the statement, ‘We’re going to have 100% clean electricity generation by 2035,’ that’s the government acting. That is an absolute statement that we have to do this. And the elected representatives of the will of the American people are going to have to act. So there ain’t no free market. And if you’re waiting for people in the free market to act on behalf of other people and save us, that is not a realistic expectation.

[Earlier in the interview you said] that the news about JP Morgan and the Hong Kong bank [both JP Morgan and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority have recently pledged to do more to fight climate change] are signs that actors in the market are doing the right thing, for reasons that are consistent with what they perceive to be their own financial interest. I want to make sure I understand.

Absolutely! Look, I’m not down on the free markets and business. I think that government has its role and business has its role. And business’s role is to work within the rules, set up by government, for the good of the people. I don’t want business setting up the rules because they’ll set up rules for themselves. The government sets up the rules, sets the framework, provides the infrastructure for business to innovate within. Business is good at innovation. Business is good at entrepreneurship. And we have to rely on them for that. But when it comes to making sure that the rules serve the people of the United States and the world, that’s why we have democracy. So people’s voices can be heard. That’s why I’m a huge proponent of the broadest democracy and set up NextGen to try and engage and empower young voters who otherwise wouldn’t vote. I definitely believe in a role for government and a distinct role for business. They’re going to have to work together, but a government reflects the values of society and sets the rules so those values are protected.

According to [a 2017] Carbon Majors Report, there are 100 companies that are responsible for 71% of all carbon emissions. And I remember when that report came out, some of my friends who are environmentalists were like, ‘Well, why don’t we just crack down on those 100 companies? Why am I going through all these efforts to reduce my carbon footprint? Why can’t some international organization or these individual governments tell these 100 companies to knock it off?’ What would your response to them be?

I understand their frustration and I agree with their point in a general way. And let me rephrase what they’re saying in a more general way that would reflect the same result, which is this: Do I think it’s important that Matt and Leah [Steyer’s press secretary] and Tom compost? Yes. But do I believe that the voluntary composting of Matt and Leah and Tom is going to save the world? No.

This was my point about governments. They’re basically saying we need government action at the highest level to step in and change the rules to make sure that private interests do not destroy the public good, namely the health and safety of humans across the planet and in effect the natural world on which we all depend, whether we know it or not. And I agree with them.

Expect to see a lot of Mitch McConnell in 2021

With the 2020 election less than two weeks away, many pundits are stressing that despite what the polls are showing, President Donald Trump might win a narrow Electoral College victory if he is able to outperform former Vice President Joe Biden in enough swing states. But Fox News’ ultra-conservative Rupert Murdoch is predicting that Biden will win by a landslide. It remains to be seen what will happen on Tuesday, November 3, but even if 2020 sees a major blue wave — even if Biden defeats Trump and Democrats achieve a majority in the U.S. Senate while holding the U.S. House of Representatives — one Republican name that will likely be heard a lot in 2021 is Mitch McConnell.

In fact, a blue tsunami could make the Senate majority leader the most prominent Republican in the United States.

Democrats have a chance of winning back the Senate this year, and the incumbent GOP senators who are considered vulnerable include Arizona’s Martha McSally, Iowa’s Joni Ernst, Maine’s Susan Collins, Colorado’s Cory Gardner and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis. If all of them lose to Democratic opponents, Democrats will have a Senate majority in 2021 — even if Sen. Doug Jones, easily 2020’s most vulnerable Democratic senator, loses to Republican Tommy Tuberville in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race. But one incumbent Republican senator who doesn’t appear to be in danger of being voted out of office is McConnell, who is up for reelection this year. Polls released during the second half of October have found the Senate majority leader ahead of his centrist Democratic challenger, Amy McGrath, by 9% (Mason-Dixon) or 10% (Cygnal).

The 78-year-old Senate majority leader, who was first elected to the Senate in 1984, has become an incredibly polarizing figure — and he would probably lose badly to McGrath if he were running against her in a blue state or even a swing state. But McConnell is seeking reelection in deep red Kentucky. While Democrats view McConnell as a mean-spirited hyper-partisan, the far-right Republican base view him as a fighter.

Assuming that McConnell is reelected, he is likely to remain the top Republican in the Senate regardless of whether or not Democrats are able to obtain a Senate minority. The Democratic National Committee, knowing how hyper-partisan McConnell is, has been warning that Biden wouldn’t be able to get very much done as president if Republicans hold the Senate on November 3 — and Democratic strategists have emphasized that flipping the White House and the Senate are both high priorities for their party. If Democrats flip the Senate, Republicans would likely want to have McConnell as Senate minority leader. And in a scenario in which Democrats controlled both the White House and the Senate, McConnell would, for the GOP, become the face of the opposition and the most important Republican in Washington, D.C.

McConnell’s most appalling behavior is the thing that endears him to the far-right Republican base — including his refusal to even consider Judge Merrick Garland for the U.S. Supreme Court after President Barack Obama nominated him to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. McConnell argued that according to the “McConnell Rule,” it was unfair for Obama to nominate Garland during an election year. But now, following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, McConnell is hypocritically trying to push Trump’s nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, though the Senate is quickly as possible. The “McConnell Rule” clearly doesn’t apply in 2020.

McConnell’s insistence that Barrett needs to be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court before Election Day is blatant hypocrisy in light of his reaction to Garland’s nomination in 2016, and Democrats are rightly calling foul. But to the far-right Republican base, the fact that McConnell plays hardball is a plus rather than a minus.

During Trump’s impeachment trial, McConnell was among Trump’s most aggressive defenders. Trump’s actions were egregious: the president, according to House Democrats, encouraged a foreign leader, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, to provide opposition research against Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden — and made dirt on the Bidens a condition of military aid to Ukraine. Regardless, McConnell wasn’t about to turn against a Republican president who supported much of his agenda. His only loyalty was to the Republican Party, not the rule of law.

McConnell fights dirty, and that is the thing that the modern-day GOP loves about him. If Biden defeats Trump and Democrats flip the Senate while maintaining their House majority, Republicans will be dispirited but will view McConnell as the one doing the most to fight for them. And if Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court, McConnell would take some of the credit for that.

Whether November 3, 2020 brings a major blue wave or Republicans defy the polls, Washington, D.C. will likely be seeing a lot of Mitch McConnell in 2021.

Despite what Trump says, the U.S. breaks COVID infection record just 11 days before the election

With Election Day a mere 11 days out—and after repeated claims by President Donald Trump the nation is “rounding the corner” on the virus—the number of coronavirus cases the United States has now set a new record high.

According to NBC News‘s tally, 77,640 new Covid-19 cases were reported on Thursday, breaking the previous record high 75,723 set in July.

NBC‘s tracker now puts the nation’s death toll from the coronavirus at 224,185 and the number of confirmed cases of the disease at 8,449,855.

For anyone who thinks that we're somehow "rounding the corner" on #covid19:

The U.S. has just broken our own record daily number of new coronavirus infections.

We will keep breaking this record, as cases are on the rise with many ongoing virus hotspots.https://t.co/8R5KPNmdP7

— Leana Wen, M.D. (@DrLeanaWen) October 23, 2020

The Covid Tracking Project, in its latest assessment, put the death toll from Thursday at 1,038, the highest single day toll since late September.

Trump, however, continues to downplay the severity of the disease and the mounting number of cases and death toll and reject science-backed measures to stop its spread. He has doubled down on his distrastrous repsonse, saying Wednesday there is “not much” he would do differently.

Thursday evening, during the final presidential debate, Trump again defied evidence and falsely claimed again of the coronavirus, “We are rounding the corner. It’s going away.”

Trump is lying again about COVID-19. Last night he said; "What we’ve done has been amazing, and we have done an amazing job, and it’s rounding the corner.” The truth: His policies have given us the highest per capita COVID death rate of any major country.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 16, 2020

The president’s comments during the debate came just a day after Jay Butler, deputy director for infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lamented, “Unfortunately, we’re seeing a distressing trend here in the United States, with Covid-19 cases increasing in nearly 75% of the country.”

That trend is poised to continue. CNN reported this week:

As cold weather is likely to drive more gatherings indoors, the case level appears too high to avoid dangerous levels of infections and hospitalizations in the coming weeks, experts have said.

“(With) the fact that we’re only going to see more transmission occur with indoor air, people inside, this is going to be a rough fall,” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told CNN on Tuesday.

That’s especially worrying given that hospitals are already overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients, a situation forcing some states like Wisconsin to open a field hospital—a step officials in Utah are standing ready to take as well.

“More than 41,000 people are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus in the United States, a 40 percent rise in the past month,” the New York Times reported Friday, adding that “the sharply rising numbers now are deeply worrisome, in part, because they are testing the limits of smaller hospital systems.” According to the Times,

Patients are now spread more broadly across the country, with troubling hot spots from North Dakota to Kentucky. More people than ever are falling critically ill in rural areas, particularly in the Midwest and the Mountain West, where they must rely on hospitals that may have only a handful of beds. And experts worry that the growing numbers in need of hospital care will only get worse if cases continue to mount.

Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of health policy and medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of a newly released study comparing Covid-19 death figures in the U.S. to those of 18 other countries, put the American response in blunt terms.

“It’s shocking. It’s horrible,” he told NPR.

“The United States really has done remarkably badly compared to other countries,” Emanuel told NPR. “I mean, remarkably badly.”

Here’s what the different “phases” of vaccine production really mean

Articles about the ongoing effort to create a vaccine for the novel coronavirus often include talk of “phases,” as if vaccine production were akin to the moon. For instance, CNN reported earlier this month that Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine was “fourth to begin Phase 3 trials in the United States.” NBC News reported earlier this week that “AstraZeneca’s phase 3 clinical trial was put on hold in early September after a study participant in the U.K. developed a spinal cord injury.” A headline from Fierce Pharma proclaimed, “Moderna, now wrapped on phase 3 enrollment, touts diversity of vaccine trial participants.”

For those who don’t work in the pharmaceutical industry, understanding the different phases of a vaccine, and what that means, can be confusing. And any similarities to the moon’s phases are superficial: vaccine candidates don’t wax and wane, per se.

Yet given the urgency with which a vaccine will let our lives continue as normal, following the internecine twists and turns of vaccine production has suddenly become front-page news. What exactly they mean is crucial for understanding what’s going on. Here’s a brief primer on what vaccine “phases” mean, and why it’s important.

The meaning of clinical trial “phases”

Before any vaccine candidate can be released to the public, it first has to go through several stages of study, which researchers organize into discrete phases. Typically, “phase” is capitalized. Before any phase begins, scientists work to develop a vaccine candidate. Once that candidate exists, they produce a small number of trial vaccines.

Then comes the first phase. In Phase I, a trial vaccine is administered to a small group of people for initial testing. (The phases are sometimes referred to with Roman numerals, and sometimes with numbers; research institutions don’t seem particularly consistent here.)

If Phase I goes well — meaning that “the vaccine appears safe and the people who get it mount a detectable immune response,” according to Dr. Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health — scientists can move on to Phase II. As Lessler added, however, “These trials are usually limited to healthy adult volunteers, but the exact composition will depend on the disease and who is at most risk.”

“Generally, people that have the disease you are trying to prevent are not included,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, wrote to Salon. “Also, anyone that would be known to have a reaction to the vaccine or any of its components. For example, people with egg allergies are excluded from Influenza vaccine trials since the virus used is grown in eggs. Also, if it is a live virus that is used for the vaccine, you would exclude anyone that could get sick from this like a person on steroids or with an immune dysfunction. If they live with someone who might get sick from the live virus vaccine. Usually kids and pregnant women are excluded. [They] may also exclude by gender depending on the vaccines goal.”

On to Phase II

Phase II expands that clinical study to include people from groups who are in particular need for a vaccine using, criteria such as age and health. According to Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, these phases contain “larger number of healthy folks – to get better assessment (since now seemingly worth studying larger number) to better establish what was studied in smaller numbers” during the initial clinical trial phase.

“What would stop it there is the seeming lack of the responses you would like to see, or an abundance or severity of those you wouldn’t,” Sommer said. “If a trial of a therapy for disease you would hope to see some impact on small numbers of those involved who are infected. But for a vaccine – want to see good response but insufficient to have any idea whether it would be protective in real life.”

During Phase II, as Medical Xpress explains, “these studies are usually not large enough for us to confirm the vaccine actually does what it needs to do, and that is to protect people from the infection it’s designed to provide protection from.” They instead serve the purpose of being as sure as possible that a vaccine candidate is safe.

Phase III is where things get exciting (and safer)

Phase III involves an even further expansion of that group, usually involving thousands of patients.

“Ideally diversity is always wanted throughout but it is essential to get gender and diversity addressed here in order to not miss concerns or efficacy concerns,” Benjamin wrote to Salon. “Anything can go wrong from serious health complication to it is not as effective as the earlier study suggested with a smaller pool. Generally, we are still only including generally health people, but you might include people with some chronic diseases at some point because you want to know if the vaccine is protective in people with certain chronic diseases. [It] depends on the protocol and the vaccine.”

He added that “once you show it is safe to use you still must show it prevents the disease.” Benjamin observed that this can be done in two ways: “Put them in the real world around people that could infect them and see who does and does not get infected. The other thing you can do is infect them on purpose. Very controversial approach and most ethicists say you can only do this if you have an effective treatment or cure for the disease you are trying to prevent with a vaccine. This would not be appropriate for COVID-19 since we don’t have effective antiviral agents.”

Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, told Salon, reinforced that view.

“In Phase III, scientists are directly asking the question for the first time whether the vaccine protects people against SARS-CoV2 and whether or not there are serious side effects not yet detected in the smaller, earlier Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials,” Medford wrote to Salon. “To do this, a large population (thousands) is studied that better reflects the diversity of people likely to receive the vaccine once it is approved. Further additional studies are often required to look at specific populations such as the immunocompromised, elderly and children.”

He added, “In a typical Phase 3 study design, volunteers are randomized to receive either the vaccine or a placebo. Scientists then monitor all the volunteers over time (months) to see who becomes infected or develops potential side effects. Neither the volunteers nor the scientists conducting the study know which volunteer has received the vaccine or placebo. It is only at pre-specified times, such as at the end of the study, that ‘the blind is broken’ and the number of infections and potential side effects is compared between the vaccine and placebo groups.” For a Phase III trial to be considered successful according to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines, “the vaccine group must demonstrate a statistically significant 50% or greater reduction in COVID-19 cases compared with the placebo group” and “the vaccine group must demonstrate no significant increase in serious, life-threatening side effects compared with the placebo group.”

The final phase is Phase IV

Finally, if a vaccine is approved and licensed after Phase III, many companies will continue through Phase IV of testing to make sure a given drug is effective and safe. If a drug reaches Phase IV, that means it has been approved by the FDA. According to the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), this means that “the drug is tested in several hundreds or thousands of patients,” which “allows for better research on short-lived and long-lasting side effects and safety.” This phase will often continue well after a vaccine is in widespread, common use.

I see stories about vaccine makers doing multiple phases at once. How does that work?

Yes, phases can also be blurred together.

“The phases are discreet — one, two and three — but sometimes companies can enter into approval with the Food and Drug Administration to combine elements of a safety study with an efficacy study,” Medford told Salon. “That would be called a Phase I/II. And in Phase II/III, it’s an agreement with the regulatory agency that will not only establish a dose finding, shall we say, but the study will be a sufficient size that efficacy results and safety results may be incorporated into a final package for a consideration for approval. It’s not unusual to combine them.”

What happens if you rush a vaccine without doing all these steps, as Russia and other countries appear to be doing?

“These steps reflect long years of experience and lessons learned by scientists, doctors, statisticians and government regulators in the US and the world in developing safe and effective vaccines against many of the world’s most serious infectious diseases,” Medford told Salon. “Today’s extraordinarily rapid development and testing of COVID-19 vaccines in the US and Europe is based on new science, technologies and approaches that embrace and build upon these lessons. However, by ignoring these lessons, such as the approval of a vaccine without a large scale Phase 3 clinical trial to assess safety and efficacy, we run the risk of deploying a vaccine to millions of people that is neither protective against SARS-Cov-2 nor safe.”

Dr. Lessler added, “The biggest risk is you get an ineffective, or even dangerous, vaccine. This can not only be dangerous in and of itself, but can make it harder to get a future vaccine approved or widely used by the population.”

What are vaccines made of? How do they work?

A vaccine is a medical tool used to either prevent or therapeutically treat specific infectious diseases. Most vaccines work by containing agents that resemble microorganisms which normally cause diseases; usually they are either weakened forms of the bacteria or virus that cause the disease, or else they contain the surface proteins and toxins associated with those microorganisms. The underlying goal is to help the body develop a proper immune response so that it will be able to protect itself from other diseases like it.

This is a painstaking process, one that requires repeated trial and error so that scientists can both guarantee that a given vaccine is effective and so that they will not accidentally give someone a drug that makes them sick, or perhaps even kills them. Rushing a vaccine can lead to “inflammatory reactions in the body when the body rushes to try to generate antibodies and T-cells against the ‘antigens’ or proteins in the vaccine formulation,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told Salon last month.

For vaccines to work, however, a large number of people must actually use them. One of the major concerns held by scientists today is that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories will scare people off of getting a coronavirus vaccine if and when one is developed.

“We very clearly know that, if we don’t get 70-something percent of the population covered, we will probably not get to herd immunity,” Benjamin told Salon in May. “There are some people that think that, with this virus, we might be able to achieve it with 50 percent, so that’s not 100 percent. But I’m thinking that 70-something percent is about where we need to be, and it’s because I’ve looked at some of the data. We may achieve it with 50 percent, but the bottom line is we’d run the risk of not getting herd immunity with the vaccine.”

What is herd immunity?

“Herd immunity, or community immunity as I like to call it, is the indirect protection we get because people around us are immune to the disease,” Dr. Lessler wrote to Salon. “The basic idea is if there are fewer people around me who can get sick, then there will be fewer people around who can infect me, so I will be less likely to get infected even if I am not immune to the disease myself. Herd immunity is a more general concept, but when people use the term they often mean herd protection; which is the point where there is so much immunity in the population that a community would not be able to start an epidemic if someone in that community got infected.”

He added, “For SARS-CoV-2 it seems reasonable rough estimate of this amount of immunity needed to achieve this is 50-80% of people being immune.”

Medford expressed a similar thought, writing to Salon that “herd immunity occurs when the spread of a disease, such as COVID-19, from person to person becomes unlikely because a high percentage of the community in which the person lives (approximately 70%) is immune to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, primarily through vaccination but also by contracting and surviving the COVID-19 disease itself. In this manner, herd immunity could help protect the rest of the community (up to 30% of the population) that is not immune to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

Why has the novel coronavirus presented such a tough challenge?

The main problem, as Dr. H. Cody Meissner wrote for American Academy of Pediatrics News, is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is very poorly understood. Vaccines take a long time to develop even when a disease has been around for a while, but because SARS-CoV-2 entered human beings less than a year ago, scientists have more work to do than would otherwise be the case.

This does not mean we should lose hope, however.

“It is encouraging to see so many players in the field, many using very different platforms (forms of vaccines),” Sommer told Salon by email last month. “This clearly increases the likelihood that at least one if not more of these vaccine candidates will prove safe and effective. Some are likely to prove more effective than others at reducing the risk of subsequent infection, and provide such protection for longer periods of time. The lessons we learn from each approach might well increase the likelihood, and the speed, at which even more effective vaccines are developed.”

Which vaccine candidates are showing the most progress?

According to MarketWatch, there are only four major vaccine candidates right now that are currently in Phase III trials. These include one being developed by AstraZeneca in partnership with the University of Oxford, one being developed by BioNTech and Pfizer Inc., one being developed by Johnson & Johnson and one being developed by Moderna. AstraZeneca currently says they expect data by the end of the year, although they halted trials in the United States in early September due to an adverse event;

Last week Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla announced that the pharmaceutical giant may apply for emergency federal approval of its coronavirus vaccine by as soon as late November. This marks the first time a drug company has offered a possible specific time for a vaccine to be ready for public use.

In tamer debate, Trump and Biden clash (again) on president’s pandemic response

In the second and final debate of the 2020 presidential race, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden sparred over Trump’s handling of the pandemic and Biden’s plan to reform health care. In stark contrast to the first debate, there was more policy talk. There was also less interrupting.

Trump said a COVID-19 vaccine is “ready” and will be announced “within weeks,” shortly before conceding that it is “not a guarantee.”

Biden said Trump still has no comprehensive plan to deal with the pandemic, even as case counts continue to climb. “We’re about to go into a dark winter, and he has no clear plan,” Biden said.

Trump claimed Biden’s health care plan would lead to “socialized medicine,” conflating Biden’s proposal to introduce a government insurance option with more progressive proposals that would eliminate private insurance. “I support private insurance,” Biden said, promising, “Not a single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan.”

You can read a full fact check for the evening, done in partnership with PolitiFact, here.

Meanwhile, we broke down the candidates’ closing coronavirus and other health-related claims so you can do your part: vote.

Here are the highlights:

Trump: “We are rounding the turn [on the pandemic]. We are rounding the corner.”False.“Rounding the corner” suggests that significant and sustained progress is being made in the fight against the coronavirus, and that’s not the case, according to the data.

The number of COVID cases is climbing once again, after falling consistently between late July and mid-September. Cases are now at their highest point since early August, with almost 60,000 new confirmed infections a day. That’s only about 10% lower than the peak in late July.

New daily hospitalizations today are lower than in previous spikes, but in the past few weeks there has been a modest increase. The positivity rate, which measures the percentage of tests that come up positive for the virus, has also been going up again in the past few weeks. Higher positivity rates are an indicator of community spread.

The one encouraging change is that, since a peak in August, deaths have fallen fairly consistently. That’s due to a combination of factors, including improved understanding of how to treat the disease. Yet COVID deaths have settled in at about 800 a day, keeping total deaths per week in the U.S. above normal levels.

Trump: His administration has done “everything” Biden suggested to address COVID-19. “He was way behind us.” We rated a similar claim Pants on Fire. While there are some similarities between Biden’s and Trump’s plans to combat COVID-19, experts told us any pandemic response plan should have certain core strategies. The Trump administration has released no comprehensive plan to battle the disease, except with regard to the development and distribution of vaccines. Trump’s main intervention was implementing travel restrictions, while efforts to roll out a widespread testing plan faced difficulties.

Biden released a public COVID plan; the first draft was published March 12. It included public health measures such as deploying free testing and personal protective equipment, as well as implementing economic measures such as emergency paid leave and a state and local emergency fund.

Trump: “As you know, 2.2 million people were expected to die. We closed the greatest economy in the world to fight this horrible disease that came from China.”His claim about the estimated deaths rates Mostly False. Trump frequently refers to this number to claim that his administration’s moves saved 2 million lives. However, the number is from a mathematical model that hypothesized what would happen if, during the pandemic in the U.S., neither people nor governments changed their behaviors, a scenario that experts considered unrealistic. The U.S. has the highest death toll from COVID-19 of any country, and one of the highest death rates. Also, credit for shutting down the economy doesn’t go primarily to Trump, but rather to states and local jurisdictions. In fact, Trump encouraged states to open back up beginning in May, even when there were high rates of COVID transmission in those areas.

Trump: “We cannot lock ourselves in a basement like Joe does.” We rated a similar claim False. It is one of Trump’s favored shots to say Biden isolated himself in his basement. In the first few months of the pandemic, Biden did run much of his campaign from his Delaware home. He built a TV studio in his basement to interact with voters virtually. But that changed.

In September alone, Biden gave remarks and held events in, among other places, Kenosha, Wisconsin; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Warren, Michigan; Tampa, Florida; and Charlotte, North Carolina. We counted 14 locations.

Trump: Said of Dr. Anthony Fauci, “I think he’s a Democrat, but that’s OK.” This is wrong. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is not affiliated with a political party. He hasn’t endorsed any parties or candidates.

Biden: “We are in a circumstance where the president still has no plan, no comprehensive plan.”This is largely accurate. When Biden claimed during the first debate that Trump “still won’t offer a plan,” we noted the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” for vaccine development as well as its more detailed plan for vaccine distribution. But the administration has not released a comprehensive plan to address COVID-19.

Trump: “There was a spike in Florida. That is gone. There was a spike in Texas. That is gone. There was a spike in Arizona. It is gone.”

This is inaccurate. Over the summer, Florida, Texas and Arizona experienced record surges in cases that later eased — but now they are all seeing new surges. Over the past week, The New York Times’ tracker notes, as of Friday, new infections are up 37% in Florida, 13% in Texas and 47% in Arizona, from the average two weeks earlier.

Trump: “When I closed [travel from China], he said I should not have closed. … He said this is a terrible thing, you are a xenophobe; I think he called me racist. Now he says I should have closed it earlier.”

Mostly False . Joe Biden did not directly say he thought Trump shouldn’t have restricted travel from China to stem the spread of the coronavirus.

Biden did accuse Trump of “xenophobia” in an Iowa campaign speech the same day the administration announced the travel restrictions — Jan. 31 — but his campaign said that his remarks were not related and that he made similar comments before the restrictions were imposed. Biden didn’t take a definitive stance on the subject until April 3, when his campaign said he supported Trump’s decision to impose travel restrictions on China.

Trump: “They have 180 million people, families under what he wants to do, which will basically be socialized medicine — you won’t even have a choice — they want to terminate 180 million plans.”

Pants on Fire . About 180 million people have private health insurance. But there is absolutely no evidence that under Biden’s health care proposal all 180 million would be removed from their insurance plans. Biden supports creating a public option, which would be a government-run insurance program that would exist alongside and compete with other private plans on the health insurance marketplace.

Under Biden’s plan, even people with employer-sponsored coverage could choose a public plan if they wanted to. And estimates show that only a small percentage of Americans would likely leave their employer-sponsored coverage if a public option were available, and certainly not all 180 million. Experts said it is not socialized medicine.

Biden: “Not one single person with private insurance” lost their insurance “under Obamacare … unless they chose they wanted to go to something else.”

This is inaccurate. This is a variation of a claim that earned President Barack Obama our Lie of the Year in 2013. The Affordable Care Act tried to allow existing health plans to continue under a complicated process called “grandfathering,” but if the plans deviated even a little, they would lose their grandfathered status. And if that happened, insurers canceled plans that didn’t meet the new standards.

No one determined with any certainty how many people got cancellation notices, but analysts estimated that about 4 million or more had their plans canceled. Many found insurance elsewhere, and the percentage was small — out of a total insured population of about 262 million, fewer than 2% lost their plans. However, that still amounted to 4 million people who faced the difficulty of finding a new plan and the hassle of switching their coverage.

This story includes reporting by KHN reporters Victoria Knight and Emmarie Huetteman, and Jon Greenberg, Louis Jacobson, Amy Sherman, Miriam Valverde, Bill McCarthy, Samantha Putterman, Daniel Funke and Noah Y. Kim of PolitiFact.

What happened to the Voting Rights Act?

This country has a long history of disenfranchising and suppressing the votes of people of color, particularly in the South. But in 2013 the voter suppression efforts of yesteryear came roaring back. That’s when the Supreme Court gutted key provisions in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those provisions had stopped states with histories of voter suppression from changing their election laws without an okay from the federal government.

Let’s take a look at how that shameful decision has played out over the years, shall we?

Today’s voter suppression often takes the form of purging eligible voters from the rolls, cutting back early and absentee voting, closing polling places, and using strict voter ID requirements – disenfranchising voters of color at every turn.

Voter roll purges have become increasingly common.

Officials purged nearly 4 million more names between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008 — a 33 percent increase. Officials in states that used to be under federal oversight purged voters from the rolls at a rate 40 percent higher than those in states with no history of voter suppression.

As it turns out, Chief Justice John Roberts was dead wrong when he argued “things have changed dramatically” in the South.

Election officials in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia have all conducted illegal voter roll purges. In Virginia in 2013, nearly 39,000 voters were removed from the rolls when state officials relied on a faulty database – removing voters who had supposedly moved out of the state.

Even if you make it past a voter roll purge, you may get stuck in endlessly long lines to vote.

Since the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013, 1,688 polling places have been shuttered in states previously bound by the Act’s preclearance requirement. Texas officials closed 750 polling places. Arizona and Georgia were almost as bad. Not surprisingly, these closures were mostly in communities of color.

In Texas, officials in the 50 counties that gained the most Black and Latinx residents between 2012 and 2018 closed 542 polling sites, compared to just 34 closures in the 50 counties that gained the fewest Black and Latinx residents. In Georgia’s 2020 primary, 80 polling places were closed in Atlanta, home to Georgia’s largest Black population — forcing 16,000 residents to use a single polling place.

And even if you get to a polling place after standing for three hours to cast your ballot, you may end up being turned away because of a restrictive voter ID law.

Republican lawmakers in 15 states have passed such laws since the Supreme Court’s shameful decision.

Texas Republicans put a voter ID law into effect almost immediately following the decision — a law that they had been prevented from passing in 2011 when the Voting Rights Act was still intact. That law has been struck down five times since it went into effect, with multiple courts finding it intentionally discriminates against Black and Latinx voters. A federal appeals court finally allowed a watered-down version that’s still one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country.

In Georgia, the state’s restrictive “exact match” ID law — requiring a voter’s ID to exactly match the name on their registration, down to any dots or dashes — allowed state officials to throw out 53,000 majority-Black voter registrations less than a month before the state’s tight 2018 gubernatorial race. Stacey Abrams, who would have been the country’s first Black woman governor, lost the election by just under 55,000 votes — after years of her rival Brian Kemp systematically suppressing the votes of people of color.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, a court found that the state’s voter ID law “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision,” and struck the law down in its entirety. Imagine all we could accomplish with all the time, money, and resources that go into prolonged legal battles against these discriminatory laws that should never have seen the light of day in the first place.

Voter suppression is wreaking havoc on our electoral process.

When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act seven years ago, it passed the buck to Congress to update it, but Senate Republicans haven’t lifted a finger.

In December 2019, John Lewis presided over the House of Representatives to pass H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, now named the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act in his honor, to restore the Voting Rights Act and stop this pervasive voter suppression. It’s been collecting dust on Mitch McConnell’s desk ever since. He and his GOP colleagues think they can sit idly by as Republican state officials suppress the vote with no accountability.

They’re wrong. The people are ready to fight back against their agenda and build a 21st century democracy that is representative of and responsive to our growing, diverse nation.

If your vote didn’t count, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to suppress it. Make sure you check your registration, stay up to date on your state’s rules for mail-in voting, find your polling place, and get involved with organizations on the frontlines of protecting the vote.

There’s no telling what we’ll be able to accomplish when we win the battle for voting rights.

Reframing America’s role in the world

The so-called Age of Trump is also an age of instantly forgotten bestselling books, especially ones purporting to provide the inside scoop on what goes on within Donald Trump’s haphazard and continuously shifting orbit. With metronomic regularity, such gossipy volumes appear, make a splash, and almost as quickly vanish, leaving a mark no more lasting than a trout breaking the surface in a pond.

Remember when Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was all the rage? It’s now available in hardcover for $0.99 from online used booksellers. James Comey’s Higher Loyalty also sells for a penny less than a buck.

An additional forty-six cents will get you Omarosa Manigault Newman’s “insider’s account” of her short-lived tenure in that very White House. For the same price, you can acquire Sean Spicer’s memoir as Trump’s press secretary, Anthony Scaramucci’s rendering of his tumultuous 11-day stint as White House communications director, and Corey Lewandowski’s “inside story” of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Bibliophiles intent on assembling a complete library of Trumpiana will not have long to wait before the tell-all accounts of John Bolton, Michael Cohen, Mary Trump, and that journalistic amaneusis Bob Woodward will surely be available at similar bargain basement prices.

All that said, even in these dismal times genuinely important books do occasionally make their appearance. My friend and colleague Stephen Wertheim is about to publish one. It’s called Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy and if you’ll forgive me for being direct, you really ought to read it. Let me explain why.

The “turn”

Wertheim and I are co-founders of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a small Washington, D.C.-based think tank. That Quincy refers to John Quincy Adams who, as secretary of state nearly two centuries ago, warned his fellow citizens against venturing abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Were the United States to do so, Adams predicted, its defining trait — its very essence — “would insensibly change from liberty to force.” By resorting to force, America “might become the dictatress of the world,” he wrote, but “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” While his gendered punchline might rankle contemporary sensibilities, it remains apt.

A privileged man of his times, Adams took it for granted that a WASP male elite was meant to run the country. Women were to occupy their own separate sphere. And while he would eventually become an ardent opponent of slavery, in 1821 race did not rank high on his agenda either. His immediate priority as secretary of state was to situate the young republic globally so that Americans might enjoy both safety and prosperity. That meant avoiding unnecessary trouble. We had already had our revolution. In his view, it wasn’t this country’s purpose to promote revolution elsewhere or to dictate history’s future course.

Adams was to secretaries of state what Tom Brady is to NFL quarterbacks: the Greatest Of All Time. As the consensus GOAT in the estimation of diplomatic historians, he brought to maturity a pragmatic tradition of statecraft originated by a prior generation of New Englanders and various slaveholding Virginians with names like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. That tradition emphasized opportunistically ruthless expansionism on this continent, avid commercial engagement, and the avoidance of great power rivalries abroad. Adhering to such a template, the United States had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, become the wealthiest, most secure nation on the planet — at which point Europeans spoiled the party.

The disastrous consequences of one European world war fought between 1914 and 1918 and the onset of a second in 1939 rendered that pragmatic tradition untenable — so at least a subsequent generation of WASPs concluded. This is where Wertheim takes up the story. Prompted by the German army’s lightning victory in the battle of France in May and June 1940, members of that WASP elite set about creating — and promoting — an alternative policy paradigm, one he describes as pursuing “dominance in the name of internationalism,” with U.S. military supremacy deemed “the prerequisite of a decent world.”

The new elite that devised this paradigm did not consist of lawyers from Massachusetts or planters from Virginia. Its key members held tenured positions at Yale and Princeton, wrote columns for leading New York newspapers, staffed Henry Luce’s Time-Life press empire, and distributed philanthropic largesse to fund worthy causes (grasping the baton of global primacy being anything but least among them). Most importantly, just about every member of this Eastern establishment cadre was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). As such, they had a direct line to the State Department, which in those days actually played a large role in formulating basic foreign policy.

While Tomorrow, The World is not a long book — fewer than 200 pages of text — it is a tour de force. In it, Wertheim describes the new narrative framework that the foreign-policy elite formulated in the months following the fall of France. He shows how Americans with an antipathy for war now found themselves castigated as “isolationists,” a derogatory term created to suggest provincialism or selfishness. Those favoring armed intervention, meanwhile, became “internationalists,” a term connoting enlightenment and generosity. Even today, members of the foreign-policy establishment pledge undying fealty to the same narrative framework, which still warns against the bugaboo of “isolationism” that threatens to prevent high-minded policymakers from exercising “global leadership.”

Wertheim persuasively describes the “turn” toward militarized globalism engineered from above by that self-selected, unelected crew. Crucially, their efforts achieved success prior to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, may have thrust the United States into the ongoing world war, but the essential transformation of policy had already occurred, even if ordinary Americans had yet to be notified as to what it meant. Its future implications — permanently high levels of military spending, a vast network of foreign bases stretching across the globe, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry — would only become apparent in the years ahead.

While Wertheim is not the first to expose isolationism as a carefully constructed myth, he does so with devastating effect. Most of all, he helps his readers understand that “so long as the phantom of isolationism is held to be the most grievous sin, all is permitted.”

Contained within that all is a cavalcade of forceful actions and grotesque miscalculations, successes and failures, notable achievements and immense tragedies both during World War II and in the decades that followed. While beyond the scope of Wertheim’s book, casting the Cold War as a de factoextension of the war against Nazi Germany, with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as a stand-in for Adolf Hitler, represented an equally significant triumph for the foreign policy establishment.

At the outset of World War II, ominous changes in the global distribution of power prompted a basic reorientation of U.S. policy. Today, fundamental alterations in the global distribution of power — did someone say “the rise of China”? — are once again occurring right before our eyes. Yet the foreign-policy establishment’s response is simply to double down.

So, even now, staggering levels of military spending, a vast network of foreign bases, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry remain the taken-for-granted signatures of U.S. policy. And even now, the establishment employs the specter of isolationism as a convenient mechanism for self-forgiveness and expedient amnesia, as well as a means to enforce discipline.

Frozen compass

The fall of France was indeed an epic disaster. Yet implicit in Tomorrow, The World is this question: If the disaster that befell Europe in 1940 could prompt the United States to abandon a hitherto successful policy paradigm, then why have the serial disasters befalling the nation in the present century not produced a comparable willingness to reexamine an approach to policy that is obviously failing today?

To pose that question is to posit an equivalence between the French army’s sudden collapse in the face of the Wehrmacht’s assault and the accumulation of U.S. military disappointments dating from 9/11. From a tactical or operational perspective, many will find such a comparison unpersuasive. After all, the present-day armed forces of the United States have not succumbed to outright defeat, nor is the government of the United States petitioning for a cessation of hostilities as the French authorities did in 1940.

Yet what matters in war are political outcomes. Time and again since 9/11, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or lesser theaters of conflict, the United States has failed to achieve the political purposes for which it went to war. From a strategic and political perspective, therefore, the comparison with France is instructive, even if failure need not entail abject surrender.

The French people and other supporters of the 1930s European status quo (including Americans who bothered to pay attention) were counting on that country’s soldiers to thwart further Nazi aggression once and for all. Defeat came as a profound shock. Similarly, after the Cold War, most Americans (and various beneficiaries of a supposed Pax Americana) counted on U.S. troops to maintain an agreeable and orderly global status quo. Instead, the profound shock of 9/11 induced Washington to embark upon what became a series of “endless wars” that U.S. forces proved incapable of bringing to a successful conclusion.

Crucially, however, no reevaluation of U.S. policy comparable to the “turn” that Wertheim describes has occurred. An exceedingly generous reading of President Trump’s promise to put “America First” might credit him with attempting such a turn. In practice, however, his incompetence and inconsistency, not to mention his naked dishonesty, produced a series of bizarre and random zigzags. Threats of “fire and fury” alternated with expressions of high regard for dictators (“we fell in love“). Troop withdrawals were announced and then modified or forgotten. Trump abandoned a global environmental agreement, massively rolled backenvironmental regulations domestically, and then took credit for providing Americans with “the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet.” Little of this was to be taken seriously.

Trump’s legacy as a statesman will undoubtedly amount to the diplomatic equivalent of Mulligan stew. Examine the contents closely enough and you’ll be able to find just about anything. Yet taken as a whole, the concoction falls well short of being nutritious, much less appetizing.

On the eve of the upcoming presidential election, the entire national security apparatus and its supporters assume that Trump’s departure from office will restore some version of normalcy. Every component of that apparatus from the Pentagon and the State Department to the CIA and the Council on Foreign Relations to the editorial boards of the New York Times and Washington Post yearns for that moment.

To a very considerable degree, a Biden presidency will satisfy that yearning. Nothing if not a creature of the establishment, Biden himself will conform to its requirements. For proof, look no further than his vote in favor of invading Iraq in 2003. (No isolationist he.) Count on a Biden administration, therefore, to perpetuate the entire obsolete retinue of standard practices.

As Peter Beinart puts it, “When it comes to defense, a Biden presidency is likely to look very much like an Obama presidency, and that’s going to look not so different from a Trump presidency when you really look at the numbers.” Biden will increase the Pentagon budget, keep U.S. troops in the Middle East, and get tough with China. The United States will remain the world’s number-one arms merchant, accelerate efforts to militarize outer space, and continue the ongoing modernization of the entire U.S. nuclear strike force. Biden will stack his team with CFR notables looking for jobs on the “inside.”

Above all, Biden will recite with practiced sincerity the mantras of American exceptionalism as a summons to exercise global leadership. “The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world. But this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well.” Those uplifting sentiments are, of course, his from a recent Foreign Affairs essay.

So if you liked U.S. national security policy before Trump mucked things up, then Biden is probably your kind of guy. Install him in the Oval Office and the mindless pursuit of “dominance in the name of internationalism” will resume. And the United States will revert to the policies that prevailed during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama — policies, we should note, that paved the way for Donald Trump to win the White House.

The voices that count

What explains the persistence of this pattern despite an abundance of evidence showing that it’s not working to the benefit of the American people? Why is it so difficult to shed a policy paradigm that dates from Hitler’s assault on France, now a full 80 years in the past?

I hope that in a subsequent book Stephen Wertheim will address that essential question. In the meantime, however, allow me to make a stab at offering the most preliminary of answers.

Setting aside factors like bureaucratic inertia and the machinations of the military-industrial complex — the Pentagon, arms manufacturers, and their advocates in Congress share an obvious interest in discovering new “threats” — one likely explanation relates to a policy elite increasingly unable to distinguish between self-interest and the national interest. As secretary of state, John Quincy Adams never confused the two. His latter-day successors have done far less well.

As an actual basis for policy, the turn that Stephen Wertheim describes in Tomorrow, The World has proven to be nowhere near as enlightened or farseeing as its architects imagined or its latter day proponents still purport to believe it to be. The paradigm produced in 1940-1941 was, at best, merely serviceable. It responded to the nightmarish needs of that moment. It justified U.S. participation in efforts to defeat Nazi Germany, a necessary undertaking.

After 1945, except as a device for affirming the authority of foreign-policy elites, the pursuit of “dominance in the name of internationalism” proved to be problematic. Yet even as conditions changed, basic U.S. policy stayed the same: high levels of military spending, a network of foreign bases, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry. Even after the Cold War and 9/11, these remain remarkably sacrosanct.

My own retrospective judgment of the Cold War tends toward an attitude of: well, I guess it could have been worse. When it comes to the U.S. response to 9/11, however, it’s difficult to imagine what worse could have been.

Within the present-day foreign-policy establishment, however, a different interpretation prevails: the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War ended in a world historic victory, unsullied by any unfortunate post-9/11 missteps. The effect of this perspective is to affirm the wisdom of American statecraft now eight decades old and therefore justify its perpetuation long after both Hitler and Stalin, not to mention Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, are dead and gone.

This paradigm persists for one reason only: it ensures that statecraft will remain a realm that resolutely excludes the popular will. Elites decide, while the job of ordinary Americans is to foot the bill. In that regard, the allocation of privileges and obligations now 80 years old still prevails today.

Only by genuinely democratizing the formulation of foreign policy will real change become possible. The turn in U.S. policy described in Tomorrow, The World came from the top. The turn needed today will have to come from below and will require Americans to rid themselves of their habit of deference when it comes to determining what this nation’s role in the world will be. Those on top will do all in their power to avert any such loss of status.

The United States today suffers from illnesses both literal and metaphorical. Restoring the nation to good health and repairing our democracy must necessarily rate as paramount concerns. While Americans cannot ignore the world beyond their borders, the last thing they need is to embark upon a fresh round of searching for distant monsters to destroy. Heeding the counsel of John Quincy Adams might just offer an essential first step toward recovery.

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Amy Coney Barrett and the Second Amendment: Why her “expansive view” is utter BS

“Pro-life” Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who will almost certainly be seated on the Supreme Court this week, seems to have no problem putting guns in the hands of individual Americans who want to buy them — every Tom, Dick and Kyle. She reportedly takes “an expansive view” of the Second Amendment, writing in her only ruling on gun regulation that it should not be considered “a second-class amendment.”

A number of groups advocating gun control and gun safety, including Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action, and the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence, expressed their deep concerns with Barrett’s nomination in a recent letter sent to leading members of Congress.

The 2008 Supreme Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller expanded the meaning of the Second Amendment far beyond militias — regulated or not. And that 5-4 majority opinion was written by Barrett’s mentor, Justice Antonin Scalia.

It might be useful to look back on that ruling to take another look at the “textualist” approach to reading statutes and the “originalist” approach to reading constitutional questions, and to learn what one might then expect of a Justice Barrett.

There are a number of things one might find admirable about Barrett. She was a seriously engaged student at all levels of her education, taking an English degree at Rhodes College and graduating at the top of her law school class at Notre Dame. She’s a mother (of seven) who manages to work in a demanding career. At her gym, she’s apparently known for her commitment to doing pull-ups, for gosh sakes.

Barrett is also a self-proclaimed “textualist” or “originalist” when she looks at statutes or the Constitution. In rendering decisions as a judge, she says she believes in adhering to precedent but also in closely reading the text of an enacted statute or the Constitution, seeking the reasonable meaning of that text, in the context of what most people at the time it was written would consider it to be.

In speaking to Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, during the confirmation hearings, Barrett put it this way: “My own approach to it would be textualism. The intent of a statute is best expressed through the words — so, looking at what the words would communicate to a skilled user of the language.”

Barrett works both as a textualist and as a particular kind of “originalist,” one who focuses on the original meaning, not the intent, of the founders, taking the same approach most recently popularized by Scalia, for whom she clerked in 1998-1999. (Apparently, the “intent” approach had been discredited in the 1990s, so conservative judges moved on to a seemingly paradoxical “new originalist” approach of looking for original meaning.)

To understand how this can work, a look at the language of the Second Amendment may be instructive, followed by a brief discussion of the Heller decision resulting from Scalia’s divining of the text of the framers, as ratified by Congress as part of the Bill of Rights in 1789.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

As we all know, that’s it — 27 words with some oddly placed commas and capitalized terms. (Odd for us, but not for that era; look, you are newly on your way to being a new originalist!)

Given that Barrett has a bachelor’s in English, from Rhodes College in Memphis, it seems fair to turn to a well-regarded reference here. According to “Fowler’s Modern English Usage,” there should be, in this case, no comma after “Militia” because what we see in the amendment is an instance of something called “absolute construction.” Fowler defines it this way:

Defined by the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] as ‘standing out of the usual grammatical relation or syntactical construction with other words’, it consists in English of a noun or pronoun that is not the subject or object of any verb or the object of any preposition but is attached to a participle or an infinitive, e.g., The play being over, we went home./Let us toss for it, loser to pay.

That might be a bit dizzying, but given that Barrett was an English literature major and is a textualist, her imperative to avoid misinterpretation here would seem like a piece of cake.

To me (and to many others, including a number of Supreme Court justices), the obvious sense here is “In that a well-regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The latter thing, the right, is contingent on the former thing, the well-regulated militia and the need for such.

The original Congress that passed the Bill of Rights might have chosen to turn it around, as in “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed because a well-regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State” (and it was in that order in an original draft by Madison), but they chose to emphasize the “well-regulated Militia being necessary” clause, which in effect makes it a conditional clause — if this is true, then this other thing follows.

But a textualist and/or originalist looks not at what the text reasonably means to people today but to the people at the time the provision or statute was enacted. The argument is that in doing so, they are honoring the enacted law, as explained in a 2019 article on The Federalist Society blog:

… the bottom-line principle of textualism is that the enacted text of a law is to be given supreme deference as the ultimate repository of the law’s purpose. Because the object of textualist interpretation is enacted text, many mainstream textualists reject the use of legislative history — history that has never been enacted into law.

Hold that thought, because when the text is considered to be not as clear as it needs to be, the textualist then is able to hunt for more information — in history, traditions and, if things are still murky, in more esoteric areas, say, sea shanties. (Okay, likely not sea shanties, unless the statute has to do with, say, whaling or piracy. Then maybe so.)

Speaking of militias, the Militia Act of 1903, also known (somewhat hilariously) as the Dick Act, for Ohio congressman Charles Dick, was passed after militia groups sent by states proved untrained and disorderly and generally lacking standards (e.g., different uniforms) during the Spanish-American War. Unfortunately, the act mentioned the creation of both an “organized” and an “unorganized” militia, and thereby confused the issue.

The organized militia became the National Guard; what was meant by the “unorganized militia” was simply a reserve of all men 17 to 45 years of age who might be called into service, if needed. It certainly did not mean a ragtag militia that gathers together for regular gun-fondling sessions or, just for instance, to concoct a plot to kidnap, “try” and execute a duly elected state governor. (You know, for tyranny.)

The “Dick Act” works on a few levels, then — it’s all male, and it’s a bit confused, like many men (I include myself). Although that particular Dick served long ago, it seems we still have a slew of Dicks in Congress purposely drawing up vaguely worded legislation, the very bane of a textualist.

Muscle-bound ponytailed oldsters riding around on choppers and those odd insect-like three-wheeled motorbikes as “militia” members often claim that the Dick Act gives them an absolute right to amass a personal armory as part of an unorganized militia. But, again, that is not what was meant.

By the way, The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) estimates there are at least 300 private militia groups in the United States, nearly all of them far-right so-called patriot groups.

According to the SPLC blog Hatewatch, far-right militia member Ryan Balch, who was photographed walking with Kyle Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse killed two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August, said they were not part of a well-regulated militia:

“There was not a whole lot of communication [that night], and that was even within the protesters themselves,” Balch told Hatewatch. Asked what he would need to call a militia well-regulated, Balch said, “There would have to be some organization.”

That last bit is worth repeating: “There would have to be some organization.”

The Scalia-led Heller decision took gun ownership beyond even the contested context of a well-regulated militia, extending it to personal ownership of handguns in defending “hearth and home.” Further, it dispensed with the part of the law in Washington, D.C., that called for guns in the home to be locked up or otherwise secured when not in use.

Soon after Heller, states began to pass laws allowing citizens to carry guns nearly anywhere they desired. Walmart? City Hall? Church? Sure, why not?

But despite Scalia’s freewheeling textualist reading of the Second Amendment, ownership outside the context of service in that annoyingly modified militia was never mentioned in the Constitution or in Madison’s drafts preparing for the convention. According to author Michael Waldman,

Many are startled to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t rule that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to own a gun until 2008, when District of Columbia v. Heller struck down the capital’s law effectively banning handguns in the home. In fact, every other time the court had ruled previously, it had ruled otherwise.

It’s also worth repeating that last line: In fact, every other time the court had ruled previously, it had ruled otherwise.

As you will see, Scalia’s originalist reading somehow dispensed with the idea of a militia. The prefatory clause (“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary…”) was reduced to a mere example of why Americans need to keep and bear arms:

The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Once you take that leap, well, you can go anywhere you like. Scalia was likely humming the “Theme of the Fast Carriers” from “Victory at Sea” when he got over that hump. The justice looked to history and tradition, to philosophy and English law and “natural law” in justifying his decision to divorce the meaning of the right from the idea of a militia. He invokes an “ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms” and notes that most state constitutions allowed gun ownership. All of that may be true, but none of it can be found in the enacted text.

Scalia might as well have just gone ahead and adopted the NRA’s concept of gun ownership as a “God-given right.”

Speaking of that, a 2019 paper on the NRA and religious nationalism published in Nature notes:

Over the last 40 years, the NRA has deliberately pivoted to protecting the Second Amendment, not as something merely important but as something sacred to be defended at all costs from the profane hands of the government. The NRA has done this by deliberately using religious imagery, language, and icons such as Charlton Heston, that map onto the largely Protestant religious beliefs and religious nationalism tracing back to the founding of the nation.

Judge Barrett piously promises that she will not make law from the bench, that she will mostly be guided by precedent. But if textualism/originalism got us to a unprecedented precedent that has resulted in people brandishing guns in schools, churches and city halls, how much stock should we reasonably put into this technique? Whose right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness obtains here — the gun fetishist or the family of the murdered child? The family of the teenager whose suicide was made perfectly efficient by the presence of a handgun in the home?

The late Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, famously wrote that the NRA had promulgated fraud about the meaning of the Second Amendment:

The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees a “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” However, the meaning of this clause cannot be understood apart from the purpose, the setting, and the objectives of the draftsmen. At the time of the Bill of Rights, people were apprehensive about the new national government presented to them, and this helps explain the language and purpose of the Second Amendment. It guarantees, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The need for a State militia was the predicate of the “right” guarantee, so as to protect the security of the State. Today, of course, the State militia serves a different purpose. A huge national defense establishment has assumed the role of the militia of 200 years ago.

In an 2018 opinion piece published in response to the student-led nationwide March for Our Lives, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the original fears of a national standing army creating problems for states was no longer a legitimate concern. Stevens called the Second Amendment “a relic of the 18th century” and advocated that it should be repealed.

Even the NRA itself has tacitly admitted what the opening clause means for the rest of the statement. According to Waldman, who writes of the takeover of NRA leadership by gun-rights radicals in 1977, the NRA dropped that portion of the Second Amendment on their headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, posting only the latter part in large letters in the lobby, as if there were no contingency: … the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Nice trick, that, just removing the offending clause — as Scalia, in essence, did as well. The Second Amendment’s “well regulated” may be the most willfully ignored modifier in history. The Heller decision also ensured that no one had to store guns at home with safety in mind.

In his book “American Dialogue: The Founders and Us,” historian Joseph Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize winner, criticized Scalia’s Heller decision as a kind of parlor trick used to push a political agenda:

If Heller reads like a prolonged exercise in legalistic legerdemain … that is because Scalia’s preordained outcome forced him to perform three challenging tasks: to show that the words of the Second Amendment do not mean what they say; to ignore the historical conditions his originalist doctrine purportedly required him to emphasize; and to obscure the radical implications of rejecting completely the accumulated wisdom of his predecessors on the court.

On a larger level, a number of the founders — James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in particular — saw the Constitution as a living document. Jefferson wrote that “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” In a review of Ellis’ book for the New York Times, Jeff Shesol wrote:

It would never have occurred to Madison … that the Constitution should dictate every answer or foreclose all debate, no matter what is said at meetings of the Federalist Society or in Supreme Court confirmation hearings. As Ellis argues, the prevailing conservative doctrine of “originalism” is a pose that rests on a fiction: the idea that there is a “single source of constitutional truth back there at the founding,” easily discovered by any judge who cares to see it.

Another American historian, Heather Cox Richardson, covering the confirmation hearings for her “Letters from an American” newsletter, addressed Barrett and the real purpose of originalism, which is to serve “a radical capitalism”:

The originalism of scholars like Barrett is an answer to the judges who, in the years after World War Two, interpreted the law to make American democracy live up to its principles, making all Americans equal before the law. With the New Deal in the 1930s, the Democrats under Franklin Delano Roosevelt had set out to level the economic playing field between the wealthy and ordinary Americans. They regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure…. Their desire to roll back the changes of the modern era serves traditional concepts of society and evangelical religion, of course, but it also serves a radical capitalism. If the government is as limited as they say, it cannot protect the rights of minorities or women. But it also cannot regulate business. It cannot provide a social safety net, or promote infrastructure, things that cost tax dollars and, in the case of infrastructure, take lucrative opportunities from private businesses. In short, under the theory of originalism, the government cannot do anything to rein in corporations or the very wealthy.

If I were to try to play “textualist” myself, I would find it notable that the framers capitalized “Militia” in the amendment. Though they were also a bit “cap-happy” in those days, the fact that they capitalized the word is an intriguing clue as to what they intended. To me, that “well regulated Militia” reads as one entity — something perhaps in existence in all 13 states, but to be organized into a whole in defense of one nation — not the innumerable little “militias,” heavily armed and running amok in their QAnon T-shirts and mail-order camouflage, that we despairingly see today.

Judge Barrett is smarter than I am. I have no doubt she can do more pull-ups, both physically and linguistically. But I’ll stand on the side of a multitude of other very intelligent people who read the right to bear arms as constituting a right only when, and if, it is done as part of a well-regulated militia. And we have that — it’s called the National Guard. You want to play with people-killing weapons? Join the Guard. Otherwise, grab a rifle or shotgun and go hunting, if that’s your thing.

If you read anything else into that while claiming to be an originalist, you are perpetrating a very solemn-sounding con on the American public and likely should wear a tricorn hat when out in publick. You know, so we can see you coming.

Conservatives naturally want to keep the founders alive and the Constitution dead. Unless it serves a purpose for them; then, with originalism, they perform a kind of séance to bring the document back to a sort of sham life — and if the words themselves are a burden, they blithely look to English common law, philosophy and elsewhere for guidance.

I myself have cherry-picked some quotes for this piece. It’s human nature — and I’m trying to keep this article from becoming so long that no one reads it. We may all be textualists now, as Justice Elena Kagan put it in her 2015 Scalia Lecture at Harvard (to the glee of the Federalist Society and some of her conservative colleagues), but we are also human — sometimes we see what we want to see. Or as Paul Simon put it, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

What will Justice Barrett find in the words of the founders to help her rule on challenges to the Affordable Care Act, or Medicare, or the environmental regulations so critical to addressing climate change?

The way I read it, if Barrett were to be faithful in her reading of the amendment, she would stand less on the recent precedents funded by the Cato Institute and the NRA — precedents that have caused unending misery and grief and have made our society much less safe — and actually begin to curtail the so-called rights of gun owners.

In that last sentence, Barrett and other textualists might note that I purposively use the subjunctive. It is a mood that is already disappearing from the language, but in my time it was often used for contrary-to-fact statements.

Trump and Biden parred over Texas’ energy industry and global warming during final debate

WASHINGTON — Climate change and the future of the oil and gas industry were key topics at the final debate between Republican incumbent President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The two men diverged greatly on energy and global warming policy: Biden advocated for alternate means of energy besides oil and gas while Trump emphasized economic priorities.

Trump supported clean air and clean water, but showed no regret over pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, a worldwide effort to reduce global warming.

“I will not sacrifice tens of millions of jobs, thousands and thousands of companies, because of the Paris Accord,” Trump said. “It would have destroyed our businesses.”

Biden, who called climate change “an existential threat to humanity” said the country had “a moral obligation to deal with it.”

Biden suggested that the country could curb climate change while also growing the economy and called solar and wind energy the fastest growing industries.

“We can grow and we can be cleaner, if we go the route I’m proposing,” Biden said.

“I know more about wind than you do,” Trump said to Biden. “It’s extremely expensive, kills all the birds, it’s very intermittent, it’s got a lot of problems, and they happen to make all the windmills in both Germany and China.”

Trump also criticized Biden for opposing fracking. Biden denied taking such a position. He did oppose fracking in the Democratic primary, but his campaign staffers walked back those comments, saying he only opposed fracking on federal land.

Moderator Kristen Welker of NBC also pressed Trump on Texans living near refineries who fear pollution is making them sick.

“The families that we’re talking about are employed heavily, and they’re making a lot of money, more money than they’ve ever made,” Trump said. “If you look at the kind of numbers that we’ve produced for Hispanic, for Blacks, for Asians, it’s nine times greater the percentage gained than it was under, in three years, than it was under eight years the two of them, to put it nicely. Nine times more.”

But Biden said that workers’ health should be a priority.

“The fact is, those front-line communities, it doesn’t matter what you’re paying them, it matters how you keep them safe,” Biden said.

At one point, Trump directly asked Biden whether the former vice president would “close down” the oil industry.

“I would transition from the oil industry, yes,” Biden said.

Trump called that a “big statement” and Biden called the oil industry a significant environmental polluter. He also said he wouldn’t support giving that industry federal subsidies.

“It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time. Over time,” Biden said.

Trump said that “in terms of business,” that was “the biggest statement.”

“Basically what he’s saying is he’s going to destroy the oil industry,” Trump said. “Will you remember that Texas? Will you remember that Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Ohio?”

The debate came less than two weeks before the election and after more than 5.9 million Texans have cast ballots during the state’s early voting period. In Texas polls, Trump this year has underperformed previous Republican presidential candidates.

Trump visited Texas’ oil-rich Permian Basin earlier this year to give a morale boost to the beleaguered region and rally oil and gas workers against Democrats.

Texas and the rest of the country has been plunged into an economic recession since the spring’s massive business shutdowns aimed at stemming the spread of the coronavirus.

But unlike previous downturns, experts said Texas’ signature oil and gas industry, which earlier this year saw oil prices dip into the negatives, might hold the state’s economy back.

Heading into the Nov. 3 election, the Texas unemployment rate hit 8.3% in September, surpassing the national unemployment rate of 7.9% and returning the state to the unemployment levels of the Great Recession.

And workers in the state’s oil and gas industry have lost work in massive waves. There were 22.6% fewer workers last month in the mining and logging industry, which includes the oil and gas sector, compared with September 2019, according to non-seasonally adjusted numbers.

That was reflected in the oil-rich Permian Basin. Odessa’s unadjusted unemployment rate increased from 11.1% in August to 13.2% in September. Midland’s unadjusted rate went from 8.1% to 9.6% in that one-month period.

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Sending Trump to Hell

For some time now, I’ve wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech. I want him to inhabit the palpable, sensory Hell that religions have long conjured up with scenes of sulfur, damnation, and screams of perpetual pain from those who once caused grievous harm to their fellow humans.

The more Trump has abused his power and position in this world and the more he’s escaped any retribution for his crimes, the more obsessed I’ve become with visualizing ways for him to pay in some version of the afterlife.

As I mulled over the treatment he deserved for the havoc he continues to wreak on the lives of countless others here in the United States and across the globe, I turned almost automatically to the work of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet whose Divina Commedia minutely recreated in a verse called terza rima what awaited the readers of his time once they died. Dante (1265-1321) laid out his otherworldly landscape in three volumes — Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — that have rightly been considered among the towering and influential literary achievements of humanity.

There was nothing abstract about the Hell he created. Dante pictured himself personally taking a voyage into the hereafter to meet men and women, both of his time and from the past, who were being rewarded for their virtue or eternally castigated for their offenses. Of that journey through purgatorial fires and heavenly wonders, guided by his dead childhood sweetheart Beatrice, it was the Florentine writer’s descent into the saturated circles of Hell that most fascinated and enthralled readers throughout the centuries. We listen to stories of the wicked as they express their remorse and experience the excruciatingly sophisticated torments he dreamt up as suitable reprisals for the damage they did during their earthly existence.

Witnessing the infernal realities President Trump has unleashed on America, I can’t help wondering where Dante would have placed our miscreant-in-chief in his afterlife of horror. In the end, perhaps not surprisingly, I realized one obvious thing: the 45th president has such a multitude of transgressions to his name that he fits almost every category and canto that Dante invented for the sinners of his age.

As I pondered what the Italian author would have made of Trump and his certainty that he was above the laws of society and nature, I was invaded by Dante’s divinatory and lyrical voice. It came to me as if in a hallucination. Listening carefully, I managed to record the words with which that visionary poet of yesteryear would describe a man who, until recently, believed himself invincible and invulnerable, how he would be judged and condemned once his life was over.

Here, then, is my version of Dante’s prophecy — my way, that is, of finally consigning Donald Trump to Hell for forever and a day.

Dante greets Trump at the Gates of Hell and explains what his punishment is to be

My name, sir, is Dante Alighieri. Among the innumerable dead that inhabit these shores, I have been chosen to speak to you because an expert on the afterlife was needed to describe what awaits your soul when it passes, as all souls must, into this land of shadows. I was chosen, whether as an honor or not, to imagine your fate once you wind your way toward us.

Having accepted this task, I was tempted, sir, as I watched your every act in that life before death, to make this easier for myself and simply conjure up the circles of Hell I had already described in my terza rima. I would then have guided you down my cascade of verses, step by step, into the depths of darkness I had designed for others.

Were you not the selfish embodiment of so many sins I dealt with in my Commedia? Lust and adultery, yes! Gluttony, yes; greed and avarice, oh yes; wrath and fury, certainly; violence, fraud, and usury, yes again! Divisiveness and treachery, even heresy – you who did not believe in God and yet used the Bible as a prop — yes, one more time!

Did you not practice all those iniquities, a slave to your loveless appetites? Do you not deserve to be called to account in ways I once envisioned: buffeted by vicious winds, drowning in storms of putrefaction, choking under gurgling waters of belligerence, immersed in the boiling blood that echoes rage, thirsting across a burning plain, steeped in the excrement of flattery and seduction, clawed to pieces by the night demons of corruption, or feeling that throat and tongue of yours that tore so many citizens apart mutilated and hacked to bits? Would it not be fair that, like other perjurers and impostors, you be bloated with disease? Would it not make sense that you be trapped in ice or flames, endlessly chewed by the jaws of eternity, like those who committed treason against country and friends in my time?

And yet, in the end, I rejected all of that. After all, I was selected not to repeat myself but because I was trusted to be creative and find an appropriately new reckoning for you — something, said the authorities in charge of this place, less savage and fierce, more educational, even therapeutic. Thus have times changed since I wrote that poem of mine!

My mission, it seems, was not to insert you in rings of an already conceived Hell of terrifying revenge. So I began to seek inspiration from my fellow sufferers so many centuries later and there, indeed, they were — your multitudes of victims, the ones who need to heal, the ones you never wanted to see or mourn, whose pain you never shared, who now want to greet you, sir, in a new way.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed yet, but I have. They’ve been lining up since the moment they arrived. Now, they’re here by my side, counting the days until your time is up and you must face them. And so I decided that they would be given a chance to do exactly that, one by one, through all eternity.

After all, each of them was devastated because of you: a father who died of the pandemic you did less than nothing to prevent; a little boy shot with a gun you did not ban; a worker overcome by toxic fumes whose release your administration ensured; the protesters killed by a white supremacist inflamed by your rhetoric; a Black man who expired thanks to police violence you refuse to condemn; a migrant who succumbed to the desert heat on the other side of the wall that you stole taxpayer money to (only partially) build. And let us not forget that female Kurdish fighter slaughtered because you betrayed her people.

On and on I could go, naming the wrongfully dead, the untimely dead, the avoidable dead, now all huddled around me, otherwise unrepresented and forgotten but awaiting your arrival for their moment of truth. Each of them will have to be patient, since according to my plan, every single casualty of yours will be afforded whatever time he or she desires to relive a life and recount its last moments. You will be forced, sir, to listen to their stories again and again until you finally learn how to make their sorrow your own, until their tragedies truly lodge in the entrails of your mind, as long as it takes you to truly ask for forgiveness.

Trump tries to find a way out of Hell

Your first reaction will undoubtedly be to indulge in the fantasy that, just as you swore the pandemic would be magically dispatched, so this new predicament will miraculously melt into nothingness. When you open your eyes, however, and still find yourself here, your urge will be to call on all your old tricks, those of the ultimate con man, to avoid sinking deeper into the moral abyss I’ve prepared for you.

Just as you’ve bribed, bought, and inveigled your way out of scandals and bankruptcies, so you’ll believe you can bluster and wriggle your way out of this moment, too. You’ll try to pretend you’re just hosting one more (ir)reality TV show where this Dante fellow can be turned into another of your apprentices, competing for your largesse and approval.

And when none of that works, you’ll make believe that you have indeed atoned for your terrible deeds and fall again into the lies and macho bravado that were your second skin. You’ll swear that you have repented so you can escape this confinement, these rooms where you have become the prey rather than the predator. You will present yourself as a savior, boast of having singlehandedly concocted a vaccine against accountability, discovered a manly cure for the terrors of Hell. You’ll dream — I know you will — of reappearing victorious and, of course, maskless on that White House balcony.

This time, though, it just won’t work, not here in this transparent abode of death. And yet you will certainly try to hurry the process up because you’ll know — I’ve already decided that much — that those you ruined while you were still alive are only the start of your journey, not the end. You will become all too aware, while you spend hours, days, years, decades with the men, women, and children you consigned to an early mortality and permanent grief, that a multitude of others will be arriving, all those who will perish in the future due to your neglect and malevolence.

They will, I assure you, snake endlessly into your mind, accumulating through many tomorrows, all those who are yet to die but will do soprematurely as the brutality you worshipped and fueled takes its toll, as the earth, heavens, and waters you ravaged exact heat waves of revenge — hurricanes and droughts and famines and floods, ever more victims with each minute that slithers by, including the women who will die in botched back-alley abortions because of your judicial nominations. The decades to come are already preparing to welcome the legions of your dead.

That is the despair I imagine for you now that I am no longer the man bitterly exiled from his beloved Florence. The centuries spent in the afterlife have evidently softened me into compassion for those who have sinned. Beatrice, the love of my life, would have admired my transformation, the one that, as you are ground down and down, will also allow you to be lifted up and up until you really do repent, until you beg for an absolution, which (if you are truly sincere) will be granted.

Even so, even as I speak and divine, I find myself eaten by a worm of doubt. This, I am being told, has been tried before. The mists of time are filled with men who, like you, thought they were gods and who, upon their demise, were led howling into rooms overflowing with the lives they broke, with the irreparable damage they wrought. And these criminals — Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Augusto Pinochet, Napoleon Bonaparte, Andrew Jackson, Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin (oh, the list is endless!) — never left the twisted mirror of their own penitential rooms.

They are still stagnating in them. That’s what’s being whispered in my ear, that the redemptive prophecy of Dante Alighieri will never come true for you, Donald Trump. Perhaps like those other accursed malefactors, you will refuse responsibility. Perhaps you will continue to claim that you are the real victim. Perhaps you will prove as incorrigible and defective and stubbornly blind as they continue to be. Perhaps there is an evil in you and the universe that will never completely abate, a cruelty that has no end. Perhaps when pain is infinite, it is impossible to erase.

I fear, then, that it may be unkind to promise any kind of justice when there will be none for those who stand in line hoping to meet their tormentor on the other side of death. Why, I ask myself, resurrect the dead if it be only to dash their hopes again and again?

What forever means

And yet, what else can I do but complete the task given to me? Of all poets, I was chosen because of the Divina Commedia that I wrote when I was alive and banished from Florence, because I descended into the Inferno and climbed the mount of Purgatory and caught a glimpse of what the sun and stars of Paradise looked like. I was chosen from the fields of the dead to prepare these words for you as a warning or a plea or a searing indictment, an assignment I accepted and cannot now renounce.

What’s left to me, then, but to conclude these words by responding to the one objection you might legitimately raise to my picture of your fate in the afterlife? I imagine you crying out — “But Dante Alighieri,” you will say, “the future you’ve painted will take forever.”

And I will answer: yes, Donald J. Trump, it will indeed take forever, but forever is all you have, all any of us have, after all.

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Raising a Black son in a white world

A week into my hunger strike to protest the food apartheid practices of Kroger, a major grocery chain, last month, my son looked up from his Oops! All Berries with an expression I wasn’t used to. We were sitting at our tiny brown kitchen table in cheap, uncomfortable chairs. I didn’t have the energy to make a hot breakfast, so he was chewing cold cereal with his mouth wide open. His little brown face was accented by a forehead wrinkled with concern, and his walnut-shaped eyes threatened to flood with tears.

“Mommy, did Kroger stop being racist yet?” he asked me.

I didn’t know the best way to respond. Those glossy eyes were contagious. My little boy is only seven, but I’ve always tried to be real with him. He understands that Santa Claus doesn’t exist — mom buys those gifts. I try to encourage questions in situations that some parents would consider grown folks’ business. Being a socially conscious parent means I am perpetually disappointed in my shortcomings. How could I explain that corporations like Kroger will never stop being racist? Should I break it to him now that plantation capitalism’s existence depends on the sustainability of anti-Blackness? Is my job as his mother to make him feel better or tell him the truth? Neither path is ideal. And to be honest, I won’t be that good at either one.

When my hunger strike started, I read about dehydration prevention and fatigue. I consulted with several medics about the changes my body might go through while I attempted to hold Kroger accountable for its role in food apartheid in our community. It was clear as I struggled to find an adequate answer that I hadn’t done enough to prepare my son for this moment.

And what would my mother have done in this situation? She too was a victim of institutional racism. When she was diagnosed with lung cancer, her pain was imaginary in the eyes of doctors she visited. She passed away in 2010, while I laid next to her in bed on Easter. I don’t have the luxury of getting her advice about how to explain racism to my son.

“Mommy, did Kroger stop being racist yet?”

This wasn’t the first time he expressed concern about me during the hunger strike. He asked why I took so many naps and why we hadn’t been to the park. The night before, he offered me some of his drink and told me it was food, so I should be able to have some. Later that night when he listened to his sleepy story, he heard my stomach growl and told me I should eat something. Children are more observant than we give them credit for.

I’m rarely speechless, but I needed a moment to collect myself. This piercing question came weeks before Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron tried to delay the release of information from the grand jury proceedings and trade Breonna Taylor’s life for a potential spot on the Supreme Court. It came months after Kenneth Walker attempted to protect Breonna Taylor as unannounced intruders burst into their apartment with a battering ram. That kitchen table felt like the barrier between my son’s innocence and his realization that the whole world is racist.

Am I raising a Daniel Cameron or a Kenneth Walker?

Little Black boys are forced to make choices earlier than other children. I want my son to see endless possibilities for his future — engineering, art, aeronautics. But I also want him to instinctively keep his hands in plain sight when approached by a police officer. Teaching him one of these skills may foreclose the other.

I’m scared that if I focus on his dreams and potential, he’ll be too naive to survive a police encounter. If I spend my energy helping him navigate an anti-Black world, he may be too jaded to pursue something he loves.

And I don’t know what I’m doing. I know that universally, no parent really knows what they’re doing. But the stakes are higher with a Black child. Black boys are not afforded the luxury of second chances and the benefit of the doubt. Instead, they’re victims of ignorance and assumptions. I remember when Trayvon Martin was killed. My son was still a thesis yet to be conceived on February 26, 2012 when George Zimmerman gunned him down. Trayvon was 17 years old. When my son was a little over a year old, Tamir Rice was killed by police. Tamir was 12 years old. What is the threshold for safety? How young is too young to be gunned down for Black skin? Unfortunately, as Dr. Brittney Cooper writes, “white America will use ‘objectivity’ to justify the murder of Black children.”

I desperately wanted to explain to my son that none of these corporations would stop being racist as long as racism continues to incentivize white mediocrity. He is the most important person in my life, but I can’t even give him the gift of safety in these spaces. Ignoring the reality of white supremacy is tantamount to wanton endangerment. Or at least neglect.

There is no fun, engaging, interactive way to talk about race and white supremacy. I scroll through my white friends’ social media posts and see them offer easy ways to discuss race. But we shouldn’t seek easy ways to have the conversation — that is a set-up for failure.

“The world is anti-Black, kiddo.”

“If it was up to Kroger I would starve to death.”

“Our only hope is to burn it all down.”

None of those possible responses felt right. So I told him that they were still racist, but some people started paying attention, so they would get in trouble for being racist. That probably wasn’t the best answer. But I can’t control everything that happens outside our home. It is irresponsible and impossible to protect him from everything. Instead, I’ve shifted to providing a safe space for him to be curious and vulnerable. If the world is against him, my duty is to be for him. There are so many Black boys and men who are starved for joy, so that is my contribution to his life. I am committed to this version of revolutionary parenting. So even if Kroger never stops being racist, my son will neither give in to crippling nihilism nor give up his joy.

In response to the hunger strike, Kroger promised to increase resources for their two Louisville locations that serve predominately Black neighborhoods. They’ve also been in talks with local Black farmers about adding them as vendors. The company still hasn’t admitted to their role in the food apartheid and they continue to enforce a heavy police presence at their West End locations. But that’s the thing — this country’s main export is racism. That does not dictate how I move through the world as a mother. Instead, my motherhood is predicated on being a safe space for my son to express all the feelings that are silenced when he leaves the house. My love for him is more fierce than white supremacy’s hatred of him. That love is my most revolutionary contribution to the struggle.

Veterans Affairs secretary headlines GOP fundraiser as COVID-19 cases surge

Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie headlined a fundraiser for the North Carolina Republican Party last week, taking time away from his job leading the government’s second-largest agency at a moment when COVID-19 cases are surging in VA hospitals.

Though legal, campaigning by cabinet secretaries is a departure from historical norms. Nevertheless, it’s become standard practice in the administration of President Donald Trump. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has hit the campaign trail for Trump, and several other cabinet members recently visited Iowa. Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, is also campaigning in North Carolina. Trump himself has routinely blurred politics with official functions, most prominently by hosting the Republican convention on the White House lawn, and he’s brushed off more than a dozen staff violations of the federal Hatch Act, which limits political activity by government employees.

Wilkie, in particular, was already under fire for frequent trips that appear to have partisan agendas. In a letter last week, the top Democrats on the House and Senate veterans committees accused Wilkie of using taxpayer-funded travel to boost Trump and other Republican candidates.

“Leaders at VA have historically risen above partisan politics,” Senate veterans committee ranking member Jon Tester of Montana and House committee chairman Mark Takano of California said in their letter to Wilkie. “Furthermore, efforts to engage in overtly political activity may have come at the expense of legitimate functions of the department’s mission.”

The letter highlighted Wilkie’s previous official trips to North Carolina, Maine and Montana for appearances with GOP senators in tough reelection races. The partisan tilt of the Montana trip was especially pronounced because it included no events with Tester despite his key post on the Senate panel that oversees the VA.

Wilkie’s latest visit to North Carolina, his home state, was not part of an official trip, according to the VA’s response to a Freedom of Information Act request. That indicates his fundraiser appearance wasn’t paid for by taxpayers. Wilkie’s spokeswoman declined to say who footed the bill for his travel or why he was in North Carolina on a weekday instead of at his job.

“He attended this event as a private citizen,” spokeswoman Christina Noel said.

The party’s financial disclosures, which might show donations and expenditures connected to the event, are not yet available for that time period. The North Carolina GOP’s finance director, Amanda Parrish, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

The event took steps to comply with the Hatch Act. The invitation, obtained by ProPublica, omitted Wilkie’s official titles, referring to him as “honorable” (a general signifier for people who have been Senate confirmed). The invitation also said “his participation is not a solicitation for funds,” but it listed suggested donations ranging from $250 to $2,500.

The email accompanying the fundraiser invitation said the organizers wanted “this event jam-packed (within CDC guidelines).” But a photo posted on Facebook by the state party chairman showed people indoors less than 6 feet apart and not wearing masks.

Noel declined to comment on what public health measures Wilkie observed to participate in the event.

Other political figures who attended, including state Rep. Holly Grange and Trump campaign organizer Matt Dula, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

From North Carolina, Wilkie traveled to Arizona, Utah and Colorado for what appeared to be official functions, according to posts on his Twitter account.

A former aide to North Carolina’s endangered incumbent senator, Thom Tillis, and former Sen. Jesse Helms, Wilkie is widely viewed as aspiring to elected office in the state. North Carolina’s other senator, Richard Burr, is not seeking reelection in 2022. Noel didn’t respond to a question about Wilkie’s political ambitions.

Wilkie has faced criticism for appearing disengaged from the VA’s critical programs. He’s also under investigation by the department’s inspector general for allegations, which Wilkie has denied, that he attempted to collect dirt on a congressional staffer who said she was sexually assaulted in a VA hospital. The results of the probe are expected soon.

The VA hospital system currently has almost 4,500 active cases of COVID-19 (including veterans and employees), a 70% increase from a month ago. More than 3,700 VA patients have died of the virus.

Veterans are a key constituency for Trump, a favorite topic in his tweets and at rallies. The VA is accommodating more political events this year by relaxing a long-standing policy that discourages site visits by political candidates close to an election. Noel didn’t respond to a question about the change.

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Cookies can be chewy and crispy at the same time. James Beard winner Kelly Fields shares the secret

It took James Beard award winner Kelly Fields two and a half years to get her chocolate chip cookie recipe “just right.” Now, the pastry chef sells more than 10,000 cookies every week at her popular restaurant and bakery in New Orleans. Both the triple-threat chocolate chip cookie and the Louisiana location carry the name of an important woman in Fields’ life: grandma Willa Jean.

Though not an excellent cook herself, Fields’ grandma was also her biggest cheerleader and supporter. Willa Jean encouraged Fields to follow her dreams, and she’s followed them to the highest peaks. After being named outstanding pastry chef by the most prestigious honor in the food industry last year, Fields followed up with her debut cookbook last month, which you can purchase here. A book of biblical proportions, “The Good Book of Southern Baking” is a modern encyclopedia that proves once and for all that southern baking is American baking.

“So the whole reason I do this — and have had the privilege to sort of come up in this industry — is because of [Willa Jean],” Fields told Salon Talks in a recent episode. “And the chocolate chip cookie itself was a quest to get back to my roots after doing really fancy food for a very long time. It was just how to go back to the most simple, delicious, bite of joy you can get — and that’s how we got there.”

When discussing her nearly three-year quest to perfect her cookie recipe in her book, Fields notes, “People have lots of feelings about what a chocolate chip cookie should be.” The pastry chef thinks “the best cookie is chewy, crispy, and crunchy, with ample chocolate in every bite.” To learn more about a grandma’s love and expert tips for baking cookies, cheesecake, and more, you can read the Q&A of our conversation below.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

I’m also from the South. I’m from Mobile, so not too far from New Orleans, where you live now.

Right down the street.

And I have a lot of family who went to school in Charleston, both the College of Charleston and The Citadel. So I also know South Carolina well, which is where you grew up.

It is, it is. I lived there until 1996, when I ended up in New Orleans.

Your mom grew vegetables and fruits, and she was into canning and making preserves. That’s the same way that I grew up with my grandfather, who had a green thumb, and my who always had sweets around the house. She made a really excellent blackberry wine cake. You compared your house growing up to a cookie factory. You were always around food. Is that what inspired you to become a baker? Was it your mom, specifically?

Yes, I think it’s a lot of how I grew up. That was always such a big part of life, and community and family for me. I didn’t realize until the ’90s that you could actually make a living doing that. And as soon as that was a realization in my life, I’ve never tried to do anything else. It just feels a really natural progression for me.

Speaking of your mom, one of the recipes in the book is her cobbler, which you said you used to have on an almost weekly basis.

Yes, especially during the summer.

With cobbler, one reader question that always comes up is: Can you use fresh fruit or canned fruit or frozen fruit? What is your philosophy on what type of fruit should be used?

My philosophy is to use what you love to eat. I’ve never tried canned fruit, but I know frozen food fruit works fine. That’s often picked and processed at the peak of ripeness, so it’s usually a guaranteed delicious item. With canned fruit, I would imagine it’s a little sweeter, because it’s usually packed with some sort of sweetener. But the rule is to eat what you love, I think.

That’s great. Your bakery in New Orleans is Willa Jean, which is named after your grandmother, who wasn’t as good of a cook as your mom.

No.

The chocolate chip cookie in your book is named after, and that’s a recipe you said you spent two and a half years perfecting. It’s soft, but crunchy and chewy at the same time. Was that inspired by her?

Well, I mean, a lot of it was when I decided to bake for a living, my grandma was my biggest cheerleader, my biggest supporter. She encouraged me to find the chefs that I wanted to emulate or learn from and go work for them, which I did (which I couldn’t really afford to do, because again, it was the ’90s in the food industry). So my grandmother helped me with my rent a little bit and then encouraged me to go to college, and go to culinary school and to get a degree. And she helped make that a reality, too. So the whole reason I do this — and have had the privilege to sort of come up in this industry — is because of her. And the chocolate chip cookie itself was a quest to get back to my roots after doing really fancy food for a very long time. It was just how to go back to the most simple, delicious, bite of joy you can get — and that’s how we got there.

How do you get a cookie that’s chewy, and crunchy and crispy at the same time?

It’s about the ingredients you use, and what proportion and also how you mix it. The order in which you mix it makes a difference. And then, I call for the cookies to be frozen overnight — just to sit. And that makes a really big difference, too. And baking them from frozen helps create all those textures and all the personalities that people love about chocolate chip cookies. All of those little steps come to a place where all of those things exist in one cookie.

When you did move to New Orleans, one of the first big names you worked for was Susan Spicer. What was it like to be a young chef working alongside her?

My nickname in that kitchen was googly eyes, if that explains it. Everybody just called me googly eyes, because I was wide-eyed and just blown away everyday by what was happening in that space — and the energy, and the people and how much people knew about everything. And I just tried to absorb it all. Susan is one of the most phenomenal chefs on the planet, and she’s so incredibly generous with her knowledge and the time she spends to share her love of food with you and with me. That job, as short as it was, was the foundation for how I wanted to cook and how I continue to cook today.

After Hurricane Katrina, you left New Orleans. And with you, came a little red notebook full of recipes. Can you tell us about that? That’s a book that you still carry with you today, one which has inspired you and informed you.

Yes, it’s a foundation for what that cookbook is. But when I evacuated for Hurricane Katrina, I left all my notebooks behind, cookbooks, everything — and it was all a total loss. And when the reality of the flood in New Orleans sort of hit home, I realized that none of that stuff was going to be there when I got back. And so I went to the store and bought that little red notebook and sat in coffee shops, or at my mom’s house, or friend’s houses and shut my eyes and walked through the muscle memory of making all of the things in the kitchen and just started writing down every recipe I could recall. I filled the whole notebook, an I still use it today. It’s still in use — falling apart, but still in use.

That’s one thing that I wanted to talk to you about — that process of physically writing down your recipes. When I grew up baking with my grandmother, she would say, “Let’s add a pinch of this, or a dollop of this or a dash of this.” She had a muscle memory when it came to ingredients. Baking is about precision. It’s chemistry, and all the ingredients have to work together just right. I didn’t write down all of those recipes, much to my regret. I think that’s not true of a lot of Southern folks, too. So what was it like for you to actually record all of these recipes as you created a new bible of a southern baking?

Ultimately, it’s a love letter to my upbringing and to the regions in which I’ve spent the most time. The thing I love about southern baking, in particular, is that it is so intuitive, and it is so simple and beautiful. Most of the things in the book come from a place of scarcity and baking from what we have around us versus trying to make something particularly precious. I think there’s been a preciousness assigned to southern baking that’s not real. I think it’s really gritty and really smart. I just want to celebrate that. Writing down everything, and then putting it in the book and having that be the foundation is, for me, to take a step back to the true heart of baking in the South.

A dollop and a dash — I think you can learn that to a degree, and I just want to encourage people to do that and not be scared of the precision or the science and the chemistry. Most of the time, if you’re baking with delicious things, you’re going to end up with something delicious. To me, that is the whole point.

In the introduction to your book, you say baking should be fun. You also say baking isn’t meant to be laborious or scary. What advice would you give to people who are baking one of your recipes at home for the first time?

One, have fun. Two, read the recipe all the way through before starting, because I think there are little things that most cookbooks say that we take for granted as professionals. But a home cook — for instance, when I talk about things being room temperature, that’s very much on purpose. So just read the recipe all the way through, and make sure that you’re fully prepared. Those little details are thought about and written about in a way that makes it seem effortless or unimportant, but they’re actually very important things to do.

On the topic of baking from a place of scarcity, like you, I didn’t think any differently about a cake pan or a cookie sheet when I grew up. We just used what we had. So what tools do we actually need to get started baking in the kitchen?

I talk about this a little bit in the book — a good baking sheet. And “good” does not mean fancy or expensive, in my opinion. I write about springform pans in the cheesecake recipe. I think springform pans are garbage. I don’t like them. I think a really good 9- or 10-inch cake pan, that’s 3 inches tall (maybe 4 inches tall if you want to go wild) is important. A baking sheet and a good mixer is all you really need, I think. And a good pie tin.

I also am not a fan of springform pans, but cheesecake is one of my favorite things in the world. Cheesecake is a big deal for folks in New Orleans. You have a pumpkin cheesecake recipe in the book, and you say that it was born out of your distaste for pumpkin pie. I’m all here for that. Is that a permanent item on your menu at Thanksgiving?

It’s starting to be. I find that I really enjoy making purees out of different squashes other than just pumpkin. I really having more fun with this spice combo than the regular cinnamon, allspice, cloves. I’ve been playing a lot with cardamom and some more Indian spices with the squash. So I’m starting to have a better taste for it.

You don’t often hear that you don’t actually need the springform pan to make a cheesecake. What do you use instead?

I use just the round cake pan. I make sure I spray the whole pan with the non-stick spray. And I cut a piece of parchment and put it on the bottom, and then spray the top of that. When the cheesecake comes out, I’ll put it in the fridge and let it get really, really cold. And then you can just very quickly flip it out and then flip it back over. And I usually put parchment on whatever I’m flipping it on, so I can just peel it off the top and it doesn’t stick to the surface of the cake once you flip it right back over.

I definitely am excited to try that after reading the book, because that’s honestly one of the things that deters me from making a cheesecake: the thought of the springform pan. It’s labor-intensive.

It really is. And it feels risky when I don’t think baking needs that much risk to it. Because if the springform goes slightly wobbly and isn’t absolutely 100% perfect, you’re filling will leak out. Or if you’re cooking in a water bath, it’ll leak in. It doesn’t need to be that risky.

A biscuit adorns the cover of your book. Being from the South, I’m obviously a huge biscuit lover. But you found that Italian flour actually works better. Can you tell us about that?

Yes, it works really well for what we call “the baker’s biscuit,” which is the biscuit we serve at Willa Jean. And we learned through lots of trial and error, because we make biscuits the way my grandmother would make them and then add steps. We want to keep a really tender, delicious biscuit. And we found that after an error — or years of trial and error — that the “00 flour” is milled fine enough that it hydrates without creating a lot of gluten. It doesn’t get super tough, so we can add those two extra folds into the pastry without creating a really tough biscuit.

I was in Italy as the outbreak unfolded there. I took a cooking class in Florence, and I did notice the difference as I worked with the flour there.

Yes, it’s a pretty big difference.

Click here to purchase a copy of “The Good Book of Southern Baking.”

Apples deliver the cozy fall twist on oatmeal cookies that’s been missing all your life

When times are tough, sometimes you just need a cookie. And when it’s fall, there’s no cookie that Salon’s resident pastry chef Meghan McGarry of Buttercream Blondie craves more than an oatmeal cookie.

This classic dessert is the inspiration for her latest dessert makeover, which uses the flavors of fall to reimagine a favorite childhood treat. Fall is all about cozy, and that’s the simplest way to describe McGarry’s Apple Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies. Loaded with apple, cranberries and a splash of cinnamon whiskey, the combination of seasonal ingredients and spices tastes like a warm hug on a crisp autumn day.

It’s the fourth apple recipe featured in McGarry’s series of go-to seasonal bakes for Salon Food. It follows an apple loaf cake, which was a warm welcome to fall; and apple crisp bars, which magnified the star fruit of the season; and apple crumb cake, which served up nostalgia in a no-fuss bake. Now, it’s time to move on to the uncharted world of cookies.

One thing that these cookies apart from traditional oatmeal cookies is the texture. By adding unsweetened apple sauce to the batter, McGarry brings Salon Food reader’s favorite fall fruit into the mix. Apple sauce ensures your cookies will come out of the oven soft and chewy in the middle with crisp edges. Whether you’re a fan of chewy or crunchy cookies, you won’t be divided about these cookies, which offer the best of both worlds.

Recipe: This nostalgic apple crumb cake is the ultimate no-fuss dessert to bake at home

While apple is the star ingredient in this cookie, the fall upgrade is rounded out by a cast of supporting players. Cinnamon, cinnamon whiskey and nutmeg deliver the spicy quality of a traditional oatmeal cookie. Meanwhile, opting for cranberries instead of raisins provides a seasonal swap with the holidays around the corner. The sweetness of the cranberries contrasts perfectly with the walnuts, which add a crunch to every bite. Dark chocolate brings the lush that rounds out this flavor parade.

What’s even better about these cookies is that you can choose your own adventure, because substitutions are easy. If you’re making these for the kids, you can skip the whiskey. If you have semi-sweet chocolate chips on hand in your pantry, you don’t have to make another trip to the store. If you’re looking for something on the sweeter side, you can toss in white chocolate instead. If you’re a traditionalist, you can stick with raisins instead of cranberries. If you’ve got pecans on hand (because it’s pie season), you can throw some of those in instead of the walnuts. Cookies should be low-stress and make you happy, so don’t be afraid to make them personal.

McGarry’s number one tip with this recipe is to make sure your cookie dough is chilled before you throw it into the oven. Cold cookie dough will ensure that the cookies bake evenly. As always, the pastry chef created a step-by-step guide for how to scoop the dough. Be sure to check out her tips here before you pre-heat your oven. Then pair these beauties with a mug of hot apple cider.

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Recipe: Apple Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients:

1 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 and 3/4 cups quick oats
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 and 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg
4 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup light brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
3/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 tsp. vanilla bean paste or extract
1 tbsp. cinnamon whiskey (optional)
6 ounces (1 cup) semisweet or dark chocolate chips/chunks
6 ounces (1 cup) dried cranberries
4 ounces (1 cup) chopped walnuts
Sea salt for sprinkling, if desired

Instructions:

In a medium size bowl, whisk together flour, oats, salt, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and nutmeg. Set aside.
In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream butter and sugars for about 5 minutes.

Click here to access the remainder of Meghan McGarry’s Apple Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies. And don’t forget to follow @ButtercreamBlondie on Instagram for more ways to bake through it.

Why a top Pentagon civilian just lost his job

This is the first of two parts about the firing of Warren Whitlock. Next: The Pentagon official comes under a second investigation while someone else gets his job.

Warren S. Whitlock enjoyed a remarkable career as a diversity officer at the federal Transportation Department, winning victories for poor communities of color that his superiors thought impossible. There’s even a documentary film about his success in getting municipal bus service for a Black neighborhood in Beavercreek, Ohio, that had been bypassed intentionally.

In its waning days of the Obama era, the Army chose Whitlock to become one of its highest-ranking Black civilians. His task: resolve diversity issues that had languished for years, some since George Herbert Walker Bush was commander-in-chief nearly three decades ago.

After Trump became president, Whitlock encountered a very different situation. He found himself reporting to Diane Randon, a white woman who defended in writing keeping the names of Civil War traitors on streets at a U.S. Army base in Brooklyn. According to Randon’s Linkedin profile, she is the Army’s assistant deputy chief of staff, G2 (military intelligence).

Behind Whitlock’s back, testimony later revealed, she denigrated him. Twice the boss ordered unauthorized investigations of Whitlock. In private, it was learned later, she maneuvered to get rid of Whitlock whose title was “Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Diversity and Leadership.”

A Whitlock subordinate who has long been friendly with his boss called him vile names behind his back, testimony would later reveal.

Whitlock, a Princeton graduate with a master’s degree from Columbia, had a strong performance record.

The Army abruptly fired Whitlock in January 2019, even though he had a pending racial discrimination complaint which is supposed to prevent retaliatory actions by our government. The way Whitlock was fired denied him an opportunity to correct an administrative mistake he made. The firing order also left Whitlock without his pension or health insurance.

Whitlock’s dismissal, reported here for the first time, could be seen as just one unfortunate example of mistreatment of an employee. But a DCReport investigation shows it is much more. It is a case with broad implications for our entire federal workforce. It reveals the effects of the Trump administration’s efforts to make the highest civilian ranks of our government as white as possible.

Trump’s never-settle policy

Whitlock, 62, faces a tough fight because in May 2018 Donald Trump issued an executive order that discourages settlements between federal agencies and employees in job discrimination cases.

Even if an employee wins, proving at trial that they were wrongly disciplined or fired, Trump’s order prohibits removing negative information from a personnel file. That makes advancement to a bigger job almost impossible. It also undermines the integrity of government records.

In addition to that directive, Trump demonstrated his scorn for people of color and diversity in the federal workforce when he signed another executive order in September. That one ended diversity training in our federal government, including the military branches, asserting this was necessary to “combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating.”

The order said any training that suggests whites have dominated society or acted other than in a spirit of equality “perpetuates racial stereotypes and division and can use subtle coercive pressure to ensure conformity of viewpoint. Such ideas may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and activities supported by Federal taxpayer dollars.”

Whitlock’s firing also sent a signal to federal executives who are people of color: Be afraid for your jobs.

Fear is a performance killer. But fear is what Trump spread in his faux reality television shows for 14 seasons where contestants anxiously tried to escape being told, “You’re fired.” Many of those “fired” actually did good or even their best work, as close observers of the show have noted.

So, what was the conduct that justified removing Whitlock with his outstanding record of accomplishments? What justified humiliation instead of, say, letting the man retire? Or just giving him a talking to and moving on?

One Keystroke

Whitlock’s unforgivable offense was punching the wrong key on an Army computer. One keystroke.

That mistake sent a draft performance evaluation of a subordinate from Whitlock’s desktop work computer to the Army’s clunky personnel software system known as AutoNOA. Whitlock should have sent the final version.

No other Army civilian has been fired for a similar “administrative error,” specifically for “accidentally uploading a wrong document.”

We know that damning fact only because the administrative law judge hearing Whitlock’s civil rights case seeking to get his job back extracted it from an Army witness. Indeed, the 2019 hearing record shows only one other person who made a similar mistake was ever disciplined. That person was allowed to retire.

You might think the way to fix the problem of sending the wrong file internally would be to just pull it back and send the final performance evaluation. You might think that someone who makes a keypunching error ought to be given the opportunity to undo the mistake, especially if they have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD. Federal law is supposed to protect workers with disabilities, including ADHD.

Unauthorized Investigations

You also might ask whether such a mistake is even worth putting in anyone’s personnel file. And it’s just as reasonable to ask why the Army isn’t investigating the woman who got Whitlock removed over that single keystroke since she orchestrated two unauthorized investigations of Whitlock, a breach of an Army regulation that seems far more serious.

But this is the Trump administration, the most racist since Woodrow Wilson more than a century ago. Despite Trump’s claims of being “the least racist person” of all time, the president talks in racist terms all the time. He has a half-century record, documented informal proceedings, of discriminating against Blacks, women, Asians and Puerto Ricans.

Trump civilian appointees in the Army seem intent on doing and spending whatever it takes to make sure Whitlock stays fired even if it means granting retroactive approval for unauthorized actions that harmed him.

The costs of fighting Whitlock’s case are relevant because Trump often boasts about how much money he saves taxpayers through random cuts in government services—like the pandemic national security team that former President Barack Obama had installed in the White House.

But when it comes to taking maximum advantage of any opportunity to rid the federal civil service of a Black person in a high position, especially those who achieve results, the de facto Trump administration policy is to spare no expense.

That Whitlock transferred to the Army during the Obama years was also a strike against him, at least in the current administration, which is determined to wipe out every success, large or small, by America’s first Black president.

Ghoulish Legal Algebra

In Whitlock’s case, there’s also a ghoulish algebra to the Trump administration’s refusal to settle. Before his firing, doctors told Whitlock that he had a form of blood cancer that disproportionately afflicts Blacks.

Meanwhile, the Army is stalling (which Trump would applaud) and has made a false claim in trying to get his case transferred away from largely black juries in Washington to conservative, white and government-friendly Northern Virginia.

That’s Trump & Co.’s ghoulish algebra—delay forever.

Trump’s merciless policies were taught to him by his longtime personal lawyer, the man he calls his second father, the notorious Roy Cohn. As consigliere to Mafiosi and fixer supremo for Manhattan’s and Washington’s political and economic elite, Cohn taught Trump that the law isn’t about justice, right and wrong, or even rules. It’s about how those with no shame can lie, cheat and steal with impunity, something Trump says in his book The Art of the Deal.

Cohn taught Trump never to apologize, never acknowledge an error, never settle; delay, delay, delay and always attack, attack, attack.

Throughout his career, Trump has used stalling tactics to run up the legal bills of the other side hoping they would run out of money, miss a filing deadline or go broke. We are witnessing that right now as he fights a subpoena issued to his accounting firm for financial records, a case he has taken twice to the Supreme Court.

There are also the more than two dozen women who have accused him of molesting or raping them who are encountering agonizing stall tactics. Trump makes people pay a price for being what Southern racists call B

lack people who don’t know their place — uppity.

This means the government’s lawyers aren’t going to settle job discrimination cases, even when the facts against our government are, as with Whitlock, overwhelmingly against our government.

Obliterating Obama’s actions

“From the time the Obama people left in January 2017, and the Trump people came in, I was under attack by my new boss,” Whitlock said during interviews for this story.

His new boss was Diane Randon, a 30-year civilian in the military.

“She was openly hostile from the start,” he said. An outside contractor confirmed that during a multi-day hearing of Whitlock’s case before a Merit Systems Protection Board administrative law judge in 2019.

The contractor, who advises the Navy and Army on diversity issues, testified she was surprised by Randon’s open animosity toward Whitlock during a meeting held shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Randon just replaced Whitlock’s boss.

The consultant, Renee Yuengling, said she only recently met Randon.

Yuengling testified that during the meeting Randon tried to “trap” Whitlock into saying something positive about one of the preferred diversity policies of Obama’s outgoing secretary of the Army, Eric Fanning. That matters because in the Trump administration anything Obama did was bad and must be undone, be it the Affordable Care Act or something as relatively minor as a positive comment by one civil servant.

Yuengling declined to comment on her testimony.

“Diane wanted me out of my position from the beginning of her detail to Manpower & Reserve Affairs Division,” Whitlock told DCReport. “I spent the next two years defending myself from a series of spurious allegations instead of being allowed to modernize that office and its mission.”

Randon did not respond to multiple messages seeking her side of the story. The Army also repeatedly declined official comment.

Former Army secretary Fanning was among those who praised Whitlock in interviews. “Warren is a terrific employee,” but faced resistance from top to bottom, Fanning told DCReport.

Renee Yuengling’s testimony

Fanning said modernizing the Army’s approach to diversity issues was difficult. “Even when I was there, we were getting push-back” from high-level employees as well as the regulars who had dealt with the Equal Opportunity Office. “We were promoting diversity as a positive, not punitive outcome, trying to get more diversity into the higher ranks which were and are still very white and male,” Fanning said.

Fanning wanted the Army to think about diversity the way the corporate world has come to embrace, as a way to increase efficiency, improve effectiveness and grow profits. “We see diversity’s goal as enhancing efficiency of the unit, performance in the command and therefore the overall success of the mission,” Fanning told DCReport.

One of Whitlock’s predecessors in the Army diversity office said the panel that chose Whitlock should have instead named someone with Army experience, who knew the “culture.”

But Karl Schneider, a member of the Army panel who has 44 years of experience as a soldier and Army civilian, said most of the panelists “wanted someone outside the Army culture.”

Other panelists gave lengthy interviews about what they said was a need to invigorate the diversity office and their belief that Whitlock’s track record demonstrated that was the best person for the job. DCReport is not quoting them because we avoid using unnamed sources.

Whitlock agreed with Fanning that his problems came from below as well as above. “The deputy I inherited, I learned, was an acquaintance of Diane’s for more than 20 years. They acted like old friends… Now that I’ve seen the documents and emails, it looks like the two of them worked in concert from the beginning to undermine me and my mission.”

Both Randon and Whitlock’s deputy, Seema Salter, testified that although they knew each other for decades and attended professional meetings together, they were not close friends.

Salter was certainly not a friend of Whitlock, her boss. In December 2016, Salter unloaded on Whitlock in unusual terms to Yuengling, the diversity consultant.

Salter “said something about his ‘ADHD ass’,” Yuengling testified at the merit systems board hearing.

Violating a confidence

“I was shocked by that because she was revealing someone’s disability to me that I didn’t have a right to know about, and it was fairly derogatory in the way that she said it,” Yuengling testified.

“Then she [Salter] said ‘I’m going to take that motherfucker down’,” Yuengling testified.

Yuengling said she quickly left to avoid being part of a negative conversation about “the client.” Salter testified that she had indeed used “motherfucker” to describe Whitlock.

Whitlock didn’t learn about that encounter until much later. Nor did he know that around March 15, 2017, less than two months after Trump assumed office, that he was secretly placed under investigation by the Army.

Randon had arranged for a 15-6 investigation that both Army and Army civilians dread, as we shall soon see. The number refers to an Army regulation.

Justification for firing

What was the justification for that investigation: Theft? Revealing secrets? Having sex in a Pentagon office? Using slurs?

None of those. It was about one of several annual awards that long-timers in Whitlock’s office handled to honor the Army’s achievements in diversity.

Several months after Whitlock moved from the Department of Transportation to the Army in late 2016, one of Whitlock’s assistants, Margo Barfield, asked him to nominate someone for the Stars and Stripes Award at the upcoming Black Engineer of the Year Award (BEYA) conference.

Every February, American military officials from around the globe fly to Washington to attend the annual BEYA meeting celebrating African American achievements in science and technology in the military and defense industries.

Whitlock, a member of the Senior Executive Service, felt that lower-level people should handle such conference matters.

“I was running around working on things like expanding religious rights and using resumes without photos attached for promotion applications. I was like, ‘You’re kidding me: I’m involved in awards?’ ” Whitlock said.

Barfield, his assistant, suggested an award for Lt. Col. Cynthia Lightner, who was Whitlock’s executive officer, testimony showed. Barfield told him that Lightner was very experienced and was planning to retire later the next year. The award would be appropriate as her send-off. Whitlock agreed. Barfield began the paperwork.

Protocol questions

Soon after the conference ended Randon began asking about the awards. What protocol had Whitlock followed in choosing Lightner for the Stars and Stripes?

That question became the focus of the first of two unauthorized investigations. It was unauthorized because in 2015 the secretary of the Army under Obama issued an order that any investigation of high-level civilian employees known as SES for Senior Executive Service first required “written approval” from the Civilian Senior Leader Management Office.

That approval was not sought, but later a Trump appointee applied a form of backdating to hide this failure. Whitlock knew nothing of the investigation.

A two-star general wrote the single-spaced 10-page investigative report in May 2017. Whitlock and his lawyer David Shapiro would not see the report until 18 months later, not long before his firing.

General Leslie Purser was critical of Whitlock, concluding that he “failed to effectively lead this organization,” “lacks good judgment” and is “naïve.”

Formal reprimand suggested

“I would suggest more training on effective leadership, but I do not believe he would comprehend the message,” Purser wrote. The general recommended that a formal reprimand be placed in Whitlock’s personnel file.

Purser wrote that the Black engineer award selection board had not been planned properly. But there is a revealing twist in that finding. It is one showing how a bureaucratic knife was thrust unseen into Whitlock’s record, a crucial detail that did not escape the general’s notice.

“This impromptu board selection was a result of delayed processing of the memo requesting the board of senior-level officials. The Form 5 for the selection was signed by Ms. Barfield on 8 Nov 2016, by Ms. Salter on 1 Dec 2016,”… Mr. Whitlock did not realize it was there until 12 December…

“Ms. Salter accuses Mr. Whitlock of stalling on this signature, yet she had the memo for several weeks prior to submission to the front office and did not identify that fact in her comments to me,” Purser wrote.

A set-up?

That could be interpreted as Salter setting up the boss she had denigrated in foul language.

The general continued in detail about the awards and the surrounding activities, including the role of Salter, who had been transferred to Fort Belvoir in Virginia, apparently to her dislike.

Much of the report seems like an analysis of how many tiny bureaucratic games could be played on the head of a pin. It detailed such minutia as which of the Army’s many diversity offices across America gets to produce the Black engineer awards conference.

Purser’s report found Salter “removed herself from awards process out of frustration and rebellion. It is noted that Ms. Salter is inflexible and prescribes to the way it always used to be.” The general also wrote that Salter “is resistant to change and is very critical of Mr. Whitlock.”

Salter told DCReport she did not want to comment on Whitlock or his case. Diane Randon did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

A troubling diagnosis

Whitlock had other problems in the spring of 2017 that he was unaware of until late 2018. Unbeknownst to him, Randon asked her staff to start keeping a time and attendance record on Whitlock, according to testimony by a human resources official.

That witness testified that “Whitlock was [the] only person that Randon asked about time and attendance records,” said David Shapiro, Whitlock’s attorney. “Warren’s an Assistant Deputy Secretary, he’s SES, and Randon wants a secret time and attendance chart on him,” an incredulous Shapiro said. “How about: He’s the only high-ranking black male in Randon’s office,” the lawyer said, adding one word: “Racism.”

Whitlock, meanwhile, had been feeling weak and sick for months. After medical tests, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that disproportionately affects African Americans.

He told Randon about his illness, including that treatment would affect his work schedule. He also disclosed that he would participate in a clinical test of a new drug. That would require trips to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., a dozen miles from his Pentagon office. He said he promised Randon that he’d make up all his lost time even though he had more than enough sick leave built up to cover his absences for medical treatment.

Defending army traitors

A few months later, in August 2017, Randon landed in the news, defending the naming of streets on an Army base in honor of generals who violated their oaths, joined the Confederacy and waged war on the United States. Members of New York’s Congressional delegation wrote the Army asking that street signs with the names of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn be changed.

Randon wrote the Army’s official refusal letter. The streets were originally named after Confederate generals in “the spirit of reconciliation” and to honor soldiers who were “an inextricable part of our military history.”

“After over a century, any effort to rename memorializations on Fort Hamilton would be controversial and divisive,” Randon wrote.

A number of Pentagon people, black and white, told Whitlock they were embarrassed by Randon’s letter, especially because of her high-level position in the diversity area.

Performance reviews

In late August, Whitlock made the mistake that got him fired, that single erroneous keystroke. Randon treated it as ammunition, firing it to kill Whitlock’s career.

The mistake came as Whitlock prepared annual performance evaluations for four subordinates. He had similar experience in his previous job at the Department of Transportation but said, “I was new to the Army job grading system.”

That system had a quirk which would become important in his discrimination case. The Army has two civilian grading systems both with ratings of 1 to 5. For some employees 5 is the best score and 1 the worst. But for others it’s the opposite.

Whitlock felt a bit overwhelmed at the Pentagon.

“I was trying to juggle finishing the evaluations while also preparing new job descriptions for my staff for the up-coming performance year, which we’d been asked for. I did not have a confidential executive assistant to perform these administrative tasks on my behalf. In hurrying to get the final job evaluations to the management support team, I hit Send.”

What he sent was a draft, not the final version, to the Army’s personnel software system called AutoNOA.

In a normal situation, that’s called a mistake or a clerical error, and it happens every day to thousands of people. But the draft evaluation was of one person who had privately declared in vile language her intent to get rid of Whitlock — Seema Salter.

This is where that quirk in the personnel system becomes important. In the draft version of Salter’s evaluation, Whitlock had rated her on the wrong scale, something he fixed in the final version, the one that he mistakenly didn’t email forward into the AutoNOA files.

Holiday weekend

On Sept. 1, 2017, the Friday afternoon before Labor Day, Salter emailed Whitlock asking why her signed paper performance evaluation with a rating of 2, which means exceeds expectations, was lowered in the electronic version in AutoNOA.

Whitlock didn’t see that email until Tuesday, the morning after the holiday.

According to Whitlock’s testimony on that Tuesday he immediately called the personnel office and said he’d sent the wrong document. He told them it was a draft. His printed draft had whiteout and other jottings indicating clearly it was not a final version.

How to retrieve that document and send the correct one? Whitlock asked. The answer: that’s difficult-to-impossible because AutoNOA is a clunky system not designed to allow correcting mistakes.

“I was told it was very hard to get something out of AutoNOA. Basically: good luck,” Whitlock told me. “I realized I’d have to fix this quickly.”

Stories diverge

It had not been fixed by the next day when Randon called him into her office. Why, she asked, had he altered Salter’s evaluation after they jointly reviewed the draft and agreed on a higher grade. Here the stories Randon and Whitlock tell diverge.

Whitlock’s position is that he told Randon it was an accident, that it would be easy to see that because of the whiteout and scribbling on the paper draft. He testified that he told Randon he was working on fixing the mistake before she inquired.

Randon testified that Whitlock told her he did not want to give Salter a high number and, without telling her, lowered the score after she had signed off on a highest grade. Randon testified that she tried to get Whitlock to sign a statement admitting that he had deliberately altered Salter’s evaluation. That would be a violation of the regulations and could justify termination. Randon said Whitlock refused.

For the next few days, Randon tried repeatedly to get Whitlock to sign the incriminating statement. Randon testified, “I chased him to his office. I mean, I was – I was stalking him.”

Whitlock refused to sign on the advice of Army lawyers. “I asked the deputy general counsel of the Army what to do and he said ‘sign nothing’.” Whitlock followed that counsel.

Whitlock tried to get Salter to sign her new evaluation with the higher performance rating she wanted and that they had agreed to originally. Salter refused. Later Randon would testify that she advised Salter not to cooperate with Whitlock’s effort to correct the record until she had talked to high-ups. Then a few days later she took what she called an altered job evaluation to an inspector general.

Alexandra Pelosi’s unfiltered “American Selfie” gives a complex picture of how we look to each other

How does America look to you right now? Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi poses this question in various ways to different people she interviews in “American Selfie,” her latest documentary chronicle of the American experience from across the political divide. The answers she gets in return all vary. None of them are bright and sunny.

“It looks like the end of days. I mean, Rome’s burning. The system’s broken, and it’s all around us,” says a masked San Francisco resident, eyeing the abandoned streets and uptick in homelessness during the early springtime’s quarantine.

“It makes me feel like it’s evil. That’s about it,” offers a man from La Cruces, New Mexico in late 2019 as he visits the El Paso, Texas Walmart where a white nationalist gunned down 23 shoppers in August of that year, egged on by Donald Trump’s threats of an “invasion” at the southern border of the United States. Or as another man at a more recent rally puts it, “America’s trying to find itself, but it’s too late. We’re heading for a bad crash, baby.”

“American Selfie” is one of those documentaries that one suspects Pelosi envisioned as a capturing the nation at a specific point in time and filtering it through the lens of our culture-wide narcissism. It begins with a bunch of young people merrily taking selfies at the famous Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park in September 2019 and ends on a note of despair at the hunger and want exacerbated by the pandemic, and the insurmountable divides created by the fault lines of race, class, gender and partisanship.

While its importance as a chronicle of our present moment is undeniable, it’s also incredibly stressful to watch right now because of everything Pelosi captures and the connections she makes from our gleeful consumerism to our willful benightedness about the world collapsing around us. The terrifying part about this documentary is that it’s highly likely that any American who watches will recognize a version of themselves in here – and Pelosi doesn’t put a pretty filter on any of what her camera captures.

Neither does she judge what she witnesses and questions, such as when she talks to a woman waiting in line to be among the first to score the latest iPhone on the same days as a climate march. Big day, she points out, then asks the woman if she plans to attend the march afterward. Probably not, she answers. “I’m not there yet. It’s not what I think about, and I’m not educated there,” she muses, staring into her phone all the while.

This jumps to the climate march where activists mourn our needless consumerism and the waste it produces, before leaping to other protests by Trump supporters demonstrating against Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar and another group of demonstrators supporting her. By swiftly moving from city to city and between moments that portray our politics in action, “American Selfie” becomes a depiction of capitalism strangling democracy.

The despair over the Wal-Mart shooting melts into the giddy elation of shopping on Black Friday; the protester’s rhetoric about immigrants overtaking the nation is contrasted by a view of the international bridge between Mexico and America where asylum seekers sleep on concrete and under plastic bags.

“Where are all the Christians that talk about helping people?” an activist asks, “Because this can’t go on.”

The daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has spent the last two decades touring America’s political psyche with a sense of curiosity and usually her most fascinating and empathetic work is set in Republican camps.

Her Emmy-winning 2000 documentary “Journeys With George” invited the viewer to tag along with her and George W. Bush for 18 months on the campaign trail leading up to one of the most contested elections in modern history. Later she recorded John McCain’s unsuccessful White House run in 2008 and recorded a marked difference in emotional tenor among conservatives, a tone shift from spirited rivalry to out-and-out rancor.

But “American Selfie” marks a shift in her view and in our politics. Pelosi doesn’t embed herself with the power brokers this time, choosing instead to throw in her lot and use her camera lens to give voice to the people impacted by their politics. By encapsulating her approach within a space between September 2019 and recent months, the footage could be seen as a useful predictor of the social ingredients that led to America’s anger boiling over in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

Prior to the pandemic’s lockdowns the scenes she captures already depict several Americas, the version enjoyed by wealthy and mostly white Americans, and the one in which the poor scrape by or are scraped off of the streets. Gleeful lockdown protests populated by Trump supporters insisting that the pandemic is a hoax are cut through by footage of bodies stacked inside refrigerator trucks in Harlem, recorded in May 2020 in as the New York borough was still being ravaged by COVID-19.

Just in case we don’t fully understand the disconnect, Pelosi ends the documentary with a scene of an Independence Day celebration at Mount Rushmore, with Trump and Melania watching the fireworks while Native Americans protesters are pepper sprayed and arrested outside its entry to the choral strains of “American the Beautiful.”

That said, if “American Selfie” comes off as a more helter-skelter in its first half that the second, perhaps this is because Pelosi may have begun with a very different thesis, which is that our devotion to recording our every move using cell phone cameras leads to complicated outcomes, both for individuals and society as a whole. The camera has a way remove us from our connection to specific time and place; we’d rather record evidence of being in where we are instead of actively enjoying the experience of being.

In turn this creating a virtual wall between whatever it is that we’re filming and ourselves; one small device can transform us into dispassionate observers. This stark observation is shown in action in scenes like one taken during her January filming in Las Vegas, where a carefree tourist poses for a photo in front of a fountain while ignoring a homeless person huddled against an elaborate set of balusters nearby. The moment follows an extended conversation with several residents who admit they don’t feel safe there, largely because the city behaves as if the mass shooting by the Mandalay Bay in 2017 never happened.

However, if this is the documentary’s initial viewpoint it is quickly transformed by racial justice protests that broke out in cities over the summer, where cell phone recordings of clashes between protesters and police awakened the American public about the prevalence of police brutality.

“Thank god for cameras on cell phones,” one man observes.

“American Selfie” proves that there is no unifying viewpoint that American citizens can agree upon. That has always been the case, but the scarier thought that Pelosi captures in action is that we no longer appear to be able to see the world from the perspective of people who don’t share our views. Wisely she remains off camera and asks questions that at times sound naïve or even irritatingly oblivious, until one understands that these are meant to elicit a certain kind of truth in the respondent, not just in their words but in their emotional reactions.

When at Super Bowl LIV she asks a Black man if all men are treated equally in this country, his response is to ask her with a note of anger in his voice, “Are you serious?” The subtext is that she should know better than to even ask that question. The reason this film exists is that so many people don’t.

“American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself” is available on Showtime On Demand and Showtime Anytime.

Biden schools Trump on environmental justice during debate

There was a first in the second and final presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle: NBC News White House correspondent and Thursday’s moderator Kristen Welker asked a question about environmental justice.

For those not familiar, “environmental justice” refers to the undue burden faced by low-income populations and communities of color from both the causes of climate change (like pollution from oil refineries and fracking operations) and its effects (like sea-level rise and extreme heat). According to Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it’s the first question on the topic to be posed to candidates on a presidential debate stage in history.

Welker asked President Donald Trump: “Some people of color are much more likely to live near oil refineries and chemical plants in Texas. There are families who worry the plants near them are making them sick. Your administration has rolled back regulations on these kinds of facilities. Why should these families give you another four years in office?”

Trump responded by saying those families were gainfully employed — “They are making a lot of money, more money than they’ve ever made” — before pivoting to talking about how his administration recently saved the oil industry.

The price of oil did plummet shortly into the lockdowns spurred by the novel coronavirus. After Russia and Saudi Arabia flooded the market with oil, demand dried up due to quarantines around the globe. The price of West Texas crudereached its lowest level in history in April. Ultimately, the Trump administration worked with the two oil-producing countries to slow supply, which steadied the markets.

But the success of American oil producers wasn’t what Welker was after with her question.

When Biden was given a chance to respond, he lectured his opponent on environmental justice, a topic that was bandied about often in the Democratic primary — and even garnered its own candidate forum during the campaign. Over that period, the term moved from environmental advocacy jargon to the headlines of the New York Times.

“Those people live on what they call ‘fence line’ — he doesn’t understand this,” the former veep said of his rival. “They live near chemical plants that, in fact, pollute — chemical plants and oil plants and refineries that pollute.”

Biden then talked about his childhood growing up near refineries in Delaware, oil slicks on the window of his mom’s car, and how many of the state’s residents at the time were being diagnosed with and dying of cancer. “The fact is those frontline communities, does not matter what you’re paying them, it matters how you keep them safe,” he said, before suggesting that the government impose restrictions on pollutants going into those communities. (It’s something the Clean Power Plan, put in place by the Obama administration, actually did; Trump rolled the plan back in 2019.)

Environmental advocates celebrated Welker’s question on social media. Adrien Salazar, a senior campaign strategist with the left-wing think tank Demos (and member of the 2019 Grist 50), chalked it up to years of hard work at the grassroots level.

Tonight we saw a question about pollution in fence-line communities. This is a testament to years of movement building and the incredible force of people power that have put #ClimateJustice and #EnvironmentalJustice at the center of a Presidential contest in 2020. #Debates2020

— Adrien Salazar (@adrien4ej) October 23, 2020

It was not only a victory for people who have been calling attention to fenceline communities throughout the country and the world for decades. The exchange also offered a stark contrast between the priorities of both the candidates. The president focused on the health of people’s and industries’ finances; his challenger focused on the health and safety of vulnerable communities.

Eight months into the pandemic, nurses say they still aren’t getting the safety equipment they need

Since the start of the pandemic, around 635,000 Americans have been hospitalized for symptoms related to COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The massive hospital influx of COVID-19 patients in this span has taxed the American healthcare system, in particular nurses, who deal with the minute-by-minute needs of these hundreds of thousands of patients. Unfortunately, many of those nurses say they have not been receiving the help that they need in return.

According to a report released last month by National Nurses United, the largest organization of registered nurses in the United States, at least 213 nurses in the United States have died of COVID-19 and related complications since Sept. 16, nearly three-fifths of whom were nurses of color. (By contrast, just under one fourth of American registered nurses are people of color.) National Nurses United also told Salon that 232 nurses have died overall as of Friday.

The National Nurses United report also found that at least 1,718 health care workers have died of COVID-19 and related complications, including registered nurses; nearly one-third of the hospital health care workers who suffered this fate were registered nurses. Overall, their report found that there have been at least 258,768 cases of COVID-19 among health care workers, a number representing 166 percent of the 156,306 cases reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other words, their report states that the CDC is underreporting them.

Nurses are noticing this, too. A survey released in July of more than 21,200 nurses nationwide found that only 24 percent of nurses believe their employer is making sure they have a safe workplace. Only 31 percent say that every patient is screened for COVID-19. 36 percent are afraid of developing COVID-19, and 43 percent are afraid that they will spread the disease to a family member.

The data is even more sobering when it comes to personal protective equipment, or PPE, with 87 percent of nurses saying they were required to reuse at least one piece of PPE at some point. Nurses also report chronic understaffing issues, with 27 percent of those who work in hospitals reporting that staffing has declined in recent months, even though the likelihood of patient death increases by 7 percent for every extra patient in a hospital nurse’s workload.

“I’m so disappointed in our lack of preparation as a country for a pandemic,” a nurse from Pennsylvania wrote to Salon. “N95s [a type of surgical mask with a respirator on it] quickly became sparse and we were forced to reuse them for days, basically until [they] broke, when they are intended per the manufacturer to be single/ one time use. We had to put them in a brown paper bag in between uses. Up until then we were to throw them away immediately after entering an airborne room. Face shields we wiped between uses [were] reused until they broke.”

The nurse added that after the hospital where she works ran out of the larger 3M N95s, “those of us who were fitted for the large had to be fit for this thin, cheap ‘duck bill’ N95 which offered very little protection, but it was the only kind they were able to get.” Nurses who did not pass the fit test for the new N95s, including the one who spoke to Salon, were told to wear “a PAPR — which is a whole face hood attached to airflow coming from a belt you wear. Hoods are supposed to be for one person and disconnected from the air/battery pack after use, cleaned with disinfectant and reused by THE SAME PERSON… but they didn’t have enough hoods, so we had to share them which is disgusting and very poor infection control. We actually had some healthcare workers quit when they found out they would have to share hoods. I don’t blame them.”

Another nurse-midwife, also located in Pennsylvania, told a similar story.

“When [COVID-19] first hit we did not have enough PPE like many others. We were given 1 mask per week,” the nurse-midwife wrote to Salon. “We were working unsafe hours due to trying to reduce number of employees in the unit at any given time. I was working 24 hour shifts every other day, so less than 24 hours off in between shifts. During this time we were made to cover clinic patients and inpatient patients at the same time. Our normal schedule would have one provider seeing patients in the clinic and one provider managing inpatient patients. It greatly increased the risk for error and was unsafe patient care.”

She added, “Currently, the OR [operating room] is trying to recoup lost revenue due to canceled elective surgeries over covid shutdown. There are four OR rooms and one is always supposed to remain open for labor emergencies. However, as of late, all four rooms have been booked for elective non-emergent cases!” The nurse-midwife pointed out that this “is a huge risk and patient safety care, all in the name of ‘the bottom line.'”

Some nurses are taking action. Earlier this month, nurses at San Leandro and Alameda Hospitals in California went on a five-day strike to protest regarding concerns about patient safety as well as alleged issues involving staffing, management bargaining with nurses in bad faith and punitive management actions. Earlier this week, the nurses scored a partial victory when the Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted to accept the resignation of the Alameda Health System’s Board of Trustees.

“We just can’t give the care you need because of this corporate drive to save money,” Lisa, a nurse who works in one of the Alameda Health System’s hospitals and participated in the strike, told Salon. “We’re at existential odds with one another on a daily basis. And we need to burn the system down and we need Medicare for All. End of story. End of story. Our medical-industrial complex is broken and ineffective and absurd.”

She added, “I can’t emphasize that enough. I really can’t.”

Tackling climate change seemed expensive. Then COVID happened

Climate deniers and opponents of aggressive climate action have long argued that governments can’t afford comprehensive measures to confront the climate crisis. The Green New Deal, for example, has been ridiculed as a “crazy, expensive mess” by the Republican Policy Committee.

But then COVID-19 challenged preconceived notions about the limits of government spending. Since August, world governments have pledged more than $12 trillion in stimulus spending to dig their way out of the coronavirus-caused economic downturn — a truly mind-boggling amount of cash that represents three times the public money spent after the Great Recession. How does that compare with the money that would be needed to fight climate change?

That’s the question behind a new paper published last week in the journal Science. According to the analysis, the money countries have put on the table to address COVID-19 far outstrips the low-carbon investments that scientists say are needed in the next five years to avoid climate catastrophe — by about an order of magnitude.

If just 12 percent of currently pledged COVID-19 stimulus funding were spent every year through 2024 on low-carbon energy investments and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, the researchers said, that would be enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious climate target. At present, countries’ voluntary commitments put the world on track to warm 3.2 degrees C (5.8 degrees F) or more by the end of the century.

Joeri Rogelj, a lecturer in climate change and the environment at Imperial College London and one of the study’s authors, said the findings illustrated a “win-win” opportunity for governments to not only address the acute impacts of the pandemic and its associated economic crisis, but to also put their economies on a more sustainable, prosperous, and resilient long-term trajectory.

“This crisis is not the only crisis looming over people’s heads,” Rogelj said, referring to the pandemic.

The paper focused on the spending needed in the energy sector, where some $1.4 trillion in annual investments between 2020 and 2024 could allow governments to develop everything from solar and wind infrastructure to energy efficiency improvements. That’s only $300 billion more than the $1.1 trillion of annual investments pledged under current climate plans. Public-private partnerships could play a role, too — governments could leverage private capital by making the clean energy investment environment more attractive, for example by making it less risky to invest in clean energy projects in developing countries.

To get to carbon neutrality by 2050 — the emissions reduction needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C — the researchers said green energy investments would also need to be paired with divestment or reduced public investment in fossil fuel sectors. Currently, these sectors are slated to receive an estimated $1.1 trillion per year in public money until 2024, but the paper recommended cutting that down closer to $800 billion per year.

Rogelj stressed the need for governments to provide transition support for workers in these most polluting sectors. “You want to support people and businesses to reschool themselves, redirect themselves,” he said, echoing the principles of a “just transition.”

Mark Paul, an assistant professor of economics and environmental studies at the New College of Florida, said the study helped illustrate the economic feasibility of climate action, but he criticized the comparison between one-time stimulus injections and the sustained investment needed for the energy transition. “It’s comparing apples and oranges,” he said. Extraordinary COVID-19 stimulus spending has been necessary, but exceptional — “a one-time shot,” as Paul put it. A holistic climate response would have to address all sectors of the economy — not just energy — and normalize much greater annual expenditures of up to 5 percent of global GDP each year for at least the next 10 years, he explained. Ideally, Paul said these injections would recur automatically each year until the economy was fully decarbonized and the unemployment rate was below 3.5 percent — a proposal he and several other climate experts made in March in an open letter to Congress.

Both Paul and Rogelj agreed that, even with enough money, there are still significant political barriers to climate action. “Clearly, we have the technologies, the resources, the workers, the finances,” Paul said. “Just not the political will.”

Since March, leaders in Germany, France, South Korea, and elsewhere have called for a green recovery from the coronavirus, but most of the world’s stimulus spending has gone to maintaining business as usual. By mid-October, G20 countries had funneled more than $223 billion into fossil fuel energy, compared to $151 billion for clean energy. Plus, the vast majority of fossil fuel funding was unconditional, meaning it didn’t come with any environmental stipulations attached. In September, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned countries not to “throw away” stimulus funds on fossil fuels that would exacerbate climate change.

As further stimulus funding materializes, Rogelj said it’s hard to say whether world leaders will seize the opportunity to address the climate crisis. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” he said. “But I can say that there is a really good case for governments to go for these green investments.”