Month: September 2021

The Supreme Court handed down its decision on Citizens United in January 2010. But a strange thing happened during the next two presidential elections. Flush with dark money, Karl Rove developed a plan for outside groups to invest $1 billion in 2012 to unseat President Barack Obama and turn the Senate Republican. But all of that money produced a 1% return on investment. According to Politico, big donors were not happy. Then in 2016, the big money king of the Republican primary, Jeb Bush, saw his candidacy go nowhere. At least in presidential elections, the dark money train was a total bust.

There are some signs that big money donors have changed their game plan. It’s not that they’ve completely stopped spending money to elect their favorite politicians. But they’re looking elsewhere to reach their goals. These days we’re seeing reports like this one from the the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel pop up all over the country.

A loose network of conservative groups with ties to major Republican donors and party-aligned think tanks is quietly lending firepower to local activists engaged in culture war fights in schools across the country.

While they are drawn by the anger of parents opposed to school policies on racial history or COVID-19 protocols like mask mandates, the groups are often run by political operatives and lawyers standing ready to amplify local disputes.

In a wealthy Milwaukee suburb, a law firm heavily financed by a conservative foundation that has fought climate change mitigation and that has ties to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election helped parents seeking to recall Mequon-Thiensville school board members, chiefly over the board’s hiring of a diversity consultant. A new national advocacy group, Parents Defending Education, promoted the Wisconsin parents’ tactics as a model.

The conservative foundation referred to in the paragraph above is the Bradley Foundation. To get some idea about what these dark money groups are up to, let’s focus on what they’re funding these days. With all of the focus on groups like the Koch brothers, you might not have heard of the Bradley Foundation. But according to the Center for Media and Democracy, they are one of America’s largest right wing foundations: “With $835 million in assets as of June 2016, the Bradley Foundation is as large as the three Koch family foundations combined.”

During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse offered a clinic on how dark money was pulling the strings of Republican efforts to stack the courts. If you haven’t already watched his 28 minute presentation, I highly recommend that you do so. The Bradley Foundation was featured prominently, donating to conservative groups that (1) select court nominees, (2) run public relations efforts on the nominee’s behalf, and (3) bring court cases and orchestrate the filing of amicus briefs. So yes, we can blame Republican senators for stacking the courts. But dark money going to groups like the Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network explain how its being done.

According to investigative reporter Jane Mayer, the Bradley Foundation also invested heavily in promoting the so-called “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. Mayer calculates that since 2012 the foundation has spent some $18 million on groups tied to voter suppression legislation, and most recently on stoking false fears of a stolen election. It has been a generous funder of a list of groups working to promote the Big Lie, including the Heritage Foundation, ALEC (American Legislative Action Council), Federalist Society, Honest Election Project (formerly the Judicial Education Project), Election Integrity Project California, FreedomWorks’ National Election Protection Initiative, True the Vote and Turning Point. It is also worth noting that Cleta Mitchell, who was on Trump’s “find me 11,780 votes” call with Georgia election officials, serves on the board of the Bradley Foundation.

Since 2003, the Bradley Foundation has annually awarded up to four $250,000 cash prizes to “distinguished individuals whose extraordinary talents have influenced American scholarship and debate.” Recipients have drawn heavily from the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, including Paul Gigot, Kimberly Strassell, and Peggy Noonan. Other recipients include Roger Ailes, George Will, Michael Barone, and Bret Stephens.

Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Bradley Foundation has a long history of attempting to undermine both public education and labor unions. Michael Grebe, the CEO and president from 2002-2016, chaired Scott Walker’s campaigns for governor, as well as his run for the White House in 2016.

Mary Botari writes that one of the major goals of the foundation “appears to be pursuing a highly partisan game plan: funding an ‘infrastructure’ on the right that benefits the Republican Party, while at the same time attempting to crush supporters of the Democratic Party.” Internal documents she reviewed  “discuss the creation of ‘grassroots organizations that argued for and defended the reforms in public discourse,’ the funding of ‘public interest legal groups that argued for and defended the programs in court,’ and ‘investigative journalism that doesn’t rely on old or new organs of the left and is able to stand on its own.’”

On the partisan nature of these activities, Jane Mayer commented that “this appears to be more evidence that a few powerful private foundations are weaponizing philanthropy for their own private political purposes. The government gives charitable foundations tax breaks in exchange for furthering the public good. Instead, it sounds as if the Bradley Foundation has been furthering the good of its own political agenda. It really begs some serious legal questions.”

Keep in mind that the Bradley Foundation is just one of the dark money groups that is “weaponizing philanthropy for their own private political purposes.” But this all helps explain the frustration PoliticalGirl articulated about messaging.

https://twitter.com/lalahhathaway/status/1434229690437361665

The right wing not only has an entire network of sites devoted to spreading their propaganda. They also have millions of dollars in dark money being poured into doing things like stacking the courts, attacking public education, and building an infrastructure to benefit the Republican Party.

So Democrats can criticize their own elected officials for not being as good as Republicans at messaging. There might even be some truth to that. But let’s be clear about how the dark money game is being played today. For the most part, these groups are not as focused on funding political campaigns. Instead, they are weaponizing philanthropy to fight their culture wars and gain political advantage. That’s what Democrats are up against. To engage in the battle means being clear about what the opposition is up to.

Based on two decades of evidence, it isn’t possible to defeat the Taliban using occupying forces. At the same time, the evidence strongly suggests that Afghanistan cannot sustain itself without impossible levels of foreign aid. A government that oversees famine and cannot keep the lights on is not going to be successful, and that means that Afghanistan needs generous patrons.

On Tuesday, the Taliban made some announcements about who will serve in some ministerial positions in their government, and some of their choices are going to cause problems.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, a deputy leader of the Taliban insurgency and the leader of the terrorist-listed Haqqani Network, was named as acting minister of the interior. And Mawlawi Muhammad Yaqoob, who is the oldest son of the Taliban’s founding leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, was named acting defense minister.

The Haqqani clan and Mullah Omar’s family are not people the United States are prepared to shower with aid. That probably goes too for the rest of the NATO coalition that fought in Afghanistan. In fact, I don’t think there are any countries other than Pakistan that are eager to buddy up these characters, although I assume Russia and China will open their checkbooks.

I don’t trust Indian sources to be objective when it comes to Pakistan, but India Today argues that the Haqqani Network is fronting for them. If their reporting is correct, it looks like the Taliban has already bent to Pakistan’s wishes. This can be seen not only in the appointment of Sirajuddin Haqqani as minister of interior, but in the surprising appointment of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar as the acting deputy leader of the council of ministers. It was expected that Baradar would get the top job.

Pakistan’s support to the Haqqani network signals how, through its military intelligence wing, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Pakistani military establishment intends to control power, according to intelligence assessments…

…It is believed that ISI wants to place members of the Haqqani network in key positions, but Taliban factions with Mullah Abdul Baradar don’t want this to happen.

If the Haqqani network enjoys power in the Taliban regime, Pakistan can use it to its advantage and also neutralise India’s influence in the country. The Haqqani network had targeted the Indian embassy in Kabul earlier.

There are also reports of a power tussle, and this even led to a clash where Mullah Baradar was injured.

Again, I don’t know if Mullah Baradar was truly injured, but I can see that he won’t be the serving as the effective prime minister. It seems that he lost the argument with the Haqqanis. For what it’s worth, you can see why the Department of National Intelligence treats the Haqqanis as a terrorist organization here.

The international community doesn’t want a famine in Afghanistan or a new massive exodus of refugees, and this gives the new government in Kabul some leeway that wouldn’t otherwise be afforded based on the Taliban’s prior record in power. But they seem to be squandering their chance to project a more tolerant and inclusive face.

One way to defeat the Taliban is to let them have power but refuse to help them. It’s a cynical ploy, especially because it involves standing by while a lot of people suffer. The New York Times explains:

Running a government will most likely prove more daunting than toppling one. To succeed, the Taliban will need to secure desperately needed aid, which has been frozen by the United States and other nations. Foreign governments and lenders are waiting to see the fate of the opposition and if rights for women and ethnic and religious minorities will be respected.

Without that money, the government faces worsening challenges, including humanitarian and economic crises that have forced Afghans to flee. Basic services like electricity are under threat, and the United Nations warned that food aid would run out by the end of the month for hundreds of thousands of Afghans.

It should be noted, however, that the United States and its allies did not choose this path. They were forced out by 20 years of futile efforts to stand up a government that could run the country. To avoid a humanitarian catastrophe, the new Taliban government needs to, in a sense, give donor nations permission to be of assistance, and bowing to Pakistan and the Haqqani Network denies them that permission.

So it appears that the Taliban will soon have a famine on their hands, and that’s going to negate the domestic good will they’ve established by putting an end to the fighting.

To be fair, the Haqqanis are probably powerful enough militarily that the Taliban have no choice but to include them in the government, but that’s not going to make the job of feeding the people any easier. I don’t think the Taliban will last in power but, since this entails more unrest and civil war, it’s not something we can characterize as good news for the Afghan people. There is nothing but suffering in their near future, with or without the Taliban.

America may not have to suffer the indignity of a Taliban government for long, but that won’t do much to improve our legacy in Afghanistan.

This sign showed up on my Twitter timeline recently and it is not hard to understand why.

A theme that seems to reverberate among Democrats is that, as the old saying goes, they “bring a knife to a gunfight.” The sentiment is that Republicans fight ruthlessly, while Democrats tend to follow the rules.

One of my favorite political commentators, Paul Waldman, weighed in on this theme with a piece titled, “The harsh truth of this moment: Republicans understand power. Democrats do not.”

We’re seeing what a profound difference there is in how Democrats and Republicans view power. When Democrats have it, they’re often apologetic, uncertain and hesitant to use it any way that anyone might object to. Republicans, on the other hand, will squeeze it and stretch it as far as they can. They aren’t reluctant, and they aren’t afraid of a backlash. Whatever they can do, they will do…

[Republicans] do not quake at the prospect of the electorate’s displeasure, especially when they’ve done so much to ensure that the will of the electorate can be thwarted with the right combination of gerrymandering and voter suppression. They know what they want, and they’ll do what’s necessary to get it.

And Democrats? They fret and worry, they restrain themselves, they recommit to norms the other side has already trashed, they live in fear of political repercussions that never come. And their own goals languish while Republicans turn America into a darker, meaner, crueler place.

This assessment gets at what might be the biggest meta challenge Democrats face today. So it is important for us to think as deeply about process as we often do about policy.

There is some truth to the notion that Democrats tend to worry too much about backlash. I suspect that comes from an assumption that voters know the truth and are willing to hold bad actors accountable.  As former Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren noted, the GOP has based their strategies on a very different assumption.

There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The goal for Republicans is to stoke distrust in the government, so they are more than happy to ensure that voters remain cynical. But everything in the Democratic platform is based on the idea that government can play a positive role in addressing the challenges we face today. So the number one job of liberals is to foster trust in government and its institutions.

That’s why, back in 2005, Barack Obama wrote that “our job is harder than the conservative’s job.”

I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate…

Our goal should be to stick to our guns on those core values that make this country great, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention that can achieve those goals, and try to create the sort of serious, adult, consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will.

Since Obama wrote that we’ve watched Republicans demonstrate a willingness to do everything in their power to block any sort of consensus around the problems we face. So perhaps it’s time to stop worrying about a backlash. Knowing that Republicans will employ lies and disinformation campaigns regardless of what Democrats propose, it is time to go for broke on policies that will actually work to address the challenges we face, which is exactly what Biden, Pelosi and Schumer are doing.

But what about the specific tactics Republicans employ. Should Democrats embrace those as well? I say a profound “no” to that one. That doesn’t mean being apologetic, uncertain, or hesitant. It simply means abiding by “the rule of law,” even when the opposition does not. Specifically, it means everything from telling the truth to abiding by laws that handicap our side…until they can be overturned legally. It means holding out the ideal of having an informed debate about our differences, even as the opposition lies and demonizes our positions.

Waldman suggests that Republicans know how to wield power and that Democrats should embrace their methods. If you are willing to throw away our democracy, I guess there’s some truth to that. The GOP is engaged in an all-out assault on the truth and is attempting to undermine government institutions. Politicians and citizens are threatening everyone from election officials to school board members. They’re working to suppress the vote and gerrymander congressional districts. On the heels of a violent attack on our Capitol to overturn an election, they are continuing to threaten violence if they don’t get what they want. That is the kind of tyrannical power Republicans are wielding.

At this point, Democrats are the last line of defense against that tyranny. It is critical that at least one party upholds our democratic ideals. Without that, we sacrifice everything.

House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently told Punchbowl News that “the uniqueness of [the GOP] today is we’re the workers party, we’re the American workers’ party.” Similarly, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) tweeted that they are “the party of hardworking, blue-collar men and women.” But what is the platform they’re using to attract these voters? According to Rep. Jim Banks, chair of the House Republican study committee, it is all about anti-immigrant, anti-wokeness, and anti-big tech policies.

In response, Steven Greenhouse, former NYT labor reporter, has written a piece titled, “How Biden Can Help Democrats Become the Party of the Working Class Again.”

Democrats must resist complacency. They can’t stop fighting for the support of workers, no matter how ludicrous the Republican attempts at rebranding may seem. To do so, Democrats must deliver on their promises to workers — or else hammer home the point that Republicans blocked their efforts.

It is important to note that Greenhouse accepts the lie that the GOP has become the “workers party.” But take a look at the numbers from the 2020 election. He points out that Trump beat Biden among voters without a college degree by 50-48. I’d call that pretty close to a tie.

But it gets a lot more dramatic when you break the numbers down by race. According to NYT exit poll data, white non-college voters went for Trump 67-32. But nonwhite non-college voters went overwhelmingly for Biden at 72-26. That becomes significant when you take into account the fact that the so-called “working class” is 41 percent nonwhite and “by 2032, people of color are set to become the majority in this section of the labor force.”

When Republicans claim to be the party of working class voters, what they’re really saying is that they’re the party of white working class voters. Perhaps now it makes sense why they have abandoned any pretense about an economic agenda to help working Americans and instead settled on launching a culture war that includes xenophobic policies related to people of color.

Meanwhile, Biden and Democrats have an agenda that pushes back against those xenophobic policies (immigration reform, voting rights, etc.) while also fighting for economic policies that will increase opportunities for all working class Americans.

Dominion Voting Systems is suing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for defamation and $1.3 billion in damages. They accuse Lindell of spreading baseless conspiracy theories about the security of Dominion’s election machines that have hurt the company’s reputation.

Meanwhile, Lindell is harboring Tina Peters, the Clerk and Recorder of Mesa County, Colorado, who hasn’t been to work or seen in public for nearly a month. Back in August, while Peters was attending Lindell’s election conspiracy conference in Minnesota, Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein announced an investigation into a May security breach during a routine software upgrade of Dominion’s machine software.

The details are a little murky but clearly sketchy as hell. County Clerk Peters allowed an unauthorized person to attend the software upgrade, which was verified by looking at a log book. Then two things happened. The unauthorized person published the passwords for the software on one of the world’s shittiest websites, Gateway Pundit. Photos and videos from the upgrade were also published by Ron Watkins, “an influential member of the QAnon conspiracy movement” who many suspect of being Q himself.

When this was first reported, the story was focused on the decision of Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold to decertify Mesa County’s machines. Since the machines integrity could no longer be assured, the county would either have to replace them or do a hand count in future elections.  It appears the county opted to sign a nearly million dollar contract with Dominion for new machines.

That’s a lot of money for a rural Coloradan county, but that doesn’t mean Peters is on the political hot seat.

Mesa County is a conservative area where voters strongly backed Trump last fall. While some residents say they want Peters voted out of office or recalled, she also has vocal backers. Recently, several hundred supporters gathered for a rally outside the clerk’s office, chanting, “We love Tina!”

While Lindell helps Peters hide, there are other problems at the office.

On Thursday her deputy, Belinda Knisley, was charged with second-degree burglary and a cybercrime over entering the building while she was suspended, pending an investigation into unprofessional and inappropriate conduct in the workplace.

It’s a lot of strange behavior, for sure, all seemingly driven by a form of madness. But it’s a madness that is metastasizing by design. As ProPublica reported this week, there is a nationwide movement spurred on by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon to have conservative conspiracy nuts take over the lower echelons of the GOP.

When the [January 6] insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.

The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”

Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.

The plan is working.

After Steve Bannon called on “deplorables” to take over the Republican Party from the bottom up, ProPublica interviewed county chairs in competitive states to find out if they’ve seen a sudden increase in local-level party officers. Forty-one out of 65 key counties surveyed reported an unusual increase in precinct officers or the local equivalent.

Hopefully, you can anticipate where this is going. These folks aren’t put in place to run free and fair elections. Their purpose is the exact opposite. Their job is to make sure the Republicans win. Their very presence will undermine faith in the integrity of our election system because that integrity will be compromised. But this is a self-fulfilling prophesy because, for example, there was nothing wrong with 2020 presidential election results in Colorado. There was no reason to compromise the security of Mesa County’s election machines, forcing them to be replaced.

Bannon, of course, was pardoned by Trump which helped him beat federal charges of stealing funds from the “We Build The Wall” campaign–“a private effort to expand the U.S.-Mexico border wall.”  He’s under criminal investigation for fraud in New York for the same scheme.

Meanwhile, people in Mesa County are wondering when Peters will return to work. She says she’s received threats, but they have a plan for that.

Local county commissioners say Peters needs to return to oversee the other parts of her job and staff.

“She’s in hiding by her own admission,” said Commissioner Scott McInnis, who like Peters is a Republican.

“We want to make sure we take the threats against her very, very seriously. We want to make sure she’s protected, but she needs to come back to work.”

Maybe Peters will eventually be charged with a crime. Maybe the people of Mesa County will decide they need an election’s clerk who shows up for work. Either way, she’s just a cog in a bigger more malignant machine.  She’s a foot soldier in a fascist movement. Don’t laugh at her, because this is serious.

I don’t know how the Texas abortion law will shake out. I want to be honest about that. Truthfully, it seems like an unnecessary diversion from the main act, which is the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, due next year, which can be reasonably predicted to eviscerate Roe and Casey.

So if the standard regimen we’ve been living under for decades is only months away from death-by-Alito, why is Texas acting all crazy now and creating abortion bounty hunters?

Scott Lemieux argues that the Republicans will pay a price for this effrontery but that it might not be a very consequential price. On the one hand, he says, “if abortion clinics close and people are getting bankrupted for giving their neighbors phone numbers [for abortion providers], people are going to notice.” On the other hand, due to gerrymandering and non-competitive states and districts, most Republicans are entirely free from political peril unless they deviate to the left. People can get as mad as they want about the country going off a right-wing cliff, but there’s not a damn thing that can be done about it.

I see this differently. I think the Republicans are upsetting the status quo on abortion in ways that are not popular. It’s true they get away with doing a lot of things that aren’t popular. Counterintuitively, they’re frequently rewarded. But this is different in the same way that enacting civil rights legislation in the 1960s was different. It will change how people vote. It will cause new people to pay more attention. And it will change the balance of energy on social issues, not just abortion.

Maybe “realignment” is too strong of a word, but it will definitely reorder the existing boundaries of political affiliations, and it will change the issues each party uses to gain an enthusiasm advantage.

One thing is certain. Women will not rest until they get the rights they’ve lost restored. Reproductive rights aren’t going to be one item among others, like tax rates and discriminating against gays.

Will it be difficult to get those rights back? Yeah, it will be absurdly difficult thanks to factors like gerrymandering and the extremely conservative Supreme Court.  But while it will harder to reverse these changes than it should be, that doesn’t mean the GOP won’t be put on the defensive in a big way.

Conservative control of the GOP is stronger than ever and growing, so they’re not going to moderate. Instead, their anti-Democratic actions will become more central and urgent as they desperately try to prevent any consequences for their radicalism. Fear of demographic change started this trend, but pissing of the more populous gender is going to add rocket fuel.

Can women really be allowed to vote? Not if it means the GOP has to soften its positions.

So, this is more a symptom of a preexisting disease than the disease itself. This fight will be long and ugly precisely because the GOP is committed to not paying a consequential price. But they will eventually lose. Either that, or we become Gilead.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a scene from Chincoteague, Virginia. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. Next week some actual paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Way back on August 21, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tried a little humor in an attempt to convince people not to use Ivermectin as a “treatment” for or prophylactic against COVID-19. The Tweet (below) got a lot of attention, and that hopefully increased how many folks actually clicked on the link that explained why taking powerful deworming medication intended for enormous animals is a very shitty idea.

Some of their key points are worth repeating here.

1. Humans use Ivermectin tablets to treat parasitic worms and there’s a topical application approved for treating head lice and skin conditions like rosacea. It’s a not an anti-viral drug, and COVID-19 is a virus.
2. When you go to the tractor store to buy Ivermectin, you’re getting a drug intended for an animal that weighs a ton or more. It also includes inactive ingredients that may not have been vetted by the FDA for use in humans, especially in these quantities. This can seriously fuck you up.
3. You don’t want to overdose on this shit because the active ingredient alone can cause a bunch of problems including “seizures, coma and even death.”
4. You are not a horse.
5. You are not a cow.
6. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.

https://twitter.com/us_fda/status/1429050070243192839

It was a pretty clear and straightforward message from the FDA, but it seems not to reached everyone. Dr. Jason McElyea is a doctor in rural southeastern Oklahoma. He says that the local hospitals are so full of patients who’ve overdosed on Ivermectin that there are no beds or ambulances available to serve anyone else, including gunshot victims.

He goes on to explain that people in his community don’t fear Ivermectin because they’re been around it their whole lives.

“Growing up in a small town, rural area, we’ve all accidentally been exposed to ivermectin at some time. So, it’s something people are familiar with. Because of those accidental sticks, when trying to inoculate cattle, they’re less afraid of it,” he said.

Now, the rural patients are going into their local agricultural or tractor supply store, ignoring the warning signs surrounding the products, and figuring out a dosage themselves.

“Some people taking inappropriate doses have actually put themselves in worse conditions than if they’d caught COVID,” said the doctor.

He’s seen at least one patient who went blind.

Assuming Dr. McElyea’s understanding is correct, locals are taking a medication they give to their cattle instead of a vaccine because one is known to them and the other is not. But that’s a partial explanation at best. It’s not just trust in the product that’s at play here. First, someone they trust had to tell them not to take the vaccine and then someone they trust had to tell them to take Ivermectin instead.

It goes without saying that another requirement is that they begin with a healthy distrust of government agencies like the FDA, so their expert advice is heavily discounted.

It should be acknowledged that there’s a difference between taking an unproven drug to prevent a disease and taking one after you already have the disease. In the latter case, at least with COVID-19, once you’re sick it’s too late to take the vaccine so it might be rational to attempt something a little risky. You definitely want to make a better choice than cattle dewormers, though. Back in May, the FDA approved the use of monoclonal antibodies, and that’s definitely a better way to go. In fact, there appears to be no risk associated with this treatment.

With vaccines readily available and free, the use of Ivermectin as a preventative measure makes zero sense. The vaccines have been used on over three billion people. You might feel horribly sick for a couple of days, but we have a big enough sample to know that you won’t become magnetic and are highly unlikely to suffer any serious or lasting health complications.

In December 2020, members of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) floated Ivermectin as a COVID-19 prophylaxis and treatment in a press conference and subsequent congressional testimony before Sen. Ron Johnson’s Homeland Security committee. It’s important to note that it was part of a cocktail of drugs they recommended: “I-MASK+ protocol, which focuses on ivermectin, but also includes vitamins C and D, quercetin, zinc, and melatonin for prophylaxis, and adding aspirin.” The dose was controlled and in some cases ramped up for certain outpatient treatments.

At the time, vaccines were not approved for the broad public. Once they became available, the calculus changed. For example, FLCCC co-founder Dr. Paul Marik–chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk–was first in line to get vaccinated in January 2021 when it became available for medical workers.

“It angers me, when I hear that [COVID-19 is] a conspiracy, that this virus doesn’t exist, that there aren’t that many deaths,” he added. “You have to come to the ICU and see that people are dying to realize this is no hoax, this is real.”

Marik finds it particularly disappointing that his work has been misinterpreted as potentially undermining vaccination.

“That’s complete nonsense,” he said. “I was vaccinated yesterday and I believe this is a bridge to vaccination,” noting that slow vaccine roll-outs, vaccine hesitancy, and vaccine quality will likely mean the world will be dealing with COVID-19 for a long time to come.

“We need to do something in the meantime,” he said.

Another original FLCCC member, Dr. Pierre Kory, remains a vocal proponent of Ivermectin but he’s about lost his mind with people taking horse doses from their local tractor supply.

Kory claims to be distraught that his organisation’s protocols have been misconstrued — ”I am literally deteriorating watching what’s happening,” he told HuffPost. But he but feels the FDA’s failure to approve the use of ivermectin for Covid is what’s driving the hysteria, not the FLCCC protocols.

“We don’t need their effing approval to prescribe during Covid. It’s called off-label use,” he said. “And now by saying this, you’re injecting the fucking idea of taking animal ivermectin into the population? Now more people are going to run at it. And I’m sorry, but I am not responsible for this fucking insanity. And I can’t correct it.”

Dr. Eric Osgood, a New Jersey-based hospitalist, is a former member of FLCCC who thought Ivermectin had promise and was worth trying on patients who would otherwise die.

Osgood called himself and Kory “kindred spirits” and, after their first conversation, felt, “If we found out in a year that this worked, that would be quite a tragedy. You don’t want to leave people to die when you could’ve done something that was very safe.” So he joined up with the alliance and began prescribing ivermectin to his patients who were hospitalised with severe Covid cases, knowing it could be months until a vaccine was widely available.

In his mind, once every American had access to the jab, ivermectin would take a backseat in the FLCCC guidance. He was wrong…

…But nearly a year after ivermectin’s introduction into the Covid conversation in the US, and with vaccines now readily available to all who seek them, doctors like Osgood…see it as unconscionable that the FLCCC hasn’t changed course. That was the final straw for Osgood, leading to his departure from the organisation in late August.

“[Ivermectin] shouldn’t have been promoted as a vaccine alternative or a miracle cure,” he said. “People are drinking sheep drench! If that’s not a call to use your clout and influence to say, ‘Enough is enough! Get your shots!’ then I just don’t know.”

Along the way, the drug has been adopted by the far right and promoted on Fox News by personalities like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson. These are presumably the voices that people in rural southeastern Oklahoma trust, but it’s landing them in the hospital and destroying their emergency health system.

They won’t listen when the FDA tells them they’re not a cow or horse. Look how that’s working out for them.

Meanwhile, with some more study, it turns out that even when used at appropriate doses designed for human consumption, the drug simply doesn’t help.

A recent review of 14 ivermectin studies, with more than 1,600 participants, concluded that none provided evidence of the drug’s ability to prevent Covid, improve patient conditions or reduce mortality. Another 31 studies are still underway to test the drug.

It’s not a useful treatment, and anyone who is still pushing it is completely irresponsible.

Credit: Michael Schwartz/WireImage

I don’t listen to a lot of talk radio or many podcasts, but you’d have to be living under a rock if you don’t know the name Joe Rogan. He’s a controversial comedian and podcast host known for being homophobic AND transphobic, as well as racist, and OF COURSE misogynist. He’s played host to (and footsie with) such charming people as Gavin McInnes and Milo Yiannopoulos, interviews which Spotify “quietly removed.”

This is all bad enough—note that Rogan likes to hide his affinity for people like this (including Alex Jones, the Sandy Hook liar) behind free speech absolutism, when what he’s really doing is promoting (and normalizing) hatred, conspiracy theories, and disinformation. But the host also traffics extensively in a more deadly line of work: vaccine skepticism, suggesting to millions of listeners repeatedly that young, healthy people don’t need the Covid vaccine.

Back on the April 23 episode of his popular Spotify podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Rogan had said, “I’ve said, yeah, I think for the most part it’s safe to get vaccinated. I do. I do. But if you’re like 21 years old, and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? I’ll go no.”

The Washington Post offers a fuller description:

But months later on his podcast, he lambasted the push for mass vaccinations and also questioned whether the vaccines actually prevented the spread of the virus — even as he couched his remarks, saying “this is neither pro- nor con-vaccine.”

Public health experts have said that vaccines are the most effective way of preventing the spread of the virus and are effective at preventing people from getting very sick and dying from covid-19, including the delta variant.

Rogan also slammed vaccine requirements for event spaces in New York City and said that he would offer refunds to anyone who had tickets to his Madison Square Garden show this fall and didn’t want to comply, saying he wasn’t going to “force” anyone to get vaccinated to see a “stupid comedy show.”

Real responsible, amirite?

In my opinion—which I’m sure he’d appreciate as my exercise of free speech—Rogan almost certainly has blood on his hands as a result of his lying. Happily, karma is a bitch.

Joe Rogan, the host of the hugely popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” said on Wednesday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus after he returned from a series of shows in Florida, where the virus is rampant.

Mr. Rogan, who was rebuked by federal officials last spring for suggesting on the podcast that young healthy people need not get Covid vaccinations, said that he started feeling sick on Saturday night after he returned from performing in Orlando, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. He did not say whether he had been vaccinated.

But don’t worry! Our man is using state-of-the-art medication!

Mr. Rogan also said he had received a “vitamin drip” as well as ivermectin, a drug primarily used as a veterinary deworming agent. The Food and Drug Administration has warned Covid-19 patients against taking the drug, which has repeatedly been shown as ineffective for them in clinical trials. However, it is a popular subject on Facebook, Reddit and among some conservative talk show hosts, and some toxicologists have warned of a surge of reports of overexposure to the drug by those who obtain it from livestock supply stores.

Just a reminder of what animal-grade ivermectin does to the human body:

“It can lead to kidney damage and kidney failure,” medical toxicologist Dr. Daniel Brooks told NBC. The idea that MMS could treat autism was “ludicrous … This stuff does nothing other than introduce potential risk,” he said.

As you’ve probably guessed, the “rope worms” that people have reported after taking ivermectin are caused by the same thing: their intestines being attacked by a massive dose of, essentially, poison. Veterinary-grade ivermectin – there is a version made for humans, but it comes in much lower doses – is causing their guts to shed its protective mucusy lining. To the untrained eye, these strands of human tissue may look like worms, but in fact they’re a sign that something is terribly wrong.

“[If] people are taking product designed for topical application or products designed for cows, horses, or other things then there’s no telling what that might look like on the back end, so to speak,” pathologist Dr Wesley Long told Business Insider.

It would be wrong for me to wish death on Mr. Rogan—although he IS a horrible person, a liar who’s probably gotten people needlessly killed (leaving a trail of grief in his wake, some comedian), a racist, and a fellow traveler with Nazis and other assorted racist pieces of shit.

Instead, I’ll just hope that he gets his just desserts—and that those desserts preclude a return to the airwaves, for good. Fuck with the bull, get the horns, Mr. Rogan.

On Wednesday, the White House released a statement:

Today, Texas law SB8 went into effect. This extreme Texas law blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v. Wade and upheld as precedent for nearly half a century.

The Texas law will significantly impair women’s access to the health care they need, particularly for communities of color and individuals with low incomes. And, outrageously, it deputizes private citizens to bring lawsuits against anyone who they believe has helped another person get an abortion, which might even include family members, health care workers, front desk staff at a health care clinic, or strangers with no connection to the individual.

My administration is deeply committed to the constitutional right established in Roe v. Wade nearly five decades ago and will protect and defend that right.

The law went into effect because the Supreme Court took no action to prevent it from going into effect. You can thank the extreme deviousness of the anti-choice movement for that because they designed SB8 carefully to prevent injunctive relief. Ordinarily, a law that likely violates the Constitution will be put on hold until it can be litigated before the Court, but in this case there’s no governmental enforcement mechanism. The state of Texas doesn’t play an active role here, so there’s nothing they can be prevented from doing. Instead, the law empowers ordinary citizens to take abortion providers and facilitators to court and win a $10,000 judgment if they can prove that an abortion took place after six weeks of pregnancy.

Most obviously, this creates tremendous financial liability for anyone who provides abortion services in Texas, and those services will certainly cease in reaction. Clinics will close their doors, and may not reopen even if later court rulings overturn the law. In this way, reproductive choice ended in Texas today, and it will not fully return even in an optimistic scenario.

Texas is a risky place for the Republicans to begin this campaign. It might be the next domino to fall to the Democrats, following Arizona and Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, so the GOP can ill afford to alienate millions of women who until this morning were more concerned about the Democrats’ so-called secularism and political correctness than any direct threat to their rights or the rights of their daughters.

Without Texas in the red column, the Republicans aren’t even competitive on the national political stage, and now they’ve really energized the opposition while creating a horde of new enemies.

But political comeuppance is no substitute for constitutional rights and reproductive freedom. This is one of the darkest days in the country’s recent history. The Taliban didn’t just capture Kabul–the American version just captured Austin.