Month: April 2021

The intensity of conservatives’ obsession with being ‘canceled’ continues to surprise me. The latest news out of Florida provides a fresh example.

Florida is on track to be the first state in the nation to punish social media companies that ban politicians like former President Donald Trump under a bill approved Thursday by the state’s Republican-led Legislature.

I don’t dispute that social media present some interesting legal and ethical questions related to political speech. I’m not going to attempt to tackle all those questions here. I’m more interested in what appears to be a full-blown panic about conservative speech being silenced or judged too toxic for public consumption.

It’s not just politicians who have their accounts canceled. And it’s not just about being denied a platform to share your views. People routinely lose their jobs, including CEO’s, for saying conservative things. Mind you, I’m not talking about opposition to abortion or support for lower taxes and regulation. It’s usually some kind of intolerant or hateful speech.

Politicians are more likely to get banned for sharing obvious and willfully malicious disinformation that pertains either to public health or the integrity of our elections. Liberal politicians aren’t immune to these repercussions, but they tend not to commit this type of offense.

Likewise, liberal citizens are less prone to saying hateful things. But that’s just a matter of percentages. What’s weird is how conservatives consider these guardrails on acceptable social media speech to be targeted at them alone, when they really apply to everyone.

I’ll allow that majority groups get less protection, and that men are less protected than women. You can get away with saying things about straight white men that would get you banned if you said them about gays or blacks or Latinos. Charges of anti-Semitism come quicker and are treated more seriously than charges of anti-Christian speech. This is partly about the majority’s inherent power to oppress, so it’s a bit less of a double standard than it might appear, but I understand why it irks conservatives.

One thing that’s obvious though is that there’s no movement on the left to protect those who’ve suffered consequences for saying hateful things about heterosexuals, white men or Christians. This isn’t because such instances are comparatively rare, but because being a dick isn’t a core value of the left that demands protection.

Again, I’m not trying to arbitrate the limits of free speech or discuss what lines social media companies can draw. If you want to argue that speech should be tolerated on these platforms regardless of its content, you can have that argument elsewhere.

I’m just nothing the difference in how this debate is treated by the two sides. Conservatives see deplatforming as a threat to their very existence, whereas liberals view it much more on a case by case basis.

In fact, of Republican politicians weren’t constantly trying to out-dick each other in their efforts to appeal to their party base, they wouldn’t see the need to create laws that protect their right to be the biggest possible dicks.

Hi photo lovers.

This is one I took very recently, in the aftermath of some severe storms that had struck our region the night before. Afterwards, the scene is tranquil. I love capturing the early evening sky, while there is just a hint of sunlight to give the clouds some color.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for about two and a half years. It seems to serve me well, for now, but I know that the lives of these devices are limited. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, so I suspect I may eventually have to succumb and go to the Dark Side of The Force. In a recessionary environment, my default is to avoid major purchases for as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters seems to have commandeered it. So it goes.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.

One of the biggest stories of Trump’s first 100 days in office was that many of his nominees to fill Cabinet positions had spent their previous careers attempting to undermine the work of the department they would go on to lead. That was designed to accomplish the goal Steve Bannon identified during his speech at CPAC: a deconstruction of the administrative state. Between positions left open and those filled by incompetent partisans, those Cabinet nominees did tremendous damage to the functioning of the federal government. For Republicans, that was a feature, not a bug.

That is why, even though Joe Biden wasn’t my first choice during the 2020 primaries, I came to realize that his familiarity with what a functioning federal government should look like and the contacts he had developed over the years with competent, experienced people might be exactly what was needed to clean up the mess left by Trump. A functioning federal government might not be something that political pundits like to talk about, but it is critical to building support for a liberal agenda.

As part of their messaging for Biden’s first 100 days in office, the White House released a fact sheet demonstrating that Biden is doing exactly what I hoped he would do.

The Biden-Harris Administration put in place its Statutory Cabinet faster than any other Administration since President Reagan. President Biden has also announced his intent to nominate 233 individuals to serve in Senate-confirmed leadership roles across the Executive Branch – more nominees than any past administration has announced by the 100-day mark.

You might remember that, following the 2020 election, the Trump administration attempted to delay and obstruct the Biden transition team. That makes the accomplishment described above even more impressive.

Of course, Biden is doing all of that while assembling the most diverse cabinet in presidential history. As the White House documented, that is also true of the positions that don’t require Senate confirmation.

[T]he White House Office of Presidential Personnel has hired nearly 1,500 presidential appointees to serve in key agency positions that do not require Senate confirmation – double the number of appointees hired by any prior administration by the 100-day mark. And, consistent with President Biden’s commitment to leveraging the talent, creativity, and expertise of the American people to build an Administration that looks like America, more than half of all Biden appointees are women, and half identify as non-white – numbers that set a new bar for future Administrations.

Of the approximately 1,500 agency appointees hired by President Biden so far:

58% are women
18% identify as Black or African American
15% identify as Latino or Hispanic
15% identify as Asian American or Pacific Islander
3% identify as Middle Eastern or North African
2% identify as American Indian or Alaska Native
14% identify as LGBTQ+
4% are veterans
3% identify as disabled or having a disability
15% were the first in their families to go to college
32% are naturalized citizens or the children of immigrants

We can see the results of those efforts at the Department of Justice. Not only has the Civil Rights division opened pattern or practice investigations into the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments, they plan to ask a grand jury to indict Chauvin and the other three ex-officers involved in George Floyd’s killing on charges of civil rights violations. On Wednesday, they also announced that the three Georgia men who shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery have been charged with federal hate crimes and attempted kidnapping. In other words, we now have a Justice Department that is operational when it comes to prosecuting civil rights violations.

Of course, in addition to his knowledge of how the federal government is supposed to work, Biden knows Congress better than just about any politician on the scene today. And as Ed Kilgore explains, it’s showing.

For all their political gifts, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — who, lest we forget, both had a much more firmly Democratic Senate and House the first two years of their presidencies — couldn’t come close to the mastery of Congress Biden has exhibited up until now…While Republicans fret about Trump and rage about “cancel culture,” Biden is eating their lunch.

There are plenty of political pundits on the left who assume that it is their job to tell Biden what he should be doing. But while I’m sure that the president will make some mistakes, I will mostly maintain a posture that allows me to watch and report what I see. As I did with a similar posture during Obama’s presidency, I suspect that I’ll learn a lot.

Stanley Kurtz at the National Review is utterly convinced that the Biden administration and congressional Democrats are conspiring to introduce Critical Race Theory into every public school in the country. He has an elaborate plan to stop this. The plan involves state legislatures taking preemptive measures

The cure for this is state-level legislation based on the model bill I have published with the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the Partisanship Out of Civics Act (POCA). (Here is my explanation for the various provisions in the initial version of the model bill.) While the initial version of the model POCA bill blocked both action civics and Critical Race Theory-based teacher training, I have now expanded the model to keep Critical Race Theory out of the K-12 curriculum as well. This includes some new language aimed at the most pernicious claims of the 1619 Project.

Down in Louisiana, here’s how that looks:

The chairman of the House Education Committee shelved his own bill Tuesday that would ban colleges and public schools from teaching “divisive concepts,” including that Louisiana or the United States is racist or sexist or that students should be made to feel guilty about their race.

“The problem is politics in the classroom,” said Rep. Ray Garofalo, R-Chalmette, chairman of the committee and sponsor of the legislation. “It is important that we address the issue.”

If this issue is so important, you might reasonably ask why Chairman Garofalo shelved the bill. It appears that he didn’t have the votes. He also didn’t have support from House Speaker Clay Schexnayder who “expressed concerns, including whether the Legislature can tell colleges what they can teach.” But after announcing a vote on the bill would be put off for another day, Garofalo went ahead with the scheduled hearing. That was probably a mistake.

“This bill does not say anything about teaching facts,” Garofalo said.

“You can teach the good, the bad, the ugly,” he said. “But you cannot say that theories are facts. You can teach facts as facts. You can teach theories as theories.”

In one exchange, Garofalo said there could be a classroom discussion of slavery, for instance.

“You can talk about everything dealing with slavery. The good. The bad. The ugly.”

Said Rep. Stephanie Hilferty, R-Metairie: “There is no good to slavery, though.”

Replied Garofalo: “You are right. I didn’t mean to imply that. And don’t believe that.”

This exchange earned the chairman a rebuke for the Louisiana Democrats’ twitter account:

The low point of session undoubtedly came today when Rep. Ray Garofalo said Louisiana schools need to teach the good of slavery. #Lalege pic.twitter.com/OPbRq98ifx

— Louisiana Democrats (@LaDemos) April 27, 2021

From there, it became a national story, with Garofalo cast as a defender of slavery. Based solely on his comments in the hearing, that’s an unfair characterization, but then one still needs to question the motivation behind holding the hearing at all.

In Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina’s official response to Biden’s Wednesday address to Congress, he insisted that America is not a racist country. That, too, was a response to this new obsession on the right with defending the historic virtue of the country be preventing discussion of race and slavery in public schools and universities. Garofalo says his bill is a response to his constituents’ concerns:

Garofalo said changes are needed because classrooms are being filled with ideologies promoted by teachers, including critical race theory that he said stems from Marxism and a view that “furthers racism and fuels hate.”

“Critical theory weakens the family, the education community and the work environment,” he said.

The lawmaker said he has heard from countless parents and students complaining about what is being taught but they are reluctant to say so publicly because of concerns about retribution.

I very much doubt that Garofalo knows much about critical theory or critical race theory, but I want to be clear that they aren’t synonyms for teaching students the history of slavery and racism. Critical Theory is a school of historical analysis that prioritizes societal structures and cultural assumptions in its explanations of persistent social problems. The Biden administration is not pushing this particular school of thought, but it has become shorthand on the right for anything that might conceivably make white students “feel guilty about their race.”

If there is anything to Garofalo’s claim that teaching racism and slavery in school “weakens the family,” it is by making white kids question the racism of their parents. With a more rounded education, these kids might not accidentally talk about the “good” side of slavery and become a national punching bag.

There are two large countries besides the U.S.A. that have been governed by anti-science nationalists during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately for India and Brazil, they did not throw out their Trumpian leader and they’re paying the price.

The New York Times reports that in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India’s “crematories are so full of bodies, it’s as if a war just happened. Fires burn around the clock. Many places are holding mass cremations, dozens at a time, and at night, in certain areas of New Delhi, the sky glows. Sickness and death are everywhere.”

In President Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, “a surge in coronavirus infections has brought many of Brazil’s intensive-care units to the brink of collapse. And daily and monthly death tolls have reached record highs.” Researchers say the health care system has never before suffered such a severe calamity.

In order to prevent the number of cases and deaths from spreading further across the country, as well as to reduce bed occupancy rates, the researchers advocate for the adoption of strict prevention and control actions, such as stricter measures for restricting non-essential activities. They also highlight the need to expand measures of physical and social distance, the use of masks on a large scale, and the acceleration of vaccination.

A Johns Hopkins University analysis of COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 of population, shows Brazil in third place globally, and America in fifth. India is in 19th place, but they’re moving up fast. The MIT Technology Review reports “the country set a global record for new cases for the fifth day in a row yesterday, reporting 352,991 and 2,812 deaths. The true figure is almost certainly far higher. Modeling by researchers from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation suggests the true figure for new daily cases in India is likely to now number in the millions.”

As far back as 2016, Indian scientists banded together to protest the Modi government. Scientific American reported at the time:

Three murders, a suicide and a rash of political appointments at universities have thrown Indian academia into an uproar against the conservative (right-wing) government. Prominent artists, writers, historians and scientists are speaking out against an intensifying climate of religious intolerance and political interference in academic affairs.

“What’s going on in this country is really dangerous,” says Rajat Tandon, a number theorist at Hyderabad Central University. Tandon is one of more than 100 prominent scientists, including many heads of institutions, who signed a statement protesting “the ways in which science and reason are being eroded in the country.” The statement cites the murder of three noted rationalists — men who had dedicated their lives to countering superstition and championed scientific thought — and what they see as the government’s silent complicity.

Anti-science sentiment has also been growing in Brazil, as The Guardian reported a year ago:

Top Brazilian politicians from across the political spectrum have warned that Jair Bolsonaro is putting thousands of lives at risk with what they called his reckless, paranoid, anti-scientific and belligerent response to the coronavirus.

In a series of scathing interviews – conducted as 26 of Brazil’s 27 state governors convened an emergency meeting to discuss Bolsonaro’s behaviour – regional chiefs told the Guardian they feared the far-right leader was sowing confusion over the need for quarantine and social distancing measures, and wasting precious time setting political bonfires to energize his radical base.

Bolsonaro sparked fury on Tuesday with an extraordinary address to the nation in which he rubbished the quarantine measures and travel restrictions being implemented by many state governors and urged Brazilians to return to work and schools – in contradiction of his own health ministry’s counsel.

The comments stunned state governors – many of whom are now in open revolt against the president.

“I was gobsmacked,” said Ronaldo Caiado, the rightwing governor of Goiás state and a former Bolsonaro ally.

“It’s appalling. You cannot govern a country like this,” added Caiado, who this week severed ties with Bolsonaro. “At a moment like this he should have the humility to leave things to those who understand them.”

Bolsonaro’s motto “Brazil before everything else” sounds a lot like Trump’s “Make America great again.” Both are resonant of Prime Minister Modi’s political movement, which pushes “the notion that India is the homeland of Hindus and all others — the hundreds of millions of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others in this sprawling, secular democracy — are interlopers.”

It’s painfully obvious that nationalism is coupled with anti-rationalism in all three countries, which made them particularly ill-equipped to deal with a problem like COVID-19 that demands a very evidence-based approach. Yet, in America, the nationalist movement was defeated last November. The change has been dramatic, as President Joe Biden pointed out from the North Lawn of the White House on Tuesday:

Today, in less than 100 days, more than 67 percent — two thirds of our seniors — are now fully vaccinated and more than 80 percent of seniors have had at least one shot.  That effort has resulted in a drop of 80 percent in deaths among American seniors, a 70 percent drop in hospitalizations.

In America, it seems like the pandemic is in retreat. The C.D.C. just relaxed its outdoor mask mandate. On January 13, a week before Trump left office, there were 4,139 COVID-19 deaths here. On April 26, the number was down to 492. Brazil and India are on the opposite trajectory.

The availability of vaccines is major contributor to the differing fortunes of the three countries, but so is disinformation. Disrespecting and ignoring science can be deadly. Biden righted the ship with an assist from the vaccines, but also by putting all his focus on getting the problem under control using the best expert advice available. If he hadn’t been fighting against the hangover of a year of Trumpist irrationality, things would be in an even better condition in America.

Hi,

Thing seem pretty normal now. So here’s a new space to talk if you wish. The next couple weeks are busy for me. Goes with some career choices I made. I hope you all are well.

Cheers,

Don Durito

Scientists are amazing. You want proof? They’ve figured out how to fly a helicopter in the thin air of Mars. Think about all the steps they had to take to pull that one off, including getting the helicopter there in the first place.

NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity broke new ground during its latest Red Planet flight, as video of the sortie shows.

Ingenuity took off early Sunday morning (April 25) on its third and most ambitious Martian mission yet. The 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) chopper traveled a total of 330 feet (100 meters) laterally, stayed aloft for 80 seconds and reached a maximum speed of about 4.5 mph (7.2 kph), smashing the marks set on its previous two flights.

Maybe Mars will soon be more inhabitable than Earth, but for now it’s a barren, radioactive wasteland. We don’t need to be there flying helicopters. But if that’s the mission, there’s only a few people on our planet that know how to get it done. We don’t assign the task to some dude on the bus or Thomas Friedman’s taxi driver. It doesn’t matter what those people think because they don’t have the first idea how to successfully launch something into space, let alone land it on Mars.

Something we do need is to get control of the COVID-19 problem. And who do you think we should assign to that task?

We could leave it all to politicians. We could let the general public decide what to do about it based on their general tolerance for risk and inconvenience. But a better way to go is to put scientists on the job. Some of them can come up with treatments to lower the mortality rate from the disease. Others can create a vaccine that prevents people from getting sick in the first place. Still others can give us advice about how to avoid catching or spreading the disease.

In this scenario, ordinary citizens aren’t asked to do much. They’re not equipped to solve the problem anyway, so this isn’t a problem. They can support the government spending required, just as they funded the Martian helicopter, but beyond that, all they have to do is follow the guidance they receive from the scientific community.

That guidance isn’t going to be perfect. As the disease is better understood, that guidance will change. In some cases, the best advice isn’t practical and the politicians will have to find a balance between what the scientists recommend and what the rest of us can tolerate. But one thing that makes absolutely no sense is to deliberately defy the scientists’ advice because it makes liberals angry.

That’s what Peter D’Abrosca, a self-described Republican campaign strategist, has decided to do.

So I have decided that because the vile political Left, which I despise in the abstract, wants me to take their coveted vaccine, I simply will not. After the horrifying displeasure of meeting several of their militant COVID-19 restriction enforcers in person over the past year, I have become even more steadfast in my stance.

My newly formed and well-developed opinion on vaccines is this: if those bastards want me to get the jab, I’m not going to do it, because it annoys them.

For clarity, D’Abrosca is very clear that he’s not refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine because he’s worried about the safety or because he’s skeptical of vaccines in general. He’s doing it because he believes it will irritate people he doesn’t like.

Of course, almost no one would actually be annoyed about this because almost no one would know. So, he wrote an article about it for the American Greatness blog to get the condemnation he craves.

I’m responding his piece not to give him satisfaction but to highlight how anti-intellectualism plays out in real life.

My primary reason for refusing the vaccine is much simpler: I dislike the people who want me to take it, and it makes them mad when they hear about my refusal. That, in turn, makes me happy.

What’s interesting is how being a deliberate moron can be so emotionally satisfying. I guess if he were treated with straight contempt rather than anger, he’d derive less pleasure from it. But that wouldn’t get to the underlying problem, would it?

It’s not much of a psychological stretch to recognize that there’s something disempowering about knowing that there are people way smarter than you are, who can solve problems that you can’t even begin to understand. They can figure out how to colonize another planet while you’re trying to decipher the IKEA instructions for your new dresser.

People don’t like to feel inadequate much less dependent. I feel like a jerk every time I hand a repairman a check after he’s done explaining how easy it was to fix something.

The thing is, I stick with feeling like a jerk rather than hating all repairmen and their super fancy mechanical know-how.  Mr. D’Abrosca takes a different tack.

It wasn’t until the sociopathic mediocrity that is the entrenched liberal political class in Washington began bullying normal people into wearing masks, staying home, standing six feet apart from others at all times, mobilizing even less impressive liberal stormtroopers to play the role of COVID-19 prevention Gestapo, and then finally propped up the vaccine as the Holy Grail that would lead us back to “normalcy,” that I finally began to have an opinion on vaccines.

Now part of this is simply a distaste for inconvenience. He doesn’t want to make any sacrifices or do any work. But part of it is that he’s equating the scientific community’s best advice with the “entrenched liberal political class in Washington.”

Those two things should not be synonymous, but given the populist drift of the Republican Party, it’s now not far from the truth. So few Republican lawmakers are listening to scientists on COVID-19, climate change, or anything else, that it’s possible to defy liberals by defying scientists.

Let’s be clear, though, about how this process works. Science isn’t liberal or conservative. Insulting scientists shouldn’t offend members of just one party or political orientation. But that’s how it works now for D’Abrosca and many people like him. He wants to make liberals mad so he makes scientists mad.

Eventually, the causation gets blurred. He began hating liberals for their condescension but winds up hating scientists too, and for a related reason. They know things he never will and this makes him feel inferior. Before you know it, he’s hating liberals for listening to scientists. In the end, he can see no difference between the two.

So, he’s telling his MAGA audience that they can make liberals mad by ignoring scientific, medical, and public health advice. Since this will bring them pleasure, it’s obviously something they should do.

But following his advice about how to handle this pandemic makes no more sense than having him do the calculations on how land a helicopter on Mars and then fly it without crashing. He’s not qualified to do either job, and this fills him with rage.

Last week Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department has opened an investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department to determine whether they have exhibited a pattern or practice of policing that “deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Then on Monday, he announced that the DOJ would also open a pattern or practice investigation into the Louisville Police Department, whose officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor.

The authority of the department to conduct such investigations was provided in the 1994 crime bill after the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers. Here is how it works:

Pattern or practice investigations are civil, not criminal, investigations, and they aim at systemic problems, not individual officers…

In investigations like these, the federal government sends attorneys and investigators to the city to learn as much as it can about the areas of police conduct under scrutiny — such as the use of force, stops and searches, suppression of free speech or all of the above. The team interviews officers and reviews arrest reports, citizen complaints, department policies and training materials. They also hold community forums and interview residents about their interactions with police to gather evidence from across the community. With the help of data scientists and experts with law enforcement backgrounds, they assess whether there is a pattern of unconstitutional conduct and also identify the sources of the systemic misconduct…

During the Obama administration, the Justice Department routinely made its findings public in detailed reports…A findings letter like that, which showed a clear pattern of constitutional violations, would normally tee up a lawsuit where the federal government would seek structural reform.

The negotiation process is hard-fought, but it results in a set of reforms that both sides believe are feasible to implement and strong enough to correct the problems…Once the consent decree is agreed to, the court has the authority to monitor its implementation. If the city doesn’t comply, it can be held in contempt and sanctioned through fines or additional requirements.

During Obama’s presidency, the Justice Department opened 25 investigations and reached 15 consent decrees, more than any other administration, thanks to the efforts of Tom Perez and Vanita Gupta, who ran the Civil Rights Division. In January 2017, the division released a report on the use of this tool.

The day before Trump fired him, AG Sessions basically ended the department’s oversight of existing consent decrees and stopped opening pattern or practice investigations. So with these announcements by Garland, we have yet another example of why elections matter. It is clear that the Biden administration plans to use this tool to tackle the problem of systemic racism in police departments.

While not a magic bullet, it has been demonstrated that this process works. According to one study, departments that went through consent decrees saw an average of 25 percent fewer police shootings in the first year of implementation.

In 2011, the Civil Rights Division opened a pattern or practice investigation into the Newark, NJ Police Department. They released their findings in 2014.

[T]he Division identified a pattern or practice of unlawful stops, searches and arrests; discriminatory policing; excessive force; and theft by officers. The Division further identified concerns about gender bias in policing, discriminatory policing against members of the LGBTQ community, and failure to protect from harm in police lock-ups.

In April 2016, the parties entered into a court-enforced consent decree. Thanks to a commitment from Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Police Director Anthony Ambrose, the work continued, even as the Trump administration failed to enforce the consent decree. Here are the results:

Newark Police officers did not fire a single shot during the calendar year 2020, and the city didn’t pay a single dime to settle police brutality cases. That’s never happened, at least in the city’s modern history.

At the same time, crime is dropping, and police recovered almost 500 illegal guns from the street during the year.

“This is significant,” says Aqeela Sherills, head of the Newark Community Street Team, a group of mostly former offenders who work to defuse violence in the city’s most violent wards. “It speaks to how reform has really taken hold in the city.”

Larry Hamm, the godfather of police protests in Newark as head of the People’s Organization for Progress, agreed. “Police brutality is still a problem,” he says. “But it’s fair to say the consent decree has had a real impact.”

Much as it did during the Obama administration, this kind of painstaking work by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division will likely fly under the radar during the Biden administration as calls for police reform intensify. But make no mistake, when Republicans attack DOJ nominees like Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke, it is at least in part due to their expertise in policing the police.

I might invite criticism by admitting that I like and to a certain extent agree with a lot of J.B. Shurk’s criticisms of George W. Bush, but when have I ever shied away from criticism? I also enjoyed the piece for its honest advancement of a point of view. It might be a pinched point of view in need of a lot more nuance and generosity, but I definitely understood where Shurk was coming from, and that’s a credit to his writing.

Shurk dislikes Bush in his entirety, and even I am willing to give him credit for a few things, here and there. Yet, when it comes to Shurk’s critique of the war on terror, there’s not a whole lot of daylight between how we judge Bush’s record.

…American soldiers who were led into war twenty years ago under the guise of fighting Islamic terrorism, protecting American freedom at home, and seeking a little payback for 9/11 instead found themselves used as nation-builders, police forces for occupied territories, and political pawns sent to combat “extremism,” and many Republicans now question the wisdom of engaging in forever-wars without clear operational goals…because once those soldiers returned home, they discovered that the ravages of NAFTA and trade normalization with China had crushed Middle America’s manufacturing and industrial workforces and condemned their hometowns to slow economic deaths.

I place more blame for the slow economic death on the failure to employ antitrust enforcement than on globalization, but I definitely recognize the problem described here. Bush sent small-town American boys abroad and they came home to a communities that were worse off than when they left. It must be hard to listen to him lecture about the perils of isolationism and protectionism.

Now, I don’t agree that this situation justifies a nativist response, but I do credit Shurk for marking out the path that leads there.

…the last thing paycheck-to-paycheck Americans needed while trying to support their own families was a constant flood of both legal (many coming as refugees from the same areas of the world where Americans have been engaged in combat for two decades) and illegal aliens competing for their jobs and balkanizing tens of thousands of small towns across the United States by transforming them from low-crime, highly integrated communities where people lived, worked, and prayed together as extended families into unrecognizable multicultural and multilingual enclaves upending town culture and destroying tight-knit generational bonds.

Imagine sending warriors off to fight and die overseas for causes that almost immediately became tragically politicized and undermined and then chastising the survivors and their families as being “nativist” for simply wanting to live and work in peace and choosing to prioritize America’s future over that of other nations.

For Shurk, Bush has betrayed the people who served as his strongest base of support. He did this by promoting free trade and he did it by sending them on a poorly defined and planned decades-long mission overseas. However you weight the trade part of that equation, there’s no doubt about the result. So, it’s offensive for Bush to stand in judgment of the people who suffered as a result.

Yet, while Bush may not have a leg to stand on, he’s still correct to resist Shurk’s worldview. The solution to small-town America’s economic woes is not to restrict immigration or to try to keep the ethnic makeup of the country “recognizable.” We have to make it possible for people to compete in business again, because the idyllic America portrayed in 1950’s movies and television was based on family-run operations, not giant corporations. America thrived because its entrepreneurial spirit, but no one can compete with Amazon.

Shurk sees economic liberty as key, but he misdiagnoses the problem and sounds like a John Bircher with his unhinged rhetoric about “the Marxists…corrupt[ing] everything from kindergarten to the military.” If the left is guilty of anything, it’s trying to mitigate the problems created by untrammeled corporate consolidation rather than confronting it straight on.

He ultimately presents a toxic stew of exaggerated Christian persecution, unapologetic white supremacy, Cold War-era conspiracy theorizing, and unsophisticated ideas on foreign policy and economics. But he comes at it honestly, which is both refreshing and quite disturbing.

The reason pieces like this are important is because it’s a response to something real. If you want to know why the old guard of the Republican Party has been swept away, Shurk’s argument is a good place to start. The same is true if you want to understand why so much of the country is acting in a desperate and irrational manner.

Shurk’s response is wrong but that doesn’t make him wrong about Bush. It was Bush who led the country to this place and he has nothing to offer that will get us out of here. The Democrats might be able to help, but they need to understand why people feel the way they do. That’s almost as important as figuring out how to revitalize the communities that have been hollowed out by decades of bad policy decisions by both parties. You can’t fix a problem unless you understand its nature.

I have never been invested in the Armenian genocide controversy. I understand why many people insist that America acknowledge the historical record, and I also understand why policymakers have historically balked when faced with threats of Turkish retaliation. When there are two defensible and opposing arguments on an issue, I generally don’t take a hard line even if I have a clear preference.

My preference will always be on the truth and for promoting human rights. For this reason, I agree with Daniel Fried that the Biden administration’s decision to finally acknowledge the genocide is the right one. As Fried explains, Turkey was given a prolonged a patient chance to take control of the narrative themselves by admitting what was done and reconciling with Armenia. They spurned it.

Truthfully, the argument for appeasing Turkey has been weakening as Erdogan’s time in power has moved Turkey away from its traditional close ties with America and towards a less secular and less-western outlook. It’s no longer clear what it is that Turkey offers that we’re afraid to jeopardize by being honest about the historical record.

Most of all, I’m just unsympathetic to Turkey’s position on the issue. It’s similar to how I feel about Americans who don’t want to reckon with our history of slavery and our decimation of the Native American population. I’ve never understood what is really gained by whitewashing history. America is not defined by the worst elements of its past, and Turkey is no different. Instead, the risk is that past sins continue to burden us because we won’t come to terms with them.

I don’t judge Turkey by what they did to the Armenians during World War One, but I do judge them by their lack of contrition and their bullying efforts to prevent their friends from stating the obvious.

There will be blowback, but I don’t think the blowback will last long or match the worrywarts’ worst fears.