Freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from mask mandates

Mask mandates do not violate the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech, assembly and association, as I wrote recently in a story that examined Constitution-based objections to mask-wearing requirements.

But a recent lawsuit filed in Florida, Tillis v. Manatee County, raises a different question: Do mask mandates violate the free exercise of religion?

The answer is no. No matter what you believe or why you believe it, the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion, known as the Free Exercise Clause, does not exempt you from a public health requirement to wear a mask.

Interferes with praying

In the Tillis case, the claim is that a mask mandate “should not apply within churches, synagogues and other houses of worship because it interferes with the ability to pray.”

The lawsuit, filed by Rev. Joel D. Tillis and Florida State Rep. Anthony Sabatini as Tillis’ attorney, challenges a mandate imposed by Manatee County. The plaintiffs allege that masks make “it more difficult … to preach and for members of the choir to sing.”

Rev. Joel Tillis, who filed the lawsuit against the Manatee County mask mandate, preaching on Aug. 8, 2020: ‘The issue is bigger than about safety now; it’s about freedom tomorrow.’

Courts typically assess freedom of religion claims based on the Free Exercise Clause, using what constitutional lawyers call the “rational basis” test.

As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Supreme Court in the 1983 case of Employment Division v. Smith, laws that do not intend to single out religion but instead apply widely must be “rationally related” to a “legitimate” governmental interest to be constitutional.

By design, that test is highly deferential to the government. Only rarely will the government fail to pass it.

If we assume that a mask mandate applies to everyone and is not intended to single out religion or people of faith, then the government’s undoubted interest in protecting public health will almost certainly satisfy the rational basis test.

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Alternatively, many states, including Florida, have passed “Religious Freedom Restoration Acts,” which typically require courts to use a much more rigorous standard of review, a standard called “strict scrutiny,” in free exercise cases.

Under this test, a court will require the law to further a “compelling governmental interest,” and the law must be “narrowly tailored” to achieve that interest. This is a much more demanding test than the rational basis test, and puts a much higher burden on the government to justify the law in question.

Compelling state interest

Which test a court will use thus depends on whether the claim is that a mask mandate violates the First Amendment to the federal Constitution or that it violates a state constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. The lawsuit filed by Rev. Tillis, for example, complains only that the mandate violates the Florida State Constitution.

Which test applies also depends on what the lawsuit claims. If the suit alleges a violation of the First Amendment, a court will ask if the mandate has a rational basis. If the lawsuit alleges a violation of a state Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a court will ask if the law is narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest.

As I wrote previously, courts are very likely to rule that mask mandates do advance a compelling state interest – the protection of public health – and do so in a way that minimizes the restriction on the constitutional right involved, whether of speech or religion.

Face masks, for example, are far less burdensome than stay-at-home orders or quarantines. Mask mandates that are carefully drafted and that indicate where, and when, the mandate does not apply, such as exemptions for situations where masking is impossible, like swimming or eating or in dental offices, are very likely to pass strict scrutiny.

Consequently, whether a court uses the more demanding strict scrutiny test or the less demanding rational basis test, the result will probably be the same. In the end, religious objections to masks are no more a constitutional obstacle to mask requirements than are objections grounded in free speech.

John E. Finn, Professor Emeritus of Government, Wesleyan University

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

Trump embraces support from QAnon: They “like me very much” and “love America”

President Trump crossed a new line Wednesday — one that until recently no one knew existed — when he offered praise from the White House briefing room for the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, which the FBI has labeled a potential domestic terrorism threat. QAnon followers “like me very much” and “love America,” the president told reporters, before affirming the group’s core belief that he is in fact “saving the world” from the “radical left.”

NBC News correspondent Shannon Pettypiece kicked off the discussion, asking, “Can you talk about what you think about [QAnon] and what you have to say to people who are following this movement right now?”

“I don’t know much about the movement, other than I understand they like me very much. Which I appreciate. But I don’t know much about the movement,” Trump said. He then connected the values of the group to one of his own campaign themes — law and order.

“I have heard that it is gaining in popularity, and from what I hear … these are people that don’t like seeing what’s going on in places like Portland, and places like Chicago and New York and other cities and states,” the president said.

“I’ve heard these are people that love our country and they just don’t like seeing it,” he added. “So I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me. And they also would like to see problems in these areas, like especially the areas that we’re talking about, go away.”

Trump then vowed he would send in “troops or law enforcement or whatever they would like” to cities to help “straighten out their problems.”

Pettypiece followed up, pointing out that the QAnon universe — an outgrowth of the 2016 “pizzagate” conspiracy theory — hangs on a core belief that the world’s levers of power are wielded by prominent liberals and celebrities who are literally pedophiles and cannibals and who kill and eat children, and that Trump has been anointed as a savior who will render justice and liberate the innocent.

“This belief that you’re supposedly saving the world from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals,” Pettypiece asked, “does that sound like something you are behind?”

“Well, I haven’t heard that, but is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?” Trump said, drawing laughs from the briefing room.

“I mean, you know. If I can help save the world from problems I’m willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there,” he said.

“And we are, actually!” the president continued. “We are saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country, and when this country is gone the rest of the world would follow. The rest of the world would follow. That’s the importance of this country.”

Although this is the first time Trump has voiced direct praise for the QAnon “movement,” the president and his campaign have been nodding and winking at Q believers for more than a year, despite a May 2019 FBI intelligence bulletin warning that conspiracy theories like QAnon were likely to “motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity.”

QAnon believers have been prominently featured at the president’s rallies as far back as July 2019, when Trump praised a baby wearing a QAnon onesie during a speech in North Carolina, and a speaker recited a QAnon slogan at a Cincinnati rally minutes before the president took the stage.

A 2019 Trump campaign video showed a woman holding a “Women for Trump” sign in which the O’s were replaced with Q’s. Another supporter could be seen holding a “Keep America Great” sign with a large “Q” taped to the top-left corner.

Trump has also amplified QAnon supporters on Twitter numerous times over the past year or more, retweeting 14 QAnon accounts on the Fourth of July alone. That was the same day that Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who figures prominently in the movement’s conspiracy lore, pledged allegiance to Q in a video posted to social media.

This year QAnon officially seeped into national electoral politics, with multiple Q-supporting Republican Party candidates winning primaries — and endorsements from the president. Last week Trump tweeted that Georgia congressional candidate and QAnon adherent Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose rhetoric has been denounced by GOP leaders as “appalling” and “disgusting,” was a “future Republican star.”

Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign laid into the president soon after his White House remarks Wednesday, connecting the moment to Trump’s infamous “both sides” comments in the wake of the 2017 neo-Nazi terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“Not only is our president refusing to take responsibility for his failed leadership that has cost over 170,000 American lives and tens of millions of jobs, he is again giving voice to violence,” said Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates. “After calling neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville ‘fine people’ and tear gassing peaceful protesters following the murder of George Floyd, Donald Trump just sought to legitimize a conspiracy theory that the FBI has identified as a domestic terrorism threat,”

When wrapping up his thoughts on the subject during the White House briefing, Trump tried once more to link QAnon to his slightly more pedestrian campaign themes, including urban crime and his as-yet-nonexistent wall along the Mexican border.

“Mexico, as you know, has a very high rate of infection,” the president said, referring to the coronavirus. “The wall is now going to be, next week, about 300 miles long. Our numbers are extraordinary on the border. And this is through luck, perhaps more than talent.”

“You don’t hear talk about the wall anymore,” Trump concluded. “We need strength in our country, not weakness. Too much weakness.”

Veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove, who has reportedly been advising Trump in recent months, told a Fox News panel immediately after the president’s remarks, “This is a group of nuts and kooks and he ought to disavow them.”

“They may like him, but they like him because they think he is fighting an incredible war against forces of ‘pedographic’ evil and it’s just ridiculous. Disavow them, get done with it,” Rove said.

Greenpeace gives Democratic platform a C+ on climate plans: “We are not impressed”

Greenpeace USA announced Wednesday that the platform which Democrats are set to adopt this week earns only a C+ rating, based on the scorecard process the group previously used to rank the climate policies of what was once a large field of Democratic presidential primary candidates.

That C+ (52.5 points out of 100) is notably lower than the B+ (75.5/100) that Greenpeace gave to former Vice President Joe Biden, whom Democrats formally nominated as the party’s candidate Tuesday night, or the B+ (77/100) the group gave to his former competitor and current running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.

Although the soon-to-be-finalized 2020 Democratic platform received “decent marks for advancing renewable energy and environmental justice,” Greenpeace determined that there are “critical policy gaps in addressing the power of the fossil fuel industry” and it makes “no mention of the Green New Deal.”

We analyzed @TheDemocrats' new platform on climate, and we are *not* impressed.

⛔️ No mention of the #GreenNewDeal
⛔️ Continuing to subsidize fossil fuels

Our communities deserve better. https://t.co/Kc5AYAjiIa

— Greenpeace USA (@greenpeaceusa) August 19, 2020

The group’s scorecard is based on whether candidates intend to “end the fossil fuel era by enacting policies to halt oil, gas, and coal expansion, phase out existing production, and center fossil fuel workers and climate-impacted communities in the transition to a renewable energy economy.”

Greenpeace also considers whether they will “advance a Green New Deal, including mobilizing towards 100% renewable energy for all, creating millions of family-sustaining, union jobs, and securing a better future for communities that have borne the brunt of fossil fuel industry exploitation.”

The Democratic platform earned 21/50 for plans to phase out fossil fuels and 31.5/50 on the transposition to clean energy. In a statement about the final grade, Greenpeace USA climate campaigner Charlie Jiang urged party members and political leaders to pursue bolder policies going forward.

“The Democrats have an opportunity to galvanize millions of young voters with an ambitious, visionary climate platform, but they’re making a mess of it,” Jiang said. “We thought the party that claims it wants to lead our country into the future had moved beyond a middle-of-the-road approach to the climate crisis.”

“This platform is a step backward, and we deserve better,” he declared. “If we use this moment to divest from systems of exploitation and extraction — like police and fossil fuels — and invest in a Green New Deal for workers, families and communities, we have the chance to navigate out of multiple crises at once.”

Despite the party platform’s shortcomings compared with what steps scientists say are necessary to ensure a livable climate in the future, Jiang suggested that electing Democrats to political office still presents a better path forward in terms of tackling the human-caused planetary emergency.

“We know the Republicans have no plan,” Jiang said, noting that President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican politicians “continue to traffic in denial and misinformation while they orchestrate a bailout for oil and gas CEOs.”

“But that doesn’t mean the Democrats can take their feet off the gas,” he added. “We expect action at the scale that science and justice demand.”

Greenpeace’s grade for the platform came after news broke Tuesday that the Democratic National Committee had quietly removed an amendment calling for an end to federal subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, a demand of climate activists that both Biden and Harris supported during the primary.

Annie Leonard, Greenpeace USA’s executive director, denounced the decision as “immoral, criminal, inexcusable.” Other campaigners decried it as “ridiculous,” “outrageous,” and a case of the party establishment “caving to big money donors.”

Journalist Emily Atkin wrote Wednesday in her newsletter HEATED that though Biden hadn’t yet commented on the move, “if he wants to retain the credibility he’s gained so far on climate, he must. Because the fossil fuel industry’s crushing grip on our political system is, and will always be, the biggest obstacle to meaningful climate action.”

This is not a fucking joke. California just recorded what is likely the highest temperature in world history. Homes are burning and people are fleeing for their lives.

This is what you want taxpayers to keep paying for, @DNC?https://t.co/mQwF5yPMes

— Emily Atkin (@emorwee) August 19, 2020

Critiques of the platform came after climate campaigners, including Jiang of Greenpeace USA, welcomed Biden’s announcement of Harris as his running mate last week—ahead of this week’s mostly virtual Democratic National Convention, which kicked off Monday and is scheduled to conclude Thursday.

“The Biden-Harris administration,” Jiang said last week, “must take transformative action from day one to advance a Green New Deal and end the era of fossil fuels.”

Donald Trump is losing his tech war with China’s Xi Jinping

Forget those negotiations with China spearheaded by the man who boasted that he was the maestro of “the art of the deal.” Recently, it’s been an all-hands-on-deck assault on that country: from deploying U.S. aircraft carriers in the South China Sea to the sudden and arbitrary closing of a Chinese consulate in Houston. Of all people, Health Secretary Alex Azar was even dispatched to Taiwan, that other China, to meet and greet the country’s president, the highest-ranking official American visitor to do so in four decades. Of course, as with so much in the age of Trump, there was a grimly comic aspect to his trip, since he made a particular point of praising the way a democratic country could handle the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic (a howler, given how Chinese President Xi Jinping and Donald Trump have each handled that same virus). And that’s just to start down a list that, from TikTok bans to criminal charges against four members of the Chinese military, only continues to grow as The Donald and crew become ever more belligerent about that rising power on a falling planet.

As TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro, author of “After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World,” suggests today, behind the growing belligerence of the Trump administration, which should be considered dangerous indeed at this moment — think new Cold War — lies the anger of a president whose world seems to be slipping out of control. Back in 2016, I suggested that Donald Trump was running as this country’s first declinist presidential candidate (the clue lay in that hardly noticed “again” at the end of his election slogan Make America Great Again, or MAGA). And, as Hiro suggests today, looking at the high-tech business world, he’s delivered big time.

Whether negotiating with China, North Korea, or any other country, the art-of-the-dealer-in-chief has proven to be either a stealer-in-chief or an unreeler-in-chief. So say goodbye to the American Century but, given the state of this planet, don’t count on a Chinese Century either. Tom

Whose century is it?
Don’t ask Donald Trump
By Dilip Hiro

For the Trump administration’s senior officials, it’s been open season on bashing China. If you need an example, think of the president’s blame game about “the invisible Chinese virus” as it spreads wildly across the U.S.

When it comes to China, in fact, the ever more virulent criticism never seems to stop.

Between the end of June and the end of July, four members of his cabinet vied with each other in spewing anti-Chinese rhetoric. That particular spate of China bashing started when FBI Director Christopher Wray described Chinese President Xi Jinping as the successor to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. It was capped by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s clarion call to U.S. allies to note the “bankrupt” Marxist-Leninist ideology of China’s leader and the urge to “global hegemony” that goes with it, insisting that they would have to choose “between freedom and tyranny.” (Forget which country on this planet actually claims global hegemony as its right.)

At the same time, the Pentagon deployed its aircraft carriers and other weaponry ever more threateningly in the South China Sea and elsewhere in the Pacific. The question is: What lies behind this upsurge in Trump administration China baiting? A likely answer can be found in the president’s blunt statement in a July interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News that “I’m not a good loser. I don’t like to lose.”

The reality is that, under Donald Trump, the United States is indeed losing to China in two important spheres. As the FBI’s Wray put it, “In economic and technical terms [China] is already a peer competitor of the United States… in a very different kind of [globalized] world.” In other words, China is rising and the U.S. is falling. Don’t just blame Trump and his cronies for that, however, as this moment has been a long time coming.

Facts speak for themselves. Nearly unscathed by the 2008-2009 global recession, China displaced Japan as the world’s second largest economy in August 2010. In 2012, with $3.87 trillion worth of imports and exports, it overtook the U.S. total of $3.82 trillion, elbowing it out of a position it had held for 60 years as the number one cross-border trading nation worldwide. By the end of 2014, China’s gross domestic product, as measured by purchasing power parity, was $17.6 trillion, slightly exceeding the $17.4 trillion of the United States, which had been the globe’s largest economy since 1872.

In May 2015, the Chinese government released a Made in China 2025 plan aimed at rapidly developing 10 high-tech industries, including electric cars, next-generation information technology, telecommunications, advanced robotics, and artificial intelligence. Other major sectors covered in the plan included agricultural technology, aerospace engineering, the development of new synthetic materials, the emerging field of biomedicine, and high-speed rail infrastructure. The plan was aimed at achieving 70% self-sufficiency in high-tech industries and a dominant position in such global markets by 2049, a century after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Semiconductors are crucial to all electronic products and, in 2014, the government’s national integrated circuit industry development guidelines set a target: China was to become a global leader in semiconductors by 2030. In 2018, the local chip industry moved up from basic silicon packing and testing to higher value chip design and manufacturing. The following year, the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association noted that, while America led the world with nearly half of global market share, China was the main threat to its position because of huge state investments in commercial manufacturing and scientific research.

By then, the U.S. had already fallen behind China in just such scientific and technological research. A study by Nanjing University’s Qingnan Xie and Harvard University’s Richard Freeman noted that between 2000 and 2016, China’s share of global publications in the physical sciences, engineering, and math quadrupled, exceeding that of the U.S.

In 2019, for the first time since figures for patents were compiled in 1978, the U.S. failed to file for the largest number of them. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, China filed applications for 58,990 patents and the United States 57,840. In addition, for the third year in a row, the Chinese high-tech corporation Huawei Technologies Company, with 4,144 patents, was well ahead of U.S.-based Qualcomm (2,127). Among educational institutions, the University of California maintained its top rank with 470 published applications, but Tsinghua University ranked second with 265. Of the top five universities in the world, three were Chinese.

The neck-and-neck race in consumer electronics

By 2019, the leaders in consumer technology in America included Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft; in China, the leaders were Alibaba (founded by Jack Ma), Tencent (Tengxun in Chinese), Xiaomi, and Baidu. All had been launched by private citizens. Among the US companies, Microsoft was established in 1975, Apple in 1976, Amazon in 1994, and Google in September 1998. The earliest Chinese tech giant, Tencent, was established two months after Google, followed by Alibaba in 1999, Baidu in 2000, and Xiaomi, a hardware producer, in 2010. When China first entered cyberspace in 1994, its government left intact its policy of controlling information through censorship by the Ministry of Public Security.

In 1996, the country established a high-tech industrial development zone in Shenzhen, just across the Pearl River from Hong Kong, the first of what would be a number of special economic zones. From 2002 on, they would begin attracting Western multinational corporations keen to take advantage of their tax-free provisions and low-wage skilled workers. By 2008, such foreign companies accounted for 85% of China’s high-tech exports.

Shaken by an official 2005 report that found serious flaws in the country’s innovation system, the government issued a policy paper the following year listing 20 mega-projects in nanotechnology, high-end generic microchips, aircraft, biotechnology, and new drugs. It then focused on a bottom-up approach to innovation, involving small start-ups, venture capital, and cooperation between industry and universities, a strategy that would take a few years to yield positive results.

In January 2000, less than 2% of Chinese used the Internet. To cater to that market, Robin Li and Eric Xu set up Baidu in Beijing as a Chinese search engine. By 2009, in its competition with Google China, a subsidiary of Google operating under government censorship, Baidu garnered twice the market share of its American rival as Internet penetration leapt to 29%.

In the aftermath of the 2008-2009 global financial meltdown, significant numbers of Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs returned from Silicon Valley to play an important role in the mushrooming of high-tech firms in a vast Chinese market increasingly walled off from U.S. and other Western corporations because of their unwillingness to operate under government censorship.

Soon after Xi Jinping became president in March 2013, his government launched a campaign to promote “mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation” using state-backed venture capital. That was when Tencent came up with its super app WeChat, a multi-purpose platform for socializing, playing games, paying bills, booking train tickets, and so on.

Jack Ma’s e-commerce behemoth Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014, raising a record $25 billion with its initial public offering. By the end of the decade, Baidu had diversified into the field of artificial intelligence, while expanding its multiple Internet-related services and products. As the search engine of choice for 90% of Chinese Internet users, more than 700 million people, the company became the fifth most visited website in cyberspace, its mobile users exceeding 1.1 billion.

Xiaomi Corporation would release its first smartphone in August 2011. By 2014, it had forged ahead of its Chinese rivals in the domestic market and developed its own mobile phone chip capabilities. In 2019, it sold 125 million mobile phones, ranking fourth globally. By the middle of 2019, China had 206 privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion, besting the U.S. with 203.

Among the country’s many successful entrepreneurs, the one who particularly stood out was Jack Ma, born Ma Yun in 1964. Though he failed to get a job at a newly opened Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in his home city of Hangzhou, he did finally gain entry to a local college after his third attempt, buying his first computer at the age of 31. In 1999, he founded Alibaba with a group of friends. It would become one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. On his 55th birthday, he was the second richest man in China with a net worth of $42.1 billion.

Born in the same year as Ma, his American counterpart, Jeff Bezos, gained a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University. He would found Amazon.com in 1994 to sell books online, before entering e-commerce and other fields. Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing company, would become the globe’s largest. In 2007, Amazon released a handheld reading device called the Kindle. Three years later, it ventured into making its own television shows and movies. In 2014, it launched Amazon Echo, a smart speaker with a voice assistant named Alexa that let its owner instantly play music, control a Smart home, get information, news, weather, and more. With a net worth of $145.4 billion in 2019, Bezos became the richest person on the planet.

Deploying an artificial intelligence inference chip to power features on its e-commerce sites, Alibaba categorized a billion product images uploaded by vendors to its e-commerce platform daily and prepared them for search and personalized recommendations to its customer base of 500 million. By allowing outside vendors to use its platform for a fee, Amazon increased its items for sale to 350 million — with 197 million people accessing Amazon.com each month.

China also led the world in mobile payments with America in sixth place. In 2019, such transactions in China amounted to $80.5 trillion. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the authorities encouraged customers to use mobile payment, online payment, and barcode payment to avoid the risk of infection. The projected total for mobile payments: $111.1 trillion. The corresponding figures for the United States at $130 billion look puny by comparison.

In August 2012, the founder of the Beijing-based ByteDance, 29-year-old Zhang Yiming, broke new ground in aggregating news for its users. His product, Toutiao (Today’s Headlines) tracked users’ behavior across thousands of sites to form an opinion of what would interest them most, and then recommended stories.

By 2016, it had already acquired 78 million users, 90% of them under 30.

In September 2016, ByteDance launched a short-video app in China called Douyin that gained 100 million users within a year. It would soon enter a few Asian markets as TikTok. In November 2017, for $1 billion, ByteDance would purchase Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based Chinese social network app for video creation, messaging, and live broadcasting, and set up an office in California.

Zhang merged it into TikTok in August 2018 to give his company a larger footprint in the U.S. and then spent nearly $1 billion to promote TikTok as the platform for sharing short-dance, lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. It has been downloaded by 165 million Americans and driven the Trump administration to distraction. A Generation Z craze, in April 2020 it surpassed two billion downloads globally, eclipsing U.S. tech giants. That led President Trump (no loser he!) and his top officials to attack it and he would sign executive orders attempting to ban both TikTok and WeChat from operating in the U.S. or being used by Americans (unless sold to a U.S. tech giant). Stay tuned.

Huawei’s octane-powered rise

But the biggest Chinese winner in consumer electronics and telecommunications has been Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies Company, the country’s first global multinational. It has become a pivot point in the geopolitical battle between Beijing and Washington.

Huawei (in Chinese, it means “splendid achievement”) makes phones and the routers that facilitate communications around the world. Established in 1987, its current workforce of 194,000 operates in 170 countries. In 2019, its annual turn-over was $122.5 billion. In 2012, it outstripped its nearest rival, the 136-year-old Ericsson Telephone Corporation of Sweden, to become the world’s largest supplier of telecommunications equipment with 28% of market share globally. In 2019, it forged ahead of Apple to become the second largest phone maker after Samsung.

Several factors have contributed to Huawei’s stratospheric rise: its business model, the personality and decision-making mode of its founder Ren Zhengfei, state policies on high-tech industry, and the firm’s exclusive ownership by its employees.

Born in 1944 in Guizhou Province, Ren Zhengfei went to Chongqing University and then joined a military research institute during Mao Zedong’s chaotic Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He was demobilized in 1983 when China cut back on its engineering corps. But the army’s slogan, “fight and survive,” stayed with him. He moved to the city of Shenzhen and worked in the country’s infant electronics sector for four years, saving enough to co-found what would become the tech giant Huawei. He focused on research and development, adapting technologies from Western firms, while his new company received small orders from the military and later substantial R&D (research and development) grants from the state to develop GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) phones and other products. Over the years, the company produced telecommunications infrastructure and commercial products for third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) smartphones.

As China’s high-tech industry surged, Huawei’s fortunes rose. In 2010, it hired IBM and Accenture PLC to design the means of managing networks for telecom providers. In 2011, the company hired the Boston Consulting Group to advise it on foreign acquisitions and investments.

Like many successful American entrepreneurs, Ren has given top priority to the customer and, in the absence of the usual near-term pressure to raise income and profits, his management team has invested $15 to 20 billion annually in research and development work. That helps explain how Huawei became one of the globe’s five companies in the fifth generation (5G) smartphone business, topping the list by shipping out 6.9 million phones in 2019 and capturing 36.9% of the market. On the eve of the release of 5G phones, Ren revealed that Huawei had a staggering 2,570 5G patents.

So it was unsurprising that in the global race for 5G, Huawei was the first to roll out commercial products in February 2019. One hundred times faster than its 4G predecessors, 5G tops out at 10 gigabits per second and future 5G networks are expected to link a huge array of devices from cars to washing machines to door bells.

Huawei’s exponential success has increasingly alarmed a Trump administration edging ever closer to conflict with China. Last month, Secretary of State Pompeo described Huawei as “an arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state that censors political dissidents and enables mass internment camps in Xinjiang.”

In May 2019, the U.S. Commerce Department banned American firms from supplying components and software to Huawei on national security grounds. A year later, it imposed a ban on Huawei buying microchips from American companies or using U.S.-designed software. The White House also launched a global campaign against the installation of the company’s 5G systems in allied nations, with mixed success.

Ren continued to deny such charges and to oppose Washington’s moves, which have so far failed to slow his company’s commercial advance. Its revenue for the first half of 2020, $65 billion, was up by 13.1% over the previous year.

From tariffs on Chinese products and that recent TikTok ban to slurs about the “kung flu” as the Covid-19 pandemic swept America, President Trump and his team have been expressing their mounting frustration over China and ramping up attacks on an inexorably rising power on the global stage. Whether they know it or not, the American century is over, which doesn’t mean that nothing can be done to improve the U.S. position in the years to come.

Setting aside Washington’s belief in the inherent superiority of America, a future administration could stop hurling insults or trying to ban enviably successful Chinese tech firms and instead emulate the Chinese example by formulating and implementing a well-planned, long-term high-tech strategy. But as the Covid-19 pandemic has made abundantly clear, the very idea of planning is not a concept available to the “very stable genius” presently in the White House.

Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author, among many other works, of After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World. He is currently researching a sequel to that book, which would cover several interlinked subjects, including the Covid-19 pandemic.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

History repeating: Trump is openly pushing Russian propaganda against Biden with GOP aid

Though former Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not establish that Donald Trump or members of his campaign conspired with the Kremlin in 2016 to influence the election, he famously concluded:

The presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump (“Trump Campaign” or “Campaign”) showed interest in WikiLeaks’s releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton.

…

[The] investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts…

And this is, undoubtedly, happening again. Despite everything that happened in 2016, the chaos and scandal it unleashed, and all we’ve learned about the Russian efforts to interfere an American Democracy since then, Trump is welcoming Russia’s help once again.

On Sunday, Trump shared a tweet that included audio that U.S. intelligence has determined to be Russian propaganda.

As CNN reported:

Late Sunday, Trump amplified a tweet that contained audiotapes of a 2016 conversation between Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko — material that was released earlier this year by Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker named by the US intelligence community in its August 7 statement about Russia’s disinformation campaign against Biden. US authorities labeled Derkach’s efforts as disinformation because they are intentionally designed to spread false or misleading information about Biden.

By retweeting material that the US government has already labeled as propaganda — and doing so with the 2020 Democratic National Convention kicking off on Monday — Trump demonstrated once again that he is willing to capitalize on foreign election meddling for his own political gain.

The conversation does not actually implicate Biden in any wrongdoing. A voice, purportedly Poroshenko, seems to cast doubt on the claim that the prosecutor Biden pushed out of a top position in Ukraine while he was vice president was corrupt. However, it was the official position of the U.S. government that the prosecutor was corrupt, and his removal was a goal shared by international allies. Additionally, Poroshenko has dismissed the recordings as fake.

The AP reported:

By amplifying the recording to his more than 85 million Twitter followers, Trump underscored the ease with which pro-Russian narratives can seep into American public discourse ahead of the 2020 election despite being flagged by intelligence officials as the product of a concerted Russian effort.

Russia has also published disinformation under the guise of legitimate news stories, U.S. officials say, reflecting something of a shift in tactics from 2016, when Russia relied on a social media campaign to sow discord and also orchestrated the release of stolen Democratic emails.

To be clear: Trump has undoubtedly been briefed on what’s going on. So either he knows what he’s doing or is barely paying attention enough to care.

And he’s not the only one. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has been warned that the investigation he’s leading into Biden’s past is tainted with Russian disinformation. But he has dismissed these concerns. And despite the obviously opportunistic nature of the inquiry — Republicans had no interest in Biden’s actions in Ukraine until he became a candidate for president — he is shamelessly ramping it up. And he has openly admitted that the section of he could use the portion of his probe focused on Trump’s “Obamagate” conspiracy theory to have an impact on the election.

“The more that we expose of the corruption of the transition process between Obama and Trump, the more we expose of the corruption within those agencies, I would think it would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection and certainly be pretty good, I would say, evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden,” Johnson said in a recent interview, as Politico reported.

More broadly, the GOP has, again and again, rejected Democratic efforts to secure our elections and to forestall further foreign intervention in our politics. While not as overt as Trump and Johnson, the party as a whole has — tacitly or otherwise — become comfortable with letting Russia help the president. What was scandalous in 2016 has now become commonplace.

“It scared me”: Rachel Maddow unnerved by Obama warning about potential “end of American democracy”

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow confessed that there were parts of President Barack Obama’s speech that genuinely “scared her.”

“President Obama’s speech tonight slayed me,” said Maddow. “I’m sure people will have different opinions about it because it’s a different kind of thing. His warnings that we could potentially be at the end of American democracy scared me, and I found upsetting and hard to watch. But it’s powerful. Powerful stuff.”

Co-host Joy Reid explained that Obama would know the facts because he not only has been in the Oval Office for eight years, but he also sat in that office with President Donald Trump when his staff was trying to get a secret line to call Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“So President Obama can be a poet,” said Reid. “There’s a kind of speech he gives — particularly his eulogies — that are all poetry and take you through these emotional chords of American history. He’s a writer, so he speaks as a writer and participates in writing his speech, which is unusual for a politician. And he has this poetic and almost dramatic sort of sense. That was not the kind of speech he gave tonight. This was President Obama saying, ‘I sat in that office and I want you to listen to me because I’m warning you because I know it from inside the job that there’s a danger here.’ This was the speech that Obama has given throughout all of the speeches I’ve read or watched that absolutely did feel like the most of a warning. And I think it was warning about the potential end of America.”

She said that it may seem dramatic, and it’s something people throw around, but that Trump has basically worked to end every institution that helped ensure someone like Obama could be elected. If Trump kills that, then America as we know it will end.

See the video below:

Trump uses Florida loophole allowing anyone a voter chooses to pick up and turn in their mail ballot

Though President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump cast mail-in votes in Florida’s congressional primary from New Jersey this week, their ballots were reportedly delivered by an individual whom the couple designated to pick up and drop off the ballots at their Palm Beach precinct.

The timeline of events raises questions about the chain of custody of those ballots, and whether it met state requirements.

According to reports from CNN and The Washington Post citing Palm Beach County election officials, the Trumps’ ballots were returned Monday — ahead of the deadline. Florida law allows registered voters to sign an affidavit authorizing an intermediary to pick up and drop off their mail-in ballots.

That affidavit is specifically titled, “Affidavit to pick-up vote-by-mail ballot for a voter.” It is required for each individual election — and also requires the designated go-between to provide photo ID.

The Trumps reportedly signed the affidavits and had their ballots picked up last week. While the deadline had passed for mail-in ballot requests, voters could still retrieve ballots in person or have a designee pick them up.

The Trumps designated Alex Garcia, a member of the Florida Republican Party, to pick up and drop off their ballots, according to both CNN and The Post. Garcia reportedly performed the same service when the first family cast mail-in ballots back in March.

Ashley Houlihan, an attorney for the supervisor’s office, told The Post that the completed ballots arrived Monday.

“The president and first lady just had their designee come in and pick up their ballot at the desk,” Houlihan told the outlet. “Many of our voters do the same thing if they miss the deadline for the mail ballot to be sent to them. Or in some cases, we have so many snowbirds, and they’re not sure which residence they’ll be at; so it’s just easier for them to come in and request their vote by mail ballot at the desk.”

According to CNN host Ana Cabrera, however, records with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections showed that the Trumps’ ballots were delivered Wednesday to Mar-a-Lago. But the Trumps have been staying since the weekend prior at the family club in Bedminster, N.J.

It remains unclear whether Garcia — who according to the terms of the affidavit would have had to retrieve the ballots from the precinct in person — delivered the ballots to Mar-a-Lago himself. Further unclear is the chain of custody to and from Bedminster.

The delivery method to Bedminster — courier or post — is not a minor detail, as the president has for months railed against mail-in ballots, falsely alleging that the practice is vulnerable to mass fraud. It is also unclear whether it would be a violation of Florida law to have someone other than the designated intermediary handle ballots. Florida election officials at the state and county levels did not reply to Salon’s requests for comment.

The president declared his Florida residency last November — and may have violated federal election law in the process.

Trump, who views Florida as a critical swing state, cited “tax purposes” as the primary reason why he had changed his residence from New York. He cast a mail-in ballot during Florida’s presidential primary in March, even though he reportedly drove by a polling place in person at least six times that month.

Reginald Stambaugh, an attorney in Palm Beach County involved in a dispute over a dock the president attempted to erect at Mar-a-Lago in recent months, told HuffPost in June that the move was “illegal.”

According to that report, Trump had tried to register last fall as a Floridian while claiming 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington as his residence. Election officials in Palm Beach County denied the attempted registration, citing the fact that the White House was not located in the county.

Trump then filed anew, listing his residence at Mar-a-Lago and affirming with a signature that it was true. (“I live in Manhattan,” Trump told U.S. governors in a conference call the week before.)

Trump, however, had in 1993 reached an agreement with the town of Palm Beach allowing him to repurpose his Mar-a-Lago estate as a club as long as he promised to never live there, The Washington Post reported in May. Registered voters in the state must also be Florida residents, and state law bars residents from registering to vote from a place of business.

Despite casting mail-in ballots, the president has spent months pushing baseless claims about voting by mail being ideal vehicles for election fraud. However, data shows otherwise.

An MIT analysis of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s database of election fraud in the U.S. found that over the last 20 years, only 143 mail ballot fraud cases — out of 204 absentee cases, themselves a fraction of 1,200 fraud cases of any kind — ended with criminal convictions. On average, that’s seven to eight cases a year across the nation — or about 0.00006% of the total number of votes cast.

The president, however, makes one exception: his new Republican-led home state, whose systems he claimed in an early August tweet, without providing detail, are uniquely “safe and secure.”

Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True. Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail! #MAGA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 4, 2020

“Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True. Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail! #MAGA,” the president said.

Florida is represented by a governor and two U.S. senators from Trump’s Republican Party.

A UX designer breaks down the intentionally malicious design of Trump’s campaign website

Beyond a mere source of entertainment, the video-sharing social media app TikTok has become a hub for quick educational videos, as users turn its 60-second video format into an opportunity to share interesting and informative lessons. User experience (UX) designer Mary Formanek (@UXWithMary) has become a viral TikTok influencer in this regard, in particular for her series of TikTok explainer videos breaking down politicians’ campaign websites for laypersons who may not know a lot about design.

One recent series of Formanek’s videos that blew up featured her explaining the design principles behind Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign website. In these TikTok videos, Formanek describes how Trump’s campaign uses design principles in a shady way, to manipulate users into getting trapped on donation pages and accidentally donating more money than they might intend. As Formanek explains, this practice — of using design psychology to obfuscate and manipulate rather than illuminate — is known as “dark UX” within the field.

For those unfamiliar, UX — short for user experience — is the general term to refer to the interaction that a user has with a website or product. A UX designer or their team will be tasked with building an easy, efficient and smooth experience for the user.

While UX designers are trained to be on the side of the user, there are ways that the user experience can be manipulated to be in favor of the “product” — in this case, a candidate. When it comes to Trump’s re-election campaign website, this translates into an unscrupulous, even ill-intentioned user experience. Formanek broke down how this worked in an interview with Salon; as always, this interview has been edited for clarity and length.

First, what is dark UX?

It’s pretty much any sort of pattern or practice [of design] that will cause a deceitful effect. It will trick the user into doing something that they don’t want to do, or not even tell the user that they are doing this action.

What’s the history of dark UX? Is this a new thing?

I graduated recently, in 2016, and because UX is [such a] new [field] we don’t have a ton of education on it. I didn’t learn about dark UX patterns until I started doing my own research and came across a couple articles on it, and learned from there. The person who started the ideas of dark UX was Harry Brignull. He proposed [the term] “dark UX” I think in 2010, and pushed the concept from there, and said, “hey, look at these really-not-great things to do; we shouldn’t do these things and this is why they’re bad and shady.”

UX is supposed to be about people, and about the users, and about helping people. This is the exact opposite of what our profession is.

On TikTok, you have a series explaining how Trump’s re-election campaign website exemplifies dark UX. In one video, you show how the “donate” checkboxes are automatically clicked for a user, thus automatically consenting them to donate $1,000 monthly. Are there any legal ramifications for this, or is it an ethics violation?

I’m not a lawyer, but in the United States, very rarely have companies got into any legal trouble for doing [dark UX] patterns. One exception is LinkedIn. They did a dark UX pattern called “friends spam” — that’s pretty much where they ask you for your name or your email, and they said that they’re going to do something with it, but they just spam all your friends in your contact list without your knowledge. They were sued for $13 million in 2015 for that.

Another example of a dark UX pattern on Trump’s website is how Trump might be taking advantage of people who are visually impaired. Can you talk more about that?

There are disabilities out there that prevent people from interacting with websites the way that most of us do. Whether they’re blind or they have issues with color contrast or they’re colorblind, they don’t see things the way they’re intended to. So imagine a button would blend into the background, and it wouldn’t make sense at that point [to someone who was visually impaired]. They will often use screen readers, or they will change the website into all text so that they read it like a book. There have been some other TikTok videos of people that are 100% blind going through with a screen reader; there was a popular one about the Starbucks app where she was going through and choosing her drink.

Usually these screen readers go very fast, and it’s how they navigate the site. And so, when I went through Trump’s re-election campaign website with a screen reader, it was confusing.

I will say in my video I did use a screen reader technique that is not normal, because usually you use a keyboard — you don’t use a mouse to hover over things. However, when I was hovering over different states they were not showing the information that was being shown on the screen. So there were things specifically left out, like that things were checked, or what the total was that you were donating. They were broken up into different individual words, so it was like “$100,” “plus,” and then “$50”; it wasn’t “$150.” So that could be considered deceitful — the checkboxes [for money] being checked, without ever telling that person that they are checked, is also deceitful. It just read like you were reading a book, not like you were [being] given options.

And then the other thing that I thought was interesting, in that sort of usability study, was that a donation button was right above the total. So, if you were going through and you’d had your eyes closed, you would click that donation button before even hearing the total, which was not a great practice either.

As you explained, Trump’s website also has a pop-up that you can’t click out of on the landing page, and you’re forced to go straight to the donation page. There’s a clear lack of choice for the user to browse around. What do you make of that? Is this a common practice?

It’s not common for websites raising money. It is common to have pop-ups and gray out the background, but not to get the user trapped. There usually needs to be a clear indicator that you can get out of that area, whether it’s a cancel or it’s an “X” in the top corner, there has to be some sort of indication that that user can get out. On Trump’s website, and on the example that I was giving you could click out by clicking the gray area.

However, when I user-test things, I test as if I’m my grandmother. If you were to click around somewhere and try to interact with something, it would go away. And I think that’s how they kind of get away with it. But without an “X” or a clear indication [as to how to close that window], then it’s a dark UX pattern, because you are not making it clear to the user that you can leave.

Can you share a little bit about how psychology plays a role in UX and dark UX?

Psychology is huge in our profession. There are about three elements that we really focus on in UX design: research, data, and psychology. Because we are constantly working with people — we’re making systems for people — psychology is one of the key things that we focus on. We look into psychology a lot when we’re doing user testing, when we’re wondering why people aren’t hitting the button that we thought would be super clear when we designed it.

And what do we know about Trump’s website and the psychology behind the design? You call Trump’s website “psychology overload.”

Red [colors], it elevates your heart rate, and it brings attention to it. . . . and if you put black in the background it also gives this very dark perception, and then the red pops out at you. It’s just screaming at you. And that not only elevates your heart rate, but it grabs your attention. From there you’re already kind of stressed. And that’s something that we learn from psychology, so we take that into effect.

Red is also used a lot in restaurants like McDonald’s and fast food, because it also makes people hungry, whereas gyms will use the color blue because it makes people have more energy. And it’s really complicated science, but on Trump’s website, there’s a lot of psychology verbiage. There’s the countdown clock that really puts you into a state that makes you feel uncomfortable. Or capitalizing “you” and “now” on Trump’s website.

What’s the difference between bad design and dark UX?

So bad design and dark UX can be deciphered by intent. If they are doing something intentional, that is considered dark. If you’re doing something on accident, it’s considered bad, and that’s strictly by definition.

Obviously you can’t speak for the design firm who designed Trump’s re-election website, but as a professional UX designer, do you believe that perhaps these designers knew very well what they were doing, psychologically, to manipulate visitors? Or is it possible that it could just be bad UX design?

Yeah, I think it’s a little bit of both, and a third party idea on top of that. I’m currently making a new dark UX video on who to blame.

In my experience, I have found that the blame can be placed on three parties: either the UX designers themselves, the business segment, or whoever is managing the UX team or the marketing team. And the marketing team, I say that because they are focused on revenue and trying to get as many ad spots into places and email sign-ups and all of that.

I put a little bit of blame on the UX team because they probably understand that this is not right. And there is an ethics code that we do have to follow because again we are on the side of the users. We are trying to help people. It is not our job to do bad things. But if the business side is telling us you have to do this thing or you’re going to get fired, they’re going to do that thing and they’re going to know it’s dark UX. There are people that know that these are dark UX patterns, but they don’t care, and they just want the ROI on what they are doing.

GOP senator’s ad on reopening Texas schools uses video of “class” in Estonia, where COVID is scarce

Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican up for re-election this year, posted an ad over the weekend touting his dedication to safely reopening schools in the Lone Star state, which appears to use stock footage of a classroom halfway around the world in Estonia.

The 30-second spot, called “Cares,” is meant to foreground the lengths which Cornyn has gone to in order to re-open schools safely.

It opens with “Becky,” a blonde Austinite wearing a Longhorn-red blouse, who tells viewers, “I’d like my kids to learn sitting in the classroom with their friends — the sooner the better.”

“But only after it’s a safe place to be,” she adds, as the scene then cuts to a cool, blue Estonian classroom setting, where a young teacher lectures students while walking an aisle between desks.

“John Cornyn gets it,” she continues. “He got money right to the local school districts so they could provide a healthy environment. “

Cornyn, wearing a Texas flag mask, takes over. “We need to do everything we can to ensure that our schools are safe,” he says. “Then we can get our kids back in the classroom.”

The classroom footage uses stock content from Estonian company Gorodenkoff Video Productions, which sometimes films in its own studios on sets it designs and builds. The company’s website reads:

Gorodenkoff Video Productions is a team of Stock Content Creators united in one studio. Our company is based in Estonia, small European country that’s renowned for its love for technology and all things digital, so are we. We gathered a team of like-minded professionals; people with inexhaustible imagination, and desire to create new stories, situations, and narratives that can be used by our dear customers all over the world.

Sometimes we think that the real world is not enough so we build our own sets, so we can shoot familiar surroundings but look at them from a different, more interesting angle.

Estonia has as about one-third as many COVID-19 cases in total as there were new cases in Texas only yesterday, according to data compiled by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Adjusted for population, Estonia has about 14% the total COVID-19 death rate as Texas.

In a July 9 TV interview, Cornyn, who has recently been called out for not speaking to the press, falsely said it was unclear whether children could catch and transmit COVID-19, as well as that no one under 20 years old had died of the disease.

“The good news is when you look at the numbers, no one under the age of 20 has died of the coronavirus,” Cornyn said. “We still don’t know whether children can get it and transmit it to others.”

That day, Texas reported more than 550 COVID-19 infections in children 9 and younger, according to a Houston Chronicle fact-check.

At the time, PolitiFact rated Cornyn’s claims “false,” citing national and state data. A 17-year-old girl in Lancaster died in April of complications related to the coronavirus, per the Dallas Morning News, and Corpus Christi-area councilman Ben Molina reported officials had logged “a COVID-19 related death of a 6-week-old infant” the day after Cornyn’s statement.

PolitiFact also pointed out that in Texas, “about 7% of the 24,459 coronavirus cases with a completed investigation have been people under 19 — 2.3% have been people under 9 and 4.8% between 10 and 19.” At the time of the interview, the CDC reported that 29 people under the age of 14, and 142 people between the ages of 15 and 24, had died nationwide after contracting the disease.

Cornyn — who finds himself in an unexpectedly tight race against newcomer M.J. Hegar, as Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s polls rise in the Republican stronghold — has repeatedly pushed to reopen schools, citing social and economic side effects. In an Aug. 4 interview, the senator said limiting schools to distance learning would place “an extraordinary burden on low-income families.”

The three-term incumbent supported a recent Senate bill, which provided $70 billion to educational institutions but withholds two-thirds of those funds if those schools do not incorporate in-person instruction — something which schools in many parts of the country have decided is unsafe for now.

The script suggests that Cornyn — who once said he blamed China for COVID-19 “because (of) the culture where people eat bats, and snakes, and dogs and things like that” — has shifted his thinking to acknowledge that more work is needed before schools are safe enough to reopen for in-person learning.

In May, Cornyn supported Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to lift economic restrictions, saying that “we can’t stay hunkered down in our homes forever . . . I think by doing this gradually with the proper safeguards is the right thing to do.”

Cases and deaths in the state surged after the move. Epidemiologists at the University of Texas project that the state will see more than 13,300 deaths by Sept. 1.

Cornyn’s office did not reply when asked about the new ad or possible policy shifts.

“White men want their power”: Billy Porter unleashes his passion for politics and doesn’t hold back

If you thought an interview with Billy Porter, the Emmy-, Grammy- and Tony Award-winning Broadway and TV actor and singer, would be all fun and fabulous because of the role he plays on FX’s bold drama “Pose,” you’d be mistaken. And, he’ll tell you so. Despite his gleaming smile, it should come as no surprise that Billy Porter is not the joking sort, at least not when he feels our country is in dire straits, an opinion many share.

The passionate star, also an outspoken activist for social justice and equal rights, joined me on “Salon Talks” for a sobering conversation about the current state of politics and race relations in America. “I don’t have any filter anymore,” Porter told me. Speaking from a home he’s renting in the country, Porter has spent the quarantine spring and summer practicing self-care, spending time with his husband, being an advocate, and speaking his mind on important issues, as he always has.

For those who have been under a rock, “Pose,” which was in the process of shooting its third season when COVID-19 shutdowns stopped production, is a drama spotlighting the legends, icons and ferocious house mothers of New York’s underground LGBTQ ball culture. Porter, who made history last year as the first openly gay Black man to win an Emmy Award as the lead actor in a drama series, is nominated again this year.

Watch the “Salon Talks” episode with Billy Porter here or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear Porter talk about how he has poured all of the parts of himself into his role as Pray Tell. “It is everything that I have ever dreamed of being able to present as an artist in this world,” he said.

Plus, don’t miss Porter’s willingness to have a little fun after at the end of our chat. He beautifully, and with no warm up, sang “My Funny Valentine” — a beloved Richard Rodgers song he performed on his collaborative tribute album “The Soul of Richard Rodgers.”

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

I wish we could actually be in person together, but this is the new normal, right?

I’ve gotten used to it. I do have to say that being able to be in one place, doing all of the things that I have been doing for the last few years, has really been life-altering in just understanding what self-care looks like, understanding what boundaries and balance looks like. I’m going to be different coming out of this because the industry can sometimes pull you in many different directions and there’s nothing left for yourself. With as terrible as it’s been, I’ve learned a lot about what I need as a human being to not get burned out.

Can you share what kind of new things you’ve been doing?

Well, first of all, having so much time to hang out with my husband. We’re two and a half years into a marriage, and it was like gangbusters for me. So to literally just have time and space to hang out with the love of my life has been so intimacy-building. The trees and the birds, we have been renting out on Long Island since March because of the pandemic. I am also diabetic, so I am high risk.

I’ve never lived in a house. I’ve never had space. I never knew that that was part of the healing. I grew up in Pittsburgh. I didn’t grow up around country and stuff like that, so I didn’t know how healing it could be to simply be surrounded by nature for real. So, that’s been lovely to discover. Lots of walks, lots of bike rides, lots of yoga and breathing, and all that therapy that I have been trying to find time to do, work on old traumas and stuff. I’ve been using this time to really take care of myself and my family.

How important. Yeah, it’s a little weird when you move to a house when you spend your life in a city. I grew up in the East Village when it was not the gentrified East Village when I was a kid. You were up in an apartment building, a couple of windows, and then you moved to a house, which I did here in Jersey. You feel exposed. I don’t know about you, but then you forget that you’re walking around in your drawers.

Ain’t no house clothes. There are clothes, but there’s lots of shrubs so can’t nobody see in. I walk around naked all the time. It’s fun.

I always ask my guests if they are wearing pants.

Today I am wearing pants.

I’m honored then.

Today I’m wearing shorts. Sometimes I’m in my swimsuit because I’m coming back and forth from the pool, praise the Lord. I am so blessed to have these things in my life at this time when a lot of people are not doing so well. I am really grateful.

Let’s talk a little bit about some of the settings and the issues that we learn about in “Pose.” I personally learned a tremendous amount about some of the divisiveness in the gay and transgender community in New York in the 1980s that I was unaware of, and some of the history of ball culture. I will of courses defer to you in taking us through a brief history of ball culture in New York and what a support system they were for the LGBTQ community, which I understand actually started in New York’s Harlem many, many years and decades before the setting of “Pose.”

The ball culture is chosen family. The ball culture is a space that was created essentially by transgender women for the most part to create spaces that were safe for the LGBTQ community. Very often, we are put out, ostracized, rejected by the people who are supposed to be the ones that love us unconditionally, and chosen family becomes the only family. This takes the form, has taken the form in the ball culture, of houses.

The balls have sort of replaced the church. It’s our church. Church is community. Church is a place historically that’s been a safe space, a community space for particularly African Americans and people of color. That is the space that kicks us out the most. That is the space that dismisses us and rejects us the most. In the spirit and in the core of that rejection, we find a space to love and live anyway. That is through the core of this chosen family and this microcosm of this family that “Pose” depicts.

My late mother was a wise woman, and in fact, a woman of color. She grew up in the south Bronx and she always told me, “You’re born into one family, but you don’t get to choose them, but you can create a family and a village from those that you choose on your journey.” I have always tried to listen to that, although I was lucky enough to come from a family who was very loving. Just shifting a little bit to you as a musical talent, the show soundtrack’s is on point.

Yes!

I heard some Kate Bush in the first scene in the car.

Yes!

I started crying because that’s the pre-remix. I have the remix for when I teach spinning. These are some of those iconic songs.

Soundtrack of our lives. That’s what it really is. I think that’s one of the greatest parts of “Pose” is that we really lean into that. Alexis Martin Woodall, who’s the music supervisor as well as many other things in the Ryan Murphy sphere, she does music and it’s chosen very specifically. Sometimes with a wink.

Oh, I got the winks. Well, kudos to her because I’m somebody who loves music and used to DJ, so all those things. Every time there was a hook, I was like, wait what? That was so excellent. It reminds me of pre-Giuliani time with the peep shows in Time Square. It was real and had so much energy, and so much has changed. I don’t know how much time you spent as a young person coming from Pennsylvania to New York, but I miss that in New York. Do you?

Here’s the deal. Yes and no. Yeah, it was real. Yes, it was gritty. Yes, it was New York City of a time. But it was also highly dysfunctional and highly dangerous. Being a Black man who grew up in the ghetto, I know how to navigate those spaces, but when you’re in a big city, I also understand the need and the want to transform it into something that is not dangerous and that is better. I understand the desire for that, so I go back and forth. It’s like, yeah it’s cleaned up. I don’t have a problem with that. Do I miss the old New York? Yeah, but it was not . . .

It was not nice. No, no.

It was not nice. So it’s like, so what am I actually longing for? I want to feel like I’m in the gutter again? I don’t know. It’s a difficult conversation because it’s so much more than just cleaning it up. It’s the cleaning up without the caring for the community that I have a problem with. That is the problem. The problem is how you clean it up, how you take care of the people who are there, who have nothing else. What are we doing to give back to these communities and uplift these communities who are the populace of these neighborhoods and these targets of clean-up? It’s a very interesting conversion.

You don’t have to worry about that now because 45 has made sure that we’re going to be in the gutter. So we’ll be right back to what all of you who missed old New York, you’re going to get it. In about 10 years, we’re all going to get it. We’re all going to see it.

It’s already destroyed. I’m looking around New York City, and Broadway is closed. Broadway is closed! Broadway wasn’t closed when it was dangerous, it wasn’t closed. The show must go on was always the thing. The show is not going on. The show is closed. The lifeblood of the city is cut off. It’s a billion-dollar industry that comes into this, more than all of the sports teams combined. Forget football, forget baseball, forget basketball. Ain’t none of y’all s**t compared to what the theater has always brought in. I don’t know what to tell y’all, but we’re going to see it. It’s not going to be cute.

It’s very sad on so many levels and especially as a performer, I’m sure it has such relevance for you and the community that has supported and uplifted you for so many years.

Yeah, there’s nothing. You look around, all of my friends are unemployed with nothing coming, with a government that doesn’t care. I hope people understand that they don’t care, and this is on purpose. I still look at these numbers and there’s still 45-46% of people in this country who support this mothef**ker. I’m sorry. I don’t have any filter anymore.

That’s all right.

It’s like, okay, if that’s what y’all want, I don’t know what to do. I’ve done everything that I can for my whole life. Fifty years of my life as a Black, gay man. My humanity has been up for legislation the whole f***ing time, the whole time. Now we’re supposed to go back and fight for the s**t that we spent the last 300 years winning because white men are scared, because white men want their power, and they’ll do nothing, they’ll stop at nothing to keep it, including destroying the entire world in the process. It’s not just America. It’s the whole f***ing world.

He’s been enabled by the white men who could have stopped him and chose not to. That’s why I’m glad about Kamala [Harris]. It’s like a rollercoaster. Sometimes I’m fine and sometimes I just literally have to lay down and go to sleep.

Yeah, you’ve got to shut it down because it’s too upsetting otherwise. But I can’t wait for the VP debate.

Oh, I can’t wait. She flummoxed Jeff Sessions. Remember that? “You’re talking too fast. I can’t . . . you’re making me nervous.” This is your job, boo.

He couldn’t believe that, not only was it a woman who was questioning him, it was a Black woman who was questioning him. That’s what confused him. That’s what threw him off was the fact that the world has moved on from whatever you think you are. Whatever you think this whiteness is and all that y’all think, it’s over. It’s actually over. It is over. That is what this response is about. That is what the “stop at nothing, burn the whole thing down” is about.

We’re seeing it, and now we as Black people don’t have to say it no more. Because y’all see it now. We’ve been screaming it for hundreds of years, and it’s like, “Oh slavery is over,” “All lives matter.” Okay, well now y’all see it, so now we can make the real decision, America. Are we better than this? Are we? We’ll see.

We will see. I hope America is right.

I hope so. I hope that we’re better, but I have questions.

Oh, and you should. Me too. Well listen, so I’m hearing so much of this fire and passion for real issues, which does of course not surprise me. So it begs the question, in the end of the first season of “Pose,” we really see your character, Pray Tell, shift in his acceptance of the growing problem from a sociopolitical standpoint, from a cultural and community standpoint of AIDS in America as perceived as a gay disease, and how Latino and Black men were dying in record numbers of this disease, and that it was quite intentional not to help them.

Yeah.

Your character makes a transition with the same fire you were just speaking with about real issues in America now. It’s just that it was more pigeonholed then specific to AIDS. Were you part of the discussion with the writers in “Pose” to giving your character that transformation, or was that more organic?

I wasn’t specifically in conversation with them, but the brilliance of our team, our creative team, starting with Steven Canals, is our creator, Ryan Murphy our godfather, Janet Mock and the whole team. They observe. They sit with us outside of shooting and filming and they observe what we talk about. They observe how we behave. They observe it and then they put it into the show. I’ve always been an activist. I’ve always been this.

Ryan and I are very close in age, so we lived through the AIDS crisis. We have had conversations about that time, about this time, about the similarities. I think he’s drawn to my passion, and they were able to infuse Pray Tell with that. While it wasn’t an official conversation, I know that they pull from who you really are.

Another issue of the time within the community that “Pose” focuses on is the division between transgender and gay people, certainly as portrayed in late 1980s New York. The fantastic MJ Rodriguez, who plays Blanca in the show, and is a transgender woman, is sometimes put down — put down for not being pretty enough and not authentic enough as a woman. Is there more unity now in the gay and transgender community in your observation than there was then when you first started?

I think that we’re on the road to having more awareness, and thereby when you know better, you do better, as Maya Angelou so effortlessly taught us. I know, as a Black gay man who came out in 1985, we went straight to the front lines to fight for our lives during the AIDS crisis. I have said in the past, and continue to say, that the T in LGBTQ was largely absent for a long time from my knowledge. I just didn’t know because that just weren’t the circles that I was in. This show in particular has really created an awareness surrounding the transgender community that is inspiring to me. It’s educational to me and it’s transformative for me in terms of . . . I believe thereby the world, in terms of, oh now we see it, now we see it . . . Once you really see it, then the thing must be addressed.

I think “Pose” has been really instrumental in helping the world see that representation matters. Our pop culture is inherently political inside of how artists communicate their authenticity to the world. When artists are fully their artistic selves, we have the power to transform people from the inside out, change the molecular structure from the inside out. That’s why I’m so proud to be an artist. That’s why I’m so proud to be on this show that I really label as activism that has been my journey and my goal. I made that choice a long time ago. My art is my activism.

Building on that, since “Pose” is a realistic fiction and period piece, how do you prepare for your role as Pray Tell? I certainly understand a lot of it is based on your own experience in the community. How do you pick up the role season after season, especially after a long break like we’re seeing now?

Well, my preparation is having lived it. I remember when I was in drama school at Carnegie Mellon back in the ’80s. Sometimes we would do work, and the acting teachers were like, “Yeah, that’s great. It’s really great work for where you are in your life. It will deepen as you live more.” When you’re 18 years old and you hear that, it sounds patronizing. That question of preparation is something that happens, something that’s more intense when you’re diving into a character that you don’t know or understand.

I know Pray Tell. I have lived Pray Tell. I am Pray Tell. My whole life was my preparation. So that’s what I get to draw from, and it’s not easy because it was trauma after trauma, after trauma after trauma in my life. But I lived. I lived to tell the tale. I lived so that I could be the vessel and the voice for the ones that we lost. That’s why. I know that for a fact, and that’s what “Pose” brings to me. So it’s not hard. What’s difficult is to relive it. That’s the difficult part is to have to relive it and leave it at the studio and not bring it home. That’s the hardest part for me.

The scenes in which you lose your partner in the show to AIDS and knowing that you must have, like many of the characters and like Pray Tell in the show, have lost many of your own friends or family members.

I remember shooting the Candy episode when she passes away in Season 2. There was a girl killed, a transgender Black girl killed the day that we were shooting that. Their lives are in danger every time they walk out of the house simply because of who they are. This has to stop. This is not okay. It is not okay. It’s not normal. It’s not okay. On “Pose” we have the space to speak to that, which is really lovely.

Coming into an interview like this, you’re a charismatic guy. You are certainly funny, but I feel blessed that we have been so serious here so far.

I’m a very serious person. I’ve always been a very serious person. For some reason, fabulous is not synonymous with being serious. I’ve had to take the reins of that and I have had to work through that in my life, in my career the entire time. I have worked through the perception that being fabulous or being pigeonholed into being some sort of clown, or also living in this space or in the room where we have people in positions of power who enjoy the narrative of, “Shut up and sing.” They enjoy that, “Shut up and dribble.” They enjoy that, “Shut up. You’re a prostitute.” They enjoy this idea and they push this narrative that, because they, whoever they are, don’t deem who you are or what you do as respectable, that your opinion doesn’t matter and that you’re a dummy. I am none of those things.

It’s surprising to a lot of people, and that’s where Pray Tell came from. Pray Tell didn’t exist before I walked into the room. Pray Tell was developed because I walked into the room and brought myself into the room. That’s why Pray Tell is who Pray Tell is. It is everything that I have ever dreamed of being able to present as an artist in this world. The culmination of my life’s work is in the DNA of Pray Tell, and it makes my heart sing, because you do laugh. You to have the time and the space at the balls where Pray Tell is fabulous. You have the fabulous and then you see the dimensions.

We are all three-dimensional human beings who deserve to be respected as such. It’s not about tolerance, it’s not about acceptance. I don’t need you to worry about my salvation. Keep your Bible to yourself. The only thing and the only conversation that I’m interested in having in this moment in 2020 is y’all’s respect for my humanity. I am a human being just as much as I respect everybody else. We can agree to disagree. You don’t have to like me. I don’t have to like you. But what we must do is respect each other’s humanity, period.

Until that happens, ain’t nothing going to be right. None of us are free until we’re all free. This is what I talk about with the Black community specifically and our relationship with the LGBTQ community. Black people and gay people and that conversation is still one that they don’t want to have. I still get s**t for calling Black people out for being homophobic and transphobic. It’s hypocritical. I don’t care what you think about my lifestyle. I don’t care. It’s hypocritical to march for Black Lives Matter and then act as if the trans community and the LGBTQ community aren’t a part of that. I’m a Black man first. We’re Black people first.

In the industry, I would like to think that, where we are now, actors could be perceived as just actors. Are you a good actor? Are you a bad actor? You are, as I understand it, the first openly gay Black man to be nominated win in any leading acting category at the Prime Time Emmy’s, and I feel compelled to ask if you think things have changed to encourage actors to come out and be themselves. Perhaps led by some inspiration by you and others.

I think things are changing. I am a part of the generation that fought for said change. I reached the pinnacle. I have reached the pinnacle to fight for visibility and get it. Now, it’s up to me and everybody else creatively in the same space to make sure that we bring the generations forward, that it doesn’t stop with me, that the archetype of the Black gay leading man doesn’t begin and end with me. It starts with me. Now y’all get to see a whole bunch of them coming behind me.

You should just be a leading man, not a Black leading man, not a Black gay leading man, right? That’s from my perspective.

Ultimately, that’s the goal, but that’s not what we are yet.

Right.

So we work and we fight, and we keep moving forward until that is.

Switching gears a little, I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on your gifted singing.

Aww.

So much of your career and your passion has been singing. I don’t know if everyone knows that about and the way that they know you as an actor. When you’re not yelling “the category is” in “Pose,” you sing and you sing beautifully in the show at several intervals. Would you sing us out with a bit of “Bewitched” or “My Funny Valentine” from your 2017 Richard Rodgers’ tribute album?

Oh, so you really do know.

Because I grew up with all those songs. My dad loved old jazz, and I’m a fan of your voice, and also I just love the lyrics are amazing.

Yeah, let me just sing a little verse of “My Funny Valentine to you.” [singing] You’re my funny valentine. Sweet comic valentine. You make me smile with my heart. Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you’re my favorite work of art. Is your figure less than Greek? Is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart? Don’t change a hair for me. Not if you care for me. Stay, little valentine, stay. Each day is Valentine’s Day.

I started that too high, but I made it!

Fox News host repeatedly fact-checks Kellyanne Conway’s alternative Democratic Convention facts

Fox News host Sandra Smith on Wednesday repeatedly called out the false claims Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway made following night two of the Democratic National Convention.

Conway praised President Donald Trump’s widely-criticized coronavirus response during the interview — and urged the public to follow his guidelines for school reopenings.

“I think it is so important that the president is providing information to the public — not confrontation with the press — in these brief briefings so he can also take the tough questions from the press,” she added. “One last thing: I didn’t hear Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, John Kerry — anybody — talk about this virus in a meaningful solutions-based way for months while we were here around the clock. If they’ve got a good idea, Sandra, they shouldn’t be sitting on it until Nov. 4”

“He’s got a plan,” Smith responded. “Joe Biden’s got a plan.”

“Oh, yeah?” Conway asked. “Where is it?”

“It’s on his campaign website,” Smith confirmed. “It’s there. You can read through it. They ask for a lot more funding, a lot more testing.”

“Yeah, sure,” Conway scoffed. “I’ve read through it. It’s not much of a plan.”

You can see the exasperation on Fox News anchor Sandra Smith's face after she's sat through Kellyanne's lies long enough.

Smith: "He's got a plan. Joe Biden's got a plan."

Kellyanne: "Oh yeah, where is it?"

Smith: "It's on his campaign website."

Kellyanne: "Yeah, sure." pic.twitter.com/9yFnf4TwQG

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 19, 2020

During another point in the interview, Smith fact-checked Conway’s claim about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who formally seconded Sen. Bernie Sanders’, I-Vt., nomination at the Democratic National Convention but supports Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign.

“I thought the most remarkable part of the evening was AOC making her one-minute count by endorsing . . . actually nominating Bernie Sanders for president,” Conway said, adding that: “AOC, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren — they’ve got a lot of power over the platform, and they will have a ton of power over a Biden presidency.”

“To be clear, that’s been reported as a lack of endorsement on her part for Joe Biden. She has asked for clarification from other news outlets this morning — not us — saying that that wasn’t the case,” Smith pushed back. “She didn’t mention Joe Biden’s name last night, but she does support Joe Biden. She put that out there this morning.”

You waited several hours to correct your obvious and blatantly misleading tweet.

It sparked an enormous amount of hatred and vitriol, & now the misinfo you created is circulating on other networks.

All to generate hate-clicks from a pre-recorded, routine procedural motion. https://t.co/crDlEymgMD

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 19, 2020

Ocasio-Cortez pushed back on claims that she “endorsed” Sanders at the convention after an erroneous tweet from NBC News.

“Convention rules require roll call & nominations for every candidate that passes the delegate threshold. I was asked to 2nd the nom for Sen. Sanders for roll call,” she tweeted “I extend my deepest congratulations to @JoeBiden – let’s go win in November.”

If you were confused, no worries!

Convention rules require roll call & nominations for every candidate that passes the delegate threshold.

I was asked to 2nd the nom for Sen. Sanders for roll call.

I extend my deepest congratulations to @JoeBiden – let’s go win in November. 🇺🇸 https://t.co/uI92P3UfLn

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 19, 2020

NBC News later deleted its tweet about her speech.

“This tweet should have included more detail on the nominating process. We have deleted the tweet to prevent its further spread, but it can be seen here for the record,” the network wrote. “Ocasio-Cortez was asked by the DNC to second Sanders’ nomination. The nomination is a procedural requirement of the convention. Ocasio-Cortez has previously endorsed Biden, & her speech was similar in length to other nominating speeches.”

Editor's note and clarification (2/2):

Ocasio-Cortez was asked by the DNC to second Sanders' nomination. The nomination is a procedural requirement of the convention.

Ocasio-Cortez has previously endorsed Biden, & her speech was similar in length to other nominating speeches.

— NBC News (@NBCNews) August 19, 2020

But Ocasio-Cortez slammed the network for letting the tweet go viral for hours before removing it.

“You waited several hours to correct your obvious and blatantly misleading tweet,” she wrote. “It sparked an enormous amount of hatred and vitriol, & now the misinfo you created is circulating on other networks. All to generate hate-clicks from a pre-recorded, routine procedural motion.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Trump’s supplemental $300-a-week subsidy for the unemployed will only last three weeks

Though the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has approved funding which will allow seven states to provide a $300 weekly supplement to existing unemployment benefits — a policy implemented by President Donald Trump through an executive order earlier this month — a recent memo from the same agency implies that states are only guaranteed three weeks of federal funding for the important economy-rescuing subsidy.

“FEMA will use data from the Department of Labor, as well as state data received on applications to project the overall funding distributions,” FEMA explained in a recent memo. “Approved grant applicants will receive an initial obligation of three weeks of needed funding. Additional disbursements will be made on a weekly basis in order to ensure that funding remains available for the states who apply for the grant assistance.”

The CARES Act, which provided $600 per week of federal unemployment benefits, expired in July, and Trump’s executive order was intended as a partial extension of the relief provided in that bill. Trump’s new executive order was reported as creating a $400-a-week supplement, but the federal government is responsible for only $300 of that supplemental payment. The remaining $100 per week is covered by states themselves. FEMA is overseeing the disbursement of the supplemental funds.

This means that states which receive federal funding for the new unemployment subsidy are only guaranteed that aid for three weeks. After that, the federal government will decide each week whether to continue providing assistance to states that have already received benefits.

So far the federal government has approved funding for seven states including Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, Arizona, Iowa, Missouri and Utah. An eighth state, South Dakota, refused to apply for assistance.

During an appearance on CNBC, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin stated, “I would expect that most of the states qualify… so I hope we see the majority of the states” ultimately receive assistance. Last month Mnuchin said that Trump’s coronavirus relief plan would be predicated on the assumption that it should provide “approximately 70 percent wage replacement.”

There are longstanding concerns that this premise, which seems to have played a role in deciding how much Trump would provide in weekly unemployment benefits through his executive orders earlier this month, underestimates how badly millions of Americans are suffering as a result of the pandemic-induced recession.

Dr. Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan, told Salon by email earlier this month that the government’s spending and stimulus bills are “a far cry from what is needed to stave off hardship and poverty. . . . We currently have widespread unemployment, it is the reason why additional stimulus is so necessary.”

Dr. Austan Goolsbee, who served on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told Salon by email in July that “cutting payments to individuals at a moment when the virus is resurgent and the unemployment rate is in double digits will threaten the recovery.”

Economists have also anticipated that the unemployment benefits may not last long enough. As American University macroeconomist Dr. Gabriel Mathy told Salon earlier this month, “the $400 unemployment extension is less than the $600 before [from the CARES Act], and it requires a 25% ($100) match from states so it may not even happen given how tight state budgets are.”

QAnon functions “like a video game” to “hook” converts — and some include former Navy SEALs: reports

More than likely, a full-fledged supporter of the QAnon conspiracy cult will be sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2021: Marjorie Taylor Greene, on Aug. 11, won a GOP primary in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District — and given how overwhelmingly Republican that district is, she is going into the general election with a major advantage. QAnon is showing no signs of slowing down, and according to The Daily Beast’s Kelly Weill, the cult is attracting some well-trained military veterans.

QAnon believes that President Donald Trump was sent to the White House to combat an international pedophile ring that has infiltrated the United States’ federal government and practices Satanism. Cult members also believe that an anonymous figure named “Q” is giving them updates on Trump’s battle against the satanic pedophiles.

FBI agents have warned that QAnon followers are quite capable of violence. And Weill, in an article published in the Beast on Aug. 18, warns that some well-trained military veterans are embracing the cult.

“In particular, some ex-(U.S. Navy) SEALs are promoting belief in QAnon or related theories that falsely accuse many of President Donald Trump’s opponents of being involved in satanic pedophilia and cannibalism,” Weill reports. And according to Marc-André Argentino of the Global Network on Extremism & Technology, the potential for QAnon-related violence should not be ignored.

Argentino told The Beast, “The violence we’ve seen has been by people without acumen and physical training. Where it could get scary is with people who do have training.”

Weill cites Louis Garrick Fernbaugh, a former Navy SEAL, as an example of someone who has been promoting far-right conspiracy theories — and he is obsessed with billionaire George Soros and antifa. Another former SEAL Weill discusses is Stephen Ralston: on Instagram, according to Weill, Ralston “frequently uses QAnon hashtags, promotes Q videos, and posts about his interest in killing pedophiles. Although opposition to pedophilia is an overwhelmingly popular sentiment across political parties, QAnon turns the concern into a bogus call to arms against Trump’s foes.”

According to Argentino, “QAnon is rooted in this war narrative, in the sense that they’re in an information war against the ‘Deep State.’ Information wars are typically combined with a more physical element . . . (Veterans) may want to be called upon to free the children from the pedophiles.”

One of the things that QAnon is doing to attract converts, Kyle Daly reports in Axios, is “working like a video game.”

“Game designer Adrian Hon has argued that QAnon is a lot like an alternate-reality game, in which players follow a trail of clues online and off, to solve mysteries or just discover more clues to chase,” Daly explains. “But QAnon also echoes other game genres, mashing them together to become an all-encompassing, highly addictive experience. Intentionally or not, it has rolled up gameplay components from the past several decades of game design.”

QAnon, according to Daly, also has elements of an “adventure game.”

“Adventure games are built around puzzle solving, with players using exploration and trial and error to discover secrets and backstory and progress through the game,” Daly notes. “Many classics of the genre have the player unravel a sinister conspiracy. At the center of QAnon are cryptic messages posted online by ‘Q,’ who claims to be a Trump Administration official with high-level clearance. QAnon adherents pore over these posts, often written in phony spy jargon, to divine clues and secret messages and make fresh links in the grand conspiracy aligned against Trump.”

Kayleigh McEnany refuses to say whether Trump will accept election results: “He’ll see what happens”

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday refused to say that President Donald Trump will accept the election results if he loses in November.

At a White House briefing, McEnany was asked about Trump’s recent remarks claiming that the only way he can lose the election is if it is “rigged.”

“Does the president believe there is any circumstance under which he could lose the election fairly?” one reporter asked the press secretary.

“The president believes that he’s done a great job for the American people and he believes that will show in November,” McEnany insisted. “He believes that voter fraud is real, in line with what we see all across the country, particularly with mail-in ballots, which are prone to fraud.”

“Is the president saying that if he doesn’t win this election that he will not accept the results?” a second reporter wondered.

“The president has always said he’ll see what happens,” McEnany admitted, “and make a determination in the aftermath. It’s the same thing he said last November. He wants a free election, a fair election and he wants confidence in the results of the election, particularly when you have states like Nevada doing mass mail-out voting to their voting rolls.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Republican-led Senate Intel Committee made criminal referrals of Don Jr. and Jared Kushner: report

Leaders of the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee last year made criminal referrals of Donald Trump Jr., presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and several other associates of President Donald Trump over suspicions that they might have lied to the panel, according to multiple reports.

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., who chaired the committee before Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., took over earlier this year, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the top Democrat on the committee, notified federal prosecutors last year that accounts from Don Jr. and Kushner were contradicted by former Trump deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates’ testimony to former special counsel Robert Mueller, according to The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Burr and Warner also told prosecutors that they believed former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, former campaign co-chair Sam Clovis and Trump associate Erik Prince — the founder of Blackwater and brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — lied to congressional investigators, which if proven to be true, would be a felony. (Mueller’s report previously concluded that Prince had lied to prosecutors about his dealings with Russians during the 2016 campaign.)

The news arrived the same week as the committee released its final report on its three-year bipartisan investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The report, which went further than Mueller’s, concluded that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked with a “Russian intelligence officer,” who may be linked to the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s rival campaign. The report also detailed longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone’s contacts with WikiLeaks, as well as efforts by the president and his aides to impede the investigation.

Though Don Jr. and others might have obstructed the investigation, the report said the panel did not pursue possible remedies because of “time and resource considerations.”

Some of the committee’s criminal referrals were sent to Mueller, according to the reports, while others were sent to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington. Burr said in 2018 that the committee had referred cases to Mueller. It is unclear whether the Department of Justice took any action in response to the referrals.

“We have made referrals from our committee to the special counsel for prosecution,” he said at the time. “In a lot of those cases, those might be tied to lying to us.”

The committee raised concerns about conflicting accounts of a meeting Don Jr. and Kushner participated in with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the campaign. Don Jr. initially claimed the meeting dealt with adoptions, but emails revealed that he had agreed to the meeting after he was told that the lawyer possessed “official documents and information,” which would “incriminate” Clinton and be “very useful” to his father.

Gates testified that Don Jr. announced at a campaign meeting that he had a lead on “negative information about the Clinton Foundation.” Kushner denied having prior knowledge of the meeting’s topic.

“We are fully confident in the testimony and information provided by Donald J. Trump, Jr.,” Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for the president’s son, told The LA Times.

The referrals of Bannon, Clovis and Prince were sent to Mueller three months after his report was released.

“As you are aware, the committee is conducting an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election,” the corresponding letter said, according to The LA Times. “As part of that inquiry, and as a result of witness interviews and document production, we now have reason to believe that the following individuals may have committed a criminal act.”

According to the letter, the committee believed that Prince had lied about his dealings with a Russian oligarch and hedge fund manager Rick Gerson. Investigators suspected that Prince might have been trying to arrange a secret backchannel between the incoming Trump administration and Russia, and he and Bannon gave conflicted accounts of the talks, according to the report.

The committee also asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Clovis had lied about his discussions with Republican donor Peter Smith, who led a secret effort to find Clinton’s missing emails.

Representatives for all three men denied they were aware of the referrals.

After the committee released its report on Tuesday, Rubio issued a statement insisting that “the committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government” but did find “irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”

Democrats on the committee said the report explicitly showed collusion between Trump’s campaign chief and a longtime associate, whom the panel identified as a Russian spy.

“The committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to the G.R.U.’s hack-and-leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” the Democrats on the committee wrote in the report. “This is what collusion looks like.”

No justice, no feast: How hunger strikers are keeping the protest over Breonna Taylor’s death alive

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—It’s mid-August when group of four protesters sit at a long dining table in front of rows of glistening triangles of watermelon stacked on paper plates. As they bring the fruit to their lips, cameras click. This is the first time two of them have eaten in 25 days.

Ari Maybe, Tabin Ibershoff, Vincent Gonzalez and Amira Bryant are part of a Louisville-based group called Hunger Strikers for Breonna Taylor. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was fatally shot in her home by Louisville Metro Police Department officers Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove on March 13.

On July 20, the four protesters announced they would abstain from caloric intake until all three officers involved in the shooting were fired from the department (Hankison was terminated in June and is appealing) and stripped of their pensions. That hasn’t happened, but that first bite of watermelon symbolizes a lot: the end of one hunger strike, the beginning of several more and the necessity for both in a city that continues to call for justice.

* * *

When I first visited the Hunger Strikers for Breonna Taylor last month, the protesters were only five days into their strike. They were staying in an Airbnb about a mile from Churchill Downs, the famed race track where the annual Kentucky Derby is held. It’s a small, muted green house with two bedrooms and a communal living room, which quickly became a tangle of wires and computer cords as the group started navigating several live streams and frequent Zoom calls.

The kitchen was, as expected, pretty bare, save a selection of herbal teas and coffees, some vitamin packets and a sinkful of reusable water bottles in need of refilling. Bryant, 27, and Ibsershoff, 29, speak with me on the sun-soaked back porch

“There are four of us physically fasting; that is our core group,” Bryant said. “Then we have a good amount of support. There are those who are handling public things like media, the live streaming, finances . . . ”

“Medical team,” Ibershoff adds. “And then researchers who are helping us keep up with things, helping keep our message on point and understanding the power structures in Louisville.”

From the beginning, their message was simple: “No justice, no feast,” a play off of the familiar anti-racist protest slogan “No justice, no peace.”

Hunger strikes have a long legacy as a form of nonviolent protest, with documented strikes as early as 750 BC. Irish Republicans, Cuban dissidents, suffragettes, ICE detainees and Guantánamo prisoners like Khalid Qasim and Ahmed Rabbini all engaged in hunger strikes as a way to advocate for some kind of legal, social or political change.

As Falguni A. Sheth, a professor of philosophy and political theory, wrote in her paper “Unruliness without Rioting: Hunger Strikes in Contemporary Politics,” the hunger strike can be seen as a “technology of political resistance” wielded by vulnerable populations against sovereign power.

“Through the use of hunger strikes — especially in grievous cases where subjects have no other recourse, perhaps because the technology of a human rights framework is denied them — ‘life,’ understood as a resource, can become the currency of communication or negotiation for those who are in ajct political positions such as long-term prisoners or those who are subjected to solitary confinement,” Sheth wrote.

She continued: “It is possible, then, for prisoners to deploy hunger strikes in order to battle sovereign power — even if not always successfully.”

In the case of the Hunger Strikers for Breonna, they were protesting a political system that diminishes the personhood of Black individuals, especially Black women.

“It’s completely worth it to put my body on the line if that could hold attention and result in accountability, which will maybe result in greater change and less of a chance of this happening in the future,” Ibershoff said. “This did not begin the day Breonna Taylor was shot.”

But, Bryant said, a hunger strike is less visible than other forms of protest, which is why the group decided to livestream their efforts.

“This is a movement that is not very naturally ‘in your face,'” she said. “It’s not like a march, it’s pretty much the opposite of screaming outside someone’s apartment building, and in order to keep us relevant, it’s the best way for people to keep up with what we are doing.”

It was also a way for the group to stay accountable to their stated mission of abstaining from calories, especially as the hunger strike wore on. At the time, both Ibershoff and Bryant said they were feeling fine; they had some headaches and tiredness, but otherwise said their bodies weren’t really feeling the effects of fasting yet.

* * *

Over the next 20 days, the members of the Hunger Strike house would pass in and out of the frame of the live stream. They would also provide regular updates via Facebook Live. Initially, their check-ins were buoyant; they still weren’t feeling the effects of the calorie deprivation yet.

They occasionally had visitors, like from their medical team, comprised of several healthcare professionals who also volunteered at Jefferson Square Park, the meeting place for the protesters who have been conducting marches in Louisville streets since late May. The protesters also organized live Zoom calls with area activists, like ACLU Kentucky policy strategist Keturah Herron and state Rep. Attica Scott.

By about the 10th day, there were signs that the protesters’ energy was flagging. In their videos, they were moving more slowly and seemed fatigued. But their message stayed consistent; they wouldn’t eat until there was movement on the Breonna Taylor case. Soon, the team adopted the hashtag #NoJusticeNoFeast.

Throughout their strike, the protesters also consistently reached out to Louisville mayor Greg Fischer asking him to meet or communicate with them about the goal of their movement.

In an Aug. 9 Facebook post, the protesters wrote: “Our bodies are weak, but we know our community is stronger than ever. We are asking you once again to lift us up. Please call Greg Fischer’s office and ask that he address the individuals on hunger strike in his ‘compassionate city,’ Ask him just how much blood he’s willing to allow be spilled in his name.”

He did not respond to their — or Salon’s — requests for comment on the strike.

Eventually, Gonzalez ended his strike after 15 days, while Bryant ended hers soon after in recognition of Black August, a movement that honors Black individuals who have been killed fighting injustice throughout history. Ibershoff and Maybe remained.

By the protesters’ 25th nightly update, it was evident that the hunger strike had taken a serious physical toll. Ibershoff and Maybe huddle on the couch, wrapped in blankets despite the 90-degree temperatures, while speaking to the camera.

“I had trouble sleeping last night because it seems like my circulation has kind of changed and it seemed like my extremities would just go numb in turn,” “Ibershoff said. “My hands, my foot, my . . . I just woke up stumbling and lightheaded and sick to my stomach, but it’s been a slow descent to get here.”

Maybe responds that she had vomited the day before and had lost 19 pounds.

“I was hypotensive this morning, and last night my heart rate was 130,” Maybe said. “That’s not good when your blood pressure is low, but your heart rate is high, so . . .”

Both reported a strange, prickly feeling in their muscles.

“Pins and needles,” Maybe said. “Pins and needles.”

* * *

The next morning, the Hunger Strikers for Breonna Taylor announced via Facebook that they would be breaking their fast. “It is with full hearts and our heads held high that we end our hunger strike at 25 days,” they wrote.

But another group quickly picked up the mantle. Louisville’s SURJ — an abbreviation for “Showing Up for Racial Justice” — announced they were encouraging their members to engage in a “rolling fast.”

“Anyone interested in sharing their witness is invited to sign up to fast for a day or more and to announce their commitment,” the group said in a release.

SURJ also asked their members to contact Mayor Greg Fischer’s office with a version of this message: “I am supporting the Hunger Strikers for Breonna by being a part of a continuing rolling fast for Breonna. Your office never responded to their 25 days of fasting. We amplify their demand that mayor Fischer use his full power to fire Brett Hankison, Myles Cosgrove and Johnathon Mattingly.”

Meanwhile, the members of Hunger Strikers for Breonna are planning to resume protesting — this time in the streets. Last week, the Louisville Metro Police Department announced it would no longer allow protests in public streets; instead, protesters must adhere to pedestrian and traffic laws and restrict their demonstrations to sidewalks.

According to the Courier Journal, those who do not comply could be cited or arrested.

“We realize this movement needs us,” Maybe said during the group’s last press conference. “LMPD recently attempting to rob the people of the right to protest motivated us to sacrifice this action and strengthen ourselves for the fight.”

Heading into GOP convention, Trump goes all-in on ugly white grievance politics

Not that this should come as a surprise, but with the Republican National Convention less than a week away, Donald Trump is sending every possible signal that whatever its official themes may be the GOP gathering’s true subject will be white grievance politics. Unlike in the past, where concerns about not appearing overtly racist have forced Republicans to resort to dog whistles and coded language, Trump seems to believe to that his best bet is to serve the racism straight up, thereby vanquishing any remaining doubts about whether our president is actually a white supremacist.

Late Tuesday night, Trump praised Laura Loomer, who won the Republican primary in Florida’s 21st congressional district, which is Trump’s official place of residence. To call Loomer a “far right” or “fringe” candidate is understating the case. She’s an obsessive bigot with a long history of unvarnished hatred of Muslims — or anyone she just suspects may be a Muslim — calling them “savages” and labeling herself a #ProudIslamophobe. Her rhetoric is openly genocidal, such as when she declared that “we should never let another Muslim into the civilized world” and urged taxi and ride-share companies not to hire Muslim drivers. (It may be reassuring to know that she almost certainly won’t win in November. The district is solidly Democratic, and Republicans didn’t even bother to run a candidate against incumbent Rep. Lois Frankel in 2018.)

Loomer has been banned by both Uber and Lyft for this overt bigotry, and then was banned from Twitter after tweeting about Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat who is one of two Muslim women in the House: “Ilhan is pro Sharia Ilhan is pro-FGM Under Sharia, homosexuals are oppressed & killed. Women are abused & forced to wear the hijab.”

In actual reality, Omar is pro-choice and supports LGBTQ rights, and has condemned “religious fundamentalists” who wish “to impose their beliefs on an entire society.” But of course Loomer doesn’t actually care about religious freedom. She feigns concern for it in order to accuse Omar and all other Muslims of being anti-American.

Trump’s celebration of Loomer’s win comes not long after his enthusiastic Twitter embrace of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a Republican House primary in Georgia despite being a QAnon supporter who has wallowed in wildly racist rhetoric and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. It’s more likely, of course, that Greene won because of those things.

Trump lets most Republican primary winners go without mention on his Twitter feed, so singling these two out for praise sends an important message: Not only does the president warmly welcome overtly racist wackos into the Republican Party, he believes that overtly racist wackos are both the core and the future of the Republican Party.

These tweets are building on a summer of Trump digging his heels in on the idea that going all-in on open racism is the key to winning the election in November. He has repeatedly insisted that the way to win over “Suburban Housewives” is to scare them with threats that people of color will move into their neighborhood and ruin the “suburban lifestyle dream.” (Trump seems to have no idea that most women who live in suburbs work outside of the home, let alone that not all of them are married or heterosexual.)

And of course Trump decided to go big with racist attacks on Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who was recently chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate, claiming that he had “heard” that she “doesn’t meet the requirements” to be vice president.

A number of outlets dutifully ran pieces debunking the elaborate legal “theories” (scare quotes because they’re more like what-if word games than theories) which posit that Harris — who was born in Oakland, California — is somehow not a “natural born Citizen” as required by the Constitution. (Of course she is, and that legal question has been settled since at least 1898, however much right-wing legal beagles wish to gnaw at it.)

But in a sense, that misses the point. By applying the same “birther” conspiracy theory to Harris that Trump used for years against Barack Obama, Trump is making clear that this has nothing to do with legitimate confusion over who is and isn’t a U.S. citizen. It’s just a backdoor method for Trump and his supporters to deny that Black people or the children of immigrants are real Americans, and to imply that the only legitimate contenders for the White House are white people.

Now the Republican convention appears to be committed to foregrounding the theme that the “real” victims of racism and bigotry are not Black people killed or abused by police or Latinos targeted for harassment by ICE or Asian-Americans subjected to hate crimes after Trump and his allies began to use racist terms for the coronavirus, but rather white people who are unfairly victimized by being called racist.

Consider that among the RNC speakers we find Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who became the target of widespread online mockery after they reacted to Black Lives Matter protesters walking down the public street in front of their house by pulling out guns and threatening the protesters. Since then, the McCloskeys have been heavily featured on the right-wing victim-complex media circuit, portraying themselves as the victims of censorious liberals even though they were blatantly trying to shut down free speech with threats of lethal violence.

The McCloskeys will be at the convention alongside Nicholas Sandmann, a high school student who has a somewhat better claim to the idea that he was unfairly portrayed in the media after he and his fellow MAGA-hat-clad anti-choice activists got into a conflict last year on the streets of Washington with some progressive activists who were demanding rights for Native Americans. Video of the event showed that neither the MAGA kids nor the Native American protesters started the conflict — that credit goes to a group of Black Hebrew Israelites, an anti-Semitic fringe group loathed across the political spectrum — and the right was able to leverage the ambiguity of the situation to spin a simplistic tale about innocent young conservatives being falsely accused of racism.

But no matter how ambiguous Sandmann’s situation may have been, the McCloskey situation was not: These were a couple of nutty white people who harassed and threatened peaceful protesters for the “crime” of walking down a public street. The conflation of the two cases shows that Trump isn’t actually interested in the guilt or innocence of anyone accused of racist actions. This is about stoking white grievance about the fact that racism is even treated as a social scourge in the first place.

Will this work? It’s tough to say, but there are reasons to hope it won’t. Trump himself is just going with straightforward racism on his Twitter feed and in his public statements, but the RNC is playing a slightly subtler game, seeking to prey on white people’s fears about being called “racist” while not quite claiming that racism is actually OK.

Most Americans already believe that Trump is a racist, and aren’t happy about it. There’s really no evidence for Trump’s theory that there’s a “silent majority” of Americans who feel oppressed by the anti-racist elite, which seems rooted in beliefs of past decades. On some level, even Trump seems to grasp that, which is why his real strategy — as Democratic insider Simon Rosenberg recently told Salon’s Chauncey DeVega — is not to win over enough voters to win a fair election so much as to rig the results by destroying the Postal Service and delaying mail-in ballots so they won’t count. But even if he loses, Trump’s strategy of empowering and enabling overt racism will leave a dark stain on this country that may take many years to scrub out.

“Squidbillies” fires actor Stuart Baker after posts about Dolly Parton, Black Lives Matter

Stuart D. Baker has been fired from the Adult Swim animated series “Squidbillies” after posting comments about Dolly Parton and the Black Lives Matter movement on social media.

Baker, who performs under the name Unknown Hinson, posted on his Facebook profile late last week about Dolly Parton voicing her support for the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so, he referred to Parton as a “freak titted, old Southern bimbo” and a “slut.” In another post, he wrote “HAVE FUN [sic] forsaking your own race, culture, and heritage.”

Read more from Variety: “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj” canceled at Netflix

Series creators Jim Fortier and Dave Willis announced Monday via the show’s official Twitter handle that Baker was no longer a part of the show.

“We’re aware of the extremely offensive and derogatory social media posts made late last week by Stuart D. Baker,” they wrote. “The views he expressed do not reflect our own personal values or the values of the show that we and many others have worked hard to produce over the past 15 years. For those reasons, production of Squidbillies will continue without Mr. Baker, effective immediately.”

Read more from Variety: “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” ousts three top producers

Baker has voiced the main character Early Cuyler on “Squidbillies” since the show first started in 2005. Over 100 episodes of the series have been produced to date, with the show having been renewed for a thirteenth season last year. It is one of the longest-running shows on Adult Swim alongside “Robot Chicken,” both of which started in 2005.

The show centers on a family of squids living in the mountains of Georgia. It is unclear at this time if the character Early will be written off the show or if they will bring in a new voice actor to play him.

pic.twitter.com/PNWhcw72CE

— Squidbillies (@Squidbillies) August 16, 2020

Anderson Cooper calls MyPillow CEO “a snake oil salesman” as he peddles coronavirus miracle “cure”

Mike Lindell, CEO of My Pillow and a vigorous supporter of President Donald Trump, is touting oleandrin — which comes from the poisonous oleander plant — as a miracle cure for COVID-19 and has recommended that Trump do the same. Appearing on CNN this week, Lindell stridently defended his recommendation — inspiring host Anderson Cooper to describe him as a “snake oil salesman.”

Lindell, during his heated exchange with the CNN host, declared, “I’m just telling you, this is the answer. Wouldn’t you want to save lives? This is what my heart is.”

While Lindell was ranting, Cooper commented: “You really are like a snake oil salesman. I mean, you could be in the old west standing on a box telling people to drink the amazing elixir.”

Lindell shouted, “I do what Jesus has me do. I give the glory to God, and I want to help people. That’s my passion. I’m not money-driven . . . Ask yourself: Why would I ruin my reputation if I didn’t believe in this product?” — to which Anderson responded, “You don’t have a great reputation.”

The MyPillow CEO declared that his critics “destroyed me when I went all in for this great president.” Lindell claimed that the Better Business Bureau lowered his score because of his support for Trump, inspiring a frustrated Cooper to say, “That’s just sad” and note that the BBB doesn’t evaluate businesspeople based on their political views.

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

>> @AndersonCooper to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell: "You really are like a snake oil salesman." pic.twitter.com/ENeSUfgc0J

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 18, 2020

Louisiana Republican wants to force mail-in voters to submit positive COVID-19 test

According to the Daily Advertiser, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin is proposing a rollback of voter eligibility to cast an absentee ballot ahead of the November election.

“Ardoin’s new plan will only allow a COVID-19 exemption for someone who tests positive for the infection during and after early voting but before election day. That will fall under the existing ‘hospitalization’ excuse for an absentee ballot,” reported Greg Hilburn. “In the previous plan voters were able to get a COVID-19 absentee ballot if they were in self quarantine, had symptoms, were under an isolation order, were under higher risk with underlying conditions or were caretakers for others.”

The new rules will be dependent on someone being able to get a test and positive results within the time frame. It will also leave out vulnerable populations who are at high risk for complications from the virus but do not actually have it.

“Though the changes will meet opposition from Democrats, Republicans who hold near super majorities in both the Louisiana House and Senate have insisted they take place for the Nov. 3 election and Dec. 5 runoff election,” said the report. It will also need approval from Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, who has urged the more expansive exemptions to remain.

You can read more here.

George Conway: “No serious criminal lawyer” would buy Justice Department’s defense of Michael Flynn

If a Democrat had done what former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn admitted to doing — lying to the FBI about his communications with a Russian ambassador — Republican allies of President Donald Trump would have demanded a severe punishment. Instead, the Trump DOJ under the direction of Attorney General Bill Barr filed a motion asking that the case be dismissed. Conservative attorney George Conway, one of Trump’s most vehement critics on the right, and trial lawyer Lawrence S. Robbins discuss Flynn’s case in a scathing op-ed published in the Washington Post on August 18 — and they stress that “no serious criminal lawyer” would make the types of arguments that Trump supporters have been using in Flynn’s defense.

“Flynn won before an appeals court panel,” Conway and Robbins note. “But when the full court of appeals heard arguments on Flynn’s petition, the judges couldn’t have seemed more bewildered at the Trump administration’s position. The government argued that the district judge couldn’t inquire into the government’s reasons for seeking dismissal even if he’d seen the prosecutor take a bribe, in open court, in exchange for dismissing the case. The Trump administration has been saying things like that a lot lately — trying to stretch the law in ways that undermine its remaining credibility.”

Trump and his allies, according to Conway and Robbins, have consistently shown a “disrespect for regularity.”

“Lawyers have a phrase for the government’s saying ‘trust us’; it’s called the ‘presumption of regularity,'” the attorneys explain. “The presumption of regularity means that courts should presume that government officials acted through a ‘regular’ process: that it carefully vetted its policy and scrupulously examined relevant legal precedents. But as its name suggests, the presumption of regularity rests on the premise that the government is functioning in a regular way. And the Trump administration is anything but regular.”

That total disregard for “regularity,” according to Conway and Robbins, has been especially obvious in the Flynn case.

“No serious criminal lawyer could have written the government’s motion to dismiss the prosecution,” Conway and Robbins argue. “The government relied on a single, 64-year-old case on ‘materiality’ that both the Supreme Court and the court of appeals have repudiated. The government asserted that FBI agents had no legitimate reason to interview Flynn, despite his obvious susceptibility to Russian blackmail. Given the weakness of the government’s arguments, it’s hard not to conclude that it sought to spare Flynn to satisfy the whims of Trump.”

Postal union officials doubt Louis DeJoy will reverse changes that led to mail slowdown: report

Faced with nationwide outrage and lawsuits from nearly two dozen states, President Donald Trump’s new postmaster general Louis DeJoy announced on Tuesday that he would be suspending several controversial new policy changes at the Postal Service that critics suspect are a deliberate effort to slow down the mail ahead of elections that will rely heavily on mail-in ballots.

But according to CNN, postal union leaders do not take DeJoy at his word that everything is fixed.

“Miriam Bell, general president of a local chapter of the American Postal Workers Union in North Carolina, said seven sorting machines at a Charlotte postal facility have been either separated out, dismantled or entirely removed in recent weeks,” reported Curt Devine and Paul Murphy. “Asked if she expects them to return, Bell said, ‘We truthfully do not know,’ adding, ‘it is highly unlikely they will be put back in place.'”

Furthermore, continued the report, “Roscoe Woods, president of APWU Local 480-481, said a dozen machines at a distribution center in Pontiac, Michigan, had been removed from service in recent weeks, and despite DeJoy’s announcement, he said he has heard from postal management that the machines are not supposed to be put back to work.”

USPS mail sorting machines cost millions of dollars. The agency reportedly had planned to take 15 percent of the sorting machines out of service, although some documents suggest this was planned even before DeJoy’s appointment.

Republicans send North Carolina voters mail-in ballot requests with President Trump’s face on them

A number of voters in North Carolina have recently received brochures encouraging them to fill out mail-in ballot requests featuring President Donald Trump’s face.

“ARE YOU GOING TO LET THE DEMOCRATS SILENCE YOU?” the mailer, sent by North Carolina Trump Victory, the joint field operation of Trump’s re-election team and the Republican National Committee, asks in large block font. “ACT NOW TO STAND WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP.”

The brochure goes on to request “immediate action” to “ensure your right to securely vote Absentee.” Next to a picture of a smiling Trump, the mailer says: “Stand with President Trump. Request your absentee ballot today.”

The president and a number of his Republican allies have routinely pushed the falsehood that voting by mail invites rampant fraud, even though he has voted by mail a number of times. CNN’s Ana Cabrera reported last Wednesday that the Palm Beach County elections board had delivered Trump and first lady Melania Trump mail-in ballots to Mar-a-Lago. Trump vowed in an on-air interview the next day that he would block crucial U.S. Postal Service (USPS) funding, citing concerns about universal mail-in voting.

“They need that money in order to have the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions of ballots,” he told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Thursday. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting. Because they’re not equipped.”

House Democrats have pushed for $25 billion in aid to the beleaguered agency and $3.5 billion in supplemental election funding as part of the next phase of coronavirus relief, but Senate Republicans have pushed back against the emergency funds.

On April 24, Trump called for the USPS to raise its prices. This summer, USPS officials reportedly floated a proposal to nearly triple the price of first-class mail — the class voters already pay to mail their ballots. In a statement provided to Salon, a USPS spokesperson called the notion “frivolous.”

“There are currently no pending changes to the rates and classes of mail impacting ballots,” the spokesperson said.

News broke last week that the USPS had sent warnings to 46 states warning of possible voter disenfranchisement.

The coronavirus pandemic has boosted the popularity of voting by mail, along with turnout, but Trump has publicly sowed doubt about the practice by claiming it is rife with fraud and abuse, claims which are not substantiated.

Chandler Carranza, of Gaston County, North Carolina, told CNN that was the reason he laughed when he received the campaign mailer last Thursday.

“The irony is very thick and definitely not lost on me,” Carranza said. “Trump has been saying mail-in ballots will bring fraud to the election, but absentee ballots are legit. Which is it? It can’t be both ways. I laughed because if the campaign actually took information from other times they have reached out to me, they’d know I won’t vote for Trump despite being a registered Republican.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who previously voted by mail 11 times in Florida, argued in May that Trump and she were both voting “absentee” — and technically not “by mail.”

At the time, McEnany told The New York Times in a statement that “absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason. It means you’re absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person.”

However, The Times pointed out that Florida does not distinguish absentee voting from mail-in voting. Any registered voter can cast a mail-in ballot without providing a reason. Around that time, an extensive voter fraud investigation in Florida ended with zero prosecutions.

The USPS delivered the Trumps’ ballots to Mar-a-Lago, where the president declared residency last November in what may be a violation of federal election law.

Still, the president has spent months pushing baseless claims about mail-in ballots being ideal vehicles for election fraud. Over the last 20 years, about 143 voting by mail fraud cases — out of 1,200 cases overall — ended with criminal convictions, according to an MIT analysis of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s database of election fraud in the U.S. That averages out to about seven or eight cases a year nationally, or about 0.00006% of the total number of votes cast.

The president, however, makes one exception: his newly declared Republican-led home state, whose systems he claimed in an early August tweet were somehow uniquely “safe and secure.”

Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True. Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail! #MAGA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 4, 2020

Florida is represented by a governor and two U.S. senators from Trump’s Republican Party.

North Carolina’s GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, whose 2020 re-election bid appears increasingly underwater, has along with his affiliated committees taken a combined $48,500 from Postmaster General DeJoy and his wife, who are fellow state residents.

Tillis, one of the chief early architects behind North Carolina’s controversial voter ID law — dubbed the “monster” law by critics — played a central role in what a federal judge called the state’s “sordid history” of voter suppression when she struck down a North Carolina voter ID law late last year.

After news of the USPS warnings of potential voter disenfranchisement broke last weekend, the Tillis campaign told the Raleigh News & Observer that “Senator Tillis is confident in North Carolina’s strong absentee ballot program, is encouraging North Carolinians to vote absentee and believes we will have a fair election.”

Senate Intelligence report reveals a vast network of — yes! — Trump-Russia collusion

Since the moment President Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey and admitted to NBC’s Lester Holt that it was “because of Russia,” he has called the investigations a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Attorney General Bill Barr declared Trump to be exonerated in all matters related to Russian interference in the 2016 election and the ensuing cover-up, and all Senate Republicans except one voted in his impeachment trial to acquit him of charges that he similarly enlisted the help of the Ukraine government in the 2020 election.

We know Trump abused his power in the Ukraine matter: That is a matter of public record, which he himself released. We also have Robert Mueller’s voluminous report, which proved that the Trump campaign welcomed, if not directly conspired with, Russian government interference in the 2016 election and that the president subsequently obstructed the investigation.

All these probes have been attacked by Republicans as unjustified partisan attacks on Trump. However, this week, the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., released the final volume of its investigation and it’s impossible to make that charge. The report was signed by all members of the committee. Indeed, this is the only time during Trump’s first term that Senate Republicans, aside from Mitt Romney of Utah, have done their duty to protect our democracy.

Essentially, the report shows the Trump campaign was crawling with Russians, many more than is commonly realized, and the evidence strongly indicates that any intelligence or law enforcement officials who didn’t look into this bizarre circumstance would have been derelict in their duty.

The Mueller report stated explicitly that as a law enforcement investigation Mueller’s team was not concerned with the non-legal concept of “collusion” and were instead bound by the criminal code’s definition of “conspiracy,” which they were unable to prove, largely due to a lack of cooperation by those involved in the probe. The Senate committee had no such restrictions and did investigate collusion — and found it.

Committee Republicans, led by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, cherry-picked certain conclusions to deny that, but the details they provided in this 1,000-page report prove them to be either lying or delusional.

The report finds that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was basically acting as a Russian agent. The campaign chairman. This is the man Trump publicly heaped glowing praise upon two years ago, patting him on the back for refusing to cooperate with the special counsel:

I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. “Justice” took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to “break” – make up stories in order to get a “deal.” Such respect for a brave man!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018

The New York Times describes the Manafort-Russia relationship that Trump was so delighted Manafort refused to talk about:

[T]he report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

In 2016, “on numerous occasions,” Trump’s campaign chairman “sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with Kilimnik, who the investigation found was very likely tied to the main Russian interference operation centered at the GRU, successor organization to the KGB. There is also information that raises “the possibility of Manafort’s potential connection to the hack-and-leak operations,” which would be big news if it’s true.

The report calls Donald Trump’s campaign chairman a “grave counter-intelligence threat.” How that doesn’t fit everyone’s definition of collusion is hard to fathom.

Kilimnik was also found to have “almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election” which, coincidentally I’m sure, Trump pushed in his famous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an act of betrayal for which he was impeached. Yet somehow, Trump and his henchmen continue to say that the president was absolutely untainted by any of this.

It is also made clear in the report that Trump’s top dirty trickster, Roger Stone, directed some of the WikiLeaks dumps and that Trump almost certainly knew about it, according to numerous witnesses. So two people close to Trump, Manafort and Stone, appear to have been intimately involved in the most outrageous of the Russian interference operations, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the timed leaks of those emails on behalf of Donald Trump. Unless we are to believe that the man who claims to have “aced” a memory test right about the same time forgot that he repeatedly spoke with Stone about the WikiLeaks operations, this means that the president lied to Mueller in his written answers.

Just as Mueller found that the White House obstructed his investigation, the committee found that it obstructed their investigation as well:

As this experience illustrated, White House intervention significantly hampered and prolonged the Committee’s investigative effort. Most importantly, some witnesses were directed by the White House not to tum over potentially privileged information…

And a whole lot of people lied. As the Los Angeles Times has reported, the committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and Sam Clovis to federal prosecutors in 2019, for misleading Congress. There’s no word on what might have come of those referrals.

The report looks at the possibility of Kompromat and details some juicy testimony about trips to Moscow, an affair with a beauty queen and evenings at fetish clubs, among other things. They couldn’t produce evidence of blackmail but kept it in the report for the purposes of showing that even misinformation could be deployed to gain influence.

The picture that emerges is of a presidential campaign, and an administration, so completely out of its depth that it “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.” In other words, Trump and his cronies were willing dupes and the Russian government took full advantage of it. In fact, it still is.

This is not a particularly startling revelation but it does track nicely with another national security story this week, the commentary by former DHS national security official Miles Taylor who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post headlined “At Homeland Security, I saw firsthand how dangerous Trump is for America.” He offers a scathing assessment of the president as an ignorant, reckless, obsessive, self-centered fool who cannot be trusted with a second term.

Taylor says that if Trump wins re-election it will be “shock and awe” and there will be no guardrails left at all.

In case you’re wondering what that might mean, just last month Vladimir Putin sneaked in a change to the Russian constitution that allows him to stay in power until 2036. He and Trump have been chatting frequently on the phone of late. We can only guess what they’re talking about.

The first words out of Trump's mouth in Yuma, Arizona tease that he wants to shred the Constitution and serve at least 3 terms: "Considering we caught President Obama and sleepy Joe Biden spying on our campaign — treason — we'll probably be entitled to another four more years." pic.twitter.com/PP9nKAvSh6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 18, 2020