Tesla secretly swapped out faulty solar panels, and there were fires “in many cases”: report

Linette Lopez, a Business Insider journalist who has covered numerous controversies involving the electric vehicle and clean energy company Tesla, reported last week that at least seven fires had occurred after the company secretly swapped out faulty parts on solar panels on its customers’ roofs.

“What I revealed is that, for years, Tesla has had a secret operation inside the company called Project Titan, where it would clandestinely switch out a faulty part on many of the solar panels on its customers’ roofs,” Lopez told journalist Nomiki Konst on her eponymous show. “Now, the solar panels are not made by Tesla. They’re made by a Chinese company named Trina [Solar]. And the problem was that the Trina panels were connected to these heat regulators made by a company called Amphenol. And the heat regulators are not working, so then the Trina panels would overheat. And what do you have? You have . . . an overheating solar panel. In many cases, you have a fire.”

She added, “And this came to light because Walmart started suing Tesla, because it had seven fires on its roofs at Walmarts across the country. In one Walmart, they had to shut down operations for two weeks. So naturally, Walmart was pissed, and Tesla tried to keep this story under wraps. Because while [Tesla CEO] Elon Musk is very litigious, he tends to punch down. He doesn’t want to get in fights with Walmart.”

This is not the first time that Lopez has documented allegations of technical issues at Tesla. Lopez reported last month that the company had continued to manufacture its signature Model S cars, even though it was aware of a serious design flaw in its battery.

Tesla learned of a design flaw in the car battery, which could result in leaks, and struggled to figure out how to fix the situation, according to emails obtained by Lopez. The documents revealed that the end fitting of the battery’s cooling coil, which helps regulate its temperature, was composed of aluminum so weak that tiny pinholes could form in the location where two key parts were meant to braze together. Possible leaks could leave behind a flammable residue inside of the battery, causing it to short.

On two separate occasions, Tesla used a third-party company to test its cooling coils. Despite receiving troubling results, Tesla continued to manufacture Model S cars, according to Lopez.

Tesla has faced other controversies over the years, from vehicles which have caught fire and fatal Autopilot accidents to concerns about the cars’ quality and reliability. More recently, Tesla has also been criticized after Musk defied California’s stay-at-home orders in May in order to reopen his automobile factory in Fremont. The acts of defiance included dismissing reports on the pandemic as “dumb,” filing a lawsuit for injunctive relief and threatening to move his factory out of California.

After the factory was reopened before its May 18 agreement with Alameda County, the facility suffered from a coronavirus outbreak, The Washington Post reported. Regarding one worker’s experiences, the outlet wrote:

“No social distancing at all when clocking in/out [because] people are . . . in a hurry to go home or get back to their work station,” the individual in the seat assembly plant said in a text message. As far as social distancing, the worker said, management “don’t say anything to the associates [because] they’re not doing it either.”

As for the changes: “It’s like nothing but with a mask on,” the worker said.

Despite the alleged suffering of his employees, Musk saw his net worth increase by 48% to $36 billion between mid-March (when the pandemic reached the U.S.) and mid-May.

Tesla did not immediately respond to Salon’s request for comment regarding the claims in Business Insider’s reports.

Former COVID-19 data chief: Outbreak is “much worse” than DeSantis administration lets on in Florida

Rebekah Jones, the Florida data scientist who in May claimed that she was fired for refusing to manipulate state coronavirus data to meet the Republican governor’s reopening criteria, has issued a new warning: The ongoing outbreak is “much, much worse” than it has been painted by the administration.

In a Monday interview with MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, Jones, who built the state government’s coronavirus data portal, identified a number of failures since she left her state job. Florida recently posted the highest daily caseload in a single day across all 50 U.S. states.

For instance, the southern state combined antibody test data with viral test data. Salon reported in May that the practice, which can obscure hotspots and misrepresent percentages, warps data not only at the state level. It may also trickle up to the national level at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A number of states have now revised this practice after criticisms of juked stats, but Florida apparently has not joined them. The recent surge in cases threatens to disrupt plans to fully reopen its economy.

Jones also said the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) only began to release hospitalization data at the county level last week, and the information contradicts the state department of health’s data.

The AHCA numbers, which are available on Jones’ own data portal, show that many counties have more people hospitalized than reported by the DOH. Jones wrote in an op-ed last week that the misuse of DOH hospitalization data stretches from bloggers all the way up to The New York Times.

“Taking the number of people hospitalized today versus the number reported yesterday doesn’t tell you how many more people were hospitalized in the last day,” she said. “It tells you how many reports of hospitalizations DOH received, which could include hospitalizations from cases back in March. The same is true of death data, as well.”

Jones noted that the state did not release testing and case numbers in either jails or state prisons. Further, she said the health department stopped publishing testing demographic data after her firing in May.

“We have no idea if recent surges in cases by age, gender, race or ethnicity are truly spikes,” she said, “or if they’re proportional to the number of people being tested within those demographic groups.”

On Sunday, Florida set a national record when it posted more than 15,300 cases in one day. As of Monday, the state had recorded nearly 270,000 total cases and more than 4,300 deaths due to COVID-19. If Florida were a country, it would currently rank ninth worldwide in cases.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Jones has accused of interfering with state data in the interest of his own political reopening agenda, dismissed the surge as a “blip” in a Friday news conference.

“We’ve got the census today. I think between 10 and 12 or 13,000 — somewhere like that — beds are available,” DeSantis said in reference to the delayed release of county hospitalization data. “There’ll be articles saying, ‘Oh, my gosh. They’re at 90%.’ Well, that’s how hospitals normally run.”

DeSantis explained that his state has had “a lot of different blips.”

“We’re now at a higher blip than where we were in May and the beginning of June,” he said.

Protesters shouted down DeSantis at a Monday press conference, demanding he resign. They yelled, “Shame on you!” and “You’re doing nothing!”

On June 15, the day DeSantis announced that Florida would fully reopen K-12 schools come August, Scott Pritchard, the lead epidemiologist on Florida’s COVID-19 response team, quit the DOH after 15 years of service. A former department employee told The Miami Herald that Pritchard left because he was afraid DeSantis would blame him when cases “started exploding.”

And cases have begun to surge. A nurse at Cleveland Clinic in Pembroke, Fla., told The Daily Beast that “counting [COVID and] non-COVID patients, we went from seeing 100 people to 200 people a day. That is how many come in to get checked.”

AHCA data shows that Cleveland Clinic had 25 available beds, nine of which were for adult ICU patients, as of Monday.

DeSantis’ defiance in the face of data and death stands out even among conservative governors, such as Texas’ Greg Abbott. On June 30, as Florida cases spiked, DeSantis declared that his state was “not going back” to tighter statewide constraints. Since then, Abbott, his own state at crisis levels, has shuttered bars, cut restaurant capacities and issued a statewide face-mask mandate. DeSantis, his critics suggested, has done little except cheerlead further reopening.

The Harvard Global Health Institute recommended last week that several states, including Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, invoke mandatory stay-at-home orders. Fifteen others should consider it, the researchers said.

The New York Times released its own study chronicling global daily infections between June 28 and July 5. Arizona and Florida were the two most affected areas in the world. South Carolina was third, followed by Bahrain and Louisiana.

The U.S. reported at the national level the first weekly increase in deaths since mid-April last week. To date, the U.S. has recorded more than 3.3 million cases and more than 135,000 deaths.

Is coronavirus immunity impossible? A new study raises grim questions

The coronavirus quarantine might last far longer than expected.

A new study suggests that individual immunity to COVID-19 may not last more than a couple of months, meaning that a person could become reinfected. It’s a possibility that – if true – will have sobering implications for our ability to contain the pandemic.

The paper, which has not yet been peer reviewed, was posted last week in the preprint server medRxiv. After pointing out that antibodies to the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, are usually detectable within 10 to 15 days after a person begins exhibiting symptoms, the researchers note that it is unclear how long these antibodies will last and whether they immunize patients from being infected again.

To ascertain whether the antibodies that can neutralize the virus (nAbs) persist long enough to provide lasting protection, a group of scientists studied blood samples taken over time from 65 people who tested positive for the coronavirus — whose conditions ranged from asymptomatic to life-threatening — over a period of up to 94 days after they initially displayed symptoms.

They found that more than 95% of the studied patients had developed the antibodies and carried nAbs roughly eight days after they were diagnosed, with nAb levels peaking after an average of 23 days. The nAb levels soon began to drop, however, and among patients who were tested after 65 days, the number who retained potent nAbs fell to 16.7%. Patients with higher nAb levels at their peak maintained them after more than 60 days, while those who did not have higher levels wound up returning almost to their baseline. These findings were reinforced by a similar study the researchers conducted of 31 healthcare workers at a different group of British hospitals.

“A wide range of SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibody (nAb) titres have been reported following infection and these vary depending on the length of time from infection and the severity of disease,” reads the study. “Further knowledge on the magnitude, timing and longevity of nAb responses following SARS-CoV-2 infection is vital for understanding the role nAbs might play in disease clearance and protection from re-infection (also called renewed or second wave infections).”

Salon reached out to Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, for his thoughts on the study.

“This is a very good study,” Medford told Salon. “What it shows is that this is similar to what we’ve seen with the other coronaviruses in this class, that antibody titres do go down after exposure. The real issue for us now is, while that’s true, to what degree does is that related to immunity and reduction in the severity of infection going forward. And we don’t know the answer to that right now.”

This is not the first time that speculation has arisen over whether human beings will be able to develop immunity to the coronavirus. A doctor named D. Clay Ackerly wrote to Vox that he had a 50-year-old patient who contracted COVID-19 on two seemingly separate occasions.

“In general, the unknowns of immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 currently outweigh the knowns,” Ackerly wrote. “We do not know how much immunity to expect once someone is infected with the virus, we do not know how long that immunity may last, and we do not know how many antibodies are needed to mount an effective response.”

There are also concerns that, even if an effective vaccine is developed to treat COVID-19, not enough people will take it for herd immunity to occur. After a survey in May found that only 49% of Americans would definitely get vaccinated if one became available (compared to 31% who are unsure and 20% who absolutely would not), Dr. Georges Benjamin told Salon that those numbers were troubling.

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

#Goyaway: How Latinx chefs are offering Goya alternatives as a recipe for boycott

“Just had a cup of coffee and a [sic] two cans of Goya beans! Take that, libs!”

Thus tweeted KW Miller, who is running as an Independent for Florida’s 18th Congressional District seat, on July 11, the day after the CEO of Goya, Robert Unanue, praised President Donald Trump during an event at the White House.

“We’re all truly blessed . . . to have a leader like President Trump who is a builder,” Unanue said at a press conference meant to highlight a new advisory commission on creating economic opportunities for Latinx Americans. “And that’s what my grandfather did; he came to this country to build, to grow, to prosper.”

Goya, which claims to be the largest Hispanic-owned company in the country (Unanue is of Spanish heritage), makes products that are standard in many Lantinx kitchens. But that’s why to many it felt like a betrayal when Unanue praised a president whose policies and statements have consistently dehumanized Mexican Americans and Latinx immigrants, from calling Mexican immigrants drug smugglers and “rapists” on the campaign trail to eventually enacting immigration policies that separate children from their families at the border and detain them in cages.

The backlash against Goya was immediate. #Goyaway and #AdiosGoya began trending on Twitter within several hours of the press conference, with several high-profile celebrities and politicians encouraging a boycott. “Oh look, it’s the sound of me Googling ‘how to make your own adobo,'” tweeted New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Meanwhile, former San Antonio mayor and Secretary of Housing and Urban development Julian Castro criticized Unanue for “praising a president who villainizes and maliciously attacks Latinos for political gain.”

“Americans should think twice before buying their products #Goyaway,” he tweeted, while in response, conservative pundits and politicians, including Ted Cruz, have started using the #BuyGoya hashtag.

The back-and-forth about Goya has launched discussions about free speech, “cancel culture” and how important it is to purchase products from creators whose beliefs do or don’t align with yours. But this topic hasn’t remained trapped in a stratosphere of lofty sociopolitical jargon.

A recipe for boycott

Currently, a number of chefs and home cooks are using their skills to bring these conversations to the kitchen table.

“Honestly, it felt like a really bad breakup because, for decades, my family and many others have used this brand. It has been a part of our culture, which is why I think it sparked such an uproar online,” said Jeremie Serrano, a Memphis-based activist who runs a YouTube channel centered around creating plant-based versions of the Puerto Rican dishes he grew up eating.

Serrano’s illustrated guides to creating homemade adobo and sazón — which can be used as alternatives to the seasoning mixes that Goya sells — went viral over the weekend as more and more home cooks were searching for Goya substitutions.

As “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted, “We learned to bake bread in this pandemic, we can learn to make our own adobo con pimienta.”)

“While it may be difficult to be completely ethical, I thought others should know that there is power in where we spend and what we cook,” Serrano said. “As a gay Puerto Rican who grew up around a diverse community of people, I have seen this administration show us that they do not stand up for us and aim to attack who we are. I knew I had to speak up.”

And Serrano is just one of the people who raided their, or their abuelita’s, recipe box to share their homemade alternatives to the popular products online. A quick scan for the phrase “Goya substitutions” on social media results in a flurry of screenshots of recipes typed in the notes app — the modern index card, I suppose.

There are also chefs like Eric Rivera, who owns addo in Seattle, who have started selling Goya substitutions from their professional kitchens — a welcome source of additional income as many restaurants are still struggling to make ends meet amid the pandemic.

“I’ve done the sazón spice mixes for years now,” Rivera said. “And it’s never really been a thing because people just kinda say, ‘Why would I spend that when I can go to the grocery store right now and get it?'”

But over the last 72 hours, he’s received a tremendous surge in orders.

“This little part of the business has now become the biggest part of the business right now, which is insane.” he said. “And the circumstances aren’t ideal, but it’s like I’m running down the street like full-sprint with a Puerto Rican flag on my back.”

Both Rivera and Serrano say that while some people want to view food and its consumption as apolitical, being able to take that stance denotes a certain level of privilege that warrants interrogation.

“I think for the longest time, people who wanted to keep it to be not political are just white and living in a bubble,” Rivera said. “When they say, ‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ it just means they are more comfortable being silent on these topics.”

And once someone’s food gets to their plate, Serrano said he thinks many people forget or fail to consider the worker who grows or picks their food.

“Many times, it is a person of color or immigrant who, despite taking just as much pride in their work as others, isn’t granted the privileges that many people in this country are,” Serrano said. “So, whether it’s the food we eat or the clothes we purchase, I think we should always question things and work to see how we might improve our means of production to create a more equitable and just society for everyone.”

Martha McSally down by 9 points in new poll as Democratic rival Mark Kelly posts $13 million haul

Retired astronaut Mark Kelly leads Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., by nine points in a new poll published on Tuesday.

The poll, conducted by OH Predictive Insights among 600 likely voters with a margin of error of 4%, shows Kelly leading McSally 52-43.

The poll shows that Kelly, the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., has cut into McSally’s base of support. Kelly has 91% support among self-identified Democrats, while McSally has only 81% support from her own party’s voters.

Kelly also leads McSally by 40 points among moderates, 27 points among independents and 19 points among women.

“The formula for a Republican winning statewide office in Arizona involves locking up the GOP vote and garnering just enough independents,” pollster Mike Noble said. “Sen. McSally appears to be having a difficult time doing either.”

McSally is one of the most vulnerable Republicans facing re-election after losing her previous Senate race to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. In 2018, McSally became the first Republican to lose a Senate race in the state in three decades years. Despite her loss, Gov. Doug Ducey appointed her to the vacated seat previously held by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

The move may have been shortsighted. All seven polls released this month show Kelly leading McSally by at least four points. Kelly has also massively outraised McSally in every quarter since announcing his candidacy last year.

Kelly reported bringing in nearly $13 million between March and June and has nearly $24 million in cash on hand. About 89% of his donations last quarter came from contributions of $100 or less, The Hill reported. Kelly has raised $44 million in total. McSally has yet to report her second-quarter fundraising numbers.

McSally has also drawn scorn from The Lincoln Project, a Republican anti-Trump super PAC led by attorney George Conway, the husband of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, and former McCain adviser Steve Schmidt. The group unveiled a new ad targeting McSally and a virtual town hall aimed at criticizing “McSally’s failed leadership,” project co-founder Mike Madrid told The Arizona Republic.

“Arizona is a key state in 2020, and frankly, we don’t see Trump winning without it,” he said. “So we’ve been ramping up our activity, both in ads and as a grassroots organization there, reaching out to voters to make an honest appeal for them to choose patriotism over cowardice and stand up to Trump and his enablers to protect America.”

McSally’s race is one of several where the race rating has shifted to the left. The race has moved from a “toss-up” to “lean Democrat,” according to Politico. Meanwhile, the Iowa Senate race, where Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, is struggling, has moved to the “toss-up” column, as has the Montana Senate race between Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock and first-term Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana. The Oregon Senate race, pitting incumbent Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Republican QAnon supporter Jo Rae Perkins, has shifted from “lean Democrat” to “solid Democrat.”

The Cook Political Report also lists the races in Colorado, where Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., faces former Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, Maine, where Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has seen her support collapse in her race against state Speaker of the House Sara Gideon, and North Carolina, where Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., faces state Sen. Cal Cunningham, as toss-ups.

Many of the vulnerable incumbents have embraced President Donald Trump, which could have severe consequences come November. Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden leads Trump by an average of nine points in recent polls, according to election forecaster FiveThirtyEight. Trump’s approval rating fell to just 38% in a June Gallup poll, including a 10-point drop among independents since the coronavirus pandemic began.

“As President Trump continues to lose ground against Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, his woes have trickled down ballot,” Inside Elections poll analyst Jacob Rubashkin wrote. “With public and private polling indicating a Trump underperformance of 2016 approaching double digits, the Senate map has continued to open for Democrats.”

Pork sliders sold by Republican House candidate who supports QAnon gave customers diarrhea: records

Lauren Boebert, supporter of the QAnon “deep state” conspiracy theory movement and newly-minted Colorado Republican congressional candidate, has put her restaurant front and center in her campaign.

Shooters Grill, which Boebert co-owns with her husband in Rifle, Colo., has a schtick. Wait staff are required to wear holstered and loaded guns as they serve customers. (For years, they were not required to take training courses.)

“It keeps that feeling of the old West alive,” Boebert told local TV news station FOX31 in 2019. “The customers have their jokes with the waitresses: ‘If I don’t tip are you going to hurt me?'”

But three years ago, Boebert’s food apparently posed a greater risk to customers than untrained staff after her pork sliders allegedly poisoned dozens of people at a local rodeo, making them nauseous and sending some home with bloody diarrhea, The Daily Beast first reported.

Boebert shot to national headlines in recent weeks when she beat Scott Tipton, a five-term, Trump-endorsed incumbent, in the Republican primary by nine full points. It was the first time a challenger has beaten a sitting congressional representative in Colorado in 48 years.

That was not her first time in the headlines this year. A few months earlier, Shooters Grill made the news when the state temporarily revoked its license for re-opening amid the coronavirus pandemic in defiance of the governor’s orders. “This was always about making payroll,” Boebert has claimed.

But local health officials were already familiar with Boebert’s operations. In 2017, authorities cited “an unlicensed temporary retail food establishment associated with Shooters Grill” for a mass food poisoning incident during the Rifle Rodeo at the Garfield County fairgrounds, according to Garfield County records.

The morning after the rodeo, the country’s public health office documented receiving calls from attendees who complained of food poisoning. Some reported severe symptoms.

An investigation traced back to the pork sliders served by Boebert at the event. The meat “was smoked at Smokehouse 1776, a retail food establishment located in downtown Rifle, Colo., across the street from Shooters Grill and owned by the same person,” according to the records.

Officials who later visited the restaurant suspected that the pork had not been stored at a safe temperature. They found that Smokehouse 1776 had no “cold holding” or “hot holding” mechanisms in place, and that the restaurant “does not maintain temperature logs so there was no way of showing that food was kept at proper temperatures.” (Smokehouse 1776 has since closed, The Beast reported.)

They also reported “bare hand contact with ready to eat foods, no handwashing station [and] no barrier protection from insects.”

A Boebert spokesperson told The Beast that the restaurant “did not receive a fine or have any other type of disciplinary action.”

“Staff was told of several individuals who claimed to experience similar symptoms but say they did not consume food at the rodeo,” the spokesperson said.

The health department report said “100% of those interviewed with diarrhea ate pork sliders.”

These days, Boebert is a conspiracy theorist who wants to abolish the Department of Education and does not believe that comprehensive sex education should be taught in schools.

She supports the bizarre but ascendant QAnon movement, the far-right fringe group which believes President Donald Trump is on a divine mission to arrest thousands of celebrities, Democrats and members of the “deep state” for allegedly running a global pedophilia ring and eating children.

In an interview with the pro-Q webcast “Steel Truth” this May, Boebert said she was “very familiar” with the conspiracy theory while appearing to maintain an acceptable distance from it.

“So, that’s more my mom’s thing. She’s a little fringe. I try to uh — I just try to keep things on track and positive,” she said. “I am very familiar with it, though.”

“Everything I heard of Q, I hope that this is real, because it only means America is getting stronger and better,” she continued. “And people are returning to conservative values, and that’s what I am for.”

Boebert added that QAnon followers were “only motivating and encouraging and bringing people together stronger, and if this is real, then it could be really great for our country.”

She is not the first Republican candidate to flirt with QAnon, though she still has not gone as far as fellow candidates Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Oregon Senate nominee Jo Rae Perkins, both of whom profess outright support.

Boebert has since sought to distance herself from that story.

“No, I’m not a follower. This is just a fake attack from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,” she told local Denver news station KDVR.

“QAnon is a lot of things to different people. I was very vague in what I said before. I’m not into conspiracies,” she said. “I’m into freedom and the Constitution of the United States of America. I’m not a follower.”

An FBI memo warned last August that the peripheral right-wing movement posed a domestic terrorist threat. Despite the alarm from his own law enforcement, Trump himself has appeared to nod at QAnon supporters in campaign ads and dozens of tweets.

Trump himself also called Boebert to congratulate her after upsetting his candidate.

“It was amazing,” she said of the experience. “President Trump got on the phone and said, ‘Lauren, you are really great. I have professionals in my office saying, ‘What happened?'”

That weekend, she met Trump at his Independence Day event at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where she says she thanked him for everything he has done for the country.

“I am the battle tested MAGA candidate,” she said. “I knew from the beginning I was more MAGA than my opponent.”

Texas and Arizona request refrigerated trucks as morgues run out of space to store coronavirus dead

Refrigerated trucks are en route to Texas and Arizona as morgues struggle to deal with the rising number of deaths resulting from the surge in coronavirus cases in the two states.

Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, a Democrat, told reporters that at least one morgue in Maricopa County, home to nearly 60% of the state’s population, was “near capacity.” A morgue run by the city’s Abrazo Health system was also at 97% capacity, she said.

“We are losing too many Arizonans,” Gallego told local news outlet KNXV. “I’m heartbroken . . . It’s been a rough week for me.”

A spokesperson for Abrazo said in a statement that the area’s hospitals still “have adequate morgue space,” but the trucks were requested as part of an emergency plan “to handle overflow morgue capacity, if needed.”

Gallego claimed that the city has been plagued by inaction from the federal government and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey.

She told KNXV that “White House officials have said everything is under control, and that she has been asking for too much support.”

Gallego has repeatedly called for Ducey to implement a statewide mask requirement, but Ducey has done little in response to the rise even as Arizona sees the highest rate of infection of any state. Ducey has rejected calls for a mask requirement and announced that restaurants would have to limit indoor dining to 50%, even though his earlier executive order already included that guidance.

Maricopa County alone has more than 75,000 cases. Hospitals in the state are around 90% capacity.

Gallego is hardly alone in her criticism of Ducey. The mayors of Tucson, Tolleson, Tempe and Flagstaff joined her in calling on Ducey to “do more to slow the spread of the coronavirus in Arizona,” the local outlet AZ Family reported.

The family of a man who died last month from coronavirus symptoms blamed both Ducey and President Donald Trump for the death in a scathing obituary in the Arizona Republic.

“His death is due to the carelessness of the politicians who continue to jeopardize the health of brown bodies through a clear lack of leadership, refusal to acknowledge the severity of this crisis and inability and unwillingness to give clear and decisive direction on how to minimize risk,” Kristin Urquiza said of her father Mark Urquiza’s passing, adding that Ducey had “blood on his hands.”

In Texas, where the virus has killed more people than the 9/11 attacks, some counties have already had to rely on refrigerated trucks. The Nueces County morgue, which includes Corpus Christi, was already full and requested a refrigerated truck that “can accommodate up to 40 more bodies,” The Texas Tribune reported.

At least 29 people died in the county from the coronavirus between last Monday and Friday, 70% of all 42 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.

“We have seen very few deaths for the first few months of the pandemic, so the FEMA trailer was placed in another city,” county medical examiner Dr. Adel Shaker told the outlet. “But the need is here now.”

Austin was also “in the process of procuring a refrigerated truck to face the surge in COVID-19 deaths,” a county spokesperson said.

Cameron and Hidalgo Counties have also brought in a refrigerated truck while Houston was using a refrigerated trailer as “temporary storage before the transfer from the hospital to funeral homes,” The Tribune reported.

San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg announced Monday that refrigerated trucks were on standby if needed, KSAT reported.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who pushed for an early reopening and at one point banned cities from requiring masks, has ordered bars to close again and required restaurants to reduce indoor dining capacity to 50% and later issued his own statewide mask requirement.

“Things will get worse, and let me explain why: The deaths that we’re seeing announced today and yesterday — which are now over 100 — those are people who likely contracted COVID-19 in late May,” Abbott told local news outlet KLBK. “The worst is yet to come as we work our way through that massive increase in people testing positive.”

Abbott pleaded for residents to wear masks or face another shutdown.

“The public needs to understand this was a very tough decision for me to make,” he said of the mask mandate. “I made clear that I made this tough decision for one reason: It was our last best effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. If we do not slow the spread of COVID-19 . . . the next step would have to be a lockdown.”

Similar trucks were also used in New York City as the Empire State grappled with the outbreak. The New York Times wrote in May that “the pandemic has now left nearly 30,000 dead in New York — and about 205 of the vehicles, sent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or purchased by the medical examiner’s office, are stationed across the city.”

“Stunningly tone-deaf”: Ivanka Trump criticized for urging jobless Americans to “find something new”

The White House rolled out a new ad campaign spearheaded by first daughter Ivanka Trump, which urges Americans laid off amid the coronavirus pandemic to simply “find something new.”

The campaign was the product of the White House American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, which is led by the president’s daughter and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.

“I got laid off twice, but you got to keep going,” one man says in the ad before others tell their stories about how they were able to find apprenticeships and vocational training programs, albeit seemingly before the pandemic.

“There has never been a more critical time for Americans of all ages and backgrounds to be aware of the multiple pathways to career success and gain the vocational training and skills they need to fill jobs in a changing economy,” Ivanka Trump, who herself graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said in a tweet promoting the campaign.

More than ever our #PledgetoAmericasWorkers is focused on helping Americans 🇺🇸 bolster skills to find new jobs + navigate career transitions.

Today we are launching the #FindSomethingNew ad campaign!https://t.co/gS1JL50lcU

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) July 14, 2020

But there is a major problem with the White House’s message, despite President Donald Trump’s claim that the economy is well on its way to recovery. Nearly 49 million Americans have filed first-time jobless claims in the four months since the pandemic began, and while the unemployment rate has ticked down slightly, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that there are nearly four unemployed Americans for every job opening.

Trump has also pushed governors to plow through federal guidelines and reopen businesses, which has resulted in massive spikes in states like Texas, Florida, Georgia and Arizona. States like California are already shutting down thousands of businesses again after new infections skyrocketed. The White House and Senate Republicans have also pushed back on calls to provide aid to cash-strapped states and cities, which is expected to result in countless job losses for workers like teachers, hospital staff, firefighters and police.

“‘Find something new’ the White House says to unemployed Americans in the worst job market since the depression,” pollster Matt McDermott tweeted. “Just a stunningly tone deaf campaign.”

“If the White House is encouraging people unhappy in their jobs to find something new, may I suggest they start with the president?” former Obama speechwriter David Litt quipped.

The White House urging tens of millions of out-of-work Americans to “find something new” also stands in stark contrast to the administration’s proposal of a massive bailout for the rich.

National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said Monday that the White House was pushing for a new phase of coronavirus relief that would include “payroll tax holiday on workers’ wages and a ‘capital gains holiday,’ which would defer payment of capital gains taxes on new asset purchases, possibly for several years.”

Roughly two-thirds of the temporary payroll tax cut would flow to the richest 20% of Americans, while the poorest 40% would get only 6% of the benefit, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. Such tax breaks are “insufficiently targeted and largely meaningless to those who’ve lost their jobs and are no longer receiving paychecks,” MSNBC’s Steve Benen added.

A capital gains tax cut would even more overwhelmingly favor the rich. Only about 6% of households in the bottom 80% of earners claim any capital gains and about 75% of such a tax cut would flow to the top 1% of earners, according to the Tax Policy Center.

“Maybe,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., “Donald Trump should ‘find something new’ instead.”

You can watch the ad below via YouTube:

Trump is trying to do to Anthony Fauci what the right did to Al Gore — but it’s not working

It’s no exaggeration to say that Republicans bought themselves years of getting away with ignoring and denying climate science by calling former Vice President Al Gore mean names. Beginning in the ’80s, Gore, with his earnestly nerdy persona, had become the face of a growing movement to raise the alarm about the rapidly warming planet and the horrors humanity would face if more wasn’t done to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. To discredit the entire idea of climate change theory, the right focused not on the science, but on discrediting Gore as a messenger.

Needless to say, the efforts to demonize Gore — and, by association, climate-change theory — were a veritable dictionary of logical fallacies. One common tactic was to call Gore fat, as if there wer any relationship between Gore’s waistline and the accuracy of climate science. He was also painted as a hyperbolic and opportunistic liar, with conservatives insisting falsely that Gore had claimed he “invented” the internet, with the implication being he was also making up climate change.

This notion that Gore was hysterical got lodged into the public imagination, so much so that as late as 2006, “South Park” offered an episode in which Gore was presented as what my colleague Matthew Rozsa called “an attention-seeking loser who tried to convince the world of the existence of a fictional monster that was ‘half man, half bear and half pig.'” The episode was an effort to discredit “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore’s 2006 documentary about climate change.

“South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone finally admitted in 2018 that Gore was right and they were wrong. Too little too late: In the 12 years since, Republican hostility to doing anything about climate change has hardened into a fact of life, so immovable that few Republicans even have to bother justifying themselves by claiming to be climate-change skeptics.

Now Donald Trump is in office — elected on a wave of the same “stick it to the liberals” energy that Gore endured for decades — and there’s a new inconvenient truth that bedevils Republicans and their loathing for the very idea of the government intervening on the behalf of the public good: The coronavirus pandemic.

The parameters of the current situation aren’t mysterious. This virus is washing across the country, infecting millions and killing, as of Tuesday morning’s data, at least 135,000 Americans and probably significantly more. Trump, out of a combination of laziness and a faith in his magical powers of gaslighting, believes that if we simply pretend the virus isn’t there, kids will go back to school, people will go back to work, the economy will rebound and he’ll win the election. He and his cronies are dusting off the climate denial handbook in an effort to confuse the public about science just long enough to drag Trump across the finish line in November.

Their new Al Gore is Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has served under every president since the ’80s and has become a trusted figure for coronavirus information, amid the sea of denialism emanating from Trump’s White House.

Trump quite clearly hopes he can do to Fauci what Republicans — and “South Park” — were able to do to Gore, in other words to paint him as a hysterical, attention-seeking busybody who can’t be trusted. Along the way, of course, the president would like to cast doubts on every aspect of scientific or medical knowledge about the coronavirus that is currently killing Americans.

Over the weekend, the White House unveiled an all-hands-on-deck strategy to discredit Fauci, ironically by highlighting past statements where, working off limited information about a brand-new virus, Fauci was overly optimistic about the country’s ability to stave off the coronavirus. Of course the “he was wrong then, he could be wrong now” tactic being used by the White House contradicts itself, since the premise that he must be wrong now is based on saying he was wrong then about the stuff he’s right about now. He is Schrodinger’s Fauci: Somehow both right and wrong, and wrong because of how right he is.

These are the same people who managed to convince huge swaths of the nation that climate change isn’t real because Gore is fat. So let’s just say it’s reasonable to conclude that their arguments don’t have to make sense to be accepted.

This time around, however, there’s every reason these efforts to convince the public not to believe in the coronavirus won’t work nearly as well as they did when applied to climate change.

And let’s be clear about the goal of Trump and his allies: They absolutely, undeniably want to convince people to believe the coronavirus is a hoax. While putting out talking points trying to undermine Fauci’s authority, Trump retweeted game-show host Chuck Woolery’s claiming that “Everyone is lying” about the coronavirus to keep “the economy from coming back, which is about the election.”

The implication here — don’t trust a medical expert with decades worth of specialized knowledge about infectious diseases; trust a Trump-loving TV personality! — isn’t exactly subtle.

Fox News, which has been amplifying and encouraging Trump in his mission to spread the belief that coronavirus is a hoax, doubled down on Monday night, with prime-time hosts telling audiences there is no need for preventive measures like face masks and social distancing.

These tactics worked so with climate change because that’s a slow-moving phenomenon, in relation to the average person’s life span. When Gore first started warning the public about climate change, the concept seemed abstract and far off. It was easy enough for conservatives to point to the fact that snowstorms still happen every winter to suggest this proved that Gore’s warnings were hysteria. It’s just a lot harder to believe in a problem that isn’t visible. In recent years, as the extreme weather events we’ve been warned about — shocking summer heatwaves, raging wildfires, terrible hurricanes, ice-free winters — become more common, we don’t here nearly as much blithe climate-change denialism as Gore faced in the first few decades of his activism on this issue.

The coronavirus, on the other hand, is neither abstract nor far away. Pandemic news continues to be all-consuming, and not just on a national scale, but on local news stations and in social media forums, especially as the new virus hotspots are not concentrated in “coastal elite” areas but in states like Texas, Arizona and Florida. Governors in states that have failed to contain the virus, usually under pressure from Trump not to enforce any restrictions on public spaces and businesses, have seen their approval ratings plummet. It took decades before Americans started to experience the effects of climate change directly, but this virus has rampaged through our country for the last four months, and seems to be getting worse, not better.

Rather than convince the public to disbelieve Dr. Fauci, Trump’s attacks on the doctor have only served as a reminder of what most Americans already know: Trump is a shameless liar who will say or do anything, no matter who it hurts, if he thinks he can gain a temporary advantage. It’s not just Trump’s critics who know this. Trump supporters know it as well. Mostly, they voted for him because they liked the way his trollish disregard for the truth aggravated liberals. But they also aren’t going to his rallies in big numbers, because they understand, on some level, that he doesn’t care about them and is willing to see them die rather than admit he’s wrong about the coronavirus.

What that means for the election remains to be seen, but if Trump somehow wins in November, it will be despite his attacks on Dr. Fauci. Climate change was easy to ignore for many years, because it seemed like a future problem for future people. But the coronavirus is sweeping the country as we speak, something anyone among us could get tomorrow. When your house is on fire, no amount of “Al Gore is fat” jokes will convince you to pretend everything is actually OK.

Jeff Sessions fights for his political survival in Alabama’s Republican primary

On Tuesday, July 14, Republican voters in Alabama will choose between two U.S. Senate candidates in a runoff election: former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former football coach Tommy Tuberville. The winner will go up against incumbent Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in the general election. And of all the times Sessions has run for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, this is the 73-year-old Republican’s toughest fight yet.

The far-right Sessions never had a problem winning a U.S. Senate race in Alabama in the past. After his stint as Alabama attorney general in the 1990s, Sessions ran for the Senate in 1996 and defeated Democrat Roger Bedford by 7% — and when he was reelected in 2002, he defeated Democrat Vivian Davis Figures by 26%. Sessions went on to win a third term in 2008 and a fourth in 2014.

But that was before he served in the Trump Administration as U.S. attorney general. Although President Donald Trump was glad to have Sessions in his administration at first, their relationship quickly soured when Sessions insisted on recusing himself from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump fired Sessions after the 2018 midterms and has been railing against him ever since.

Trump, in fact, has done everything he can to hurt Sessions’ 2020 campaign — and it appears to be working. Although Sessions has insisted that he still supports Trump, the president holds a bitter grudge against his former attorney general and has been endorsing Tuberville — who has been leading in polls. An Auburn University at Montgomery poll, for example, found Sessions trailing Tuberville by 16%. And a Cygnal poll found Tuberville leading by 23%.

In his attack ads, Tuberville has been slamming Sessions as insufficiently Trumpian. One of Tuberville’s anti-Sessions ads complains that Sessions “wasn’t man enough to stand with President Trump.” And Trump, in a July 11 tweet, posted, “Big Senate Race in Alabama on Tuesday. Vote for @TTuberville, he is a winner who will never let you down. Jeff Sessions is a disaster who has let us all down. We don’t want him back in Washington!” And Sessions, responding to Trump’s tweet, attacked Tuberville but not Trump himself.

Big Senate Race in Alabama on Tuesday. Vote for @TTuberville, he is a winner who will never let you down. Jeff Sessions is a disaster who has let us all down. We don’t want him back in Washington!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 11, 2020

I’ve taken the road less travelled. Not sought fame or fortune. My honor and integrity are far more important than these juvenile insults. Your scandal ridden candidate is too cowardly to debate. As you know, Alabama does not take orders from Washington. https://t.co/1I6ROih43E

— Jeff Sessions (@jeffsessions) July 11, 2020

Of all the Democratic U.S. senators who is seeking reelection in 2020, Jones is widely regarded as the most vulnerable — as Alabama is a deep red state where Trump is still popular among Republican voters. If Jones loses, Democrats will need to flip at least five Republican-held seats in order to achieve a majority in the U.S. Senate. Incumbent GOP senators who are considered vulnerable include Maine’s Susan Collins, Iowa’s Joni Ernst, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Arizona’s Martha McSally (who has been trailing Democrat Mark Kelly in poll after poll).

A poll conducted by the right-wing Club for Growth in late June and early July found that if Tuberville won the runoff and went up against Jones in the general election, he would win by 10%. However, Jones’ campaign has asserted that its own internal polling shows a much closer race.

Roger Stone thanks Tucker Carlson for pushing Trump to commute his sentence: “Incredible loyalty”

Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone singled out Fox News host Tucker Carlson for praise after President Donald Trump commuted his sentence stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

For his first interview since the commutation, Stone sat down with Carlson’s Fox News colleague Sean Hannity. He thanked a number of individuals in the same manner in which one does after receiving an award. Stone praised Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., convicted former New York police chief Bernie Kerik and conservative activist Charlie Kirk for raising doubts about his sentence ahead of Trump’s decision.

“I have to really single out your Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson,” Stone told Hannity. “He took up the cudgels early. He stayed on this case with every twist and turn — wasn’t afraid to take on the judge, laid out the jury question, encouraged me when I got discouraged. He’s a man of incredible loyalty, and he’s a great friend. He may be the best friend a man can have, so my hat’s off to him.”

“I really want to thank God,” he later added, “because I was literally hours away from being sent to a COVID-infested prison.”

Roger Stone thanks Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Matt Gaetz who he would like to see in the White House. He also thanks a few others and God for not being sent to a COVID infested prison pic.twitter.com/NVejSegM98

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 14, 2020

Stone was scheduled to begin his 40-month prison stint this week after he was convicted of seven felonies, including lying to Congress and witness tampering. But the self-proclaimed dirty trickster waged a monthslong campaign to pressure Trump to grant him clemency.

“He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him,” Stone told NBC News’ Howard Fineman ahead of the commutation. “It would have eased my situation considerably, but I didn’t.”

Carlson had long championed Stone’s cause, “offering up a steady stream of segments framing Stone as a victim of anti-Trump law-enforcement run amok and explicitly advocating for the president’s intervention,” The Daily Beast reported earlier this year.

“There was no collusion. Stone is still looking at life in prison,” Carlson said of Stone’s three-year sentence in March. “Where is Roger Stone’s pardon? His pardon from the president? Let’s hope it comes very soon.”

Stone’s commutation drew a rare public statement from Mueller, who defended his investigation amid Trump’s attacks.

“I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “The Russia investigation was of paramount importance. Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who oversaw Stone’s case, called on the Department of Justice to provide more clarity Monday about the scope of Stone’s commutation. Hours later, the department made public Trump’s order showing that the commutation included post-prison supervised release and fines levied by the court.

The order said that justice would not be served if Stone were “to remain confined to his home or serve the said sentence, and the safety of the community will not be compromised if he is released from home confinement and clemency is granted.”

Trump’s commutation came against the advice of Attorney General Bill Barr, according to NBC News. Though Barr led an intervention into the case to recommend a lower sentence for Stone than the one recommended by career prosecutors, which prompted the prosecuting team to quit the case, the attorney general defended the sentence which was ultimately handed down.

“I think the prosecution was righteous, and I think the sentence that the judge ultimately gave was fair,” he told ABC News earlier this year.

Stone’s comment that he was “under enormous pressure to turn on Trump” — but did not — and Trump’s tweet quoting Stone vowing to “never testify against Trump” also prompted questions about Barr’s remarks during his confirmation hearing last year.

“Do you believe a president could lawfully issue a pardon in exchange for the recipient’s promise to not incriminate him?” Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., asked Barr.

“No,” Barr responded. “That would be a crime.”

Stone denied any such arrangement to Hannity on Monday.

“Now, in the last two days when . . . people said, ‘You see Stone had the goods on Trump and he traded his silence for commutation,’ that is patently false,” he said. “I never said that. I never implied that.”

Andrew Weissman, who served as a lead prosecutor on Mueller’s team, said that is exactly what happened.

Stone, he wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “got his reward for keeping his lips sealed.”

Julian Zelizer on the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich: The man who was Trump before Trump

When I describe a Republican politician who rose the political ladder by smearing his political opponents with lies and attacking the system as corrupt, and who never expanded his core base while burning bridges with many of his onetime supporters, you might probably would assume I’m talking about Donald Trump. And you would be correct. Except there’s another famous GOP politician cut from that same cloth who helped pave the way for Trump: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

As Princeton professor and CNN contributor Julian Zelizer lays out is his new book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party,” Gingrich was Trump before Trump. Zelizer explained in his recent visit to “Salon Talks” that Gingrich’s “ruthless partisanship” and “political wrecking-ball” style helped usher in a new style of partisan politics. Before Gingrich, members of Congress in opposing parties were far more cordial with each other. Gingrich changed all that as the original “own the libs” conservative — who like Trump, he seemed to care more about garnering headlines and acquiring power (at any and all costs) than actually governing.

Gingrich led the GOP to a smashing victory in the 1994 midterm elections, gaining 54 seats in the House (and eight in the Senate) to win a congressional majority for the first time in 40 years. Gingrich’s famous “Contract With America” was clearly a precursor to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda, but with a lot more legislative details.) Gingrich became speaker of the House in a major political realignment — but it all came crashing down just a few years later, when he was forced from power after the 1998 midterms, in large part because of Gingrich’s scorched-earth style of politics as he championed the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Zelizer or read a transcript of the conversation below, to hear more about how Trump benefited from Gingrich’s groundwork and why liberals have largely failed to learn the tough lessons of this new era of intense partisanship, but are finally showing signs of change.

Many will remember what happened with Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s and his impact on partisanship in Congress. Your book gets into that and Newt’s origin story. I had assumed Newt was from some kind of elite family because he’s stuffy and arrogant, to be blunt, but it was interesting to learn that his childhood and upbringing was vastly different than that. His father left his mother while she was pregnant with Newt. Share a little bit about that.

Yes, he was raised really in difficult circumstances. His mother would remarry to someone who was very kind as a person, but not a very easy person to be raised by. He was cold and tough on his son — a kind of macho stepdad who didn’t give a lot of love, even though he took good care of him. He also did not grow up wealthy. He was an Army brat. He grew up in kind of blue-collar surroundings, living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a good portion of his life during the summers and also settling in Georgia. Some of the conservative populism he promoted comes out of his own background and struggles.

You start the book with something that I did not recall that was much more recent. In 2016, Newt Gingrich almost became Donald Trump’s running mate. He got very close. He was even interviewed by the Trump family.

As the Trump campaign started, Gingrich was one of the people in his inner circle. He was in his inner circle as an adviser, someone who Trump listened to, but he was also one of the people, in the final rounds, being considered for the vice presidency. In some ways, it became him or Mike Pence. I start the whole book with that story of him being considered, being in Indianapolis for a meeting with the Trump family and doing an interview on Fox News.

It was a great interview because Gingrich essentially gives a reason not to pick him. Saying that he’s a pirate like Trump’s a pirate, and two pirates on the ticket might be a little bit too much. Which is classic Gingrich — just saying what’s on his mind, even if it hurts him. But it was important because I think the connection between them is at the heart of the book, with Gingrich’s approach to partisanship and politics really being the foundation for what we see in the Trump White House.

Mike Pence has the unique ability to close his eyes and disappear in the middle of a storm of Trump literally yelling at people. Newt Gingrich is not like that. And with perhaps Newt on the ticket, Donald Trump wouldn’t have won. Maybe the evangelicals don’t come out when you have two deeply flawed men on social issues running together as a ticket.

Both their ego and their style don’t necessarily complement each other. Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump have very large egos. This is something that even the closest advisers and friends of Newt Gingrich admit. Gingrich is also very much an in-your-face politician. That’s at the heart of the book. He doesn’t remain quiet. He likes to get out front and that’s not what you necessarily want from a vice presidential pick. It would be triply hard with Donald Trump, who’s constantly trying to get air time. Although in some ways it made sense, in retrospect it actually could have led to Trump’s defeat.

You have a chapter titled “A Political Wrecking Ball.” You’ve mentioned already that Gingrich laid the groundwork for Donald Trump to be a wrecking ball in 2016, both within the Republican Party internally and outside. There’s one line you use about Gingrich’s playbook, to the effect that everything could be turned to his advantage, and that if he’s criticized for doing so, he cries foul. That’s Trump. Without overstating things, if Barry Goldwater is a father of the modern-day conservative movement, then Newt Gingrich is the father of Trumpism.

I think it’s not simply Trump, Gingrich helped invent the modern Republican political style. He came of age in an era where things were already becoming more partisan and the parties were more divided. Partisanship in the ’70s and ’80s was often seen as a good thing. That instead of bipartisan backroom compromises, we wanted politicians who stood for things. Gingrich then took it to a whole new level. He argued that in pursuit of partisan power, you can do almost anything. Any institution could be twisted and turned or it could be destroyed if it got in the way of what a Republican needed to do to win. The norms that were important to Washington so that legislators could interact with each other and that things didn’t break down so badly that we essentially had a dysfunctional city — that didn’t matter to him either.

He argued openly and repeatedly and in memos to colleagues, “We need an aggressive party that ignores all that stuff.” He was willing to assassinate the character of his opponents. He was willing to take routine procedures and use them for his own political purposes. He was willing, and this is in the book, to take ethics reforms from the ’70s meant to make Washington better and just use them to destroy his opponent. And that’s Gingrich politics. And I think from Gingrich to the Tea Party to Donald Trump, there is a clear line. I do believe Gingrich was enormously important on that front.

Before Gingrich got to Congress, were Democrats and Republicans more cordial, more civil, to each other? Look where we are today. They barely talk to each other and it’s become personal.

I do think before the 1980s there was more civility. I don’t think that’s just nostalgia. I do think members of both parties, generally, not everyone, but generally were committed to the job they had — to the idea that ultimately they were there to govern. And while they took firm positions — many Republicans opposed welfare programs, opposed civil rights, opposed any kind of federal intervention — in the end, they would work with Democrats on legislation, often compromising during the final vote.

Relations between members was far different. It was not as destructive as it was today. And there were just more boundaries to what you would do. Someone like Joe McCarthy from the 1950s, the famous senator who was a fierce anti-Communist, was ultimately pushed out. The party leaders said, “We can’t have this as the face of our party. It’s too destructive.” And that mentality really was Washington until the 1970s. Gingrich just threw that out and introduced a new era where Republicans didn’t have to worry about that. And you could have relations that were totally destroyed because that really wasn’t his main concern. I think it’s fair to say something happened in the ’70s and ’80s and he’s a big part of it.

You write about Newt Gingrich attending Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1980 and a quote from that speech, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” When you hear that now, it seems so tone-deaf in the crisis we’re living through today, both economically and health-wise with COVID-19. Do you think the GOP is going to have to shift away from this Reagan-esque philosophy?

Oh, we’ll see. I think the quote you’re talking about is at the heart of Republican politics since the 1980s. They’re not always consistent. They certainly support military spending and Republicans allow the government to subsidize certain parts of the economy. But in general, this anti-government ethos is the guiding argument of what it means to be a Republican. It’s part of why Gingrich could do what he does. I think Republicans can ultimately be more fierce than Democrats because they don’t believe in government and they’re not relying on it, whereas Democrats check themselves because they need government to function.

Does the pandemic undermine this argument once and for all? Meaning, is the crisis so severe and the need of government so clear that we move to a new philosophy in the GOP? I’m not sure. We’ve had other crises since the 1980s that revealed government was necessary, like the 2008 financial crash, where George W. Bush used a government bailout to save the economy. But the party keeps going back to this Reaganite philosophy. It’s misplaced. I think it’s just not accurate, but it still has a powerful hold on all Republicans.

You mentioned Joe McCarthy. Some have accuse Newt Gingrich of McCarthyism. As you point out in your book, Gingrich rose the ladder of power on the backs of carcasses, people he destroyed politically. What I was amazed by was that his only ideology seemed to be about acquisition of power, not focus on policy. Is that accurate?

Yeah, that is true. Before he’s speaker of the House, he’s not particularly interested in legislation. Members of Congress whose goal is to have a bill and to make policy, whether you’re conservative or a liberal, he didn’t care about that. And he was honest about it. He cared about partisan power. And everything he did revolved around that. And because of that philosophy, that’s what allowed him to be very McCarthyite. One of the early stories I tell is in ’83 and ’84 where Gingrich would go on the floor of the House at the end of the day and make these one-minute speeches where he’d accuse Democrats of being weak on defense and failing to support Reagan’s fight against communism in Central America.

He would ask individual Democrats to respond to the charge that they were essentially unpatriotic. What you couldn’t see if you were watching C-SPAN was there was no one in the chamber. It was totally empty. Of course no one was going to answer, but it made the Democrats look like they were doing exactly what Gingrich said. A lot of Democrats said this was really low-ball politics, that it was Joe McCarthy again. The difference in my story is that Gingrich ends up in the leadership, as opposed to McCarthy, who was ultimately pushed out.

Now, at some point, there is a pivot to, at least on its face, policy, and that’s with the Contract for America in 1994. And any fan of politics that rings a bell, Contract for America. Republicans were pushing this because they had not controlled the House for decades and they were getting a sense, maybe we could win the House. This is Bill Clinton’s two years in, the economy’s not doing great and here comes Contract for America.

What you started with is important to remember, Republicans were not in control of the House of Representatives since 1954. They were basically a permanent minority in Congress. And many Republicans thought that way. We’re never going to have power. We’re always going to be second fiddle to the Democrats. That was part of the appeal of Gingrich. He said, “That’s not true.” And he said, “We can fight in a way that will ultimately give us control back.” And ultimately in ’94, when he is leading the midterm campaigns, Bill Clinton is president, he nationalizes the campaign. He says, “Let’s run it not as a bunch of local Republicans, but as a national party fighting for an agenda, just like a president does.”

The “Contract With America” was actually for TV Guide. It’s a pullout basically that you could put on your refrigerator with a 10-point plan promising what Republicans will do if they have power. A balanced budget amendment, term limits for members of Congress. It’s kind of a hodgepodge of ideas, but the ideas didn’t matter anyway, just like we’re talking about with Gingrich. What mattered was having this symbolic piece of paper voters can put on their refrigerator and a promise of what they would do. And it worked. Many argue this kind of campaign tactic, very media-centered, was exactly what Republicans needed to do to finally win.

It was remarkable that you had Newt for years saying, “We can win the House.” Finally it happens, they win in ’94 and he becomes speaker in ’95, third in line to be president. He gets his dream and then, within a few years, it completely unravels. Remind people again — this is like knowing the ending of the movie but not remembering exactly the details — what led to Newt Gingrich’s collapse?

Well, it’s the same thing throughout his career: He goes too far. It’s in the nature of how he fights a battle. He will put everything on the table. He will go to places most people won’t go and he uses the media to command constant attention. This is always the principle to what he does. All of that means it’s easy for this to fall apart relatively quickly. And there were various moments before he’s speaker where he goes too far and all the media attention he gets ultimately turns against him. And this was a big part of what happened as speaker. He introduces a new kind of speakership where he’s on TV almost every day. He’s challenging Bill Clinton for media attention, but ultimately stories emerged, such as when he was on the flight back from Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral in Israel, he complained that Bill Clinton didn’t come to the back of the plane and talk to him about a budget negotiation that was going on.

The media had a famous cover story, “Cry Baby,” and it captured what he was about. He shuts down the federal government in ’95 and ’96 over this issue, and instead of turning in favor of Republicans for finally taking a stand, it made him look vindictive and petty and not capable of governing. Ultimately, he falls from power, but the other story is, his politics remains the way the Republican playbook is written. And that’s a key part of the story that I want to tell: The Republican establishment, for the reasons you say, they were open to letting him in. They wanted to win and they were willing to embrace his style if that was the path to victory.

He probably was the biggest loser in the Bill Clinton impeachment, where he was leading the charge and then promising that in the midterms of 1998, Republicans be rewarded soundly with a lot of more seats. That didn’t happen and he had to step down.

Two things happen during the midterms, which are right in the middle of the impeachment battle. Republicans don’t do well in the House races, where traditionally these are midterms that you’d expect a Republican gain in seats. Because here you have a president being impeached. But they actually don’t perform well and many Republicans blame Newt. The other part of it is the hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich, which is a part of the story that I tell.

He’s often accusing people of doing exactly what he does. In the ’80s, he’s accusing the Democratic speaker, Jim Wright, of unethical behavior involving the sale of books, when he himself was unethically selling books, as would later be revealed. And in ’98, he’s leading a charge against the president revolving around his affair while he himself is having an affair. The combination of a poor performance in the midterms with everyone understanding that Gingrich is in the middle of the kind of relationship they were trying to tag the president with was devastating. They call for him to step down. In some ways that’s very Gingrich-like, because Gingrich argued that no leader should be permanent. His whole career is about taking down people. Ultimately that’s what they did to him.

I can’t help thinking about the trajectory of Donald Trump. For years, he fought to become president, he talked about it for decades. Finally runs. Similar to Newt Gingrich, a scorched-earth campaign. He doesn’t care who he destroys, even members of his own party, even former generals who served in his administration. Is it fair to say that Trump might be on that same trajectory of burnout?

Someone like Gingrich isn’t a long-term player in many ways. Even though he’s been around for a long time now, he’s a burnout kind of politician because he puts so much heat and fire in his fights, and ultimately that’s hard to sustain. Is Donald Trump in a similar situation? I don’t know. Donald Trump has more of a foundation in some ways. He has an entire media apparatus with Fox News that wasn’t there for much of a Gingrich’s career. Even as speaker, it wasn’t what it is today. Trump has a much more loyal Republican electoral base than Gingrich did. We’ve become more polarized and the Republican electorate is much more solid. It could be that he might be in a burnout mode, but it doesn’t matter. The party is in a place where they will keep him in power. They will essentially say he’s better than Biden and that works in his favor. It might not lead to the same fate, I guess I’m saying.

Republicans who like Trump are going to vote for him. But Trump used to tout his record, that everyone he endorsed for GOP congressional primaries won. Well he’s lost three races in recent two weeks, including Mark Meadows’ former seat in North Carolina. This 24-year-old insurgent, who will be 25 by the time he is sworn in, won the district. Does this show some weakening of Donald Trump’s control of his base?

I think it’s also a danger for him — meaning the burnout part. I think he can actually survive in the short term, but the one thing ultimately he can’t survive is Republican leaders reaching the conclusion that they will lose their power because of him. They haven’t reached that conclusion yet. But these primary fights, that’s exactly what the signal is. Why doesn’t he carry these tickets? Why can he put all of his energy into an endorsement — in Mark Meadows’ case, for his chief of staff, former head of the Freedom Caucus, it’s his seat and there’s no control there. And that’s where he’s vulnerable because the Republican style of politics, there is no loyalty to person in this era. That is Gingrich in a nutshell. He wasn’t loyal to anyone. What he was loyal to was power. So if these primaries start to suggest that Trump can’t deliver. like Gingrich in ’98, I do think more Republicans are willing to throw him off the ship. I think he understands that and we’ll see how much they feel that. But I think it’s definitely a red light for him.

The last part of your book is called “The Rise of a New Republican Party.” I have to ask though, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, famous Newton’s Law. On some level, isn’t Newt Gingrich what led to the rise of a new Democratic Party in which you have insurgency and hyper-partisanship, not just because of Newt but with the fuse Newt lit? Now we have two parties where there are more extremes. On some level, do you think Newt Gingrich set us on a trajectory to where we are today?

It’s an important point. In the period my book focuses on, the Democrats don’t really adjust. And part of the story I’m telling, it’s not just about Gingrich. It’s about the fact Democrats didn’t get where this was all going. They thought things were going to return to normal. They thought ultimately the Republicans would contain the Gingrich-like elements of their party, and they didn’t have to fight in a tougher fashion because this was not how things worked in Washington. My book argues they were wrong. Jim Wright, the first real victim of this style of politics, resigns in 1989, based on the assumption he says in his speech, “If I resign, I’m sacrificing myself, let’s go back to normal.” He didn’t get that Gingrich wasn’t going to stop and the Republicans weren’t going to stop. And what’s interesting, in the last few years, just from observing it, the Democrats seem to possibly be changing. Some recognition that the rules of partisanship are pretty tough and that you can’t simply sit back and assume “normal” anymore.

Then, at the grassroots level, you’re seeing a pretty phenomenal showing of new elements of the party who on policy are demanding very different directions on issues from criminal justice to immigration to climate change. And we’ll see, but I think if they connect to party leaders, as we’re seeing with some of these Democratic primaries, which are bringing in a younger generation, they might start to embrace new tactics that aren’t Gingrich like, but they’re certainly a response to understanding that’s what the Republican Party is about. AOC is a great example, I think, of a Democrat who is like what you’re saying, who sees the game and without becoming Gingrich-ian is trying to hit back hard through social media, through very powerful appearances on the Hill and through good old-fashioned primary work to try to make sure the party moves in the right direction.

Why is the stock market soaring amid a pandemic? Because Trump thinks that may save him

Donald Trump isn’t a smart man, but he knows how to manipulate the stock market. Not only is he allegedly engaging in market manipulation while president, but it’s a Trump con that goes back decades.

Back in October 2018, the New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning profile of Trump’s extensive tax fraud schemes, and in the process of that reporting uncovered one of the ways Trump screwed with the financial markets. Journalists David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner reported that Trump would routinely engage in a scam known colloquially as “greenmailing.” It involved Trump, along with his father, Fred, as his “wing man,” exploiting the news media to pump up the price of a stock by planting rumors, devised by Trump himself, about a takeover. This would drive up the price of the stock, only for Trump to either sell or to demand “lucrative concessions from the target company to make him go away.”

All told, Donald Trump is a bit of an expert at blurting things that force the markets to bend to his will. And he’s engaging in similar shenanigans now, while Americans are dying by the thousands.

Before the pandemic and accompanying economic calamity hit us, it’s possible, while not proven, that Trump used his inexplicable trade war to seize control over the indexes. Since Trump launched the trade war with China in early 2018, whenever he’d announce good news about negotiations with Beijing — which were probably lies — the markets would rise. Whenever he’d announce bad news along those lines, the markets would collapse. We can see it in the charts: Since 2018, we’ve observed wildly unprecedented whiplash swings by hundreds of points in single days of trading, and most of those gains or declines were linked to the trade war.

Last year, Vanity Fair’s William Cohan published a mind-blowing item that closely examined several “chaos trades” and the linkage between Trump’s blurts and the movement of the S&P 500. Sure enough, someone — or a connected group of someones — was making colossal trades just prior to Trump’s announcements about the trade war. When I say “colossal,” I’m understating the magnitude of the windfalls these trades produced.

This year, the question we’re all asking is why the hell the markets are doing so well in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, not to mention the existence of a recession and a record-high budget deficit. As I write this on Monday, July 13, the Dow is up 452 points despite everything else collapsing around us. (At the end of the day, the Dow closed up just 10 points, due to bad news about the virus. More on this presently.) Astonishingly, the Dow has climbed 8,000 points since its pandemic low point on March 23.

Why?

Trump desperately wants to be re-elected this fall to avoid being prosecuted, not to mention getting crushed under an avalanche of incoming lawsuits. The presidency serves as his last best shield against true accountability. He knows as well as anyone that the economy is the only thing keeping him from an approval poll average in the low 20s, and a landslide victory for Joe Biden in November, similar to Barack Obama’s resounding victory in 2008. Consequently, Trump’s returning to some of his old tricks to try to keep the major market indexes happy, at the very least. Only this time, his tricks are exacerbating the pandemic and literally killing Americans, all for the sake of his re-election.

Many of the biggest upside days for the markets have come as a result of Trump’s insistence upon prematurely reopening the economy, a process he moronically kicked off while the rate of daily infections was at its then-high point. Since irresponsibly and catastrophically pulling the trigger way too soon, the markets have moved higher every time it looks as if the reopening will continue despite the worsening coronavirus numbers. Good news for Trump. (Examples: Here, here, here and here.) Conversely, when the possibility of another shutdown emerges, the markets fall. (Examples: Here, here and here.) And that’s bad news for Trump.

In other words, Trump’s constant rose-colored blurts about the economy and the reopening process have artificially resurrected the markets, for now, helping Trump politically while leaving the rest of the economy behind.

To be clear: No, the markets aren’t the economy. But the incongruous rise in the markets since March have been enough to provide Trump with some much-needed fuel for his perpetual bullshit machine, allowing him to repeatedly brag about the “record” heights of the indexes, keeping smiles on the faces of everyone with skin in the Wall Street game, while appeasing his aspirational fanboys who are only interested in winning no matter who dies.

Speaking of which, the federal budget deficit could climb to a record-smashing $4 trillion this year. That’s more than $2.6 trillion higher than it was in 2009 in the midst of the Great Recession. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate is 11 percent, or a full point higher than it was during the 2008-2009 collapse. At least 135,000 Americans are dead, with no ceiling in sight, all due to the pandemic and Trump’s apocalyptic response. Indeed, everything’s becoming more apocalyptic by the day, with the threat of another lockdown emerging in several large states, while more and more Americans follow Trump’s frenetic lead, shirking the use of masks and other safety measures meant to end the crisis responsibly.

Yet the markets are still merrily climbing, thanks to Trump’s policy of death-for-the-Dow. As long as Trump continues this policy, the jacked-up white guys in lower Manhattan will keep buying. It’s ghoulish to the extreme.

Everything else in America is nearing hellscape status, and, despite his manipulations, the markets aren’t out of the woods yet. Georgia appears to be on the verge of entirely shutting down again, with other states, including Texas, soon to follow. On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the closure of all bars, indoor restaurants and virtually every other form of indoor recreation. And because life tends to find a way, it’s likely that other states still on the low end of their curves, will see the numbers begin to climb again.

Trump could have called for more stimulus legislation to keep the economy afloat until the infection curves dropped toward zero. He could have taken responsible steps to remain closed while keeping the economy above water, at least. Had he done all that, the pandemic might have been over by now, or at least on a downward trajectory. Instead, he did the worst possible thing at the worst possible time: He sacrificed thousands of lives to the Wall Street meat-grinder, and the economy might have to shut down again anyway. More whiplash at the hands of a professional conman.

Trump, a real life Patrick Bateman, is just soulless enough to be unconcerned about the bloody consequences of his malicious behavior. By ignoring the pandemic for the sake of the Dow, and hence his re-election campaign, he’s risking the distinct and calamitous possibility that thousands more Americans will die, or suffer from lifelong pre-existing conditions, all to serve his blindingly irresponsible re-election strategy — and the way it looks right now, he might not even win. Losing the election anyway, despite sacrificing all those lives, is a risk he’s willing to take. He’s willing to balance the outcome of the election on a pile of American bodies — including the bodies of American soldiers targeted by his paymaster Vladimir Putin, by the way. This isn’t the behavior of a servant of the people, it’s the behavior of a genocidal tyrant, which he surely is. That’s exactly how history ought to remember him after he’s gone.

Trump and corruption: Who cares in the time of COVID?

Donald Trump may have initially become more widely known for his co-written 1987 “The Art of the Deal” autobiography.

From Art of the Deal to Art of Undermining

But it is his 2020 sequel “The Art of Undermining: How to Upend the United States from the Oval Office” that will secure his fame. In the annals of history, he can lay claim to the title of being America’s most corrupt President.

Despite some vigorous efforts to tackle his many abuses of the law, Mr. Trump is unlikely to be brought down by his increasingly outrageous abuses of his office.

This includes the July 9 Supreme Court ruling that he is not above the law, as he and his lawyers had preposterously claimed.

Protecting himself and his friends

From his inauguration as President in January 2017 to this day a paramount priority for Donald Trump has been the relentless pursuit of a never-ending series of manipulations of the law to serve himself and his friends.

On Friday evening, for example, Trump announced that his old friend and political advisor, Roger Stone, is a free man. Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month prison sentence — he was due to go to jail on July 14.

Making the Justice Department a political agency

Stone had been found guilty by a jury of multiple crimes related to the 2016 presidential election campaign.

The U.S. Justice Department, long an institution with a rather stellar track record and reputation, first announced it would go for a 7 to 10-year prison sentence. But then, U.S. Attorney-General William Barr intervened and called for a much lower sentence, which he was given.

One wonders: Was there a deal in place — with Trump vowing to Stone that he would never let him go to jail provided that Stone in return lied about Trump’s knowledge of Wikileaks disclosures about Hilary Clinton’s e-mails? We will never know.

Barr’s interventions

Nobody is as willing to be the hatchet-man for Trump as William Barr. In a most brazen departure from old customs, Barr has always acted as the President’s personal lawyer, thus making a mockery of his official job title of Attorney General of the United States serving all the people.

At the end of his career, ‘Loyal’ Bill Barr has obviously opted for shredding a once solid reputation to ensure, at least, that he makes it into the history books.

Out of that corner, he has been fighting intensely — and preposterously — to assist Donald Trump in his multiple personal fights to prevent the U.S. Congress, U.S. prosecutors and the U.S. public from seeing his personal tax returns.

A win against Trump?

It was Barr’s Justice Department that claimed that Cyrus Vance, Jr., the public prosecutor for the Manhattan, New York area, could not investigate Trump’s finances because the President is immune from all investigations.

That was a ludicrous assertion and all the justices on the Supreme Court agreed with Chief Justice John Robert’s statement in the opinion that:

Two hundred years ago, a great jurist of our Court established that no citizen, not even the President, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding. We reaffirm that principle today and hold that the President is neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need.

Winning yet more delays

However, the Supreme Court also crucially said Trump could go back to lower courts in New York to fight his case. It thereby opened the way for the President to seek further delays.

More specifically, in another ruling on July 9, the Supreme Court agreed with Barr’s Justice Department that the Congress could not get the multitude of financial documents about Trump that it is seeking.

The Court asserted that the demands made by Congress were too wide-ranging, but it indicated that it is legitimate for Congress to seek specific documents from the President, notably those such as his private financial details that are not subject to Executive Privilege.

It will take months before Congress can move effectively, so Trump has won delays here too.

Filling, not draining the swamp

Beyond these cases which made national and international headlines, a vast number of legal actions against Trump and his family are now moving through various U.S. courts. So is a plethora of charges for conflict-of-interest and ethics violations.

In another era just one or two of the cases would have been sufficient to do enormous damage to a President of the United States. But in the Trump era, the scandals come so frequently and fast that nothing seems to stick.

That is part of Mr. Trump’s method. He counts on nobody being able to keep up with all his violations of the law.

“…the swamp drainers”

Away from the “big” headlines, what has been especially troublesome for the institutional set-up of the United States has been the way in which Donald Trump has extended his sense of personal fiefdom management to the offices of U.S. Inspectors Generals (IGs).

These are an important, but much overlooked institution to ensure institutional cleanliness. Especially in a country with such vast bureaucracy and such vast financial powers (and hence potential for abuse), they are important gatekeepers.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley from Iowa is seething that the 1978 law from the post-Watergate era that established the offices of Inspectors General (IGs) is being ruthlessly undermined by Trump.

Grassley has been the IGs’ champion in the U.S. Senate for many years and now wants to strengthen existing laws to restore the independence of the IGs. He notes that the IGs were meant to be the “original swamp drainers.”

A crucial cleansing brigade

Senator Grassley explains that, under the 1978 law, the IGs were authorized to conduct audits and investigations; promote efficiency and deter fraud and abuse; and keep agency heads and Congress “fully informed” about the problems IGs find.

Today, there are 75 IG positions across the federal government and their actions have uncovered waste and fraud on a vast scale over the years — saving the government over $20 billion in the first six months of 2020 alone, says Grassley.

IG’s are essential for the transparency and accountability of government, but what is the current practice? Are Americans, via the processes that see IGs report independently to Congress, still assured that investigations of fraud and abuse in the federal government will be pursued?

Neutering the inspectors

The following sample clearly says not so:

President Trump announced in late March that he would replace Christi Grimm, the senior Inspector-General at the Department of Health and Human Services, after she reported failings in the government’s response to the crisis.

Michael Atkinson, the Inspector-General for the National Intelligence Agency, was removed late on Friday, April 4, for having failed to prevent Congress from receiving the whistle-blower complaint about Trump’s Ukraine extortion that led to the House of Representatives impeaching the President.

A few days later, on April 7, Trump ousted Glenn Fine, as the special IG in charge of a panel of IGs to oversee the disbursements of large amounts of the $2.2 trillion Cares Act relief program. Trump clearly did not believe that Fine would be sufficiently loyal to Trump and his friends.

Meanwhile, public documents show that many corporations run by the President’s friends, as well as one owned by the family of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, received loans and grants from the U.S. Treasury and Small Business Administration as a result of the relief program.

And then, Steve Linick, the Inspector-General at the State Department, was fired on Friday evening, May 15, and while no official reason was given, he was investigating the ways that Secretary of State Pompeo, at the urging of the Raytheon arms company, circumvented Congressional processes to rush ahead with a major sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

Conclusion

The Government Ethics Office is a wasteland, the office of Inspector-General has been neutered and the U.S. Justice Department has become the President’s personal law firm.

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign vow to “drain the swamp” is a farce. A sign of his arrogance and the weaknesses in the institutional set-up of the United States, Mr. Trump has made a mockery of anti-corruption efforts. In this time of COVID 19, he seems to be getting away with his abuses.

Threatening to reform the Supreme Court worked — for now. We must keep the pressure on

Last week, the Supreme Court wrapped up its latest term. For progressives, the mix of positive and disappointing rulings demonstrated both the power and the limits of organizing and advocating around the judiciary. Despite a handful of critical progressive rulings, however, the court’s conservative majority remains a co-conspirator in a scheme to sabotage democracy for partisan reasons. And we must not let that reality resign us to a generation of minority rule.

Over the last few decades, the left has largely ceded judicial politics to conservatives. Conventional wisdom held that any discussion of the courts would backfire on Democrats by energizing Republican voters. Fortunately, that outdated view is beginning to erode. My organization, Take Back the Court, is one of several formed during Donald Trump’s presidency and dedicated to rebalancing the judicial playing field.

The momentum for court reform was on full display recently, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and a bevy of rising stars headlined a rally that we organized with like-minded partners, Indivisible and Demand Justice. A diverse coalition of advocacy groups recently endorsed court expansion to reverse the 2016 theft of the court, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell squelched Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. Support for the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch and, most especially, Brett Kavanaugh hangs like an albatross around the necks of many key senators.

Our focus on the court is making a difference in Americans’ lives. Chief Justice John Roberts is a shrewd political actor and observer. Make no mistake, data shows that Roberts is every bit as dangerous as his extreme colleagues, such as Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. But he also understands that his political and policy aims depend on the Court’s perceived legitimacy, and he is willing to play a long game. The threat of court reform seems to have influenced Roberts’ decisions to reject Trump’s racist repeal of protections for Dreamers, Louisiana’s unconstitutional attempt to dismantle abortion rights, and legalized workplace discrimination against LGBTQ Americans. Each of those rulings was a major victory for fairness, equality and the rule of law. And each could easily have gone the other direction without the tireless work of advocates.

At the same time, several decisions over the last two weeks highlight the grave threat the Supreme Court continues to pose to American democracy. Along partisan lines, the justices rejected pandemic-related voter protections in Alabama and ensured that congressional investigators will not get Mueller investigation documents before November’s presidential election. Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh all but guaranteed that Trump’s financial documents will remain hidden until they can no longer damage him. These decisions are part of a long-term pattern of rulings, such as the infamous Citizens United decision, that corrode democracy for partisan advantage. As America’s demographics change, minority rule depends on institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College and anti-democratic practices like voter suppression, gerrymandering and stealing courts.

Roberts has likened his job to that of a baseball umpire calling balls and strikes. In fact, he more closely resembles the infamous point-shaving ex-NBA referee Tim Donaghy. Roberts gives Supreme Court proceedings the auspices of an honest competition, but the fix is in. The Roberts court has issued 80 split-decision civil rulings in which conservative donors had a clear interest. The Roberts majority sided with conservative donors in all of them.

Over the last year, support for structural court reform has grown exponentially. Leaders have proffered plans ranging from term limits to rotating justices between the Supreme Court and other federal benches. Many of these ideas have merit, but only one can plausibly rebalance the court after its 2016 theft: adding more seats.

The Constitution prescribes many details of the Supreme Court’s existence. Size is not one of them. Since our founding, Congress has changed the number of justices seven times. The next Congress could simultaneously add seats and confirm judges to fill them. By contrast, other proposals carry implementation lags, during which they could be enjoined and stuck down by the court’s current majority.

The beltway “both sides” class will cry “court packing.” But make no mistake: the court is already packed. How else to describe manipulating the number of justices in 2016 to block the legitimate nomination of Judge Garland?

Still, this is not a tit-for-tat partisan power grab. After adding seats, Congress should enact additional reforms — like term limits — to depoliticize the court, along with pro-democracy measures like the For the People Act (H.R.1). But we cannot simply lodge complaints with the increasingly-biased referees as a narrow faction bulldozes all norms of law and democracy. Democracy cannot survive if only one side plays by the rules — and if only one side is allowed to govern, no matter how voters cast their ballots.

Now is the time to keep fighting back. We are not powerless against this court unless we allow ourselves to be.

Federal judge immediately blocks sweeping Tennessee abortion ban

Reproductive rights advocates celebrated Monday after a federal judge blocked Tennessee’s sweeping new restrictions on abortion within in an hour of Republican Gov. Bill Lee signing them into law.

“This is a critical win for people in Tennessee who will not lose access to their constitutional right to abortion,” declared Anjali Dalal, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. “But we cannot lose sight of the big picture: that it took a court order to stop these politicians from pursuing a ruthless anti-abortion agenda in the middle of a pandemic, passing a ban that would disproportionately harm Black and brown people.”

“We would urge Tennessee’s elected officials to abandon this destructive, shameful effort and return to the job they were hired for: serving their constituents,” added Dalal.

The national and Tennessee arms of the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights (CCR), and Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) had filed suit to block the law after it passed the state legislature in June.

PPFA president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said in the groups’ joint statement on Monday that “today’s ruling ensures that for now, people in Tennessee can continue accessing safe, legal abortion in their home state. But while we can enjoy a moment of relief today, we can’t forget that legislators passed this dangerous abortion ban in the dead of night without any public input.”

“While the country rises up against racism, it’s important to recognize that these laws are inherently discriminatory,” she continued, vowing PPFA will keep fighting such measures. “Abortion bans are part of a larger public healthcare system that targets people of color through barriers to care, and systemically erases their freedoms and bodily autonomy. Enough is enough. Banning abortion is illegal, full stop.”

WE ARE OPEN: TN Governor Bill Lee signed a sweeping abortion ban on Monday, July 13, but a judge almost immediately granted a comprehensive temporary restraining order. PPTNM's health centers continue to provide essential reproductive healthcare at all of our locations. pic.twitter.com/BeJCvaiZl0

— Planned Parenthood: Tennessee & North Mississippi (@pptnmcares) July 13, 2020

District Judge William L. Campbell on Monday granted (pdf) a restraining order to block the law while the challenge to it is before the court.

“Plaintiffs have demonstrated they will suffer immediate and irreparable injury, harm, loss, or damage if injunctive relief is not granted pending a preliminary injunction hearing,” Campbell wrote. “The act will immediately impact patients seeking abortions and imposes criminal sanctions on abortion providers. The time-sensitive nature of the procedure also weighs in favor of injunctive relief pending a preliminary injunction hearing.”

The Nashville-based Tennessean explained that in addition to prohibiting abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected—as early as six weeks—the law bans the procedure:

If the doctor knows that the woman is seeking an abortion because of the child’s sex or race;
If the doctor knows the woman is seeking an abortion due to a diagnosis of Down syndrome; and
For juveniles in custody of the Department of Children’s Services, including removing the current option to petition a judge for permission.

The law also makes it a Class C felony for a doctor to perform an abortion under any of those circumstances, the Tennessean noted. It requires doctors to determine and inform the patient of the gestational age of the fetus, allow the patient to hear the fetal heartbeat, conduct an ultrasound and display the images to the patient, and explain the location of the fetus as well its dimensions and visible body parts.

There are already several other state-level restrictions on abortion in Tennessee. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the state’s restrictions include forcing patients to endure state-directed counseling and then wait 48 hours before an abortion is provided, and barring doctors from providing medication abortions via telemedicine. The procedure would also be banned statewide if Roe v. Wade were overturned.

Campbell’s Monday order came as the United States remains the global hot spot for the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 3.3 million confirmed Covid-19 cases and 134,500 deaths nationwide. Some representatives for the rights groups challenging the constitutionality of Tennessee’s currently blocked law put the measure and the judge’s order in the context of the ongoing Covid-19 crisis.

CRR senior staff attorney Jessica Sklarsky charged that “it is unconscionable that—in the middle of a public health crisis and a national reckoning on systemic racism—lawmakers are focused on trying to eliminate access to abortion.”

BREAKING: We, along with our partners at @PPFA, @ACLU, and @aclutn blocked Tennessee's abortion ban in court just MINUTES after @GovBillLee signed it into law.

Abortion is still legal in all 50 states. We'll keep fighting to make sure this law never takes effect. #StopTheBans

— Center for Reproductive Rights (@ReproRights) July 13, 2020

“Abortion is an essential health service, and this law clearly violates the constitutional rights of patients and disproportionately harms communities of color,” Sklarsky said. “Tennessee should stop attacking reproductive healthcare and instead work to implement policies that will help marginalized communities. This law does the exact opposite.”

ACLU of Tennessee executive director Hedy Weinberg agreed, saying that “especially in the midst of a global health crisis, lawmakers should realize that their continued attacks on access to abortion are particularly harmful to those struggling financially and those who already face significant barriers to healthcare—including people of color and people who live in rural areas.”

More broadly, Weinberg added, “it’s past time for the politicians in our state get the message that they cannot insert themselves in someone else’s personal, private decision to end their pregnancy.”

Lee was among the Republican governors who earlier this year tried to block access to abortion during the pandemic by declaring it a nonessential procedure, but his effort was thwarted by a ruling from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in late April—thanks to a lawsuit filed by the same advocacy groups challenging the state restrictions that were temporarily blocked Monday.

Meet Alex Morse, the gay progressive mayor taking on a 30-year Democratic incumbent

At age 22, Alex Morse was elected mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts, while still a senior at Brown University, becoming the youngest openly gay mayor in America. It’s the only job he’s known for his adult working life.

Morse trying to change that now, running as a progressive in the Democratic primary against Rep. Richard Neal, who chairs the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and has represented Massachusetts in Congress for almost as long as Morse has been alive. The primary will be held Sept. 1.

Morse comes across as thoughtful and self-assured, with an irrepressible lifelong love for, of all things, local civics, which he’s been engaged with since middle school.

He spoke with Salon about what motivated him to take on Neal, and how he plans to use his appetite and talents for the hands-on, nitty-gritty of municipal policy to execute a progressive agenda so ambitious it can sometimes disappear into abstraction.

Morse also spoke deeply about his personal experiences growing up gay in a working-class town, jumping headlong into civics and local politics as a high schooler, and his own journey as a young mayor while helping his mother and brother navigate serious struggles with mental illness and addiction.

(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.)

Could you start with your own background?

So Holyoke, Massachusetts, where I’m mayor, is a post-industrial city of about 40,000 people, once the paper capital of the world and, you know, it fell on hard times with forces of globalization and capitalism. I grew up in the backdrop of a community that had high poverty, a dead downtown, white flight, poorly performing public schools, high crime. People just had this quiet resignation that nothing could ever improve. And we just had the same people in office year after year, decade after decade.

My mom and dad grew up in public housing and poverty here, both raised by single mothers. They met as teenagers in public housing. My mom got pregnant at 17 with my oldest brother Doug and dropped out of high school. Neither she or my dad had the opportunity to go to college. My dad’s worked at the same meat packing company in Springfield for 35 years, Coronado Meat Company, and when I was born my mom started a family daycare in our childhood home.

I’m the youngest of three boys and went to the public schools. I got involved in a few civic efforts in middle school and high school that really got me into government politics. I joined a youth commission. I joined a statewide group called Teens Leading the Way, and worked on policy and mental health issues.

And as I did that, I came out as gay. I was 16, a sophomore at Holyoke High School, and I started the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. And then I founded a citywide LGBTQ nonprofit, and every year we organize a youth Pride Prom.

I went on to Brown University, but unlike a lot of my classmates and friends, stayed very connected to my hometown. My family has had some very real challenges and struggles that have kept me close to home and close to them. My mom, when she was alive, struggled with mental illness and addiction for most of her life, and I wanted to be there for her. And then my oldest brother, Doug, struggled with heroin addiction for the last 20 years, and unfortunately passed away from an overdose just a few months ago.

Those two real-life experiences informed the way that I knew the world and healthcare, and so my senior year I decided I was going to run for mayor. I announced my candidacy while still a senior, running against the 68-year-old Democratic incumbent. I knocked on thousands of doors, ran a very grassroots campaign, reached out and included the Latino community for the first time in decades and became the youngest and first openly gay mayor of the city. Nine years later, I’m still the mayor, in my fourth term. I’m 31 years old, and now I’m running for Congress.

How did you get into public service at such a young age?

My family was not political at all. No one in the family had ever run for office. The first time that people in my family held a campaign sign or went to a fundraiser was for me.

Nothing can teach you in a class what you learned by growing up and noticing inequity in a very real way in a community like Holyoke. Taking the bus to school every day and seeing some kids, where they go home to, and others not having much to go home to.

That lens helped me. I was always interested in service and government and helping when possible in middle school. I joined these school commissions, and we’d meet with the mayor every couple of months, give out grants. So that really gave me an interest in civics and getting involved and working with other young people.

In high school I sat on committee meetings with the mayor and the school superintendent, and we’d offer a comprehensive sexual education curriculum, and racial and social justice training for our teachers. I became an organizer and that stuck with me.

You mentioned the Pride prom. I’m a little older than you, not a lot. I’m going to be 38. I grew up in Fairfax County, just outside D.C., a pretty wealthy suburban school district. I remember when the first kid came out as gay in my school. I think I was a senior. It was just him, and he just took it all on. He had a lot of support, but it was also ugly. But you put together a Pride prom, and you were an active organizer for that community in your school. And the difference in years between us is so slim. Something happened, there, culturally, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

You know, it’s changed even more rapidly since I had my experience in high school. It’s so encouraging to see students coming out younger, and there’s more trans visibility in the community.

I remember, you know, like most closeted kids, struggling with my sexuality my whole childhood. I mean, you’re sending messages from the minute you’re born, like about your gender presentation and heteronormative behavior or languages. And if you veer from those norms, then you’re automatically labeled as “other,” as gay. We all kind of have a community struggle with that.

I knew I was gay in middle school, and in high school it was very hard to find openly gay students. I remember at the time the prevalence of homophobic and derogatory language. It was so pervasive, in classes and hallways and gym class, and it would never be interrupted or stopped by adults or educators.

If you’re in a class and some kid says, “Oh, that’s so gay” or calls someone a faggot or whatnot, the teacher just says, “Oh, let’s move on.” When I heard that stuff as a closeted kid, and a teacher just dropped it, that validates that kind of language and it’s obviously not helpful.

But when I went to the first retreat for Teens Leading the Way, that was the first time in my life I met people my age that were openly gay, happy and in a relationship. It opened my eyes, and I kept in touch with them, and within a few months I came out to my parents. I didn’t want them to find out from anyone else.

And I remember — it was MySpace at the time, and when I updated my “interested in” tab on MySpace, it just spread throughout the school.

Lost to the sands of time.

I know, it doesn’t exist anywhere anymore. Maybe I can pull it up somehow.

But I started the gay-straight alliance. I thought we would just have a couple of students there, but we had dozens of people at the first meeting. We organized a school-wide assembly on LGBT issues, two hours long, all 1,200 students were required to go. I gave a speech about coming out, and my sexuality, in front of the whole student body. I invited some special guests. We did student-led training for all the teachers in the district or at the high school about interrupting homophobic language, putting “safe space” stickers on the classrooms. Many of them are still in those classrooms.

Now, when I walked the halls with the mayor, that was pretty cool. But I remember at the time there were parents of classmates of mine that had a lot of issues with that assembly. And there were teachers who were equally upset with the principal for allowing us to do the teacher training. There were some letters to the editor from parents saying we were encouraging sexual experimentation and deviancy all that other stuff. And I was a very vocal teenager, so I wrote letters back and and rallied people around us. It felt like we were a little bit ahead of our time in terms of high school organizing.

Now it’s evolved a lot. We used to do that youth Pride prom, and we had upwards of 600 or 700 kids from all over western Massachusetts, but I think now, to an extent, more and more young people feel comfortable with expressing their gender. Going with a same-gender partner to a regular high school prom is much more normal today than it was even 15 years ago.

I mean, it’s fun, and kind of nice to have our own space where we can be ourselves. But it’s also progress to know that we could be in those spaces and also feel like we can express ourselves the way that we want to.

There are a lot of superficial similarities between you and another mayor, Pete Buttigieg. Both of you are young, ambitious, openly gay, running blue-collar towns. Care to speak to what’s similar, and maybe draw lines between you?

Well, it’s interesting. Pete and I got elected the same day in November 2011. I first met him because Harvard runs a new mayor’s program at the Kennedy School of Government, where they bring all these mayors-elect together from around the country. And we both went to that in 2011. So that’s when I first met Pete, another young mayor, probably the closest one there to my age. I was 22, and I think he was in his late twenties, early thirties, from South Bend. But he wasn’t out at the time. I was 22 and openly gay. I had been out for maybe six or seven years by then, and I had no idea that he was gay at the time. But we hung out to some extent, at the dinners and the classes.

Did he know at the time that you were gay?

I think he knew I was gay. I’m pretty open about it and there had been a lot of articles written about the youngest openly gay mayor elected in the country, stuff like that. So I imagine he knew, but we never really got there. He was in the closet, he would’ve likely avoided going there anyway.

We’re both from relatively working-class areas. We certainly have different backgrounds in terms of our families, and in terms of backgrounds of class and privilege and educational attainment. So it’s different struggles and challenges.

But when I see Pete being an openly gay presidential candidate, married to his husband, being open and honest, all of that is very real. We all have our own timelines and it’s never too early or too late to come out, and we all have to respect each other’s processes and internal struggles and never invalidate someone’s decisions. I have the utmost respect for him. We agree on a lot of policies and I think we disagree sometimes on how to get there. But we both love our country and that we want it to be a more just place for everybody.

What are the things that you want to change or create?

I’ve always been driven by a passion to provide a voice to those that have just been like shut out for so long. So many people are just doing the best they can to get by, to stay healthy, to pay their rent, to live in a safe place, to find housing. The daily decisions that I make can lead to those things being possible for people in my city.

I’m in a city that is 50% Latino, and there’s a very strong old guard here. I have had a very intense focus on making investments in the downtown, and including the Puerto Rican community. You would never know that we have the diversity we have when you looked at our government in the past, our fire department, our police department, our department heads, our city boards and commissions.

I’ve been very intentional about building a city hall that includes everyone. It looks like it speaks the language of the vast majority of our people here. When you make decisions that way you oftentimes get pushback from people who have privilege, who feel like they’re losing something. But the center of my mission is making Holyoke a place where no matter what you look like or what language you speak or where you come from or what neighborhood you live in you too can get a good education and live in a safe neighborhood and get a good job.

Fights for fairness and justice and equity have been ingrained with me since I was a kid. And that’s what always drives me when I think about what I do.

When I took office only 49% of our students were graduating from high school. The vast majority of students not being well served by our district were low-income Latino students. And today nearly 75% of our students are graduating from high school. We’ve done that by building a school system that actually meets our students where they’re at and provides a pathway for every student. It doesn’t shut out or exclude the students who need a good public education the most.

For example, we at one point had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the entire state. Our school district pushed young mothers out of the system and made them feel they were unworthy of a quality education. We built a school system that accommodates young mothers, and partners with local organizations to provide day care. It sends a message that you don’t have to choose between being a mother and getting a high school diploma.

We’ve also formed partnerships with our community college, we’ve revamped our vocational high school, offering night and weekend and alternative education pathways for students that just don’t thrive in a typical eight-hour school day. Those are some of the improvements we’ve made.

Congressman Neal will criticize me for our schools being in what’s called state receivership, when the state takes over the control of the local school district. But these are his schools too, right? He’s our member of Congress. So what has he done for our public schools in Holyoke and in Springfield or throughout the district? Two of the three school districts in Massachusetts that are under receivership are in the 1st congressional district. When we were struggling to maintain local control in 2015, Congressman Neal was nowhere to be found.

How else do you distinguish yourself from the incumbent?

It starts with the influence of money in politics. Congressman Neal is like the poster child for everything that’s wrong with government in Washington, given that he’s the top recipient of corporate money of any member of Congress, Democrat or Republican, and that has directly impacted the way he uses his power in Washington. Look no further than his influence in killing a piece of legislation on surprise medical billing, after Blackstone became his biggest donor of this cycle, giving him $50,000 and lobbying against the bill that he singlehandedly killed.

I believe health care is a human right, particularly in the midst of this pandemic, where 40 million Americans have lost their jobs and many have now lost their health insurance. But Congressman Neal is using his power to subsidize the private health care industry rather than to fight for health care to be a human right. We have hospitals closing in the district, birthing centers closing, psychiatric beds shuttering.

He’s the only member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation — nine members of Congress and two senators — who refuses to get behind the Green New Deal and continues to take money from the fossil fuel industry. At the same time he negotiated the USMCA with the Trump administration, which completely ignores the climate crisis. I mean, every major national environmental organization came out against that agreement, and Congressman Neal is incredibly proud of negotiating it.

He supports defense authorization budgets that, again, divest from domestic priorities and provide billions of dollars to war and militarization.

But regardless of your political affiliation or values, people just want a member of Congress that is accessible, that shows up, that’s in touch with the district. And Congressman Neal is none of those things. He hasn’t had a town hall here in nearly three years and people right now are looking for a visible leadership that they can hold accountable, that they can communicate with. So I’m not asking people to send me to Washington to do the work for them. I want to be their partner in Congress. I want to be a partner to local elected officials, to the residents and constituents that live here, to feel like they have a member of Congress that is looking out for them and their interests, not looking out for the interests of the wealthy and the well-connected.

Coming from being a mayor to going into Congress, how will your skills and approaches translate, or serve like a bridge to national change?

I would arrive in Washington with nine years of executive governing experience, which is different than some members of Congress. So I have experience working with people who don’t necessarily share my values.

One of the differences between House Democrats, and Congressman Neal in particular, and myself is I don’t walk into the council chamber ceding the argument to them at the onset. I know my values, I know what I want to accomplish and why, and I work as hard as I can to accomplish as much as I can to meet that policy goal. I realize that I’ll never get 100 percent, but I think too often Democrats like Congressman Neal cave to the right, allow the Republicans to set the parameters.

You don’t get what you don’t fight for. But if we actually have a Democratic Party that isn’t bought by corporations and special interests, imagine what we can do with the White House and a House of Representatives and the Senate. We’ve had that before but we haven’t been able to deliver transformative change to the most vulnerable members of our communities.

Last year was the first time that the House ever had hearings on Medicare for All, not because the speaker decided it was a good idea suddenly, but because we grew the progressive caucus and elected more progressives to Congress in 2018. And that’s what we’re going to do again in 2020.

But right now we don’t have a congressman that is accessible. People want to know that their representative in Washington comes from this community.

You’re young, and you got involved in a serious job at an impressionable age. This is a weird time to be in charge of a city. What did you learn as you became an adult in the world at the same time you were responsible for a small corner of that world? What mistakes shaped you?

Thank you for asking that. My whole 20s I’ve spent campaigning or being mayor, and I’ve also had some very real personal challenges too, since becoming mayor. Navigating the death of my brother, as I said before, experiencing loss in a very real way the last few years with that, and the death of my mother and the death of my grandmother. Dealing with that while being a mayor and having the support of your constituents and your community has been a beautiful thing, but also very difficult. In my 2017 campaign, I’d have to leave the campaign office and then visit my mom at an inpatient psychiatric unit in town. Navigating those different spaces and struggles has been a challenge.

In terms of the political space and the stakes, I learned my first year in office I can’t be everything to everybody. I campaigned on an anti-casino platform, and in my first year in office, there came a moment where I decided to explore a proposal from a casino developer. I thought there was an opportunity to explore the possibility of that in the city, and I got intense pushback from my strongest supporters and constituents who were disappointed. But I felt like it was my responsibility as mayor to examine a new proposal.

But then I remember thinking, I ran on this issue and my conscience and my values, my personal feelings are that this is a lose-lose. It sucks money out of the local economy. Doesn’t add value to our city. And we need to invest in that more sustainable long-term economic development strategy.

I decided not to move forward, but I remember the day that I decided to pull the plug on the casino’s proposal, and I just felt complete relief. I’m glad I did that my first year in office. I’m never going to make everyone happy, but to the extent that I can, I will always be open and honest and explain my position and why I think it serves the best interests of my constituents and the community.

If that makes you lose an election or lose supporters, it is what it is. You have to live with yourself and look at yourself in the mirror and be proud of the decisions you make. And some will be with me and some won’t. In many ways, it’s my job to educate folks and bring them along with me.

Would you feel comfortable talking about your mother and your brother? How those experiences shaped not just your personally, but your politics as well?

Sure. I mean, I don’t think you need to have personal experience with folks who are struggling with substance abuse or mental health to be empathetic or passionate about it. But it’s hard to separate the two.

When I took office in January 2012 we had the third-highest rate of HIV and hepatitis C in the state, because of IV drug use. The findings showed that harm-reduction programs, like needle exchange programs, make a big difference. This was 2012, and there were only four needle exchange programs in the state at the time, and not a single program had opened up since 1995. So I opened up a needle exchange program that spring in partnership with the board of health. Our city council, years prior, had put a nonbinding referendum before the voters to ask if they approved of one or not, and overwhelmingly the voters said no.

I knew that, but I also knew it was in the best interest of public health to start this program, despite the fact that I would get pushed back. I got sued by the city council at the time. The lawsuit went on for I think four years, but we ended up settling, and it led to a change of state law that defined boards of health, not city councils, as the authority that could open up a needle exchange program in Massachusetts cities and towns. So today there are 30 needle exchange programs around the state, when in 2012, there were five.

And my brother was one of those people who had hepatitis C from IV drug use, and you want your family members and your friends and your community to be healthy when they seek treatment. Needle exchange programs are more than just about receiving and distributing a clean syringe. It’s also about connecting people to harm-reduction programs. And it may not be the first time they show up, it may be the 12th time, but they’ll go to the needle exchange program and maybe decide to seek treatment and go to detox. We give out bleach kits and Narcan and do overdose prevention trainings.

My brother would sometimes disappear for a few days, but we had a close enough relationship where when he was ready to be picked up wherever he was, I would pick him up and make some calls and try to find a detox bed for him and drop him off and make sure he was OK. And a number of times, even I, as mayor of Holyoke, literally couldn’t find a bed for him in all of western Massachusetts. It’s very real for my family, and if it’s real for me, I can only imagine the struggle it is for other families throughout the district.

Similar to my mom. She struggled with depression and mental illness, and many people would never know it. She’d have good years but then she would get into a darker place where she would just say to me, “I wish people understood what I was going through.”

I wish I had some fantastical element that people could see and understand, but when it comes to mental health, there’s still so much stigma and misunderstanding of what people are experiencing. And sometimes it meant my mom couldn’t be at my events, but she was always there in spirit.

I had to navigate this health system with her. I can’t tell you how many times we went to a place and they’d say, “Sorry, your insurance can’t be taken here.” We have a federal health care system that doesn’t give a majority of people coverage for mental health or substance abuse, and in the middle of this epidemic in our district, psychiatric hospitals are closing, people can’t find mental health care. They can’t find treatment beds. I mean, that’s the status quo. How could someone, after 32 years in Congress, be proud of the outcomes here in the district?

What is, in your view, the biggest challenge facing the country today, or specifically facing progressives?

Our biggest challenge right now in the country is eradicating white supremacy and systemic racism in our institutions, and how it is embedded in every single policy decision we make, from the federal government on down. Until we can actually face the ugly history of this country and the modern manifestations of slavery and how it continues to prevent people from being their full selves, we’re not going to be the country that we think we are.

I know that is a big statement and kind of broad, not one specific policy issue, but I think that this by far is our biggest challenge as a country. We have a lot of work to do in terms of how we live our lives, but also in how we formulate policy that will directly attack our country’s history and make sure that we’re the country we want to be.

We don’t have a member of Congress that understands the urgency of this moment, on this issue in particular. I was one of the first mayors in the country to make Holyoke a sanctuary city back in 2014. I was the first and only mayor in 2016 to publicly endorse the legalization of the recreational use of cannabis and marijuana.

We’ve done what we can on the local level, but without a member of Congress that actually shares those values and is using the power of their voice, we can only do so much. Trump signed an executive order last fall that requires mayors like me to explicitly send a letter to the federal government saying we continue to be OK with the resettlement of refugees in our communities, which has been the case for decades. I signed that letter, but the mayor of Springfield, Congressman Neal’s ally, refused to sign it. When asked if he agreed with one of his biggest supporters and surrogates as to his refusal to sign the letter, Congressman Neal refused to take a side.

So even during this uprising around the country, the police commissioner and the mayor of Springfield tried to reinstate five white officers who assaulted black men off-duty at a bar, and just fired an officer of color for posting a Black Lives Matter image on her personal Instagram. All to the silence of our congressman.

People are looking for a member of Congress who grasps the urgency of the moment, understands these issues. As a white man, too, with my privilege, I need to use my voice as a mayor and eventually as a member of Congress to be an ally, to be an accomplice, and to be active in dismantling these systems and creating policy that directly addresses it. Congressman Neal is just unable to be that person.

Ted Cruz sanctioned for “interfering in China’s internal affairs”

China announced Monday it is issuing sanctions against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and three other U.S. officials for “interfering in China’s internal affairs,” a move that drew a dismissive reply from Cruz.

The announcement came days after the United States issued sanctions against three Chinese officials for Beijing’s human rights abuses against ethnic minority groups in the Xinjiang region. Details on the sanctions against Cruz have not been disclosed.

Cruz, who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a Monday statement that he does not plan on traveling to the “authoritarian regime that covered up the coronavirus pandemic and endangered millions of lives worldwide.”

“The Chinese Communist Party is terrified and lashing out,” Cruz’s statement reads. “They forced over one million Uighurs into concentration camps and engaged in ethnic cleansing, including horrific forced abortions and sterilizations. These are egregious human rights atrocities that cannot be tolerated.”

The U.S. officials being targeted are Sam Brownback, the Trump administration’s ambassador for international religious freedom, and three members of the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China: Cruz; U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida; and U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-New Jersey.

On Thursday, the Trump administration banned three Chinese Communist Party senior officials and their family members from entering the U.S. The Chinese officials being sanctioned allegedly targeted Uighur Muslims, a population indigenous to Xinjiang, and members of other ethnic and religious minorities in the region, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

“Xinjiang affairs are China’s internal affairs, and the U.S. has no right to interfere in them,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told reporters in Beijing, according to The Washington Post. “We urge the United States to immediately withdraw its wrong decision.”

Cruz applauded the Trump administration’s actions Friday in a tweet saying it was a much-needed move.

“We must continue to hold Chinese government officials accountable for their egregious human rights atrocities against the Uighurs & other minorities,” Cruz tweeted.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the number of U.S. officials sanctioned by China. It’s four, not five.

“It’s a slow-moving train wreck”: Senate Republicans worried by weak online fundraising numbers

A true blue wave in November would not only include former Vice President Joe Biden defeating President Donald Trump, but also Democrats retaking the U.S. Senate, expanding their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and winning victories in state races. None of that is guaranteed to happen, but according to an article by Elena Schneider, James Arkin and Ally Mutnick for Politico, some Republican activists are worried that when it comes to U.S. Senate races and online fundraising, the GOP is falling short.

“The money guarantees Democrats nothing heading into November 2020,” Schneider, Arkin and Mutnick explain. “But with President Donald Trump’s poll numbers sagging and more GOP-held Senate races looking competitive, the intensity of Democrats’ online fundraising is close to erasing the financial advantage incumbent senators usually enjoy. That’s making it harder to bend their campaigns away from the national trend lines — and helping Democrats’ odds of flipping the Senate.”

Similarly, Kevin McLaughlin — executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — told Politico, “Some GOP Senate candidates have made great strides online, but we’re still light years away from where we need to be as a party. 2020 should serve as a canary in the coal mine to anyone on the ballot in 2022 and beyond. They have a simple choice: adapt immediately or find a new job. We have better resources than Democrats, but they don’t do any good if no one uses them.”

Corry Bliss, executive director of Congressional Leadership Fund (a Republican super PAC), is sounding the alarm as well. Bliss told Politico that Democrats “are better at online fundraising than we are — period.”

While Democrats have the fundraising platform, ActBlue, Republicans have a similar fundraising platform of their own: WinRed. But according to Schneider, Arkin and Mutnick, GOP strategists and donors are worried that GOP campaigns aren’t doing enough to take advantage of WinRed and other fundraising tools.

Eric Wilson, a GOP consultant known for his work with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, told Politico that Republicans are dropping the ball in terms of campaigning and fundraising. According to Wilson, “It’s a slow-moving train wreck. The warning signs are flashing right now, and they’re ignoring it.”

At an NRSC event in June, the Politico journalists report, Republican activists presented a slideshow and noted that during 2020’s first quarter, Republican senatorial candidates trailed their Democratic counterparts by $30 million collectively.

In order to win back the U.S. Senate in November, Democrats will need to maintain all of the seats they are defending and flip at least four GOP-held seats. Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama is considered the most vulnerable incumbent Democratic senator, while vulnerable incumbent GOP senators include Maine’s Susan Collins, Arizona’s Martha McSally, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, Iowa’s Joni Ernst and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis.

Federal judge orders Trump to turn over Roger Stone’s commutation documentation

A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to turn over President Donald Trump’s order commuting the sentence of longtime friend Roger Stone.

According to reports, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson has questions about whether Trump commuted Stone’s parole along with his prison sentence.

“Judge Amy Berman Jackson wants to see Roger Stone’s commutation paperwork, after questions have arisen about whether President Trump’s clemency covers only Stone’s prison time or also his probation,” CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz explained. “US Probation Office has raised questions about the commutation.”

!!! Judge Amy Berman Jackson wants to see Roger Stone’s commutation paperwork, after questions have arisen about whether President Trump’s clemency covers only Stone’s prison time or also his probation. US Probation Office has raised questions about the commutation @kpolantz

— Shimon Prokupecz (@ShimonPro) July 13, 2020

Movement on the #RogerStone docket: judge wants to know if Trump commuting his longtime ally’s sentence includes the parole sentence along with the term of incarceration. pic.twitter.com/nlpOph52qf

— Megan Mineiro (@MMineiro_CNS) July 13, 2020

Democrats have long had a pipe dream of turning Texas blue. Will it finally come true in 2020?

If Democrats are Charlie Brown – and they could be – Texas is the political football yanked away at the end of every game. Promising candidacies continue to endure painful yet predictable losses, which clock in close enough to hold on hope for next time.

The polls are teeing them up again in 2020. A new CBS News/YouGov survey finds President Donald Trump up one point over former Vice President Joe Biden among Texas voters at 46% to 45%. That’s well within the margin of error.

And that poll is not an outlier. An average of the eight Texas public polls since May shows Biden and Trump in a statistical tie, with Biden up by 0.3 points. A Real Clear Politics average of five recent polls also rules the race a tie, and FiveThirtyEight’s weighted average puts Trump up by only 0.1 points.

A few factors are driving the numbers, including the heavily-criticized response of Republican leadership to the coronavirus pandemic as cases surge across the state. Houston has turned into the country’s most intense hotspot. In a recent Dallas Morning News/UT Tyler poll, only 38% of Texans approved of Trump’s performance.

Though Texas has been over-hyped as a swing state, Democrats have posted numbers unmatched in a generation. This is sparked by accelerating shifts across a number of key political demographics, such as increases in Hispanic voters. Perhaps less well documented is an injection of college-educated white voters in the state’s most populous cities: Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.

Texas, however, is a massive state, and flipping it would likely require an immense well of resources and time, which may be better placed elsewhere. Besides, the state is not an electoral tipping-point: The race can be won on other more manageable battlegrounds.

Though the Biden campaign has engaged voters across the state, holding virtual roundtables, community meetings and calls, it has so far shown a reluctance to mess with Texas. In a statement to Salon, the campaign suggested it would let voters make the call for themselves, pointing to Trump’s botched response to the pandemic.

“Texans won’t forget Trump’s inability to lead our country during this pandemic, and this fall they will have the opportunity to make a change and send Joe Biden to the White House,” the campaign said.

Trump Campaign Deputy National Press Secretary Samantha Zager dismissed any speculation out of hand.

“Democrats like to pretend Texas is on the table, but they know that’s a joke – just ask Governor Wendy Davis, Senator Beto O’Rourke and President Hillary Clinton,” she told Salon in an email, in an attempt to comedically mock the defeats of three recent high-profile candidates.

Zager has a point: Pundits who predicted upsets got three wake-up calls in a row. But election experts do not point to past results. They point to current data, and they point to trends.

In that sense, Zager’s black-and-white claims belie the troubling reality facing the Trump campaign: The margin of victory shrank considerably between each of those races.

First, Davis’ 2014 gubernatorial bid drew national attention — and national dollars — after her forceful 13-hour filibuster against a 2013 anti-abortion bill. Davis ultimately lost her race to Republican Greg Abbott by 20 points.

Clinton’s candidacy, or perhaps Trump’s vulnerabilities in the heavily-Hispanic state, built up more buzz in 2016. However, Clinton never got within three points, coming closest in early August on the heels of Trump’s disparaging remarks about a Muslim Gold Star family. When she lost the state by nine points, she became the first Democratic president to come within single digits since the 1990s. It was one of the 10 tightest wins that year for Trump.

The gap narrowed again in 2018 with the Senate candidacy of former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a spirited, resolute young politician whose image seemed to capture something central about the generational changes across the state. He sprung to the national stage only a few months before the election, pulling tens of millions of dollars in donations from around the country. Though he ran a tight race, O’Rourke came up three points short of Republican opponent Ted Cruz.

What’s more: This year’s Senate race may be competitive, too. In the CBS/YouGov poll, Sen. John Cornyn was up six points (against Royce West) or eight points (against MJ Hegar) against his possible Democratic challengers. Recent state polling shows that about one-third of Texas voters are still undecided, even about their 18-year incumbent.

Also, the Cook Political Report anticipates that as many as six Republican-held House seats may realistically flip in November. In other words, at least certain races in Texas are very much in play for Democrats.

Today, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball project at the University of Virginia lists Texas as “leans Republican.” But the group says that is not a lock.

“We still think Trump is favored in Texas,” Kyle Kondik, the site’s managing editor, told Salon. “But the numbers are what they are.”

“The state is becoming more competitive, and the Democratic growth is being driven to no small degree by the migration of white voters with four-year college degrees into the Democratic Party – or at least into the anti-Trump column,” he continued. “We see this kind of trend in highly-educated places across the country, and that includes a lot of suburban congressional districts in Texas

“At this point, I think our best guess would be that the presidential race would look a lot like the Senate race in 2018 – close, but with a Republican edge,” Kondik added. “However, even that would be close for comfort for Republicans, who cannot put together a plausible Electoral College majority without Texas.”

Sabato’s Crystal Ball currently has four states in the “toss-up” category: Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Nonetheless, Texas polls have been consistently closer than all four.

Asked whether this trend could nudge Texas into the toss-up column, Kondik said: “If it still looks like this come Labor Day, quite possibly.”

Tucker Carlson announces vacation after his top Fox News show writer resigns for racists posts

Minutes after Fox News was called out on MSNBC, the embattled host of The Tucker Carlson Show announced that he would be going on a “long-planned” vacation.

The announcement came after Blake Neff, the show’s top writer, was exposed for his history of racist, homophobic and misogynistic social media posts.

“We’re out of time — gonna spend the next four days trout-fishing. Long-planned,” Carlson claimed. “This is one of those years where if you don’t get it in now, you’re probably not going to.”

CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy thought it was quite the coincidence how Fox News hosts always go on vacation during major scandals.

“Really remarkable how all these Fox News hosts coincidentally always seem to have pre-planned vacations RIGHT when they ignite controversy!” Darcy tweeted.

Sending hosts who get in PR trouble on vacation is a classic Fox PR tactic, Carlson had one after calling white supremacy a hoax, Hannity amid the Seth Rick conspiracy theories, Ingraham after attacking David Hogg, etc.

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) July 14, 2020

Astronomers perplexed by “Odd Radio Circles,” a newly discovered, very rare space phenomenon

Astronomers believe they have discovered a new, bizarre type of cosmic object that is invisible to all wavelengths of light except radio.

The strange circular objects in question have been unofficially dubbed “Odd Radio Circles” (ORCs); three of them were discovered in a recent data accumulated during a preliminary survey by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, a radio telescope array in Western Australia. A fourth Odd Radio Circle was discovered when researchers sifted through old data from 2013.

The new phenomenon is the focus of a new paper published on the preprint website arXiv, which was submitted to Nature Astronomy by a group of international astronomers. It is yet to be peer-reviewed.

“Here we report the discovery of a class of circular feature in radio images that do not seem to correspond to any of these known types of object or artefact, but rather appear to be a new class of astronomical object,” the authors of the paper write.

The ORCs are mostly circular in shape, with the exception of one shaped like a disc, and they cannot be seen with infrared, optical, or X-ray telescopes. Three of them are brighter around the edges.

The circular nature of the ORCs has led to some curiosity over their true nature. “Circular features are well-known in radio astronomical images, and usually represent a spherical object such as a supernova remnant, a planetary nebula, a circumstellar shell, or a face-on disc such as a protoplanetary disc or a star-forming galaxy,” the researchers write.

Astronomers initially believed the ORCs may have been a telescope glitch — which is why the discovery of the fourth ORC, from data that was gathered in 2013 by the Giant MetreWave Radio Telescope in India, was key to the finding. That observation ruled out the possibility that the phenomenon was merely an artifact of the specific Australian radiotelescope array.

So what could these strange, circular radio objects be? In the paper, the researchers suggest a list of scenarios. First, they rule out that ORCs could be remnants of a supernova, mainly because of how rare ORCs are. Galactic planetary nebulas are ruled out, too, for the same reason. “[I]f the ORCs are [supernova remnants], which they strongly resemble, then this implies a population of SNRs [supernova remnants] in the Galaxy some 50 times larger than the currently accepted figure, or else a new class of SNR which has not previously been reported,” the researchers explain.

Instead, they suspect the ORCs are a circular wave that appeared after some sort of extra-galactic “transient” event—like fast-radio bursts, another mysterious but far better documented astronomical phenomena.

“The edge-brightening in some ORCs suggests that this circular image may represent a spherical object, which in turn suggests a spherical wave from some transient event,” the researchers write. “Several such classes of transient events, capable of producing a spherical shock wave, have recently been discovered, such as fast radio bursts, gamma-ray bursts, and neutron star mergers.”

The researchers add that because of the “large angular size” the transient event in question “would have taken place in the distant past.”

Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, told Salon via email that he thinks the ORCs are “likely the result of radio emission from a spherical shock that resulted from an energy source at their center.”

“They have a characteristic diameter of about an arcminute, corresponding to a physical length of ten light years (a few parsec) at our distance from most stars in the Milky Way or ten million light years (a few mega-parsecs) at our distance from most galaxies in the visible universe,” Loeb said. “The former is a reasonable length scale for a supernova remnant, whereas the latter is a reasonable scale for the reach of the jets produced by the most powerful quasars.”

However, since the distance to the source of the event is unknown, it remains unclear which interpretation is more likely.

Loeb added that the most likely explanation is that the ORCs are “the result of outflows from galaxies.”

“We know that galaxies have powerful winds, driven by supernova explosions and quasar activity in their cores,” Loeb said. “The collision of these outflows with the intergalactic medium is predicted to produce radio shells on the scale of the distance between galaxies, which is a few million light years, exactly as needed at a cosmological distance.”

Two decades ago, Loeb co-authored two papers theoretically predicting these “radio halos.”

“Perhaps this is an indication that they exist,” he added.

Don’t be fooled by the “cancel culture” wars: Corporate power is the real force behind racism

The “cancel culture” — the phenomenon of removing or canceling people, brands or shows from the public domain because of offensive statements or ideologies — is not a threat to the ruling class. Hundreds of corporations, nearly all in the hands of white executives and white board members, enthusiastically pumped out messages on social media condemning racism and demanding justice after George Floyd was choked to death by police in Minneapolis. Police, which along with the prison system are one of the primary instruments of social control over the poor, have taken the knee, along with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of the serially criminal JPMorgan Chase, where only 4 percent of the top executives are Black. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world whose corporation, Amazon, paid no federal income taxes last year and who fires workers that attempt to unionize and tracks warehouse laborers as if they were prisoners, put a “Black Lives Matter” banner on Amazon’s home page.

The rush by the ruling elites to profess solidarity with the protesters and denounce racist rhetoric and racist symbols, supporting the toppling of Confederate statues and banning the Confederate flag, are symbolic assaults on white supremacy. Alone, these gestures will do nothing to reverse the institutional racism that is baked into the DNA of American society. The elites will discuss race. They will not discuss class.

We must be wary of allowing those wielding the toxic charge of racism, no matter how well intentioned their motives, to decide who has a voice and who does not. Public shaming and denunciation, as any student of the Russian, French or Chinese revolutions knows, is one that leads to absurdism and finally despotism. Virulent racists, such as Richard Spencer, exist. They are dangerous. But racism will not end until we dismantle a class system that was created to empower oligarchic oppression and white supremacy. Racism will not end until we defund the police and abolish the world’s largest system of mass incarceration. Racism will not end until we invest in people rather than systems of control. This means reparations for African Americans, the unionization of workers, massive government jobs programs, breaking up and nationalizing the big banks along with the for-profit health services, transportation sector, the internet, privatized utilities and the fossil fuel industry, as well as a Green New Deal and the slashing of our war expenditures by 75 percent.

The politically correct speech and symbols of inclusiveness, without a concerted assault on corporate power, will do nothing to change a system that by design casts the poor and working poor, often people of color, aside — Karl Marx called them “surplus labor” — and forces them into a life of misery and a brutal criminal caste system.

The cancel culture, with its public shaming on social media, is the boutique activism of the liberal elites. It allows faux student radicals to hound and attack those deemed to be racist or transphobic, before these “radicals” graduate to work for corporations such as Goldman Sachs, which last year paid $9 million in fines to settle federal allegations of racial and gender pay bias. Self-styled Marxists in the academy have been pushed out of economic departments and been reborn as irrelevant cultural and literary critics, employing jargon so obscure as to be unreadable. These “radical” theorists invest their energy in linguistic acrobatics and multiculturalism, with branches such as feminism studies, queer studies and African-American studies. The inclusion of voices often left out of the traditional academic canon certainly enriches the university. But multiculturalism, moral absolutism and the public denunciations of apostates, by themselves, too often offer escape routes from critiquing and attacking the class structures and systems of economic oppression that exclude and impoverish the poor and the marginal.

The hedge fund managers, oligarchs and corporate CEOs on college trustee boards don’t care about Marxist critiques of Joseph Conrad. They do care if students are being taught to dissect the lies of the neoliberal ideology used as a cover to orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history.

The cancel culture, shorn of class politics, is the parlor game of the overeducated. If we do not examine, as Theodor Adorno wrote, the “societal play of forces that operate beneath the surface of political forms,” we will be continually cursed with a more ruthless and sophisticated form of corporate control, albeit one that is linguistically sensitive and politically correct.

“Stripped of a radical idiom, robbed of a utopian hope, liberals and leftists retreat in the name of progress to celebrate diversity,” historian Russell Jacoby writes. “With few ideas on how a future should be shaped, they embrace all ideas. Pluralism becomes a catchall, the alpha and omega of political thinking. Dressed up as multicultural, it has become the opium of disillusioned intellectuals, the ideology of an era without an ideology.”

The cudgel of racism, as I have experienced, is an effective tool to shut down debate. Students for Justice in Palestine organizations, which almost always include Jewish students, are being banned on college campuses in the name of fighting racism. Activists in these outlawed groups are often barred from holding any student leadership positions on campus. Professors that dare to counter the Zionist narrative, such as the Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita, have had job offers rescinded, been fired or denied tenure and dismissed. Norman Finkelstein, one of the most important scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict, has been ruthlessly targeted by the Israel lobby throughout his career, making it impossible for him to get tenure or academic appointments. Never mind that he is not only Jewish but the son of Holocaust survivors. Jews, in this game, are branded as racists, and actual racists, such as Donald Trump, because they back Israel’s refusal to recognize Palestinian rights, are held up as friends of the Jewish people.

I have long been a target of the Israeli lobby. The lobby, usually working through Hillel Houses on college campuses, which function as little more than outposts of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), does not attempt to address my enumeration of the war crimes committed by Israel, many of which I witnessed, the egregious flouting by Israel of international law, exacerbated by the plans to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank, or the historical record ignored and distorted by the lobby to justify Jewish occupation of a country that from the 7th century until 1948 was Muslim. The lobby prefers not to deal in the world of facts. It misuses the trope of anti-Semitism to ensure that those who speak up for Palestinian rights and denounce Israeli occupation are not invited to events on the Israel-Palestine conflict, or are disinvited to speak after invitations have been sent out, as happened to me at the University of Pennsylvania, among other venues.

It does not matter that I spent seven years in the Middle East, or that I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, living for weeks at a time in the Israel-occupied territories. It does not matter that I speak Arabic. My voice and the voices of those, especially Palestinians, who document the violations of Palestinian civil rights are canceled out by the mendacious charge that we are racists. I doubt most of the college administrators who agree to block our appearances believe we are racists, but they don’t also want the controversy. Zionism is the cancel culture on steroids.

The Israel lobby, whose interference in our electoral process dwarfs that of any other country, including Russia, is now attempting to criminalize the activities of those, such as myself, who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The lobby, with its huge financial clout, is pushing state legislatures, in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, to use anti-boycott laws and executive orders to punish companies and individuals that promote BDS. Twenty-seven states have so far enacted laws or policies that penalize businesses, organizations and individuals for supporting BDS.

The debate about the excesses of cancel culture was most recently ignited by a letter signed by 153 prominent and largely privileged writers and intellectuals in Harper’s Magazine, a publication for educated, white liberals. Critics of the letter argue, correctly, that “nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing.” These critics also point out, correctly, that signatories include those, such as New York Times columnist David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell, with access to huge media platforms and who face no danger of being silenced. They finally note that a few of the signatories are the most vicious proponents of the Zionist cancel culture, including New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who led campaigns while at Columbia University to destroy the careers of Arab professors; literary scholar Cary Nelson, who was one of those who denounced the Palestinian American scholar Salaita as a racist; and political scientist Yascha Mounk, who has attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar as an anti-Semite.

I find the cancel culture and its public denunciations as distasteful as those who signed the letter. But these critics are battling a monster of their own creation. The institutional and professional power of those targeted by the Harper’s letter is insignificant, especially when set against that of the signatories or the Israel lobby. Those singled out for attack pose little threat to the systems of entrenched power, which the signatories ironically represent, and indeed are more often its victims. I suspect this is the reason for the widespread ire the letter provoked.

The most ominous threats to free speech and public debate do not come from the cancel culture of the left, which rarely succeeds in removing its targets from power, despite a few high-profile firings such as James Bennet, who oversaw a series of tone-deaf editorial decisions as the opinion page editor at the New York Times. These corporate forces, which assure us that Black Lives Matter, understand that the left’s witch hunts are a harmless diversion.

Corporations have seized control of the news industry and turned it into burlesque. They have corrupted academic scholarship. They make war on science and the rule of law. They have used their wealth to destroy our democracy and replace it with a system of legalized bribery. They have created a world of masters and serfs who struggle at subsistence level and endure crippling debt peonage. The commodification of the natural world by corporations has triggered an ecocide that is pushing the human species closer and closer towards extinction. Anyone who attempts to state these truths and fight back was long ago driven from the mainstream and relegated to the margins of the internet by Silicon Valley algorithms. As cancel culture goes, corporate power makes the Israel lobby look like amateurs.

The current obsession with moral purity, devoid of a political vision and incubated by self-referential academics and educated elites, is easily co-opted by the ruling class who will say anything, as long as the mechanisms of corporate control remain untouched. We have enemies. They run Silicon Valley and sit on corporate boards. They make up the two ruling political parties. They manage the war industry. They chatter endlessly on corporate-owned airwaves about trivia and celebrity gossip. Our enemies are now showering us with politically correct messages. But until they are overthrown, until we wrest power back from our corporate masters, the most insidious forms of racism in America will continue to flourish.