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Donald Trump didn’t invent vote suppression — he’s just taking it to the next level

One of the more tedious tasks in writing about politics is that every single election year it’s necessary to discuss the latest cheating schemes cooked up by the Republican Party to suppress the votes of minorities, challenge the legality of perfectly legal votes and otherwise make all elections they do not win look suspect in the eyes of American voters. Needless to say, this year is worse than usual because Donald Trump makes everything worse than usual.

But it’s important not to ascribe the latest attempts to manipulate the election results solely to Trump and his minions. Even though he is more crude and obvious about what he’s doing, he is actually following in a longstanding tradition of the modern GOP, traceable all the way back to the 1960s.

Obviously there has been cheating in elections since the founding of the republic. Once upon a time, it was institutionalized by the big-city bosses, who were almost entirely Democrats. For a century, African Americans were denied the vote by Democrats in the white supremacist Jim Crow South with the deployment of a whole arsenal of restrictions, including onerous poll taxes, literacy tests and residency requirements.

As everyone is aware, Southern party identification began to switch to the GOP in the 1960s with the civil rights movement and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, at which point the newly converted Republicans eagerly stepped up to the task of disenfranchising Black people and other ethnic minorities. They’ve been very creative about it ever since.

For instance, they’ve done “vote caging” ever since the ’60s, as described in this voluminous report about the practice by Project Vote:

Voter caging is a practice of sending non-forwardable direct mail to registered voters and using the returned mail to compile lists of voters, called “caging lists,” for the purpose of challenging their eligibility to vote. In recent years, other techniques, such as database matching, have been used to compile challenger lists.

They have used more direct forms of voter intimidation such as “Operation Eagle Eye” and the modern knockoff “True the Vote” and have created large, well-funded legal organizations, most notably the Republican National Lawyers Association and the Voting Integrity Project, devoted to challenging laws throughout the country that make voting accessible. This was the institutional legal apparatus that immediately launched into overdrive during the disputed presidential election in Florida in 2000.

For more than 50 years the Republican Party has been working feverishly to ensure that Democratic voters are denied the right to vote, especially African Americans and other minorities. It hasn’t just been Southern white supremacists in deep-red states doing this. Such campaigns have been sanctioned and endorsed by the highest reaches of the Republican establishment. The corruption that lies at the heart of this project has been demonstrated by Republican Departments of Justice and the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, with essentially no repercussions.

So, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that because Donald Trump is crude and ignorant his current attempt to sabotage the November election by defunding the post office and delegitimizing the vote-by-mail system is an anomaly. It may not have the subtlety of vote caging or the elegant sophistry of insisting that counting all the votes will disenfranchise voters, but it’s very much in line with the Republicans’ ongoing program of vote suppression.

Trump is taking it to a new level, however, by attempting to suppress Republican votes right along with Democrats. For years the GOP has been pushing voting by mail to help their senior and rural constituencies who have tended to prefer it. R Roughly one-fourth of Trump’s votes in 2016 were delivered by mail.

The attacks on the U.S. Postal Service are also going to hurt his own voters just as much as Democrats. Republicans like to get their mail on time too. And many of them are just as nervous about standing in line for hours on Election Day in the middle of a deadly pandemic as Democrats are — although there’s some evidence that they will do it because their president wants them to.

Officials in Trump’s claimed home state of Florida apparently convinced him that he could lose the state this way because he amended his blanket condemnation of voting by mail by claiming that Florida alone knows how to do it correctly. He and the first lady have already requested their mail-in ballots, which raises the question of why he can’t go to the voting booth on Election Day as he expects everyone else to do.) But Trump still insists the rest of the country is incapable of running elections as efficiently as Florida (!) and cannot be trusted to handle a large number of mail-in ballots.

His obsession with the Postal Service originally stemmed from his erroneous belief that the main function of government is to make a profit (except for the military, of course, which is to be smothered in cash beyond any possible necessity). Trump is also jealous of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and thinks he can destroy him by destroying the post office. Now he’s attacking the agency in order to suppress the vote by making people believe their ballots won’t make it in time and won’t be counted for months, if ever.

All of this is downright self-defeating if he wants to get out his vote, but that’s clearly not what he’s trying to achieve. Recall that in 2016 he also claimed the election was “rigged” and during one presidential debates refused to say whether he would accept the results. He amended that shortly thereafter:

You may also recall that even when after he won his fluke Electoral College victor, Trump convened a “voter fraud” commission in an effort to prove that he had actually won the popular vote as well. It was quietly disbanded a few months later, without issuing any kind of report.

It appears that all this nonsense is in service of a plan to contest his defeat if the vote count is delayed or if there’s any significant confusion, regardless of the vote margin. And he won’t have to go it alone. The New York Times reported last May that the Republican Party was gearing up to help him:

The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and Mr. Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.

This isn’t a Trump thing. It’s a GOP thing. And it’s been going on for a very long time. At some point, this country is going to have to come to terms with the fact that the Republican Party is fundamentally hostile to democracy and do something about it. 

Should you risk COVID-19 to get routine health screenings?

Last spring, a reminder popped up on my calendar that I was due for a couple of routine cancer screenings. But healthy me wasn’t going anywhere near a health care facility in a pandemic — and apparently, the rest of America had similar thoughts. Screening for breast, colon, and cervical cancers fell as much as 94 percent in March compared to averages from the same time period over the last three years, according to an analysis of 2.7 million health records by the health care software company Epic.

As the pandemic has worn on, though, many doctors and health care facilities are beckoning patients back, telling them it’s safe and prudent to schedule appointments, that delaying screenings can do more harm than good by causing a dramatic spike in undiagnosed and untreated cancers, and that screening exams can save your life. Entreaties like these often play to people’s sense of responsibility and fear. A recent article in USA Today quotes Therese Bevers, the medical director of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center: “People should understand that they are more likely to die from cancer that has progressed as they sit at home to prevent Covid-19 … than they are to die from Covid-19.” 

In an editorial for Science magazine, Norman Sharpless, the director of the National Cancer Institute, puts a number to the likely effect of the pandemic on breast and colorectal cancers, which together account for about one-sixth of all cancer deaths. NCI modeling projects that nearly 10,000 more Americans will die of those cancers over the next decade due to delays in screening and treatment, Sharpless noted — a 1 percent increase over the roughly one million deaths from those diseases expected during that time.

That sounds grim, but some critics are beginning to push back on the screening narrative, suggesting that patients aren’t getting the sort of nuanced information they need. Not everyone, they say, needs screening right now, and whatever the potential fallout from skipped screenings, it needs to be considered against the risks of the novel coronavirus.

H. Gilbert Welch, a senior investigator in the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a long-time critic of unnecessary tests and interventions, for example, suggested that even when taking what he called the NCI’s “back-of-the-envelope calculation” at face value, the predicted excess cancer deaths over the next 10 years still represent only a small fraction of U.S. Covid-19 deaths from the last six months. What’s more, Welch adds, the NCI analysis conflates routine screening with seeking care for actual symptoms. “Those are really, really different,” he said. A woman with a lump in her breast should be encouraged to come in for a diagnostic mammogram whatever the local Covid-19 risk, Welch noted. “But it’s a totally different kettle of fish about whether we should be inviting everybody else in to get screened and making them feel bad about it.”

That’s because while there’s no doubt treatment saves lives, the same can’t be said for some screening tests, which in some cases do more harm than good. That discomforting fact has long led to disagreements about who should be screened when and whether a screening creates more trouble than it’s worth. Covid-19 just adds another dimension to those decisions.

Welch and others who research the impact of screening also view this unprecedented pause as an opportunity to rethink blanket screening mandates in favor of what makes sense for individuals based on their medical history and preferences — not just during a global pandemic, but as a matter of standard operating procedure. After all, if the benefit of a treatment or test is not worth the risk now, said Bishal Gyawali, summarizing the argument of an editorial he and colleagues from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario published in JAMA Oncology last month, “then we need to actually seriously consider was it actually warranted even before the pandemic.”

* * *

By definition, a screening test looks for unrecognized disease or risk factors in people without symptoms. “A good screening test is one that will inform or change what we do in a way that will improve someone’s health and quality of life,” said Alex Krist, an associate professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University and chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent, volunteer panel of experts that advises the public on preventive care. By that measure, blood pressure checks are a great screening tool; by detecting and treating hypertension, which commonly causes no symptoms, you can reduce the risk of heart attack by 20 percent and stroke by 30 percent.

At the same time, “harms can come downstream from testing,” Krist added. Those harms include unnecessary tests and procedures to chase down false alarms, unnecessary treatment for benign abnormalities, and the anxiety of suddenly transforming from a healthy person into a patient.

With some screenings, especially those for certain cancers, the benefits only marginally outweigh those risks. For example, a 2018 analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association summarized the data for breast cancer: Screening 10,000 average-risk women in their 40s annually for a decade may avert three deaths, but 32 will die of breast cancer despite screening and 28 will be “over-diagnosed” and treated for slow-growing cancers that likely would never have hurt them. More than six in 10 will experience false alarms that require follow-up with more scans or biopsies.

Messaging about screening often focuses on the idea of “saving your life” while glossing over those messier uncertainties. Am I really risking my life by delaying or even skipping a mammogram this year? It’s unlikely said Welch, who was lead author of an analysis of four decade’s worth of cancer statistics published in the New England Journal of Medicine last October. Cancer death rates have dropped in the last 40 years, Welch and colleagues found, but for the most part that wasn’t due to screening.

“First and foremost, this is largely about a decline in smoking and the resulting drop in lung cancer deaths,” Welch said. We can also thank improved treatments for breast, prostate, and a few rare blood-borne cancers. Early detection has played a role in reducing colon and cervical cancer deaths, but they were already trending downward before the advent of widespread screening. For reasons not fully understood, those diseases, as well as stomach cancer, are occurring less frequently.

Overall, the incidence of cancer is on the rise, though, driven by more diagnoses of breast, prostate, thyroid, kidney, and melanoma skin cancers. Meanwhile, people die of thyroid, kidney, and melanoma skin cancers at much the same rate as in 1975. “What we are seeing is not a true increase in cancer occurrence,” said Welch. “It’s overdiagnosis of nonlethal cancers detected mostly through screening.”

So, what can the NCI models tell us about the impact of screening delays alone on cancer deaths? The institute shared unpublished data for the scenario where, for six months, 75 percent of people due for a breast or colon cancer screening skipped it. In that simulation, the estimated increase in cancer deaths was two-thirds lower than when treatment was also delayed. While the models are capable of computing the harms of screening — including overdiagnosis — NCI researchers told me, they opted not to factor that in.

* * *

The data presented in the Science editorial is just an interim look at a much more thorough work in progress, Sharpless told me. The pandemic has provided a possibly once-in-a-lifetime chance to examine what happens when health care as we know it grinds to a halt. “This — call it an experiment of nature, if you will — provides a real research opportunity to understand this complex topic of screening and overdiagnosis and overtreatment,” he said, “which is an area that’s been of interest to the NCI for decades.”

“This is also an opportunity to consider new technologies for screening, particularly things that can be done at home like self-sampling for cervical cancer,” said Sharpless. While still investigational, that test could be lifechanging in low- and-middle-income countries where cervical cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women. “I don’t think patients are going to want to go back. I think they really like telehealth and some of the things we’ve been able to do,” he said. “If there’s a silver lining to all of this it’s been that it forced us to be innovative.”

Maybe, but the marketing suggests that medical centers are eager to return to the pre-pandemic status quo. “The system needs patients,” said Welch. There’s a financial incentive to screening because it involves lots of people and reliably generates income from follow-up testing and procedures. Of course, major medical centers are big businesses that want patients back, he said. “That’s totally understandable. But we want to make sure that our system needs don’t trump our patient needs.”

Krist makes the case that now is the time to address oft-neglected issues related to mental and behavioral health: “The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommendations about screening and counseling on unhealthy alcohol use, on diet and exercise, on weight loss, and depression.” Given that we know the pandemic has exacerbated these issues, preventive services to help people deal with them can be more impactful than the tests people fixate on, he said. “And, actually, they’re not dependent on being seen in person to deliver.”

Like everyone I spoke with, Sharpless offers advice that is more nuanced than the marketing. Most importantly, people with symptoms or who are undergoing treatment for cancer need to be seen, he said. “For some people cancer is a way bigger threat [than Covid-19] and it should be driving their decision making.” But my routine screening mammogram? “That could probably be deferred for a while,” he said.

According to Krist, who is a family practitioner, the “right” decision is wholly dependent on the individual patient. For someone who’s at higher risk of disease and not up-to-date on screenings, it could be worthwhile to don a mask and brave the clinic. But even then, if you have a compromised immune system and the level of Covid-19 is high, you might still want to wait, he said. “Those are the type of tough decisions that patients and doctors have to make together.”

But Gyawali, who writes a column on “Common Sense in Oncology” for Medscape, argues that both now and post-pandemic, those decisions should be based on evidence, not fearmongering among patients. “My biggest disappointment is that we are putting fear in people’s mind, which is not healthy,” he said. “How much fear have we put into their hearts that they are worried about not being able to do screening at the time of a pandemic? That means that the fear is quite real and it’s quite big.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

As a strange DNC kicks off, are Bernie Sanders and the Squad being left out?

Democrats appear as united as can ever be expected, kicking off the strangest Democratic National Convention in living memory, a somber and toned-down entirely virtual affair this year. As the nation watches the coronavirus death toll slowly climb toward 200,000 and braces for the reopening of schools in some strange and tense new fashion capacity, it’s become painfully obvious that Donald Trump is a clear and present danger. Based on the apparent coalescence of the base after a contentious presidential primary season, Democratic voters understand that. And without an in-person convention, this year’s DNC won’t feature the infamous intra-party floor fights that marred 2016’s festivities.

Bernie Sanders opens the week with his keynote address on Monday evening, dubbed “We the People” night by the DNC. Sanders will then hold a virtual town hall, apart from the convention, which will feature Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., fresh off her easy primary victory, along with progressive organizers and Joe Biden’s director of progressive outreach. Sanders delegates also plan to hold a “shadow convention” outside the DNC.

Leading Sanders surrogates Rep. Ro Khanna of California and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan have already announced they plan to vote no on the DNC’s platform — which does not include either support for Medicare for All or marijuana legalization, two progressive policies that garner majority support with Democratic voters. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is the only Sanders supporter, aside from the former candidate, who gets a speaking slot this week even though about one-fourth of this year’s delegates are Sanders supporters. She only gets one minute. 

That’s it. That’s the outreach. Former Ohio governor John Kasich, a Republican, will receive a bigger platform at the Democratic convention — and that just about sums up the state of the party less than three months ahead of the election. The triumphant center claims it is extending a hand to progressives and NeverTrump Republicans but is leaning hard in onl one of those directions. 

Yes, these are serious times and the threat of a second Trump term should be all the persuasion necessary this go-round for both groups to support Biden. But Democrats are clearly not capitalizing on their nearly all-virtual convention to reach key groups it failed to reach last time. “The four-day event includes only three Latinx headliners and entirely leaves off Muslim Americans, each making up a complex, diverse group of individuals who Biden is hoping to turn out in record numbers,” progressive activists pointed out to the Daily Beast. The convention is supposed to be a unifying event for the party where Democrats from all factions come together but this year’s DNC lineup doesn’t reflect the political complexities of the moment, as Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir recently took note: 

Ever since Biden swept to victory on Super Tuesday and the subsequent primaries, Democratic primary voters in various places have delivered a different and more complicated message. Three more longtime incumbent members of Congress have been primaried out by more progressive opponents this year, including a committee chairman, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, and the scion of a Black political dynasty in St. Louis, Rep. William Lacy Clay of Missouri. 

Another committee chair, Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York, survived by an eyelash after a painfully slow six-week vote count. Two other New York progressives — City Councilman Ritchie Torres in the heavily Latino South Bronx, and former Justice Department lawyer Mondaire Jones in the largely-white northern suburbs — defeated establishment-supported Democrats for open House seats, and will become the first two openly gay Black members of Congress. Similar conflicts lie ahead: Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and grateful recipient of Big Pharma and financial industry dollars on a grand scale, faces an intriguing challenge from Alex Morse, openly gay 31-year-old mayor of the working-class city of Holyoke.

Progressive policies and politicians have seen electoral success before and after Biden’s rise. As voters in Missouri recently voted for progressive challenger Cori Bush over incumbent Rep. Lacy Clay, they also passed the expansion of Medicaid in the red state. Three members of the far-left plank known as the Squad — Omar, Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez — easily defeated primary challengers backed by big-money donors. After all the “moderate” presidential candidates quickly coalesced around Biden ahead of Super Tuesday, Sanders quickly realized the fight was over and led progressives into a unity campaign behind the apparent Democratic nominee. It’s curious that neither the DNC platform nor the speakers’ lineup go very far to acknowledge the effort. 

If there is a chance for major outreach to progressives this week, expect it on Wednesday when Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., is set to speak as Joe Biden’s running mate. Among Black Americans, 78 percent approve of her selection, according to a new Washington Post poll. Considering the national explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement against racist police violence, Harris has a historic opportunity to forcefully address the mood of the streets. Along with speeches from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton and a performance by Billie Eilish, that evening will offer a “Ladies Night” vibe that serves as a striking contrast to whatever Trump and the Republicans have to offer the following week.

Democratic, Republican parties both play favorites when allotting convention delegates to states

As the Democratic and Republican parties pick their nominees for the presidency, they’ll do so under a delegate system that rewards states for their partisan loyalty – and ignores the common principle of everyone having an equal say.

Consider these examples: Texas, home to 28.9 million people, will have 228 pledged delegates at the Democratic National Convention. New York, with two-thirds the number of people, at 19.5 million, will have more pledged delegates – 274. This inequality extends to less-populous states as well: Arizona’s 7.3 million residents will be represented by 67 pledged delegates, while Maryland’s 6 million people will have 96 pledged delegates.

It’s similar with the Republican National Convention. Ohio, with a population of 11.7 million, will have 82 delegates, while Pennsylvania – home to 12.8 million people – has just 34. Oregon’s 4.2 million people have 28 Republican delegates, one fewer than either of the Dakotas, which each has well under a million residents.

Only delegates can vote on party decisions at the conventions. This situation makes it harder for either party to attract independents, who make up about one-third of U.S. voters. If leaders in especially blue states get a disproportionately higher number of delegates than those in purple or red states, they will have more power to control which Democratic Party member is nominated, what the platform will be and what the rules will be for awarding states delegates the next time. It’s a similar story in the GOP for particularly red states, whose leaders will get more power over Republican decisions than people from swing states or states that tend to vote for the Democratic Party.

Big differences in voting power

I divided the pledged delegates assigned to each state by the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee by the states’ populations, and found some staggering disparities.

For the Democratic Party, the District of Columbia received 28.34 delegates for each million residents, while Texas had 7.86 delegates per million people. A D.C. Democrat’s voice has 3.6 times the power of a Texas Democrat, which is the widest disparity in that party.

But that’s nothing compared to the situation in the Republican Party. Wyoming received 50.1 delegates per million residents, compared to 2.66 delegates per million residents for Pennsylvania. The GOP’s widest disparity gives a Wyoming Republican a voice that is a whopping 18.9 times as powerful as a Pennsylvania Republican.

That’s far more even than the Electoral College disparity, in which Wyoming gets four times more electoral votes per person than Florida.

Why such a difference?

The parties’ rule books for delegate selection are quite extensive. The RNC book is 40 pages long, while the DNC rules go on for 165 pages.

It comes down to more than just population. Democrats have a formula for delegates that includes how the state voted in the last three presidential elections, the state’s number of Electoral College votes and when the state holds its primary.

The Republican system gives each state three delegates per congressional district, 10 at-large delegates, and three more delegate spots – to be taken by party leaders from that state. The GOP also gives states “bonus” delegates if they voted for the Republican nominee in the previous presidential election, and if they have Republican governors and U.S. senators, and if there are Republican majorities in state legislatures and U.S. House of Representatives delegations.

Both of these systems, in different ways, reward states where the party is strong, at the expense of party members in states that are more evenly divided or could be stronger.

If your state votes solidly blue or bright red, you’ll have more power over that national party. Perhaps that’s why parties are becoming more extreme; the delegate allocations mean the Democratic Party is dominated by the most liberal states, while conservative states own the Republican Party. That leaves even less of a voice for states that are ideologically moderate, hurting party outreach efforts.

Effects on the public

Of course, the political parties can argue that they are private groups who can determine their own governance however they wish. But that power is not absolute.

In the early 20th century, the Texas Democratic Party sought to exclude Blacks from voting in its primaries. A series of Supreme Court decisions over two decades culminated in a 1944 ruling declaring that state laws establishing party primaries made the Texas primary more than just a function of a private organization. Instead, those laws made the party’s primary a key component of the electoral process, and therefore the party could not exclude Blacks from participating.

Beyond being unequal, these systems hurt parties’ ability to reach moderates. When New Jersey Democrats get more delegates than Georgians, despite having a smaller population, the party is less likely to select candidates who appeal beyond the die-hard faithful, who are more likely to be found among New Jersey’s delegates. It’s the same for Republicans, where the Alaska GOP has more than 10 times the delegates, proportionally speaking, as California’s GOP.

A fairer future?

There may be improvement on the horizon: Democrats are debating their delegate system for the 2024 primary. They are considering whether to continue limiting the power of superdelegates, determining what should happen to the delegates of candidates who drop out and encouraging diversity among party leaders.

And GOP state conventions like the one this year in Texas are having a conflict over who will represent the party at the national convention and in the Electoral College. The question specifically is about whether rank-and-file party members will dominate, or whether the process will be opened up more to independents, libertarians and other nonmembers.

So long as their most loyally partisan states have such disproportionate influence over candidate choices, party platforms and even the rules for delegate allocation, neither party will be at its best for reaching swing states or independent voters.

John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College

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

The pandemic has revealed America’s zip code map of inequality

It is understandably tempting to drop all the blame for America’s catastrophic response to COVID-19 on the big desk in the Oval Office. But there’s more to the story than epic incompetence, grift and delusion at the highest levels of government. The stark divide in the level of health care from testing to treatment is divided by wealth and the legacy of systemic racism.

In the words of Ed Yong of the Atlantic: “Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID-19.” Yong could also add Hispanics to that list, along with virtually any person of limited economic means, regardless of race.

In the land of the free and the home of the brave, income and zip code determine everything. And this is not a new phenomenon. In a recent article in Le Monde Diplomatique, historian Thomas Frank quotes physician Dr. Michael A. Shadid, who was a longtime advocate for cooperative health care from the 1920s onward until his death. In his 1947 book, Doctors of Today and Tomorrow, Shadid made the case for socialized medicine on the grounds that “[p]oor people get sick quicker, stay sick longer, need medical aid most, get it least. Some are poor because they are sick. Others are sick because they are poor.”

Nothing has fundamentally changed since Shadid’s time. The United States continues to have the most expensive health care system in the world, yet a 2019 comparison of health indicators in the United States versus those of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries’ average reveals a system that persistently produces inferior outcomes relative to other nations (in spite of higher expenditures) and has done so for decades.

COVID-19 has both amplified and revealed these long-standing flaws, tragically reflected in its death count, but it is by no means a historical anomaly. Earlier pandemics reveal a similar pattern, suggesting a more widespread systemic problem: namely, that the high death counts relative to the rest of the world are an inescapable consequence of our for-profit, pervasively oligopolistic health care system. The problems of a for-profit health care system are exacerbated by the diversion of resources and skills into militarism, and unequal food distribution systems’ effect on diet and obesity. All of these pre-existing problems contribute to higher mortality rates, as does access to proper medical care, which is heavily circumscribed by income.

In terms of fatalities, COVID-19 now ranks as one of the most severe pandemics in modern history, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The most deadly was the 1918 influenza pandemic: 50 million deaths globally out of a worldwide population of 1.8 billion, or 2.7 percent, while the U.S. recorded 675,000 fatalities, or 0.65 percent on a per capita basis out of a population of 103 million. The only “good” thing that can be said about the 1918 tragedy is that the United States fared relatively better than the rest of the world, by this measure.

By contrast, a notable feature of four major pandemics over the past 63 years* (the 1957-1958 H2N2 influenza virus, the 1968 H3N2 influenza virus, the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus or so-called “swine flu,” and COVID-19 today) is America’s persistent underperformance in terms of fatalities relative to the rest of the world in spite of the vastly higher sums the country devotes to health care expenditures (in both absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP). For all of the talk about American exceptionalism, the only thing “exceptional” about the U.S. health care system is this profound systemic failure.

The 1957 H2N2 flu virus caused 1.1 million deaths globally out of a worldwide population of 2.9 billion, or 0.038 percent on a per capita basis; whereas in the United States, it caused about 116,000 deaths out of a U.S. population of 178 million, or 0.065 percent on a per capita basis. The 1968 H3N2 virus resulted in 1 million fatalities worldwide out of a global population of 3.6 billion, or 0.028 percent on a per capita basis; in the United States, there were 100,000 deaths out of a population of 203 million, or 0.049 percent on a per capita basis. The 2009 H1N1 virus caused far fewer overall deaths both globally and within the U.S., with 284,000 fatalities globally and a mere 12,469 fatalities in the U.S.; per capita fatality rates were the same (.004 percent on a per capita basis). But COVID-19 has reflected the reversion to American underperformance: as of August 13, confirmed global fatalities (out of a worldwide population of 7.8 billion) were 749,776, or 0.0096 percent on a per capita basis, versus 169,488 deaths in the United States out of an existing population of 331 million, or 0.051 percent on a per capita basis.

Even more disturbing is that American fatalities are profoundly impacted by income disparities. Low-income communities and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) are experiencing substantially higher rates of mortality. Examining by zip code the geographic distribution of the segments of the population most likely to die from COVID-19—BIPOC, as well as people over the age of 65, and those of any age who are nursing home residents (other than those in luxury elderly care facilities)—these three overlapping segments account for most deaths. It may be that in the northern states these most vulnerable people are heavily concentrated in densely populated areas and thus are quickly exposed to infection and die relatively soon after COVID-19 starts spreading in their area. The New York experience validates that assessment.

In the southern and western states, these most vulnerable populations are more widely scattered across vast suburban and rural areas, which likely explains why the United States as a whole has experienced rolling hot spots, in which the more diffuse population centers become infected and die relatively later after the initial outbreaks of the virus that were largely experienced in heavily urbanized regions. We see this pattern manifested in a recent Arizona compilation of new cases by zip code, as AZ Family reports using analysis by CBS 5 Investigates. Arizona has been one of areas most badly affected by COVID-19 during the summer months, and the AZ Family report illustrates that the hotspots for new cases are dominated by zip codes with “large minority populations” living in areas that are rural or on the outskirts of urban centers.

Why is this significant? David Dayen of the American Prospect explains: “Rural hospitals… are in total crisis in the U.S., with 19 closures last year and 120 since 2010. As hospital networks consolidate and strive for ever-greater profits, rural hospitals that fail to bring in the necessary revenue fall away.”

In the same piece, Dayen quotes a study from Health Affairs, which reports that “49 percent of the lowest-income communities had no ICU beds… whereas only 3 percent of the highest-income communities had no ICU beds.” He highlights an extreme example of this problem, originally reported by the Houston Chronicle: the Rio Grande Valley, along the Texas-Mexico border, “home to 1.3 million residents… [with] no public hospital. Starr County is one of the only in America to have to resort to triage, choosing who to care for and who to send home to die.”

Dayen’s analysis illustrates the fundamental flaw in the system: Levels of provision are a function of profitability; they do not reflect health care priorities. Hence the lowest-income hospitals are often shut down, which means worse health care outcomes for residents in these poorly serviced areas.

The other problem in Texas is that the state historically has also featured a high concentration of undocumented (largely Hispanic) immigrants (the second-highest “unauthorized immigrant” population in the U.S., behind only California), who are being forced to work even when sick, since they are, by virtue of their undocumented status, largely excluded from any and all virus-relief economic aid and access to primary health care. As ProPublica noted: “Texas is also the largest state in the nation that refused to expand health insurance for low-income residents under the Affordable Care Act… Nearly a third of adults under 65 in Texas lack health insurance, the worst uninsured rate in the country, and more than 60% of those without health insurance in the state are Hispanic.”

Furthermore, living in crowded multigenerational settings, workers infected on the job come home and risk spreading the illness to their parents and grandparents (many of whom may also have problematic immigration status in the country and risk deportation if they seek to address their health issues). Consequently, Hispanics are now suffering some of the worst health outcomes in the U.S.

With this information in context, it’s clear the more we lay blame at Trump’s feet, the further we’re going to be from confronting that COVID-19 fits neatly into a decades-old pattern of pandemic response. American health care can literally impoverish its citizens even as it undermines their physical well-being. Breaking the pattern can only happen if Americans keep putting pressure on institutionalized racism, get serious about inequality, and flip the switch on our employer-based private health care system.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney provided research assistance on the compilation and analysis of the pandemic data.

Trump’s dodgy Israel-UAE “peace deal” smells like the work of Henry Kissinger

Whatever you think of the agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates to open diplomatic relations in exchange for Israel’s temporary halt to its planned annexation of Palestinian territories, the deal is driven by a hard-headed, hard-hearted realpolitik that’s characteristic of Henry Kissinger — who happens to have visited with Donald Trump in the White House several times while the deal was being made. (The photo above was from the second of at least three visits.) 

I can’t prove that Kissinger’s fingerprints are actually on the Israel/Emirates deal. But since he was deeply involved in settling the Yom Kippur War between Israel and several Arab nations in 1973, and since his recent visits with Trump were obviously more than just photo ops, it’s time — once again — to understand Kissinger’s premises and modus. 

First, diplomacy is duplicitous by nature. Its practitioners have to move stealthily, beneath presidents’ and prime ministers’ fine phrases and grand public pretensions, to stem the blood-dimmed tide in the world’s endless “swirl of lusting, murderous, satanic desire” by arranging publicly unthinkable bargains and face-saving exits for power-crazed statesmen. So writes Charles Hill, a former speechwriter for Kissinger at the State Department in the 1970s and a top aide to his successor George Shultz, in his 2010 book “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order.” At one point Hill likens Kissinger to the fallen angel Mammon in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” who counsels Satan’s hosts to “adapt to the conditions of Hell” and “seek to prosper.” 

In a bit of gallows humor among diplomats, Kissinger has praised Hill’s book for reviving “the classical ideal of statesmanship.” Kissinger’s own 2014 book “World Order” credits Hill with helping him to draft and edit that grim, instructive survey of the fraying fabric of national sovereignties and international law.

So why isn’t Hill ever mentioned or even cited in the footnotes to Barry Gewen’s recently published “The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World,” a new intellectual biography of the classical statesman par excellence? Why doesn’t Gewen mention Gary Bass’ widely respected “The Blood Telegram,” which establishes Kissinger’s gruesome complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Bengalis by Pakistan in 1971?

Why doesn’t Gewen acknowledge, even if only to rebut, Greg Grandin’s “Kissinger’s Shadow,” or Bouthaina Shaban’s “The Edge of the Precipice: Hafez al-Assad, Henry Kissinger, and the Remaking of the Modern Middle East,” or Robert K. Brigham’s “Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam”? And why does Gewen mention only in passing, and perhaps only grudgingly, the two highest-profile book-length indictments of Kissinger: Christopher Hitchens’ “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” and Seymour Hersh’s “The Price of Power“?

The answers surely vary for each book and for each of many other well-documented and/or formal, legal indictments of Kissinger. But as I explain in “The Inevitability of Defending Henry Kissinger” for The New Republic, Gewen’s book presents Kissinger’s dark side in a highly selective, calculating and, yes, duplicitous manner that characterizes both Kissinger’s diplomacy and Gewen’s own work as book-review editor at the New York Times.

Gewen wants not so much to valorize Kissinger as to use him to wean naïve Americans of what both Kissinger the statesman and Gewen, his apologist, consider our Pollyanna-ish illusions about democracy and foreign policy. He rationalizes Kissinger’s support for — and sometimes direct involvement in — American covert operations that prompted coups and other subversive moves against legitimately elected governments, including our own: Kissinger remained Richard Nixon’s secretary of state and his close confidant throughout a domestic covert operation known as Watergate.

Gewen has also written that in the Iraq war fiasco, Kissinger would have preferred replacing Saddam Hussein with another strongman such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. “Abetting a coup against an elected government is no one’s idea of a happy ending,” Gewen wrote in a 2008 review of Charles Ferguson’s “No End In Sight: Iraq’s Descent into Chaos,” speculating about how to salvage something viable from that war, which Gewen had supported, not least by assigning and editing several Times reviews of books on it, as I’ve shown in The Nation and now, again, in The New Republic.

Gewen’s own 2008 review of the Iraq debacle concludes with a former UN ambassador’s observation that “If you are a military officer looking at this political class unable to make basic decisions … the temptation must be great to think you can’t do it any worse.”

All of which suggests why Gewen’s estimation of Kissinger in “The Inevitability of Tragedy” inclines me to think of the new Israel/Emirates deal as a Kissinger-style coup against President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank — even though the PA isn’t really a sovereign state, and even though Kissinger, who’s long retired from public office, isn’t officially involved. But I do imagine him involved in advice-giving: Again, all those visits to the White House aren’t just photo-ops. And Gewen’s way of handling Kissinger mirrors Kissinger’s “Now you see it, now you don’t” way of doing things.

It also reflects Gewen’s own transition from left to right — from his beginnings as a democratic-socialist doctoral student of labor history and a writer of speeches, congressional testimony and reports for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union to his intellectual and political conversion, especially after 9/11, to the more-Satanic, Kissingerian understanding of realpolitik that has driven him to write this book. Like some other rightward-tacking former Democrats, Gewen retains some of his pro-labor union views. But lacking direct experience in foreign policy councils, he has imagined and read his way into them. He has internalized and, in his editing and writing for the Times Book Review, promoted Kissingerian realpolitik, with all its diplomatic duplicity. The problem here is that supposedly omniscient, hard-headed diplomats and the statesmen whom they advise are no less prone to disastrous miscalculations than the sometimes-wild democratic polities that sometimes wisely reject them.

Yet the democracy-disdaining Gewen often determines which nonfiction books about politics and history the Book Review will assign, and what reviewers it will choose to make or break those books’ credibility in Times readers’ minds, and in the publishing industry’s mindless, tasteless gyrations.

No wonder that nearly anyone who wants to get a book reviewed by the Times has praised or been silent about Gewen’s “Inevitability of Tragedy.” He has every right to promote Kissinger’s worldview there and in his own bylined essays and reviews, but not, I argue, in assigning and editing reviews by others, including several he has edited by Kissinger himself.

Gewen and his Times colleagues insist that all their assignments are made collectively and collegially. If you believe that, you’ll believe his assertions that Kissinger is mainly a morally grounded American patriot who wants to protect our democracy from its own excesses. And you’ll have to ignore Gewen’s suggestion in 2017, which I cite in my review, that foreign policy strategists who consider working for Donald Trump should emulate Kissinger’s thinking as he was deciding to work for Richard Nixon. 

At 97, Kissinger is too old to consider working for Trump, but he’s not too old to have considered advising him in making foreign policy, such as the U.S.-brokered Israel/Emirates deal. And I see no reason to think more of that advice than I do of the more than half-crazed foreign policy maneuvers that even Gewen acknowledges offer “numerous lessons” in Henry Kissinger’s contributions to American decline.

Senate panel referred Trump family members to DOJ over suspicions of “misleading” Russia testimony

Bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year notified the Department of Justice that members of President Donald Trump’s family and close circle “might have presented misleading testimony” to the panel during its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Washington Post reports.

According to the Post, then-Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-VA) referred a list of individuals, including Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner to federal prosecutors after their accounts of a pre-election meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya “were contradicted by the president’s former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates” during former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

In a separate section, the congressional panel said it had reason to believe Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and former campaign co-chair Sam Clovis “had lied to congressional investigators — a potential felony,” the Post reports.

According to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported on the referrals and viewed a copy of the panel’s letter, the committee believes Bannon may have lied about his knowledge of a meeting Prince held in the Seychelles with a Russian official tied to the Kremlin. Per the Post, “Prince had told Mueller’s team that he briefed Bannon on the meeting, which occurred before Trump’s inauguration in early 2017; Bannon denied the conversation took place.”

Read the full report at the Washington Post.

Following outrage, Trump pulls nomination of “unapologetic racist”

Environmental campaigners on Saturday welcomed news that President Donald Trump withdrew his nomination of “pro-polluter” and “unapologetic racist” William Perry Pendley for director of the Bureau of Land Management, with groups saying he should no longer be allowed to continue in his role as unofficial head of the agency.

Pendley, who’s called fracking an “environmental miracle,” was panned by civil rights, environmental, tribal, and immigrant advocacy groups as “the worst possible person you could conjure to be a leading steward of our shared public lands” given his public record that includes a history of racist and sexist comments, “overt racism” toward native people, dismissal of the climate ciris, suggestion that “the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold,” and a 17-page list of 57 potential conflicts of interest.

“Pendley never should have been nominated, and the fact that he was shows you what you need to know about this administration’s conservation priorities,” Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) said in a statement Saturday.

Trump formally nominated Pendley in June to lead BLM, an agency within the Interior Department (DOI). However, he has been overseeing—to the outrage of progressive groups—BLM for over a year, with the agency’s website describing him as “exercising authority of the director.”

Outdoor Life first reported on the news of the withdrawal.

Interior spokesperson Nicholas Goodwin confirmed the nomination withdrawal to The Hill but provided no explanation for the decision. “The president makes staffing decisions. Mr. Pendley continues to lead the Bureau of Land Management as Deputy Director for Programs and Policy,” Goodwin said.  

Critics of Pendley responded to the news with fresh attacks on his record.

According to Lena Moffitt, director of the Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign, “Pendley’s tenure as head of the Bureau of Land Management, like the entire Trump administration, has been a disaster for our public lands. At best, he’s demonstrated a total disregard for the health of our communities and our wild places, prioritizing giveaways to polluting fossil fuel corporations. At worst, he actively worked against marginalized communities.”

Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, suggested the withdrawal simply represents the administration seeing Pendley as unlikely to be confirmed by the Senate.

“Unfortunately, the ignominious end of Pendley’s nomination is more of a cynical nod to political realities than a retreat from the nihilist ideology he championed—and provides small solace for the communities and wildlife affected by the unbridled leasing of wildlife habitat and recreation lands across the West to energy development,” said O’Mara.

Further dampening any reason for progressive applause is that Pendley is not yet ousted from his current role at BLM.

“This is a sham,” tweeted climate scientist Peter Gleick. “Trump is withdrawing the nomination but leaving Pendley in charge anyway.”

“Another unconfirmed, illegal appointment,” he added.

Udall, in his statement, demanded that Pendley “not be allowed to continue in this role in an acting, unconfirmed capacity.”

“It’s time for DOI stand up for our public lands and our trust and treaty obligations to tribes,” he said.

Republican congressman slams QAnon “basement-dwellers” who are infesting the GOP

Appearing on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” with host Brian Stelter, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) expressed disgust with QAnon conspiracy “basement-dwellers” who have made inroads into the Republican Party, saying some of his GOP colleagues need to step up and drive them away.

In an interview that will likely enrage the conspiracy-minded QAnon believers, the GOP lawmaker was unsparing in his criticism of their preposterous theories that he said have poisoned the political atmosphere in the U.S.

Asked by the CNN host to explain the growth of the loosely-organized far-right extremist group, Kinzinger explained, “So, you know, we don’t necessarily know where it comes from, if it’s one person, if it’s a basement-dweller where this started as a joke, if it’s multiple people now, if it’s Russian intelligence even — we don’t necessarily know. But it started with in October of 2017, what they’re calling ‘Q drops,’ very vague conspiracy theories about this satanic network in the government that Trump was sent to basically tear out.”

“They’ve had predictions about this thing called ‘the storm,’ a mass round-up and arrest of everybody and of executions of thousands of people and people adhere to this,” he continued. “What happens, it kind of confirms what you already believe and it’s dark and it’s really attractive in some cases. I haven’t addressed it for a while but it’s made its way to the mainstream and now it’s important for leaders to push back.”

With host Stelter saying the conspiracy theories are being shared widely and tearing families apart, the GOP lawmaker replied, “I think that’s the key.”

“If anybody buys into a conspiracy theory, whether on the far left, far right, we never landed on the moon, whatever it is, it’s out of an interest of ‘if only the truth is known, life would be better for me and other people,'” he suggested. “So, everybody thinks they’re the good guy, everybody wants to do right. And I think understanding humanity from that perspective and then engaging them in that perspective through love and understanding is far different. You’re never going to offend somebody onto your side.”

“If you believe in this conspiracy theory stuff, especially QAnon, do some independent research, there’s a lot of stuff debunking it, including all the predictions that didn’t come true and now the new Q stuff reads like basically a tarot card reader that gives you something so vague that will fit into something that will happen in the next months,” he added.

Watch below:

Sorry, believers: Skeptics say there are rational explanations for military pilots’ UFO videos

The Pentagon announced Thursday that it is creating a task force to investigate UFO sightings. Though the notion that the military is investigating UFOs sounds like a fringe conspiracy theorist’s ultimate redemption, the military’s actions are far from preposterous. That’s because their own trusted soldiers have credibly encountered UFOs while piloting military aircraft.

The Pentagon’s footage from these sightings, which has been made public, depicts objects zooming quickly through the sky, as recorded by military pilots. Though these objects fit the technical definition of a UFO — meaning an unidentified flying object — they may not adhere to the folk understanding of “UFO” as synonymous with an extraterrestrial spacecraft. That’s because there isn’t exactly any evidence that these objects are of extraterrestrial origin, or that they defy any existing laws of physics that might hint at their development by a more scientifically advanced species. 

“To understand the videos, all you need to do is ask any fighter pilot familiar with the FLIR camera system,” Brian Dunning, a professional scientific skeptic and podcaster, told Salon by email. “What looks like great speed and wild maneuvers is just a common optical illusion combined with the effects of the FLIR’s gimbal and glare filter.” FLIR cameras, short for forward-looking infrared cameras, are capable of seeing slightly into the infrared spectrum, meaning that heat sources light up on FLIR camera footage.

Dunning zeroed in on a released video that appears to show a bat-winged shaped craft, noting that “the object you’re seeing is a single point of heat from an unidentified plane, probably a distant commercial jet, flying away from the F-18. The camera is looking out the side of the F-18 which is speeding past nearby clouds, making the object appear to be moving relative to the clouds.”

He added, “Its bat-wing shape is how the FLIR’s glare filter always depicts single bright points (there are plenty of examples of this on YouTube), and whenever the object appears to turn, this is simply the FLIRs gimbal rotating to keep the target in view as the F-18 maneuvers. The other videos also have similarly prosaic explanations.”

Timothy Caulfield, a law professor at the University of Alberta who also hosts a TV series that debunks pseudoscience (titled “A User’s Guide to Cheating Death”), explained to Salon that there are a number of potentially innocuous explanations — many of them involving military or other highly secretive scientific experiments — that get ignored due to sensationalism.

“I get why people are fascinated by this topic. It’s exciting, it’s intriguing, it’s mysterious,” Caulfield said. “But the idea that these things are UFOs and alien sightings, and that there is alien material left on our planet, is scientifically implausible and highly unlikely. It’s an Occam’s Razor story. I think there is probably a more straightforward explanation, but we will just never know with the deep uncertainty. People want answers.”

He drew particular attention to how the pilots that spotted these UFOs may have inadvertently fanned the flames of conspiracy theorists.

“When people look at those kinds of videos and the reaction of the pilots, for example, I think that’s often also used to give them more credibility with these expert pilots, often military pilots, commenting on the behavior of the shifts,” Caulfield explained. “I’m not a physicist, I’m not an engineer. I can understand what people are intrigued. They don’t know what this object is and it’s moving in a manner that seems impossible given our current technology.”

Alexander Wendt, an international relations professor at Ohio State University who has become a prominent amateur ufologist, pointed to the reactions of the military pilots as a sign that these new UFOs should be taken seriously.

“I challenge anybody to do better than the Navy to explain what’s in those videos. If the Navy couldn’t do it…” Wendt told Salon, before adding that “they had every reason to want this off their plate.”

As Wendt pointed out, “I think what’s unique about these Navy videos is that the whole issue arose from the pilots… I think the upset pilots is really a key thing. These guys are the experts on what’s in the sky. They have thousands of hours of experience flying up there. You see some of the interviews with these pilots and they think something is going on, and they were the ones that pushed this whole issue to the front.”

Another Ohio State University professor, political scientist Thomas Wood, opened up to Salon about why people embrace UFO conspiracy theories.

“If you look at the data on public opinion on this, it is really sort of incredible,” Wood explained. (A Gallup poll last year found that 33 percent of Americans believe that some UFO sightings were caused by alien visitation; a YouGov poll last month found that 56 percent of Americans believe that the government would hide UFO evidence from the public.) “The American public fascination with UFOs is one of the very durable conspiracy theories in the American public’s imagination. Most conspiracy theories may become popular and then quiet quickly — for instance, the Barack Obama was born in Kenya theory, the American government planned the 9/11 terrorist attack theory. The UFO conspiracy theory is one of those that just sort of stuck around.”

Dunning was quite cynical about the reasons for people believing in UFOs.

“Two words: Sensationalism sells,” Dunning emailed Salon. “Nobody is excited about the artifacts of the FLIR glare filter; everyone is excited about the prospect of the Pentagon hiding the ‘truth about aliens.'”

He added, “Humans are hardwired for anecdotal thinking. Our brains gravitate toward the simple and the desirable, and away from the complicated and the boring. The people in the business of selling TV programming are well aware of this, and that’s why we see UFOs, ghosts, psychics, and miracle cures dominating pop culture.”

Many famous people claim to have encountered either UFOs or aliens, from singers Elvis Presley and Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge and President Jimmy Carter. They were able to have successful careers despite the stigma associated with such an alleged experience, though many other believers were not. 

Earlier this year, the TV series “Unsolved Mysteries” devoted an episode to a group of people from a small town in western Massachusetts who claim they encountered a UFO in 1969. They described being socially rejected, viciously bullied, and in one case even harassed to the point where they moved away. it makes sense why they wouldn’t go to the police or the local press at the time with their story. Many other reports of UFO sightings and encounters follow the same pattern — those who come forward suffer for doing so. As one of the people in the episode puts it, the town devolved from “Norman Rockwell to Salvador Dali” as public opinion and un-visited citizens turned against the purported witnesses.

Trump’s new comments about Edward Snowden put pressure on Democrats to support a pardon

Democrats were urged this weekend to publicly demand a pardon for Edward Snowden after President Donald Trump said Saturday he was considering that action for the National Security Agency whistleblower.

“I’m not that aware of the Snowden situation. But I’m going to start looking at it,” Trump said at a press conference his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club when asked if he would pardon Snowden, who’s been living in exile in Russia since 2013. 

“It seems to be a split decision,” the president said, adding that “many people… think that he should be somehow treated differently and other people think he did very bad things. And I’m going to take a very good look at it.”

The remarks came days after Trump said in an interview published Thursday by the New York Post that he is open to pardoning Snowden—a comment widely welcomed by whistleblower advocates. Among that chorus was Freedom of the Press Foundation, for which Snowden serves as board president—with that group responding, “No matter your feelings on Trump, a Snowden pardon would be a major win for those who care about fighting back against mass surveillance in the digital age.”

The ACLU also restated its support for the whistleblower in the wake of latest comments from Trump, noting in a late Saturday tweet that “Snowden blew the whistle on illegal government activity kept secret for years, sparking a global debate about the proper limits of government surveillance.”

“We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again,” the group added. “Snowden is a patriot and should be pardoned.”

In a Saturday tweet, digital rights activist Evan Greer singled out progressive lawmakers including “Squad” members Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and said they should help “lead their party right now by publicly calling to #PardonSnowden” and protect whistleblowers. 

Greer added in tweets later Saturday an accusation that Trump is “a self-serving bag of farts who is only going to ‘take a look’ at this to score political points” and said Democrats risk being “fucking idiots if they let Trump take this as a win instead of just finally admitting Snowden was right.”

One high-profile Democrat who rejected Trump’s floating a pardon for Snowden is Susan Rice, national security adviser under the Obama administration.

Rice’s response on Twitter—”I. Just. Can’t. Congratulations GOP. This is who you are now.”—were seized upon by surveillance state critics including Glenn Greenwald, who was among the team of journalists that first reported on the Snowden revelations.

The tweet from Rice also came in for criticism from Mehdi Hasan, a journalist at The Intercept.

“Your former colleague, ex-Attorney General Eric Holder, said Edward Snowden performed a ‘public service,'” Hasan responded to Rice. “And everyone from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty to the New York Times and Guardian editorial boards have called for some form of clemency or pardon for Snowden.”

This simple ham and cheese galette is like a grown-up Hot Pocket

Like many, once the pandemic hit, I initially used the extended hours at home as an opportunity to experiment with recipes I’d bookmarked and filed away as “projects” for when I had the time. I’m talking about those all-consuming, multi-step (or day) dishes that require time to rise, an unwavering attention to detail, or potentially even dragging out the blender. For the first few weeks of quarantine, I found solace in learning to roll and braid babka, ordering obscure ingredients online and finally cracking open my Yotam Ottolenghi cookbooks. 

But then, a switch was flicked. 

I’m not sure if it was general fatigue or the dawning awareness that the “new normal” was gut-wrenchingly isolating and that this was only just beginning, but one morning I woke up, looked at the bowls of dough that were taking up a solid 60% of the space in my refrigerator as they cold-proofed, and realized that I would gladly give up my remaining yeast stash for a couple bags of cheese puffs, a slice of Funfetti birthday cake and a box of Smuckers Uncrustables. 

Where initially the lengthy cooking process served as catharsis, I hit a point where I craved comfort in the form of convenience and intense (maybe synthetic?) flavor. This recipe is something of a middle ground between the two. 

A galette is French pastry similar to a tart or a hand pie; it’s essentially pastry dough wrapped over a sweet or savory filling. They tend to have a moment every summer when fresh fruit becomes plentiful and people tend to find their rustic-chic aesthetic appealing (meaning galettes have a tendency to burst, but it’s not a huge deal — you just cover any imperfections with a scoop of vanilla ice cream). And that moment just happened to coincide with an intense craving of mine for a Hot Pocket. 

Thus, this ham and cheese galette was born. 

It’s simple — packaged pie dough does most of the work — but flavorful enough to keep me from totally raiding the grocery store freezer section. 

Ham & Cheese Galette 

Yields: 1 small galette, 2-3 servings

  • 1 9-inch round of premade pie dough, thawed (plus, an optional second round if you’d like a lattice crust)
  • 1 minced shallot
  • 2 tablespoons of butter
  • 8 ounces of ham steak, cubed
  • 1 cup of shredded sharp cheddar cheese
  • 1 egg yolk, whipped with 2 tablespoons of water.

1. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees and lay one of the premade pie dough rounds on a greased baking sheet. (Slice the other dough round into 1-inch strips for the optional lattice topping). 

2. In a small saucepan, melt the butter and add the minced shallot, stirring over low heat until the shallot is translucent. At that point, add the ham to the pan, stirring with the shallot until both begin to lightly brown. 

3. Allow the mixture to cool slightly and then stir the cheddar cheese through until slightly melted. Spoon this filling onto the prepared dough circle, leaving about a two-inch border around the edge. 

4. Fold up the uncovered border over the edge of the filling and pinch into pleats. You can cook the gallette as is, but to create a texture more reminiscent of a ham and cheese Hot Pocket, I added a lattice topping. Here is a great tutorial on the pattern to get you started. 

5. Brush the dough with the egg mixture and place in the oven. 

6. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until the crust has turned a light golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least five minutes before slicing.

Democrats call on Postmaster General to testify on USPS scandal, threaten “arrest” if he refuses

Virginia Congressman Gerry Connolly (D) on Sunday suggested that the House committee could move to jail Postmaster General Louis DeJoy if he refuses to testify at an upcoming hearing.

Democrats on Sunday called for DeJoy’s testimony after President Donald Trump suggested that he is undermining the U.S. Postal Service in order to win the election.

“The President has explicitly stated his intention to manipulate the Postal Service to deny eligible voters access to the ballot in pursuit of his own re-election,” House Democrats said in a statement. “Alarmingly, the Postmaster General – a Trump mega-donor – has acted as an accomplice in the President’s campaign to cheat in the election, as he launches sweeping new operational changes that degrade delivery standards and delay the mail.”

In a tweet, Connolly insisted that DeJoy’s appearance “is not optional.” He said that Democrats should be prepared to use “inherent contempt” to force the Postmaster General’s compliance.

 

 

 

Although “inherent contempt” has not been used by Congress in nearly a hundred years, it allows for “a substantial fine and imprisonment for up to one year,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) is also on record supporting an “arrest” of the Postmaster General if he refuses to testify.

 

What happens if Biden wins?

Assume Joe Biden wins the presidency. Assume as well that he genuinely intends to repair the damage our country has sustained since we declared ourselves history’s “Indispensable Nation,” compounded by the traumatic events of 2020 that demolished whatever remnants of that claim survived. Assume, that is, that this aging career politician and creature of the Washington establishment really intends to salvage something of value from all that has been lost.

If he seriously intends to be more than a relic of pre-Trump liberal centrism, how exactly should President Biden go about making his mark?

Here, free of charge, Joe, is an action plan that will get you from Election Night through your first two weeks in office. Follow this plan and by your 100th day in the White House observers will be comparing you to at least one President Roosevelt, if not both.

On Election Night (or whatever date you are declared the winner): Close down your Twitter account. Part of your job, Joe, is to restore some semblance of dignity to the office of the presidency. Twitter and similar social media platforms are a principal source of the coarseness and malice that today permeate American politics. Remove yourself from that ugliness. Your predecessor transformed a presidency that had acquired imperial pretensions into an office best described as a cesspool of grotesque demagoguery. One of your central tasks will be to model a genuine alternative: a presidency appropriate for a constitutional republic, where reason, candor, and a commitment to the common good really do prevail over partisan name-calling. That’s a lot to ask for, but returning to a more traditional conception of the Bully Pulpit would certainly be a place to start.

During the transition: Direct your press secretary to announce that on January 20th there will be no ritzy Inaugural balls. Take your cues from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration for his fourth term in office, a distinctly low-key event. After all, in January 1945, the nation was still at war; victory had not yet arrived; celebration could wait. Our present-day multifaceted crisis bears at least some comparison to that World War II moment. So, as you plan your own inauguration, ditch the glitz. A secondary benefit: you won’t have to hit up wealthy donors for the dough to pay for the party. And with no party, you won’t have to worry about inaugural festivities triggering another spike in Covid-19 infections.

In addition to selecting a cabinet and ignoring your predecessor’s bleating, the main focus of your transition period has to be policy planning. When you take office, the coronavirus pandemic will still be with us: that’s a given. Even if optimistic predictions of an effective vaccine becoming available by early 2021 were to pan out, we won’t be out of the woods. Not faintly. So your number-one priority during the transition must be to do what Trump never came close to doing: devise a concrete national strategy for limiting the spread of the virus along with a blueprint for prompt and comprehensive vaccine distribution when one is ready.

That said, it would also be prudent to engage in quiet contingency planning to lay out possible courses of action should your predecessor refuse to acknowledge his defeat (“rigged election!“) or leave the White House.

On January 20th, the big day arrives.

Noon, Eastern Standard Time: With the chief justice of the Supreme Court presiding, take the oath of office in the East Room of the White House in the presence of Vice President Kamala Harris and your immediate family. No inaugural address, no parade, no festivities whatsoever. Make like you’re George Washington: he wasn’t into making a fuss. When the ceremony ends, have lunch and get down to work.

That afternoon: Issue an executive order directing the formation of a National Commission on Reconciliation and Reparations, or NCRR. Recruit Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates or another scholar of comparable stature to head the effort. While likely to be a lengthy and contentious endeavor, the NCRR will provide a point of departure for addressing the persistence of American racism by taking on this overarching question: What does justice require?

That evening: Speak to the nation from the Oval Office. Make it brief. Your address will set the tone for your administration. The nation has its hands full with concurrent crises. The moment calls for humility and hard work, not triumphalism. Don’t overpromise. Consider Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address as a model. Curb your inclination to blather. Abe only needed 701 words. See if you can better that.

Day 2: In a letter to House and Senate leaders, unveil the details of your coronavirus strategy, which must include: 1) a national plan to curb the existing Covid-19 outbreak and prevent future ones; 2) a nationwide approach to vaccine distribution; 3) a strategy for averting and, if needed, curbing the outbreak of comparable diseases; 4) adequate funding of key government pandemic relief and prevention facilities and activities. In the process, identify near-term and longer-term funding requirements that will require congressional action.

Day 3: Issue an executive order reversing the announced withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accords. Describe this as just an initial down payment on the $2 trillion Green New Deal you promised Americans during the election campaign. Joe, if you can make meaningful progress toward curbing climate change, future generations will put you on Mount Rushmore in place of one of those slaveholders.

Day 4: Send a personal message to the German chancellor, the British prime minister, and the presidents of China, France, and Russia, declaring your intention to recommit the United States to the Iran nuclear deal that Donald Trump ditched in 2018. Quietly initiate the process of opening a back channel to the Iranian leadership. (I’ve got colleagues who might be able to lend a hand in laying the groundwork. Let me know if the Quincy Institute can be of help.) That same day, on your first visit as president to the White House press room, casually mention that the United States will henceforth adhere to a policy of no-first-use regarding its nuclear weapons. Simultaneously, tell the Pentagon to stop work on “modernizing” the U.S. nuclear arsenal. That’s $2 trillion that can be better spent elsewhere. No first use will flush “fire and fury like the world has never seen” down the toilet. Generals, weapons contractors, and aging Cold Warriors will tell you that you’re taking a great risk. Ignore them and you will substantially reduce the possibility of nuclear war.

Day 5: Issue an executive order suspending any further work on your predecessor’s border “wall.” At the same time, announce your intention to form a non-partisan task force to recommend policies related to border security and immigration, whether legal or otherwise. Ask former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro to chair that task force, with a report due prior to the 100th day of your presidency.

Day 6: Accompanied by Secretary of State Elizabeth Warren, visit the State Department for an all-hands-on-deck meeting. Let it be known that your administration will reserve all senior diplomatic appointments for seasoned Foreign Service officers. No more selling of ambassadorships to campaign contributors or old friends hoping to acquire an honorific title. Make clear your intention to revitalize American diplomacy, recognizing that the principal threats to our wellbeing are transnational and not susceptible to military solutions. The Pentagon can’t do much to alleviate pandemics, environmental degradation, and climate change. Those true national security crises will require collaborative action. Also use this occasion to announce the formation of a non-partisan task force that will recommend ways to reform and re-professionalize the Foreign Service. Top-flight diplomacy requires top-drawer diplomats. Ask former Ambassadors Chas Freeman and Thomas Pickering, both savvy global thinkers and seasoned diplomats, to co-chair that effort, with instructions to report back by July 11th, the birthday of John Quincy Adams, our greatest secretary of state.

Day 7: Begin your morning by inviting General Mark Milley to the Oval Office for a one-on-one meeting. Ask him to tender his immediate resignation as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Milley’s participation in the infamous Lafayette Square stunt, even if unwitting, renders him unfit for further employment. Later that same day, visit the remaining chiefs in the Pentagon. Explain your intention to commence a wholesale reevaluation of the U.S. military’s global posture — command structure, bases, budgets, priorities, and above all emerging threats. Ask for their forthright assistance in this endeavor, making it clear that anyone obstructing the process will be gone.

Day 8: Call on Ruth Bader Ginsberg in her chambers at the Supreme Court. Invite her to retire now that the Senate is in Democratic hands. Offer private assurances that her successor will be a) liberal; b) a woman; c) a person of color; and d) a distinguished jurist.

Day 9: Do what your predecessor vowed to do, but didn’t: end America’s endless wars. At your first full-fledged cabinet meeting, charge your new Defense Secretary James Webb with providing a detailed schedule for a deliberate, but comprehensive withdrawal (no ifs, ands, or buts) of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, with a completion date by the end of your first year in office.

Day 10: Visit Mexico City. Engage in a trilateral discussion with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. At day’s end, sign the Declaration of Tenochtitlan affirming a common commitment to democracy, the rule of law, human rights, economic growth, and continental security. Your predecessors have taken Mexico and Canada for granted. You will correct that oversight. In fact, no two countries on the planet are of greater importance to the wellbeing of the American people.

Day 11: Invite China’s president Xi Jinping for an informal meeting at Camp David at a date of his choosing. As you know, Joe, the United States and China are hurtling toward a new Cold War. Reversing the momentum of events will prove difficult indeed. This will require considerable personal diplomacy on your part. Given the need for the planet’s two major economic powers to cooperate on lowering greenhouse gasses globally, nothing is more important than this. Start now.

Day 12: Announce plans to visit NATO headquarters in the near future. Begin quiet consultations with European members of the alliance to nudge them toward taking responsibility for their own security. Let them know that before the year is out you intend to make public a 10-year timetable for withdrawing all U.S. forces from Europe. That will concentrate minds in London, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere in the alliance.

Day 13: Convene a meeting of the best minds in tech (which, by the way, does not necessarily mean the wealthiest tech tycoons). Pick their brains on the issue of privacy. This challenge will extend beyond your presidency. You can at least highlight the problem.

Day 14: You’re 78, the oldest man ever to walk into the Oval Office as president. Be smart. Take a day totally off to recharge your batteries. You have a long way to go.

Joe, you’re a bit long in the tooth for the duties you’re about to assume. Keep in mind the adage that applies to all us old folks: time is fleeting. We never know how much we have left, so seize the moment. No offense, but your days (like mine) are numbered.

Good luck. I’ll be pulling for you.

Copyright 2020 Andrew Bacevich

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Political conventions today are for partying and pageantry, not picking nominees

In August the Democratic and Republican national conventions will take on new, uncharted formats. Due to COVID-19 concerns, gone are the mass gatherings in large convention halls, replaced with a switch to mostly online formats.

This is just the latest modification in presidential nominating conventions since they were first introduced in the 1830s.

Initially, conventions were insulated meetings of representatives from the state parties, with convention delegates on their own determining which candidate became the party’s presidential nominee.

By the early 20th century, convention participants began to receive information about public preferences from commercial public opinion polls and a small number of presidential primaries, which constrained conventions in their choice of presidential nominees.

Today’s national conventions ratify a candidate already chosen by the voters in primaries and caucuses.

Insulated conventions

George Washington needed no formal nomination, as he was the overwhelming choice for president among those who would make up the Electoral College.

Subsequent early presidential candidates were nominated by their party’s members in Congress. But if a state did not have a representative from a particular party in Congress, it had no say in the party’s presidential nomination.

In the 1830s, political parties switched to national conventions, which were meetings of representatives from the state parties. Each state was allotted delegates proportional to its Electoral College vote, and early conventions consisted of just a few hundred delegates. These delegates sought to find a popular candidate to head the party’s general election ticket, but had little information on who this candidate might be.

Candidates’ names were placed into contention by being nominated, and seconded, by a convention delegate. The winning candidate was determined by a series of roll-call votes of state delegations that continued until one candidate won the required number of delegates.

Candidates did not attend the conventions; the norm of the day was that politicians were not to openly campaign for the presidency. Instead, managers of the various candidates bargained with state party leaders to accumulate the required number of delegates.

If one candidate began gaining strength in the rounds of voting, that candidate experienced a bandwagon of new support as other delegates wanted to be on the winning side.

Sometimes none of the early contenders was able to secure the winning total, and the convention turned to a compromise candidate instead. These late-round compromise candidates were known as “dark horses.” James Polk became the Democratic nominee in 1844 as one of these dark-horse candidates.

Party platforms, encompassing the party’s positions on issues, were introduced in the 1840s.

How Lincoln won the nomination

At the 1860 Republican convention, a half-dozen potential candidates split the initial vote, although New York Senator William H. Stewart was considered the front-runner.

Candidate Abraham Lincoln’s strategy was to prevent Stewart’s nomination on the first ballot. Lincoln’s campaign managers would consolidate anti-Stewart delegates behind him in subsequent rounds. Lincoln’s managers won over some delegates by arguing that Lincoln was the most electable candidate, who could draw votes from farmers and businessmen as well as abolitionists.

While Lincoln requested that his managers not make any deals, they did promise a Cabinet position to powerful Pennsylvania Senator Simon Cameron to gain support from that state’s delegation. Lincoln’s managers also packed the public audience in Chicago with his supporters, a task made easier by the use of counterfeit public tickets.

Lincoln won the nomination on the third round of voting.

Public gets a voice

In the 20th century, information about public preferences became available, which would help delegates to determine who would be their party’s most popular presidential candidate.

Early in the century, a handful of states adopted presidential primaries to select delegates, though most states continued to use traditional methods such as appointment by state or local party leaders or selection at local caucuses. Thus, the vast majority of 20th century convention delegates remained representatives of their state parties, not supporters of specific candidates.

An early use of presidential primaries in 1912 proved disastrous. Former President Theodore Roosevelt ran for president again, won 10 of the 13 presidential primaries and was favored by the progressive wing of the Republican Party.

But the majority of Republican convention delegates were party regulars who supported the current president William Taft instead. In addition, by this time a new norm had taken hold, to renominate sitting presidents.

Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination, founded the Progressive Party in protest, was nominated by that party and split the Republican vote in the fall general election, allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win.

Demise and comeback of primaries

With the divisive results from the 1912 Republican convention and the waning of the Progressive Movement, which championed state adoption of primary laws, presidential primaries went out of favor.

In the middle of the 20th century, typically only 15 states held presidential primaries, selecting only one-third of the convention’s delegates. Few candidates ran in these presidential primaries, as primaries were not seen as a successful pathway to the nomination.

The public, however, still influenced presidential nominations as newly reliable public opinion polls measured support for potential nominees. In the mid-20th century, the candidate at the top of the national polls almost always was nominated by the national conventions.

Other changes came to 20th-century conventions. Franklin Roosevelt was the first presidential nominee to attend a convention when he gave an acceptance speech in 1932, broadcast nationally by radio.

Presidential primaries became somewhat more influential after World War II, when some candidates adopted a strategy of running in presidential primaries. Other candidates avoided running in primaries and relied on a traditional strategy of courting the party’s elite who would be delegates at the convention.

Running in presidential primaries was a risky strategy: A candidate who lost in a primary could see their presidential bid end, but even someone who won every single primary would not earn enough delegates to secure the nomination.

The goal of candidates entering the primaries was to convince party leaders of the candidate’s vote-winning abilities. John F. Kennedy in 1960 used primary victories to convince Democratic convention delegates that he would be the most popular candidate.

Hubert Humphrey, in 1968, became the last candidate nominated for president without running in any of the presidential primaries.

All over but the shouting

Today’s conventions are ratifying rather than nominating conventions. Their main contribution is to bring the party together in support of their nominee.

While in the past, convention delegates chiefly represented their state’s party, today’s delegates are bound to support specific candidates based on the outcomes of the presidential primaries and caucuses.

By accumulating these bound delegates, a party’s presumptive nominee becomes apparent by mid- to late spring. That’s when one candidate takes a commanding lead in the delegate totals and the other candidates withdraw from the race. Even in the unusually long Democratic contests of 2008 and 2016, by the time of the last primaries in June, one candidate had already secured the support of 50% of delegates.

Today’s conventions also approve the presidential nominee’s choice of a running mate. As has happened with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, the selection of a presumptive presidential nominee in spring gives them plenty of time to vet potential vice presidents.

In addition, modern conventions sign on to a party platform written before the convention and which has been strongly influenced by the nominee’s positions.

Once begun as places to make deals and deliberate on possible candidates and positions, today’s conventions are public relations events, stressing the character, issues and strong party support for the party’s presidential ticket.

Barbara Norrander, Professor, School of Government & Public Policy, University of Arizona

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

“Lovecraft Country” is an intoxicating, myth-shattering hero’s journey through a map of Black fear

History, both the edited and sanitized version taught in most schools or the closer-to-accurate records unearthed by those brave enough to search for it, can only explain the experience of living while Black in America up to a point. What can’t be fully quantified are the innumerable feelings of anger, frustration and fear converging in an invisible boulder that has a weight and a pressure inside the body, a natural survival compass.

That guide transforms would-be simple pleasures – road trips, shopping in unfamiliar areas, moving to new neighborhoods – into an internal negotiation for some of us, one that most white people may never feel, comprehend or even believe, but that “Lovecraft Country” translates into intoxicating, terrifying visual metaphor.

There may be no better illustration of the ever-present threat of white supremacy than to see it manifest as a slimy, many-eyed creature with multiple rows of teeth and a predilection for burrowing into the Earth and hunting under the cloak of night. To understand the danger of pretending an ugly history of crime and murder doesn’t exist, it’s instructive to cast it as a malevolent, bloodthirsty spirit.

Series creator Misha Green doesn’t sculpt “Lovecraft Country” as a didactic piece any more than she conceived of her previous series “Underground” as another brooding drama about slavery. Green’s gift is in centering Black characters in blockbuster-style epics. That affection inspired her to present a slavery narrative as an action drama steeped in emotion. Here she seizes the opportunity – and HBO’s ample budget – to play around with an array of cinematic genres and tell many stories within the course of a single, season-long quest.

“Lovecraft Country” opens with a midcentury sci-fi scene – an explosive battle sequence that introduces Atticus “Tic” Freeman (Jonathan Majors), a soldier fighting for his life in the Korean War. Without warning the scene seamlessly merges into a dazzling fireworks storm, otherworldly bodies and squid-like horrors. This is our earliest view inside the hero’s mind.

Otherwise Tic navigates in the real world of 1950s America, where the hardened Korean War veteran is not much safer than he was on the battlefield. Initially he heads home to Chicago on a quest to find his father Montrose (Michael K. Williams), who has gone missing. Soon he’s joined on his journey by his childhood friend Letitia Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) and his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance, who weighs in on the horrors in a recent episode of “Salon Talks”).

Like Atticus, George loves pulp novels and makes his living as the publisher of “The Safe Negro Travel Guide,” the story’s version of “The Negro Motorist Green Book” by Victor Hugo Green. George sees the trip as an opportunity to add a few entries to his guide; Leti’s in it for the adventure, and to run from the rejection of her estranged sister Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku). Hence the trio heads out to Ardham, Massachusetts in the family’s spacious station wagon – and true to the title’s promise, encounter an assortment of monsters, mostly of the human variety.

“Lovecraft Country,” based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, refers to the New England territory where H.P. Lovecraft set many of his stories. The Northern placement of the story is intentional on Ruff’s part and Green’s in that it shatters the longstanding myth among white Americans that vicious racism is a relic of the old South, that somehow the North was more benevolent and enlightened.

Naturally the title also serves as a lure for Lovecraft aficionados, long drawn to his slimy, gooey invertebrate renderings of pure evil. If that’s what you’re looking for, “Lovecraft Country” obliges straightaway by raising up a few made-for-TV shoggoths, placed on the trio’s path as a point of contrast with the ordinarily lethality of human malevolence; despite the racists sharing a common country and language with their prey, it’s enraging to realize Tic, Leti and George have no chance of reasoning with them or the mindless monsters hunting them down.

All this is before the three encounters what may be most dangerous menace of all: an astronomically wealthy Aryan blueblood Samuel Braithwhite (played by Tony Goldwyn) and his enigmatic daughter Christina (Abbey Lee), who have their own plans for Tic and his companions.

It’s fortunate that “Lovecraft Country” looks and feels as expansive as it does, because it houses a lot of its subplots and themes under its roof. Episode to episode, Green, who writes the first four and is credited on every script, takes care to tell the stories of each member of Tic’s circle of relations and friends, tailoring its terrors accordingly.

Editing and stylistic choices embed a clever sense of humor and knowing within each story. This is a show that assumes a familiarity with its audience by way of including anachronistic riffs of modern music over ’50s scenery, with one of its most inspired sequence set to an instantly recognizable 1970s sitcom theme. All of the soundtrack choices ground the surreal nature of what we’re seeing in granite truths, and audio overlays of recitations by the likes of James Baldwin and Gil Scott-Heron boldface the subtext.

Such flourishes link this fictional depiction to our own time while accentuating the limitless nature of its brand fantasy – at times reminding us, maybe, that it’s OK relax into this world.

These shifting storytelling sands might not work if they weren’t encased in the main quest’s plot. This also means the energy varies in each hour, giving the season’s flow a fluid unpredictability that viewers may either embrace wholeheartedly or find jarring.

It helps to regard “Lovecraft Country” as an anthology veiled in a family story, making it more along the lines of “The Twilight Zone” than the average quest-driven drama, not to mention brand-aligned with Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams, fellow executive producers on the series along with Green.

Such freedom allows Green and her collaborators to show their stunning command of the energy and spirit the story’s blending of science fiction and horror requires. It means that every slice of the audience, from monster movie lovers to Dan Brown-style conspiracy thriller nuts and Indiana Jones fans, will find something to enjoy here.

In keeping with the genre, Green and her writers expand the horror metaphor to dance with other social themes – feminism, sexism, patriarchal imposition and trauma – while also depicting how white supremacy asserts itself even within the relatively safe space of Tic and Leti’s close-knit community and their own families.

The main story may hinge on Atticus, but “Lovecraft Country” gives each of its women their individual star turns, Leti most of all. Smollett already announced herself as a star on the rise in “Underground” and the films she done since, including the feminist grenade of “Birds of Prey.” Her smoldering presence in this series deserves to lead to more work in premium projects.

She’s an extraordinary force whose work complements Mosaku’s might and Aunjanue Ellis’s glowing performance as George’s wife Hippolyta, a woman forced to swallow her career ambitions. Lee’s chilly rendition of Christina, a character Green created for the series, gives them an engaging adversary to contend with, and given where Tic’s mission takes everyone she lends a wild streak to all the grimness.

Pulp science fiction, the kind that Tic loves and influences “Lovecraft Country,” is defined by heroes with hideous origin stories who go on to have fantastic voyages. Tic is forced to defend one such hero, John Carter, when another travel companion asks about the book he’s reading, “A Princess of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Carter, Tic explains, was a Confederate captain who finds himself mysteriously transported to the Red Planet, and his fellow traveler questions how a Black man can square himself with reading a story about a man who fought for slavery.

He replies that stories are like people, that their author doesn’t necessarily make them perfect, and it’s up to the reader to try to cherish them and overlook their flaws. He owns his love of these stories, and later on his and George’s knowledge of the rules of these world’s help them survive. But even in this acknowledging simple joy, Tic is obligated to haggle with his own conscience and reconcile with the ugliness.

Fantasy-loving Gen Xers are more likely to associate Lovecraft with creating the Cthulhu mythos that helped spark the 1980s and ’90s “satanic panic” than to recognize the enthusiastic racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia central to his work, formalized in his writing of one of the vilest poems in existence.

“Lovecraft Country” makes sure we don’t forget that part of Lovecraft’s legacy by expressly mentioning the author’s name in association with that poem, even saying its full, offensive title out loud. But the protagonists’ resilience and defiant bravery shout down that darkness, and their adventures stand in rebuke of structural forces aligned against them, whether manmade or supernatural.

All of this lends a giddy satisfaction to the experience of this voyage with Tic, Leti and the rest, and at reveling in watching men and women that a disgraceful elder deity of pulp literature considered his lessers overcome his monstrosities to become the champions of their own story. We can’t call them fearless, because no sane marginalized person in this society is fully that. Instead they’re something more compelling: they’re imaginative and resourceful in facing the world as it is, with all of its claws and teeth exposed, and barreling down its backroads nevertheless.

“Lovecraft Country” premieres Sunday, Aug.16 at 9 p.m. on HBO.

From universal healthcare to permanent vote-by-mail, the case for making pandemic policy permanent

The sudden onset of the pandemic prompted governments worldwide to spring into action with emergency policy changes — for instance, the CARES Act in the United States. Most of these emergency measures were humanitarian in nature — related to self-preservation, and protecting the masses. And as many commentators have noted, these kinds of COVID-19-related social measures provide us a prime opportunity to make things better after the pandemic is over.

But how, exactly, and why, should we do so? I want to offer a new answer.

First, I should note that there is broad agreement about the kinds of things that governments (and people) worldwide should be doing — general, obvious humane political measures. Specifically, there are five fundamental things that every country should be doing during the pandemic:

  1. While the virus is raging out of control, non-essential workers should not be allowed to go to work. Instead, we should be supporting them to stay at home.

  2. Nobody should have to pay for healthcare for testing or treatment for the novel coronavirus.

  3. We should put in place postal voting, to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to vote safely at this time.

  4. We should give individuals and small businesses rent breaks or reductions, or prohibit evictions, at this time.

  5. The wealthiest companies should be switching their production lines to things that are so badly needed but in short supply right now.

I hope you will agree that these claims are all highly plausible.

Now, for a surprising claim: the reasons for which we should be doing these things for the sake of most people during the pandemic apply equally in normal times, to assist and protect a significant subset of us (including many poorer citizens and socio-economically disadvantaged). These reasons are exactly the same in kind. If you accept that the former exist, you must also accept that the latter exist.

Start with (1). Why shouldn’t non-essential workers be working right now? It is because of the health risks posed to them (as well as to others whom they might infect) by going to work right now. It is unacceptable that these people be exposed to such a risk of severe illness, death, or long-term health complications that might reduce their life quality in the long run or result in early death.

But now, many workers in normal times face equivalent risks from the work they do over the course of their lifetimes. While few face exposure to a killer virus, or even to much of a chance of dying on the job, many have significantly increased risks of illness in the long run. These risks are due to, for example, prolonged standing or sitting, staring at screens, stress, boredom, lack of opportunity for creative expression or autonomy, repeated exposure to contaminants, job insecurity, and so on. The health conditions they face include hypertension, heart disease, cancer, musculoskeletal disorders, and mental illness.

If it is unacceptable to allow most people during the pandemic to risk their health by going to work, then it is also unacceptable to allow so many workers in normal times to face equivalent risks by working their normal jobs.

The solution, of course, is not to keep the latter workers at home in normal times, but simply to improve their working lives—say, by allowing them to work fewer hours for better pay, or in better conditions.

Turn now to (2). Why shouldn’t people today have to pay for healthcare due to COVID-19? Part of it is that the virus is so infectious and thus hard to avoid. And part of it is that the treatments are, for most people, prohibitively expensive. If people had to pay for these treatments right now, many wouldn’t seek medical care when they should do so. It is clearly inhumane to have a system that deters people from seeking treatment right now because of the high costs involved.

Then, in normal times, when there is no killer virus circulating (at least, not in wealthier countries), there are countless other health conditions that affect people more or less indiscriminately (through no fault of their own) and which are for many people prohibitively expensive to treat. It follows that in normal times, we should be providing free healthcare to people for these conditions. To fail to do so is inhumane in precisely the same way that it is inhumane not to treat people who are sickened with COVID-19.

Turn now to (3). Why should everyone have access to vote-by-mail ballots at this time? It is because it is unacceptably burdensome right now to go to polling stations.

But this is exactly the same sort of situation that a large subset of the citizens (in countries like the US, at least) face with respect to voting in normal times. They have to work, or look after children, or cannot drive, etc. So, in normal times, for the exact same reason, we should be making voting far easier for these people than it is—say, by increasing the number of polling stations, helping to drive people to stations, or improving access to postal ballots.

Turn now to (4). Why should we give rent breaks or prohibit evictions during the pandemic? It is because the reason so many people cannot pay rent is that they have suffered job losses or illness through no fault of their own.

But now, in normal times, it is also often the case that people cannot pay rent because of job losses or illness that is no fault of their own. We should assist them, too, then. This is not to say they should be allowed to stay on, rent-free, indefinitely. But greater assistance should be given.

Turn now to (5). Why must companies help out in this time? It is because of the dire threats people are facing.

But, as I’ve noted, many people in normal times are facing equivalently dire threats. These threats are partly workplace-related over the course of their lifetimes. But they go beyond this. People on low incomes are much less able to afford healthy food, housing that is near to green spaces, leisure time or holidays, good quality healthcare that allows them to get early diagnoses or treatments for health conditions, and so on. All of these things greatly increase one’s chance of bad health problems later in life.

Just as large private companies should be marshalling their resources now during the pandemic to contribute to preventing bad health outcomes for people, they should be doing much more in normal times to do so as well. How? Simply by paying more taxes to help reduce poverty.

In summary: in normal times, life is, for a subset of the population, relevantly like how the pandemic is for most people today. In a pandemic, it is easy to see that governments and big companies should be protecting and assisting those who are experiencing great hardship. This helps us to see that they should be doing so in normal times as well, given that the reasons to do so are of the exact same kind.

If we do not improve the status quo post-pandemic, then we escape the pandemic only to leave many of our people still trapped within something like it.

House Democrat rejects DNC platform without Medicare for All

Congressman Ro Khanna, co-chair of the California delegation to the Democratic National Convention, announced in an op-ed for Common Dreams Thursday that he is voting against the 2020 Democratic platform over its failure to endorse Medicare for All, joining what has become a significant delegate revolt against the party’s refusal to commit to guaranteeing healthcare as a human right even amid a global pandemic.

“History teaches us that the Democratic Party has sometimes faced an issue so great that it alone should be the yardstick for measuring the wisdom of voting for or against the platform,” writes Khanna, pointing to fights over civil rights and the Vietnam war in the party’s 1948 and 1968 platforms, respectively.

“In my view, 2020 presents us with another such issue,” adds Khanna, who served as national co-chair of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) 2020 presidential campaign. “I believe that moving away from a profit-based healthcare system is the moral issue of our time. And in the final analysis, because of that belief, I could not vote for a platform that lacks a clear statement supporting Medicare for All.”

“I will be voting ‘No’ on the platform because when we say that healthcare is a human right, we must truly mean it — and fight for it,” the California Democrat continues. “I believe if we remain stuck on such concepts as ‘affordable’ when talking about solutions to healthcare accessibility, we are badly constrained inside a limited debate.”

Coming from the head of the nation’s largest state delegation to the Democratic convention, Khanna’s announcement has the potential to substantially boost the ranks of the more than 750 delegates who are publicly opposing the Democratic platform over its exclusion of Medicare for All.

Voting on the Democratic platform began earlier this month, and the 750+ delegates — including some delegates for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden — cast their votes against the aspirational document earlier this week.

“While we think it’s vital that we elect Joe Biden to stave the destruction that has occurred these past three disastrous years under President Trump and his administration, we will work to ensure that we hold our party accountable to create a country which works for all of us, not just the few,” more than two dozen North Carolina delegates said in a statement Tuesday announcing their no votes on the Democratic platform.

Khanna told Common Dreams that he is “inspired by the delegates who are voting no,” calling them “the force and energy behind our party.”

“They are the future,” said Khanna. “I stand in solidarity with them. We will prevail.”

As Common Dreams reported, the DNC Platform Committee late last month overwhelmingly rejected an amendment by longtime single-payer advocate Michael Lighty — a Sanders delegate from California — that would have added a Medicare for All plank to the Democratic platform. 

In its current form (pdf), the platform includes a nod to “those who support a Medicare for All approach” but does not endorse a single-payer system. The vote against the Medicare for All amendment came just two weeks after a study by advocacy group Families USA found that the Covid-19 pandemic has kicked at least 5.4 million Americans off their insurance.

“Covid-19 makes Medicare for All an urgent moral imperative,” Khanna told Common Dreams. “Millions have lost their jobs. They shouldn’t lose their healthcare. After this crisis, it should be self evident that a person’s health care should not depend on their job.”

In his op-ed Thursday morning, Khanna stresses that he plans to “do everything possible to help end the disastrous presidency of Donald Trump, and that means emphatically supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

Khanna also notes that there is much “progress embodied in the platform,” including its support for a $15 federal minimum wage.

But, Khanna writes, “I will cast my one vote of ‘No’ for every person who has had to ration medication to afford food, or who has lost a loved one because a procedure that a doctor said was needed was not covered in an insurance plan.”

“I want my party, the Democratic Party, to address this moral problem with clarity of moral purpose,” Khanna concludes. “We are now long past the time when our country should face the cruel injustice of a system that denies healthcare as a human right. And when we face it, we can change it — with Medicare for All.”

Asked what it will take to get Medicare for All onto the legislative agenda under a Biden presidency, Khanna told Common Dreams that “ultimately, politicians do not make history but committed movements do.”

“This is the time the American people are open to the need for guaranteeing healthcare for everyone,” said Khanna. “If we continue to mobilize, we can secure a vote in the House and the Senate and send a bill to Joe Biden’s desk.”

 

What is QAnon? A not-so-brief introduction to the conspiracy theory that’s eating America

I’ve been involved in the wild world of conspiracy theories for 24 years now, ever since I published my first article in the pages of Paranoia Magazine in the spring of 1996 when I was 24 years old. What most impressed me about Paranoia was the anarchy of information available within its pages. It wasn’t a right-wing conspiracy magazine. It wasn’t a left-wing conspiracy magazine. It didn’t even exist between these two poles. Its editorial mission (or non-mission) was beholden to values (or non-values) that lay far beyond these limiting parameters, a dedication to cataloging and analyzing the extremes of fringe beliefs from multiple points of view. As Marshall McLuhan once said, “A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.“ The editors of Paranoia dedicated themselves to not having a point of view. It was the exact opposite of propaganda. By its very nature, propaganda excludes any information that contradicts or undermines the message the dedicated propagandist is intent on disseminating.

Conspiracy theories have always been used by what we now call “persuasion engineers” as tools of mass indoctrination. A good conspiracy theory that seems plausible and frightening enough can be worth more than a thousand well-reasoned stump speeches.

In my first book, “Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form,” I broke conspiracy theories down into five distinct categories: 1) Insanity, 2) Disinformation, 3) Misinformation, 4) Satire, and 5) Legitimate Research. Some theories manage to merge two or more categories into one. Only on very rare occasions do such theories manage to combine all five categories. The most recent — and arguably most impactful — strain of this hybrid form of conspiracy-mongering first emerged in 2017, promulgated by an anonymous 4chan poster known only as “Q” — or “QAnon.” You’ve been hearing a lot about this lately, most likely. At least one QAnon supporter is almost certain to be elected to Congress in November, and devotees of this particular conspiracy theory are eagerly supporting the re-election of Donald Trump. 

The average person, who has not spent the past couple of decades studying the origins of conspiracy theories (a reasonable choice, I might add), would probably not recognize the origins of most of the quasi-surreal elements that make up the convoluted QAnon narrative.

Earlier this year, in March, I was talking to a friend about COVID-19 and the national lockdown. He’s 10 years older than me and lives in a small town in the Midwest. I live in Long Beach, California. While chatting with him on the phone about all the unexpected difficulties that have arisen from teaching my English classes online, he suddenly volunteered the opinion that COVID-19 would be a positive development in 2020. 

“Yeah?” I asked. “How so?” 

He proceeded to tell me, with complete sincerity, that after Trump is re-elected in 2020, he will deliver “free energy” to the people of America. Not only that, he’s also going to abolish the income tax. Right now, at this very moment, United States troops have been deployed underground where they’re busy “cleaning out” covert subterranean tunnels, “saving hundreds of children from satanic slaves,” and kicking out the “black hats.” Without skipping a beat, my friend then insisted that news of this game-changing development would be “coming out” soon. 

“It’s a great thing,” he told me in measured tones. “Trump will have to use the Emergency Broadcast System to give this news to the American people because the media keeps lying and social media like Twitter and YouTube are censoring and deleting videos that report reality the way it actually is.” 

Furthermore, my friend said in tones of absolute certainty, Trump supporters working behind the scenes (referred to by my friend as the “white hats”) had recently wrested control of the entire Google corporation from devil worshippers, which is why you could now retrieve “accurate information” from that particular search engine. 

“Uh … where are you getting all this?” I asked.

He seemed reluctant to tell me. At first he hemmed and hawed, then muttered, “Oh … just these message boards.” 

“Well … what message boards?” He wouldn’t say. “Could you send me the links?” I asked.

“There are no links,” he replied.

“No links? What is this, the dark web or something?”

He chuckled. “Kind of.”

When I pushed further and asked for more details about this “accurate information,” in a conspiratorial whisper he urged me to search the word “Adrenochrome” in Google.

*  *  *

I first read Hunter S. Thompson’s classic nonfiction book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” when I was 18. I’ve taught the book in my English composition classes at Cal State Long Beach, off and on, since 2002. I’m well aware that Thompson’s alter ego, Raoul Duke, encounters Adrenochrome when Dr. Gonzo (Duke’s speed-fueled attorney) suggests that he ingest the drug because it “makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer.” He also warns Duke, “You’ll go completely crazy if you take too much.” Duke claims that the hallucinogenic effects of Adrenochrome work best when the substance is harvested from the adrenaline glands of living human bodies. 

Even at the tender age of 18, I knew that this inspired idea was one of Thompson’s many phantasmagorical asides in an otherwise journalistic narrative. Thompson was famous for these detours into Munchausen-level jabberwocky, like the time he claimed that Sen. Ed Muskie was taking “massive doses” of a psychedelic drug called Ibogaine during the 1972 presidential campaign, a hilarious (and entirely false) tale related in Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.” 

On the commentary track that accompanies the 2003 Criterion DVD release of Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Gilliam confirms that Adrenochrome is “a totally invented nonsense-drug that Hunter [made up].” Gilliam follows this with an eerily prescient statement that almost foreshadows the introduction of the drug into QAnon’s ever-expanding mythology: “This scene had such an effect on so many people that afterwards I was hearing kids say, ‘Oh, I’ve had Adrenochrome!’ They were talking about where they get it. ‘Oh, there’s a guy who can get me Adrenochrome.’ I just love how the Big Lie always works. It worked for Hitler, and it can work for people like us [i.e., artists and storytellers].” 

It appears to be working for QAnon as well, since “totally invented nonsense” has a way of becoming facts in the minds of the gullible, the semi-informed, the frustrated and the insane.

So I did exactly as my friend suggested. I googled the word “Adrenochrome.” Keep in mind that my friend insisted that Trump-supporting “white hats” had taken control of Google, so I would receive only accurate information from that search engine when inputting this particular word.

The first result that popped up was Emily Writes’ March 17, 2020, article in Spinoff entitled “Down the Rabbit Hole With the COVID-19 Conspiracy Theorists,” which begins as follows:

Today I fell down a rabbit hole of rabid Trump supporters who are convinced COVID-19 is both a hoax and also Trump’s greatest moment as president. He has acted decisively apparently, while also knowing that COVID-19 is a Hollywood Liberal Elite cover-up …. Adrenochrome is a drug for the liberal elite of Hollywood made from actual human brain stem containing hormones from the adrenal gland. Hillary Clinton manufactures this drug by torturing children in a pizza shop …. Tom Hanks is addicted to Adrenochrome and he caught COVID-19 from the latest batch of tainted Adrenochrome that came through Celine Dion who is a high priestess from the Church of Satan. She is well-versed in poison as she’s been lacing her children’s clothing line with a chemical that makes our children “gender neutral.” Tom Hanks signalled to the Hollywood Liberal Elite Cabal DeepState in his Golden Globes acceptance speech that there would be a shortage of Adrenochrome. Ellen has closed her studio audience because she’s addicted as well. 

After reading this article in its entirety, I emailed my friend and pointed out that when I put his advice to the test and Googled “Adrenochrome,” the first article that popped up sardonically tore the entire conspiracy theory to shreds. How did this jibe with the notion that Trump-supporting “white hats” had total control over Google?

I received no direct answer to this question. I was told, instead, to search the name “Rachel Chandler.” This would somehow answer all my questions. Bypassing those pesky “white hats” at Google, I decided to use a different search engine called Millionshort, and almost immediately found a March 22, 2019, Daily Dot article entitled “QAnon Is Attacking a Random Woman in a Disturbing and Dangerous Way,” which detailed how QAnon posts had become strangely focused on a photographer and casting director named Rachel Chandler, who is part of the newspaper-owning Chandler family but has no visible political footprint and is not otherwise a public figure:

Q made a seemingly endless stream of posts referencing Chandler, insinuating that she took a 2017 picture of Bill Clinton and registered child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (whose light prison sentence handed down by current Trump cabinet official Alexander Acosta is currently under investigation) hanging out together in a pool.

Beyond that, QAnon accused Chandler of “procuring” “girls” for Epstein, having her photography studio funded by elite Satanists who used it for rituals, flaunting Epstein’s “sex and torture room victims” with her pictures, having a link to a still-unexplained (yet supposedly horrific) event at the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood ….

To be clear, Chandler has not been accused of any wrongdoing by any law enforcement agency …. There’s no evidence she took the pool picture that QAnon claims proves she’s linked to Epstein, and it doesn’t even feature him — though it does feature George Nader, the convicted pedophile who’s providing evidence in the Mueller investigation regarding President Donald Trump’s link to meetings with Russian officials.

And yet Chandler’s name has been dragged into the conspiracy so completely that the first page of a Google search shows nothing but QAnon-related content, while five of the top six videos that come up when searching her name are by QAnon acolytes.

None of the many videos and speculations posted by QAnon and his numerous supporters provide any definitive links between Chandler and Jeffrey Epstein, yet somehow this red herring has received intense focus from thousands of amateur detectives, most of whom no doubt have a sincere desire to get to “the truth.” 

One might argue, as does Emily Writes in her above-mentioned Spinoff article, that when “people feel like they have no control over their lives — like in the midst of a global pandemic — the comforting certainty of conspiracy theories seems increasingly attractive.” One might also argue that racism, xenophobia and (perhaps most deadly of all) neophobia fuel the interest in such theories. But I think these explanations, while partially valid, ignore the heart-meat core of the real issue plaguing America at this moment.

The real problem is that genuine conspiracies are unfolding before our eyes every day, but when the mainstream media avoids reporting on such conspiracies — for a whole variety of reasons, the main one being that it’s simply easier to get paid rewriting corporate press releases and slapping one’s byline on the end product than by actually putting one’s reputation on the line tackling a plethora of inconvenient truths — it becomes necessary for average people to fill in the gaps on their own. These people may be ignorant, but they’re not stupid. They know instinctively that they’re being victimized by blatant lies every day. So, with no training whatsoever, they perform “research” on their own by scouring through a multiplicity of such “reliable” online sources as 4chan, 8chan, 8kun and Reddit.

As award-winning science fiction writer Cory Doctorow wrote in May of this year:

[W]hy is it so easy to find people who want to believe in conspiracies[?] My answer: because so many of the things that have traumatized so many people ARE conspiracies.

The opioid epidemic was a conspiracy between rich families like the Sacklers and regulators who rotate in and out of industry. The 737 crisis was caused by Boeing’s conspiracy to cut corners and aviation regulators’ conspiracy to allow aerospace to regulate itself.

Senators conspire to liquidate their positions ahead of coronavirus lockdown, well-heeled multinationals conspire to get 94.5% of the “small business” PPP fund, Big Tech conspires to fix wages with illegal collusion while fast food franchises do the same with noncompetes.

In a world of constant real conspiracy scandals that destroy lives and the planet, conspiracy theories take on real explanatory power. 

Everything Doctorow says here is true; however, we rarely apply such clinical observations to people we know personally. Often, we use such explanations to dismiss the cockeyed beliefs of peculiar strangers encountered online. Before March of this year, I had known my friend to be a rational person with a fair amount of real-world experience and common sense, not someone who would be swayed easily by illogical rhetoric or over-the-top nonsense. On the other hand, I hadn’t been in close contact with him since the last presidential election and the birth of QAnon, who emerged from internet obscurity in November of 2017.  This was, coincidentally, the same time period when Trump’s approval ratings had reached a “near-record low.” (The full effect of QAnon on Trump’s approval ratings since November of 2017 has not been studied in any substantial way.) 

After about four weeks had passed, I emailed my friend and asked him a few more questions about QAnon, trying to understand how anyone could believe so many unsubstantiated claims with so little skepticism. Surely, I thought, there must be something at least halfway reasonable to back up these outrageous statements. I needed to know the source so I could evaluate the claims myself. On May 3, I sent him the following email:

I’m trying to wrap my head around this whole QAnon thing, so maybe you can help me. I have a few questions.

Why would the United States military be “cleaning out” covert underground bases when they’re the ones who built the bases in the first place? Who else but the U.S. military would be in charge of massive underground bases built on U.S. soil? 

Why would Trump be interested in implementing free energy? Isn’t he trying to revive the coal industry? It would seem to me that free energy would undermine all of his business interests.

According to most reliable sources, censorship on Google seems to be alive and well at the moment, which is nothing new. (In my experience, I’ve found that millionshort.com is a far better search engine tool.) 

I’m not certain that “white hats” exist in our current political situation. Perhaps “black hats,” “slightly-less-black hats,” and “gray hats” would be more accurate terms?

Didn’t the whole concept of “Adrenochrome” being harvested from live human beings originate with Hunter S. Thompson — as a satirical concept? I always thought that passage in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was intended as a joke. Is QAnon claiming that Hunter S. Thompson had “insider knowledge” when he wrote the book?

The next day, my friend responded to my questions with another question: “You’re a researcher. Why are you playing D.U.M.B.?” That’s it. Nothing else.

Since I had no idea why he had written the word “dumb” as an acronym, I replied, “I’m not playing ‘D.U.M.B.’ I honestly don’t know the answers to those questions. I’m trying to understand the proposed scenario. If you have the answers, I’d love to hear them.”

Later that day, he wrote me back and explained that “D.U.M.B.” stood for “Deep Underground Military Bases.” The explanation rendered the first message even more confusing than before. (How could I possibly be playing “Deep Underground Military Bases”? I resisted the urge to ask him to elucidate further, as I suspected the response would just add to my befuddlement.) He sent me several links as well, despite the fact that a month earlier he had insisted that there were no links he could possibly send me. He never bothered to explain how or why this situation had changed during the past four weeks. 

Inevitably, the first link led me to QAnon’s posts. Most of these posts were so cryptic, they didn’t answer any of my questions. 

Addressing my question about Trump delivering free energy to the American people, my friend responded, “President Trump’s uncle John was asked by the F.B.I. to investigate Nikola Tesla’s papers.” This terse sentence was then followed by a link to an Aug. 2, 2017, post at Heavy.com entitled “John Trump, Donald’s Uncle: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.” Right after the link, my friend wrote, “And you wonder where I come up with free energy for the nation in the future.” 

Nothing in the Heavy.com post suggested that Donald Trump was working on delivering free energy to the United States during his second term in office. 

Attempting to address one of my other questions, he wrote, “If Google’s censorship is on, then why, when you search ‘Rachel Chandler,’ you get all of this information about her?” 

Of course this is a perfect example of “circular reasoning.” Everything QAnon says about Rachel Chandler is true because, when you Google “Rachel Chandler,” all of QAnon’s posts pop up. Therefore, everything QAnon said about Rachel Chandler is true. (If A, then B. If B, then A. Or perhaps I should say, “If Q, then Q. If Q, then Q.”)

To answer my other questions, he sent me links to three different YouTube videos, one of which dealt with the untold story of the Deep Underground Military Bases. 

The first video (entitled “The Underground War, Happening Now”) features a “Christian Patriot” named “Rick B2T” in conversation with an anonymous fellow calling himself “Gene.” I subjected myself to 38 minutes and 16 seconds of unsubstantiated rumors about U.S. Christian soldiers battling demon-worshipping members of the Illuminati in deep underground bases. 

This directed me to an even more convoluted YouTube video entitled “1 of 2 — Best of ‘Underground War Details! Part 8’ — Gene Decode — B2T Show,” in which I learned that Gene had decided to risk his life going public with these dangerous secrets because, one fateful day, God had contacted Gene and expressly told him, “This information has to come out!” At this point, Gene teamed up with an anonymous former “Canadian military officer” to reveal the disturbing truths about these “Deep Underground Military Bases” where (and this is a direct quote) “animal and human sacrifices nourish the bowels of creatures — in other words, we’re talking demonic, terrible things that inhabited Earth long before Man arrived.” 

After this startling revelation, Gene elaborated on the scenario further: “The New World Order is in the final stages — that is, they were, until Trump came along — the final stages of their satanic plan to reduce the current world population by 80 to 90 percent […]. If it weren’t for Trump, most of us would not be listening to anything right now.” [Gene chuckles darkly.] “Instead of the Word of Christ, you’d be listening to the angels.”

As of May 28, only 10 days after being posted, this video had already received 33,105 views and only 34 dislikes. I’ve seen YouTube videos of random kids opening birthday presents get more dislikes than that. The Blessed to Teach YouTube channel has 92,600 subscribers. 

If it’s not clear to you yet, let me spell this out: Even as you’re reading these words, there are thousands of “Christian Patriots” living in the United States who sincerely believe that Donald Trump saved them from being eaten by demons when he entered the White House. This is not hyperbole. This is a literal interpretation of what they believe. 

This is the mentality you’re dealing with. No amount of logic, common sense or reason can combat such convoluted delusions. These people are clearly the product of incessant brainwashing, and yet they think everyone else in the country is mind-controlled to such an extreme degree that people who do not support Trump are either A) soulless demon-worshippers or B) poor unfortunates incapable of understanding the obvious truths being unveiled by geniuses like “Rick B2T” and his pal “Gene.” On Nov. 18, 1978, hundreds of “True Believers” in Guyana held similar beliefs, only seconds before they literally drank the Kool-Aid.

You might assume that most of Rick’s viewers are hardcore evangelicals dwelling in a deep pit in the Ozarks. But my friend wasn’t raised a hardcore Christian and had never expressed such views in my presence over the course of many, many years. Something happened to change him radically between the emergence of QAnon in 2017 and the advent of the national lockdown in 2020. Even a regular Joe can be swayed by nonsense with a fair amount of ease.

Nonsense has always been an essential part of the American landscape, from Salem witch hunts in the 1690s to New Age UFO cults in the 1990s, but QAnon takes this tradition of nonsense to a whole new level.

Next installment: The roots of QAnon: From 1940s science fiction to 19th-century anti-Masonic propaganda

Kamala Harris is already helping Biden’s campaign with key voting groups, according to new poll

Released on Friday morning, August 14, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found former Vice President Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump by 11% — which, for Biden, was an improvement over an NPR/PBS/Marist poll from June that found him ahead by 8%. The new poll, however, was conducted largely before Biden’s Tuesday, August 11 announcement that he had chosen Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate. And an Axios/SurveyMonkey poll conducted after Biden’s announcement offers some insights on how U.S. voters are responding to his choice.

Axios’ Margaret Talev reports, “Kamala Harris is accomplishing what Joe Biden’s campaign hoped she would in her first two days as his running mate: doing no harm, while exciting parts of the base with whom Biden needs the most help.” And according to Jon Cohen, chief survey officer for SurveyMonkey, “The initial, modestly positive take on Harris is sure to encourage Democrats.”

The poll, conducted August 11-12, asked: “Are you more or less likely to consider voting for Biden with Kamala Harris as his running mate?” And among “all Americans,” 56% responded that it made “no difference” — while 22% said that it made them “more likely” to vote for Biden and 19% said that it made them “less likely” to vote for the former vice president.

Axios/SurveyMonkey broke the poll down by specific demographics, from “white men and women” to “black women.” Among black women — a crucial part of the Democratic base — 48% said that it made “no difference,” while 43% said that it made them “more likely” to vote for Biden and only 7% said that it made them “less likely” to vote for him.

The poll found that 59% of “white men and women” said that Biden’s Harris pick made “no difference,” while 23% said that it made them “less likely” to vote for Biden and 16% said that it made them “more likely” to vote for him.

Axios/SurveyMonkey divided Democrats into “moderate/conservative” and “liberal/very liberal” categories, and both were generally supportive of having Harris on the Democratic presidential ticket: 48% of “moderate/conservative” Democrats said that it made “no difference,” while 47% said they would be “more likely” to vote for Biden because of Harris and only 5% said they would be “less likely” to. And 56% of “liberal” or “very liberal” Democrats said it made “no difference,” while 40% went with “more likely” and only 4% went with “less likely.”

So, in other words, picking Harris as his running mate doesn’t appear to be hurting Biden with either the centrist Barack Obama/Bill Clinton/Kyrsten Sinema wing of the Democratic Party or the progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Pramila Jayapal wing of the Democratic Party.

Talev notes, however, “One area of relative weakness for Harris appears to be younger voters, who are effectively split over whether she makes them more or less likely to vote for Biden — though around six in 10 say it makes no difference.”

How quarantine has inspired new amateur astronomers (some who wouldn’t mind an alien abduction)

In early April, after nearly a month of being isolated in her cramped studio apartment, Kae Wood opened a package that changed the entire course of her summer. It was a Celestron 70mm portable telescope, a gift from her sci-fi loving dad who was concerned she would spend “quarantine just staring at screens.” 

Wood left the telescope in the box for a few days, but on a particularly temperature Memphis evening, she spent about an hour assembling it on her small strip of balcony while watching YouTube videos about how to focus the lens. 

“I hadn’t ever used a telescope before,” Wood said. “So once I initially got the lens in focus, I was just blown away by how the stars look, like ‘sparkle’ doesn’t begin to describe it. After that first night, I realized I wanted to take some time to actually figure out what I was looking at.” 

Wood started by locating some of what she calls the “big-name” constellations: Orion (and his belt), Ursa Major and Minor, Virgo, and Canis Major. As the novel coronavirus pandemic wore on, she would actually look forward to the point in the evening when the sky was beginning to darken enough that she could pull out her telescope and listen to music while making notes in her astronomy notebook. 

Then she began taking short trips out of the city and away from the light pollution, finding empty fields and campsites where she could spend a few hours observing. 

“It’s an activity that I can do all by myself, but there are enough resources online that I don’t feel totally alone in these weird times,” she said.

Woods isn’t the only person to turn to amateur astronomy and stargazing amid the pandemic. As the New York Times reported on Aug. 4, many outdoor retailers are reporting an increased demand — often resulting in backorders — for outdoor equipment as more and more Americans are adjusting to what life with social distancing requirements looks like. 

Inflatable pools, bicycles, and camping gear were all hot summer items. But some are turning their attention to the what will soon be autumn skies. Downloads are up for apps like SkySafari, Starmap and Pocket Universe, some national parks and community groups are beginning to plan socially distanced star gazing outings. According to Brian Berg, the president of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York, more people are interested in joining groups like his. 

“I would say that we have absolutely seen a significant uptick in inquiries as far as membership goes, and as far as inquiries about how to use a telescope,” Berg said. “All the things kind of related to people being introduced to astronomy — there’s absolutely been a very significant uptick in the numbers.” 

Berg said that while the quarantine lifestyle certainly has something to do with those increased inquiries, it’s also been a really big year for astronomy and space-based discoveries. 

In late March, Comet NEOWISE was discovered by astronomers during the NEOWISE mission of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer space telescope. The comet is visible to the naked eye (though binoculars or a telescope will give stargazers a better view), but won’t return to our skies for another 6,800 years.

“One of the things that we were able to tell is that [Comet NEOWISE] did not come from another part of the universe, which means that it’s actually from our solar system, which means that it actually has the remnants of the beginning of our solar system in it,” Berg said. “So I think different news outlets were reporting on these different parts of it and that really got people’s antennas up.”

He also points to coverage of  SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch and the organization’s plan to put 25,000 satellites in orbit (and the subsequent news that Amazon also plans to put satellites into orbit), as well as the Mars 2020 rover mission by NASA’s Mars Exploration Program that launched on July 30. 

“Talk of Mars is finally realistic,” Berg said. “Not, you know, like the comic books I read when I was a kid, but in the next decade or two, we’ll be going to Mars. It sounds like science fiction, but that is real talk.” 

He thinks the coverage of these developments, plus the increased amount of free time at home, has perhaps encouraged people who had a passing interest in astronomy to investigate the topic more. That was the case for Stephen Dennison, a bar manager and beverage consultant based in Louisville, Ky.

“I’ve always been a little bit interested in astronomy, but at the end of the day, you know, who has the time?” Dennison said. “Especially for these types of subjects, I think a lot of us put it on the backburner because we are busy with our lifestyles, with work. Then all of the sudden, the world goes on hold, and you’re like, ‘Wait a minute. I have time.'” 

Dennison said that the coverage of  SpaceX and Mars 2020 is what really kickstarted his desire to learn more. He’s been spending time watching “How the Universe Works” and “NASA 360” on Hulu, and listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Star Talk,” all of which he describes as accessible resources. 

“If you just think about it, two generations ago, we hadn’t even been to the moon yet,” he said. “Now we’re exploring the outer rims of our own solar system, starting to look for Planet Nine and other planets. Not that I necessarily want to get off this rock, but it is that kind of sense of exploration that is fun to watch.” 

Dennison’s comment about the potential appeal of leaving Earth someday is something that underlies Kae Wood’s newfound interest in astronomy. She said that since the world around her as she knows it feels so bizarre, it’s a nice reminder that in the scheme of the universe, our planet is just a tiny part. 

She and her dad often talk about their mutual desire to look up through their telescopes and catch a glimpse of something otherworldly. “I mean, things on our planet are such garbage right now,” Wood said. “If I looked up, saw an alien and they wanted to beam me up —  I wouldn’t exactly say no.”

But in the meantime, she said that she’ll keep looking to the stars for comfort.

Silicon Valley has been quietly selling ineffective tech “solutions” to police departments

As Black Lives Matter protests continue to grip the country, some of the world’s largest corporations have made public shows of support for the nascent movement against racist police violence. Nowhere is this more evident than in Silicon Valley, whose companies are renowned for progressive values and workplaces. Yet despite its veneer of progressiveness, many of tech’s giants have a long history of collaborating with police departments around the country, selling them so-called tech “solutions” that, studies show, make them less effective in their communities and more prone to violence. That these corporations have an interest in seeing bloated police budgets remain that way is at odds with their progressive image.

Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Axon and others use aggressive marketing tactics and rely on a lack of police department savvy around technology adoption to push untested tech products. While large police forces like the New York Police Department employ rigorous technology standards and community board advisors, many smaller police departments lack such resources. The end result has been increased market share and lucrative contracts for Big Tech at the expense of public safety, as police officers spend more time online and less time with communities..

“There is a myth that additional technology will make policing more efficient and effective,” says Malkia Devich-Cyril, the founding director and senior fellow of Media Justice. “This is wrong. It is just not true.”

Tech “solutions” are making cops worse at their jobs

The products being sold by tech companies are not making policing better. Instead, they’re giving police ineffectual technology on the assumption that it will reduce police man-hours. However, technology also reduces time spent in communities. Dave Maass, an investigative researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, shared that police departments are doing less community outreach because they are policing from a computer. This results in less legwork, fewer investigations, and increased use of untested algorithms which can result in faulty arrests.

As a 2015 report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, Major County Sheriffs Association and Federal Bureau of Investigation notes:

The real imperative in creating stability, trust, and peace in our most challenged and troubled communities and neighborhoods is to engage networks of disaffected teens and young adults who are both the victims and perpetrators of a disproportionate amount of violent crime. The reality of policing is that we have not devoted enough time and resources to building relationships with the people with whom we interact the most: disenfranchised, marginalized communities where jobs, hope, and stability are in short supply and violence, guns, drugs, and despair are all too common.

When police sit behind computers they spend less time in neighborhoods. This is aggravated by the fact that these new technology tools do not just reduce proven tactics to increase peace and stability — they subvert them.

Facial recognition technology is a global market worth $3.5 billion in 2019, and it is expected to reach almost $10 billion by 2025. Adoption is largely driven by police and border control agencies. Yet facial recognition technology is often faulty and erroneous, the combination of which often results in the imprisonment of wrongly convicted citizens. Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. And, Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities. The American Civil Liberties Union and artificial intelligence researchers note that “the threat of computerized misidentification isn’t just an academic error, but a potentially ruinous one that could improperly influence police officers prior to an encounter, or even cause them to seek a search warrant, by presenting them with a false criminal history.”

Video surveillance tools like Amazon-owned Ring, which are generally sold to consumers but have relationships with law enforcement, also do not live up to their hype. Ring promises to “make neighborhoods safer” by deterring and helping to solve crimes, citing its own research that says an installation of its doorbell cameras reduces burglaries by more than 50 percent. But an NBC News Investigation with 40 law enforcement agencies in eight states who partnered with Ring for at least three months found that there is little concrete evidence to support the claim. And, a review of public crime data and a previously unreported study show that the evidence the doorbells slash crime is far shakier than the company would have cities and consumers believe. In fact, the only study carried out independently of Ring found that neighborhoods without Ring doorbells were actually less likely to suffer break-ins than those with them.

Instead, it could be argued that the Ring does not improve policing but does increase community fear. As Michael Guariglia of EFF notes, “Companies aren’t selling safety. They are marketing fear.” Localized surveillance video culture in conjunction with monitoring apps, like Amazon’s Neighbors app, create a community that is suspect and watchful — or as journalist Caroline Haskins argues, “Neighbors reinforces the racist biases of its users, and actively puts people of color at risk in communities where the app is being used.”

License plate readers are also less adept at finding criminals than otherwise promoted: the ACLU reviewed tens of millions of scans from 293 police departments and five state agencies and found hit rates of between 0.01 and 0.08 percent. Using license plate readers, police collect geolocation information by license plate number. This allows them to grid a neighborhood where they can then collect data. However, the nature of grinding means that often there are more readers in a specific neighborhood, which can lead to lopsided data interpretation. That produces inaccurate distribution maps which can often lead to over-policing simply because of a poorly constructed and misinterpreted feedback loop.

Finally, tech tools like Tasers often provide more harm than comfort to police departments. “Tasers,” notes one former police officer I interviewed, “are a good tool when used properly, but lots of police departments bought into it because it reduced hand to hand skill which can be hard to develop. However, Tasers poorly shot make people more angry. When people are angry this escalates the use of force. So, now this tool can be used improperly and as a crutch. That substantially hurts the efforts of police officers.”

Axon, the maker of Taser, has claimed that the devices are between 80 and 97 percent effective at subduing a suspect in the field. However, data from some of the largest police departments in the nation reveals “that officers rate their Tasers as effective as little as 55 percent of the time, or just a little better than a coin flip. When Tasers fail to subdue someone, the results can be life-threatening — for police, and especially for the public.”

Police departments are unprepared to respond

The erroneous and overblown claims made by tech companies are often advertised to police departments that have no one on staff who can evaluate the new technologies being introduced. In an interview with a police officer from a mid-size police office in the Pacific Northwest who has asked to remain anonymous, he shared stories about how companies like ICop sold unreliable hardware to police departments that were ill-equipped to evaluate their effectiveness. He estimates that over $1M of devices went un-utilized at taxpayer expense. Crucially, he claims that there was no technical expertise to manage or evaluate the software being peddled to them: “Axon experts were our technical experts.”

Large agencies had significantly more IT directors or other technical experts compared with small agencies as a whole. And, these large agencies were also more likely to have a departmental task force involved in the decisions to purchase new technology. At smaller agencies, the decision on what to purchase and from whom was largely driven by interest (not education) in the subject or seniority, confirms those interviewed.

Furthermore, a 2016 report prepared for the Department of Justice notes that “at a national level, agencies are not making decisions to acquire technology based on dominant policing philosophies or the activities they prioritize. Instead, agencies appear to adopt technology ad hoc in response to a constellation of factors that includes executive staff decisions, perceived needs, community demands, and available funding.” Police departments are ill-equipped to understand what they are buying and its broader implications.

The police department is for sale

Selling technology products to police departments is a lucrative market. Nearly $355 billion dollars will be spent globally on products for domestic security, with law enforcement software alone expected to be an $18.3 billion market by 2023. The largest percentage of both of those markets is based in the US. “In the police-industrial complex, companies best known for their civilian sector products make untold millions—in some cases billions—by catering to—or creating—the needs of law enforcement agencies,” notes Jaqui Shine, a writer and historian, who attended the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in 2015. These companies include household names like Microsoft, Motorola, Samsung, 3M, Ernst & Young, AT&T, Cisco, and Target, who sponsor the event in hopes of obtaining lucrative contracts that supply police departments with technology and goods.

The technology companies employ standard marketing tactics like sponsoring trade shows, offering incentives and subsidizing products. Tradeshow events like Counter-Terrorism 2012, Urban Shield, Safariland and the IACP conference helphundreds of vendors market products to police departments around the nation. Dave Maass, of EFF, said that he has seen examples of Big Tech gifting thousands of dollars of free technology tools (such as in the case of Amazon with the Ring), hiring celebrities like Shaquille O’Neal to encourage adoption of these products, and going so far as to rent out spaces like Universal Studios (Axon) while providing free drinks and food to attendees. While this may be standard marketing practice at business to business conferences, police are civil servants. When police department suppliers aggressively market their products through indirect bribery, the health of the American public is at risk.

Technology companies are selling to police departments not to meet a specific need of the police but to increase their addressable market. Encouraging technology adoption on behalf of both police and consumers means more data harvested and sold, more hardware needed, and more opportunity to develop and leverage new products. Companies like Amazon have set up incentive programs where police departments have acted as business development units pushing communities to adopt their technologies with kickbacks based on increases in customer adoption. In some cases, Amazon dictates, ascribes and messages exactly what police departments can and will say about their products. The assumption is adoption leads to better policing and safer communities. The reality is the opposite.

Companies and police departments are working off the faulty premise that the problem with policing is a lack of efficiency. But, the real problem with policing “is a lack of equality,” Cyril of Media Justice says. “I don’t want policing to be more effective; I want it to be different.”

But Big Tech’s police gadgetry and software doesn’t fundamentally challenge the nature of police work; in fact, it reinforces the status quo.

Reshaping policing doesn’t require new technology

A Department of Justice report notes that that “technology has not yet had a game-changing impact on policing in terms of dramatically altering the philosophies and strategies used for preventing or responding to crime and improving public safety.” However, the US government, local and regional budgets continue to funnel money into police departments for the procurement of more technology.

While there are many necessary steps to change the relationship between police departments and technology adoption, one big step is to change the way the departments make purchasing decisions. Sales representatives shouldn’t dictate what police departments should purchase. Police departments shouldn’t be making complicated technology purchasing decisions if they do not have technical expertise and depth of knowledge in the products being procured. Community advisory boards like CCOPS must be employed to determine why technology is being purchased, to what end and for what duration. This will eliminate some of the croneyism that comes from trade show conferences and the limited review of products, where faulty first-party research is used to overblow claims that products can improve policing efforts. Finally, police departments should not ever be allowed to act as business development units on behalf of private companies. Doing so disgraces the role of the public servants and blurs lines between public and private data.

Right now, police departments nationwide have adopted overhyped technology solutions that have routinely failed in their efforts at policing. The fault is not theirs alone. When big technology companies are allowed to market poorly researched faulty products and sell those into our policing system, it puts everyone’s lives at risk.

ICE guards “systematically” sexually assault detainees, lawyers say

This article is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

Guards in an immigrant detention center in El Paso sexually assaulted and harassed inmates in a “pattern and practice” of abuse, according to a complaint filed by a Texas advocacy group urging the local district attorney and federal prosecutors to conduct a criminal investigation.

The allegations, detailed in a filing first obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, maintain that guards systematically assaulted at least three people in a facility overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — often in areas of the detention center not visible to security cameras. The guards told victims that no one would believe them because footage did not exist and the harassment involved officers as high-ranking as a lieutenant.

According to the complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and shared with prosecutors, several guards “forcibly” kissed and touched the intimate parts of at least one woman. She faces deportation next week — meaning investigators could lose a key witness. Her attorneys have requested that immigration officials pause her deportation pending a review of the matter.

The woman said in a telephone interview that she would rather return to Mexico, even though she is in danger there. She said she worried about being targeted in the detention center for speaking up about the abuse.

“It’s going to get worse now,” she said. “I can’t handle this anymore.”

Since the complaint was filed Wednesday, two more women, including one who is currently detained in the El Paso facility and one who was previously held there, have come forward with abuse allegations. At least one other woman was deported after a guard assaulted her, detainees told lawyers.

An El Paso County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson said that the agency had forwarded “potentially criminal allegations” to the DHS’ Office of Inspector General, which did not respond to emails seeking comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas said that it had received the complaint and takes allegations of “misconduct by public officials extremely seriously.”

A spokesperson for ICE wrote in an email that the agency was aware of the accusations and that they would be investigated, including by its Office of Professional Responsibility. A 2003 law intended to protect against such abuses sets stringent standards for detention facilities.

ICE has “zero tolerance for any form of sexual abuse or assault against individuals in the agency’s custody and takes very seriously all allegations of employee misconduct,” the spokesperson wrote. “When substantiated, appropriate action is taken.”

A spokesperson for Global Precision Systems, a subsidiary of Bering Straits Native Corporation, which contracts with ICE to run the El Paso facility, wrote in an email that she could not comment on pending legal matters.

The El Paso allegations are the latest instance of sexual abuse complaints related to detention centers run by ICE, which imprisons about 50,000 immigrants across the country each year — mostly through contractors at a taxpayer expense of almost $2.7 billion.

About 14,700 complaints alleging sexual and physical abuse were lodged against ICE between 2010 and 2016, according to federal data obtained by the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants. The group found that only a small fraction were investigated by the Office of Inspector General.

In 2018, the year with the most updated statistics available online, ICE reported 374 formal accusations of sexual assault, of which 48 were substantiated by the agency and 29 remained pending an investigation as of that year.

Most recently, in a May federal court filing in Houston, a Mexican woman said that she was in an ICE facility there in 2018 when she and two female detainees were moved to an isolated cell. Around midnight, three men wearing facial coverings entered the cell. They raped and beat them, according to the complaint. The immigrants were bused to Mexico hours later, where the woman eventually discovered she was pregnant from the assault.

A spokesperson for the company overseeing that detention center, CoreCivic, denied the allegations, calling them “slanderous.” The woman’s attorney, Michelle Simpson Tuegel, said the pregnancy aligns with the woman’s stay in ICE detention. The civil lawsuit is ongoing.

The El Paso accusations that are the subject of this latest complaint to authorities came to light when one of the women, a 32-year-old Salvadoran, was released because of a medical condition and told an attorney that she feared for the detainees still there.

“She was that disturbed by what was happening,” said Linda Corchado, director of legal services for Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, who filed the complaint. “It’s awful to think how disposable these women are.”

She said they are especially vulnerable because many will probably be deported, making it more unlikely that their abusers face consequences.

The Salvadoran woman told Corchado that she was detained in the El Paso facility for about three months where she was repeatedly harassed. A guard said that if she would “fool around” with him he would give her clean uniforms and soap. He told her that he would pay her “a lot of money” to meet him for sex in a spot not visible to cameras.

Two other officers also repeatedly targeted her, according to the complaint. One sent her messages through other women even after she was released.

She said in a telephone interview that guards encouraged women to sign up for anti-anxiety medication and antidepressants because they oversee the dispensing of medication at night and have access to an enclosed off-camera area.

“Most women who are still there are scared of saying anything,” she said. “You don’t know what they can do.”

A male detainee, a legal permanent resident convicted of money laundering, said that an officer in the detention center stared at him while rubbing his genitals as he showered in July, according to the complaint. After he reported the incident to a captain, the detainee was placed in solitary confinement. He began a hunger strike and was transferred to another ICE facility. Lawyers said that he speaks English and is better able to advocate for himself than most of the female victims, who speak only Spanish.

The woman who remains in the El Paso detention center and is set to be deported is a 35-year-old mother from Mexico who was charged with a drug-related crime and illegally entering the country.

During her 11 months in the ICE facility, she told lawyers that two guards assaulted her. In November, an officer touched her private areas and kissed her while she was in an area not visible to cameras. The assault happened as she was walking back from the medical unit to her barrack.

Days later, the guard did so again.

“If she behaved,” he told her, according to the filing, “he would help her be released.”

He stared at her through a window while she used the bathroom.

When she complained to a captain, she said he dismissed her. She said she did not see that officer for several months but that he later returned, becoming “increasingly aggressive and intimidating.”

“She has lived in constant panic that he may do something against her again,” according to the document.

The woman said another officer also assaulted her at least twice in a camera “blind spot,” touching and kissing her. These attacks also happened when she was returning from the medical unit to her cell.

A lieutenant passed messages through her to other detained women.

If she reported them, an officer warned, “No one would believe her.”

October surprise: Will war with Iran be Trump’s election eve shocker?

Was Donald Trump’s January 3rd drone assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani the first step in turning the simmering Cold War between the United States and Iran into a hot war in the weeks before an American presidential election? Of course, there’s no way to know, but behind by double digits in most national polls and flanked by ultra-hawkish Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump is a notoriously impetuous and erratic figure. In recent weeks, for instance, he didn’t hesitate to dispatch federal paramilitary forces to American cities run by Democratic mayors and his administration also seems to have launched a series of covert actions against Tehran that look increasingly overt and have Iran watchers concerned about whether an October surprise could be in the cards.

Much of that concern arises from the fact that, across Iran, things have been blowing up or catching fire in ways that have seemed both mysterious and threatening. Early last month, for instance, a suspicious explosion at an Iranian nuclear research facility at Natanz, which is also the site of its centrifuge production, briefly grabbed the headlines. Whether the site was severely damaged by a bomb smuggled into the building or some kind of airstrike remains unknown. “A Middle Eastern intelligence official said Israel planted a bomb in a building where advanced centrifuges were being developed,” reported the New York Times. Similar fiery events have been plaguing the country for weeks. On June 26th, for instance, there was “a huge explosion in the area of a major Iranian military and weapons development base east of Tehran.” On July 15th, seven ships caught fire at an Iranian shipyard. Other mysterious fires and explosions have hit industrial facilities, a power plant, a missile production factory, a medical complex, a petrochemical plant, and other sites as well.

“Some officials say that a joint American-Israeli strategy is evolving — some might argue regressing — to a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes,” concluded another report in the Times.

Some of this sabotage has been conducted against the backdrop of a two-year-old “very aggressive” CIA action plan to engage in offensive cyber attacks against that country. As a Yahoo! News investigative report put it: “The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what amounts to a sweeping authorization for such activities, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter… The finding has made it easier for the CIA to damage adversaries’ critical infrastructure, such as petrochemical plants.”

Meanwhile, on July 23rd, two U.S. fighter jets buzzed an Iranian civilian airliner in Syrian airspace, causing its pilot to swerve and drop altitude suddenly, injuring a number of the plane’s passengers.

For many in Iran, the drone assassination of Soleimani — and the campaign of sabotage that followed — has amounted to a virtual declaration of war. The equivalent to the Iranian major general’s presidentially ordered murder, according to some analysts, would have been Iran assassinating Secretary of State Pompeo or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, although such analogies actually understate Soleimani’s stature in the Iranian firmament.

In its aftermath, Iran largely held its fire, its only response being a limited, telegraphed strike at a pair of American military bases in Iraq. If Soleimani’s murder was intended to draw Iran into a tit-for-tat military escalation in an election year, it failed. So perhaps the U.S. and Israel designed the drumbeat of attacks against critical Iranian targets this summer as escalating provocations meant to goad Iran into retaliating in ways that might provide an excuse for a far larger U.S. response.

Such a conflict-to-come would be unlikely to involve U.S. ground forces against a nation several times larger and more powerful than Iraq. Instead, it would perhaps involve a sustained campaign of airstrikes against dozens of Iranian air defense installations and other military targets, along with the widespread network of facilities that the United States has identified as being part of that country’s nuclear research program.

The “art” of the deal in 2020

In addition to military pressure and fierce sanctions against the Iranian economy, Washington has been cynically trying to take advantage of the fact that Iran, already in a weakened state, has been especially hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Those American sanctions have, for instance, made it far harder for that country to get the economic support and medical and humanitarian supplies it so desperately needs, given its soaring death count.

According to a report by the European Leadership Network,

“Rather than easing the pressure during the crisis, the U.S. has applied four more rounds of sanctions since February and contributed to the derailing of Iran’s application for an IMF [International Monetary Fund] loan. The three special financial instruments designed to facilitate the transfer of humanitarian aid to Iran in the face of secondary sanctions on international banking transactions… have proven so far to have been one-shot channels, stymied by U.S. regulatory red tape.”

To no avail did Human Rights Watch call on the United States in April to ease its sanctions in order to facilitate Iran’s ability to grapple with the deadly pandemic, which has officially killed nearly 17,000 people since February (or possibly, if a leaked account of the government’s actual death figures is accurate, nearly 42,000).

Iran has every reason to feel aggrieved. At great political risk, President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei agreed in 2015 to a deal with the United States and five other world powers over Iran’s nuclear research program. That accord, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), accomplished exactly what it was supposed to do: it led Iran to make significant concessions, cutting back both on its nuclear research and its uranium enrichment program in exchange for an easing of economic sanctions by the United States and other trade partners.

Though the JCPOA worked well, in 2018 President Trump unilaterally withdrew from it, reimposed far tougher sanctions on Iran, began what the administration called a campaign of “maximum pressure” against Tehran, and since assassinating Soleimani has apparently launched military actions just short of actual war. Inside Iran, Trump’s confrontational stance has helped tilt politics to the right, undermining Rouhani, a relative moderate, and eviscerating the reformist movement there. In elections for parliament in February, ultraconservatives and hardliners swept to a major victory.

But the Iranian leadership can read a calendar, too. Like voters in the United States, they knowthat the Trump administration is probably going to be voted out of office in three months. And they know that, in the event of war, it’s more likely than not that many Americans — including, sadly, some hawkish Democrats in Congress, and influential analysts at middle-of-the-road Washington think tanks — will rally to the White House. So unless the campaign of covert warfare against targets in Iran were to intensify dramatically, the Iranian leadership isn’t likely to give Trump, Pompeo, and crew the excuse they’re looking for.

As evidence that Iran’s leadership is paying close attention to the president’s electoral difficulties, Khamenei only recently rejected in the most explicit terms possible what most observers believe is yet another cynical ploy by the American president, when he suddenly asked Iran to reengage in direct leader-to-leader talks. In a July 31st speech, the Iranian leader replied that Iran is well aware Trump is seeking only sham talks to help him in November. (In June, Trump tweeted Iran: “Don’t wait until after the U.S. Election to make the Big deal! I’m going to win!”) Indeed, proving that Washington has no intention of negotiating with Iran in good faith, after wrecking the JCPOA and ratcheting up sanctions, the Trump administration announced an onerous list of 12 conditions that would have to precede the start of such talks. In sum, they amounted to a demand for a wholesale, humiliating Iranian surrender. So much for the art of the deal in 2020.

October surprises, then and now

Meanwhile, the United States isn’t getting much support from the rest of the world for its thinly disguised effort to create chaos, a possible uprising, and the conditions to force regime change on Iran before November 3rd. At the United Nations, when Secretary of State Pompeo called on the Security Council to extend an onerous arms embargo on Iran, not only did Russia and China promise to veto any such resolution but America’s European allies opposed it, too. They were particularly offended by Pompeo’s threat to impose “snapback” economic sanctions on Iran as laid out in the JCPOA if the arms embargo wasn’t endorsed by the council. Not lost on the participants was the fact that, in justifying his demand for such new U.N. sanctions, the American secretary of state was invoking the very agreement that Washington had unilaterally abandoned. “Having quit the JCPOA, the U.S. is no longer a participant and has no right to trigger a snapback at the U.N.,” was the way China’s U.N. ambassador put it.

That other emerging great power has, in fact, become a major spoiler and Iranian ally against the Trump administration’s regime-change strategy, even as its own relations with Washington grow grimmer by the week. Last month, the New York Times reported that Iran and China had inked “a sweeping economic and security partnership that would clear the way for billions of dollars of Chinese investments in energy and other sectors, undercutting the Trump administration’s efforts to isolate the Iranian government.” The 18-page document reportedly calls for closer military cooperation and a $400 billion Chinese investment and trade accord that, among other things, takes direct aim at the Trump-Pompeo effort to cripple Iran’s economy and its oil exports.

According to Shireen Hunter, a veteran Middle Eastern analyst at Georgetown University, that accord should be considered a world-changing one, as it potentially gives China “a permanent foothold in Iran” and undermines “U.S. strategic supremacy in the [Persian] Gulf.” It is, she noted with some alarm, a direct result of Trump’s anti-Iranian obsession and Europe’s reluctance to confront Washington’s harsh sanctions policy.

On June 20th, in a scathing editorial, the Washington Post agreed, ridiculing the administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran. Not only had the president failed to bring down Iran’s government or compelled it to change its behavior in conflicts in places like Syria and Yemen, but now, in a powerful blow to U.S. interests, “an Iranian partnership with China… could rescue Iran’s economy while giving Beijing a powerful new place in the region.”

If, however, the traditional Washington foreign policy establishment believes that Trump’s policy toward Iran is backfiring and so working against U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf, his administration seems not to care. As evidence mounts that its approach to Iran isn’t having the intended effect, the White House continues apace: squeezing that country economically, undermining its effort to fight Covid-19, threatening it militarily, appointing an extra-hardliner as its “special envoy” for Iran, and apparently (along with Israel) carrying out a covert campaign of terrorism inside the country.

Over the past four decades, “October surprise” has evolved into a catch-all phrase meaning any unexpected action by a presidential campaign just before an election designed to give one of the candidates a surprise advantage. Ironically, its origins lay in Iran. In 1980, during the contest between President Jimmy Carter and former California Governor Ronald Reagan, rumors surfaced that Carter might stage a raid to rescue scores of American diplomats then held captive in Tehran. (He didn’t.) According to other reports, the Reagan campaign had made clandestine contact with Tehran aimed at persuading that country not to release its American hostages until after the election. (Two books, “October Surprise” by Gary Sick, a senior national security adviser to Carter, and “Trick or Treason” by investigative journalist Bob Parry delved into the possibility that candidate Reagan, former CIA Director Bill Casey, and others had engaged in a conspiracy with Iran to win that election.)

Consider it beyond irony if, this October, the latest election “surprise” were to take us back to the very origins of the term in the form of some kind of armed conflict that could only end terribly for everyone involved. It’s a formula for disaster and like so many other things, when it comes to Donald J. Trump, it can’t be ruled out.

Copyright 2020 Bob Dreyfuss

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