Month: November 2021

I needed a laugh this morning, and even if it’s a grim kind of humor, I’ll take it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) hit back at Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) after he posted an altered anime clip that showed him killing her, the Washington Post reports.

Said Ocasio-Cortez: “While I was en route to Glasgow, a creepy member I work with who fundraises for Neo-Nazi groups shared a fantasy video of him killing me.”

She added: “This dude is a just a collection of wet toothpicks anyway. White supremacy is for extremely fragile people & sad men like him, whose self concept relies on the myth that he was born superior because deep down he knows he couldn’t open a pickle jar or read a whole book by himself.”

One of the more fascinating things about Paul Gosar is that his own siblings consider him extreme and dangerous, and have criticized the Democrats for moving too slowly to expel him from Congress.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is correct when she connects the Arizona congressman to Neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Gosar uses Nazi themes in some of his social media postings, and has an overly intimate relationship with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes.

Still, on the biggest issue facing Congress so far this fall, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, Gosar and Ocasio-Cortez both voted in opposition . This put them on the opposite side of the entire Democratic caucus, but also of 13 Republican House members  and 19 GOP senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who called the legislation  “a godsend for Kentucky.”

The bill is a certainly a godsend for New York City, a probably for Arizona as well.

The New York City region will see that investment in the form of projects like the addition of subway station elevators, upgrades to Amtrak–and a revival of the long-stalled Gateway Project‘s Hudson River tunnels. Carlo Scissura, president and chief executive officer of the New York Building Congress, said, “It really does transform the physical part of our region in a way that we haven’t had a federal investment like this in decades honestly.”

The bill will bring funds to the further extension of the Second Avenue subway, updates to the Port Authority bus terminal, a long list of much-needed subway improvements, and bridge and road improvements for Westchester and Long Island.

Over $6.5 billion will be headed to Amtrak’s high-speed rail plans for the Northeast Corridor; $3.6 billion will go to intercity passenger rail grants. The city’s airports will benefit as well, with $295 million potentially available to JFK and $150 million to LaGuardia for repairs and improvements. The state could get $90 billion for upgrades to its water infrastructure and $100 million for broadband improvement. The MTA is expected to receive more than $10 billion.

That’s a lot of nice stuff to vote against, but Ocasio-Cortez had her reasons which are quite distinct from Gosar’s. She didn’t want to vote in the physical infrastructure bill until President Biden’s Build Back Better social infrastructure bill is passed. She doesn’t trust that Democratic centrists won’t water down or kill the former bill not that they’ve secured the latter one. Gosar voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill because it’s a Democratic proposal, and perhaps for ideological reasons.

Still, it was an odd time, when he was in rare agreement with AOC, to post a video of him killing her. It seems like an act worthy of expulsion from Congress. I don’t see how it’s tolerable behavior and it certainly should earn a formal rebuke at a minimum.

Of course, he waddled into the threshing blades a bit by earning such a hilarious series of put-downs from Ocasio-Cortez. Maybe he’ll post a video proving that he actually is man enough to open a pickle jar.

As for AOC, it’s really a shame and not a little frightening that she’s become such a target of the far right. She’s just one out of 435 members of Congress, and she has very little seniority or power. She hasn’t done anything to merit the kind of vitriol that’s sent her way. I think Congress should act to protect her, and that starts by taking some serious action against Gosar.

The most strongly Republican areas of the country are sparsely populated which should make it harder for a virus to spread, but despite this a higher and steadily growing percentage of COVID-19 deaths are suffered in counties where Trump did especially well when compared to the densely populated counties that were friendliest to Joe Biden. David Leonhardt, who has been tracking these results for the New York Times, says that October showed the worst disparity yet.

The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

There is a simple explanation for this: “almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.”

At this point, the Republican Party has grown so skeptical of vaccinations that they’re attacking Sesame Street’s Big Bird for giving the same pro-vaccination message he’s been providing since 1972. The Orlando Sentinel reports that Florida “pediatricians are worried that pandemic disruptions and vaccine politicization could threaten progress against measles, whooping cough and other illnesses once thought to be nearly eradicated.” And it’s a national problem.

Health Department statistics illustrate the drop-off. Vaccination coverage for 2-year-olds served by county health departments fell from 93.4% to 79.3% during the pandemic. A state official called the 14-point drop “alarming” in a June memo.

The insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, sounded the alarm nationally, reporting 40% of parents and guardians it surveyed in 2020 said their children missed vaccinations because of the pandemic.

With schools closed or remote-only, and parents reluctant to make doctor’s visits, it’s understandable that a lot of kids didn’t get vaccinated during the first year of the pandemic. But an increased (and partisan) level of vaccine avoidance is going to stick with us now for a very long time, and it could get worse.

The Republicans decided that vaccination mandates are tyrannical and it’s their patriotic duty to defend freedom by resisting. This is a simple legacy of Trump’s decision to treat the COVID-19 pandemic as a political threat rather than a public health crisis. The more he was justly attacked for his handling of the crisis, the more his supporters sought to defend his rhetoric and his actions, and to see expert advice as a partisan effort to undermine Trump’s reelection chances. Science and medicine became their political foes.

Conservatives have always struggled with the concept of collective sacrifice and collective action. In their minds, society is composed of atomized individuals who succeed or fail entirely through their own effort and merits. It’s difficult for them to embrace the idea that you might get vaccinated less to protect yourself than to protect your neighbor. But until Trump and COVID-19 came along, they seemed to be fine with schools mandating vaccinations for things like measles and mumps.

As Leonhardt points out, the worst of the pandemic may be over. Promising new antiviral treatments from Pfizer and Merck should reduce the death rate, especially for the unvaccinated, so the disparity in COVID-19 mortality between Trump and Biden counties may go away. But we’ll probably see a persistent gap in childhood vaccinations for other diseases.

If Trump had treated the outbreak of COVID-19 like a rational person, this would not have occurred. Now the damage is permanent.

I get that Philip Klein of the National Review is disappointed that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was able to pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill on Saturday with the help of Republican votes. He wanted President Biden’s whole agenda to crash and burn. But one point that Klein makes can’t go unchallenged.

The strategy all along was for Democrats to win over some Republicans to their cause by creating a charade that their agenda was actually divided into two parts: a physical infrastructure bill, and a sweeping social-welfare bill.

For months, Democrats have been battling amongst themselves, with some members more attached to the infrastructure bill and others more attached to the social-welfare bill. But ultimately, time and again, it has become clear that the two bills were inextricably linked, and would rise and fall together.

Senate Republicans got the ball rolling when 18 of them decided support the unnecessary infrastructure bill, with its $550 billion in new spending, and send it to the House for final passage.

My problem here is Klein’s insistence that the physical infrastructure bill is “unnecessary.”

I understand that different people have different priorities. Conservatives aren’t convinced that it’s “necessary” to give people “social”  infrastructure in the form of paid leave or assistance with day care. They don’t think there’s a need to lower the price of insulin or other life-saving drugs. While liberals disagree, I can see where there’s at least a legitimate debate about the urgency of these investments.

But I don’t think there’s a legitimate debate about the need for physical infrastructure spending. Maybe the most potent argument in favor of my point is that in May 2020, President Trump requested $2 trillion in infrastructure spending as part of his COVID-19 relief package.

Four days after signing an unprecedented $2 trillion relief bill to blunt the economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic, the president on Tuesday called for the U.S. to spend another couple trillion bucks on a massive infrastructure package. In a tweet, he wrote that “this is the time” to craft an infrastructure overhaul with U.S. interest rates at zero during the crisis.

“It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country! Phase 4,” the president said, referencing the three pieces of emergency legislation lawmakers have already passed to combat the outbreak rampaging across the U.S.

Of course, eleven months later, in April 2021, Trump heavily criticized the nascent form of the bill that passed last night, even though it was half the size of the bill he’d called for in 2020. But even then he didn’t say it was unnecessary. He said the Republicans should negotiate a better deal.

“Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill is a disgrace,” Trump said in his opening message. “If Mitch McConnell was smart, which we’ve seen no evidence of, he would use the debt ceiling card to negotiate a good infrastructure package.”

Trump, who was unable to secure a infrastructure package while in office, said that lawmakers didn’t have enough time to fully read the legislation.

“This is a 2,700 page bill that no one could have possibly read — they would have needed to take speed reading courses,” he said. “It is a gift to the Democrat Party, compliments of Mitch McConnell and some RINOs, who have no idea what they are doing.”

This is pretty clearly an example of Trump supporting something when he’d get credit for it and opposing it when he wouldn’t. The truth is, the need for investment in infrastructure is real and doesn’t depend on political authorship. The Council on Foreign Relations produced a report in August on the state of American infrastructure, and the findings were unambiguous. Nearly a quarter of our bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, our airports suffer from severe flight delays, we need hundreds of billions of dollars in water investment, our ports are inefficient, and our electrical grid is old and unreliable.

The $20 trillion U.S. economy relies on a vast network of infrastructure from roads and bridges to freight rail and ports to electrical grids and internet provision. But the systems currently in place were built decades ago, and economists say that delays and rising maintenance costs are holding economic performance back. Civil engineers raise safety concerns as well, warning that many bridges are structurally deficient and that antiquated drinking water and wastewater systems pose risks to public health. Meanwhile, Americans’ international peers enjoy more efficient and reliable services, and the U.S. lags behind other developed countries in infrastructure spending.

When we look at what is contained in the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, we see that it addresses these needs.

The clear need for physical infrastructure investment is precisely why the bill attracted Republican votes in both the House and the Senate. The only substantive debate is over how much to invest in each area of need, and how to pay for it.

And that’s the problem with Klein’s temper tantrum.

Every Republican who voted for this monstrosity who is not already retiring should be primaried and defeated by candidates who will actually resist the Left-wing agenda. Those who are retiring should be shamed for the rest of their lives. It also is not too soon to be asking whether Representative Kevin McCarthy should be ousted from leadership for his inability to keep his caucus together on such a crucial vote.

Insofar as Klein has a leg to stand on, it’s his recognition that by helping the Democrats pass the physical infrastructure bill, they’ve also helped their prospects of passing the Biden administration’s Build Back Better social infrastructure bill. But Biden could have put both bills together from the start and pushed it all through the budget reconciliation process that only requires 50 Senate votes to pass. He split them in half instead so Republicans could have a say in how the physical infrastructure spending is allocated. Liberals weren’t thrilled with this idea because it meant making compromises, but the cost for having a say for Republicans is actually supporting the bill when it comes to a vote. Enough of them did that in both the Senate and the House to create a much needed piece of bipartisan legislation.

Trump should have been able to accomplish the same thing, but he didn’t know how, and he didn’t even try. He proposed $2 trillion in spending, but his own party rejected him outright, even though it was an election year and he was struggling with bad poll numbers. He didn’t have the skills or relationships with the Democrats to pull votes from their side, so he was left empty handed.

Biden promised he could get it done, and he delivered. Maybe that annoys Klein, but it’s not a reason to primary Republican lawmakers.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle in the UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×10 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

For this week’s cycle I have made several updates to the castle. I have started the details of the stone, especially the corner tower. Note the darkening of the shadowed areas. Good progress but much more to go.

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.

It’s been about thirty years since James Carville could be considered an accomplished political operative, so it’s not surprising that his post-election analysis isn’t very sophisticated:

“I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that — people see that. It’s just really — has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something. They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”

Let’s start with some basics. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post detailed on Wednesday, the movement toward the Republicans in the Tuesday elections was pretty uniform and somewhat surprisingly did not track with population density. Here’s how Nate Cohn described the numbers out of Virginia:

In a departure from recent demographic trends, there weren’t really any notable demographic trends in Virginia at all.

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor, won by making broad gains over Democrats in every part of the state and, apparently, across every demographic group. He gained in the cities, the suburbs and rural areas. He gained in the east and west. He made inroads in precincts with both white and nonwhite voters.

Now, overall, turnout was very high. You might argue that the Republicans were more motivated and came out to vote at a higher rate than the Democrats, but the Democrats showed no signs of voter apathy. In relative terms, we can say the Democrats lost the turnout game, but this wasn’t a matter of the left going to sleep. It was much more a matter of persuasion. A lot of Biden voters decided to cast votes for Republican candidates, in many cases no doubt reverting back to their prior pattern before Trump.

The rural situation for Democrats got worse, but the situation in the suburbs was more a return to a more normal distribution. This is exactly what I warned about in my post-2020 presidential election analysis. I noted that the Biden had relied on an urban/suburban alliance that is both unnatural and unstable.

The Democrats’ main problem is that that their urban/suburban coalition is fundamentally unstable. Typically, suburbanites choose to live outside of cities for carefully considered reasons—lower crime, better education–and they resist spending their tax dollars on urban priorities. Historically, the Republicans have had tremendous success in exploiting this wedge, and it’s not hard to foresee them making inroads in the suburbs again using messaging that’s less blunderbuss than Trump’s cries that low-income housing projects will be built next door and your life is in danger. What’s driving the cities and suburbs together is growing demographic and cultural similarities, but common economic interests are lacking.

Now, one thing I noted back in November 2020 was that the Republicans’ weakness in the suburbs was driving them by necessity into a more white identity-focused strategy designed to roll up higher margins in rural areas and heavily white small towns. The emergence of Critical Race Theory as a political theme is a reflection of this, but it’s also proved highly effective in stirring white identity among suburban voters.

Carville’s shorthand for this is the example of San Francisco deciding “to rename 44 schools named after controversial public figures, including former Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and current Sen. Dianne Feinstein.” He’s got a point insomuch as the real potency of the Critical Race Theory backlash doesn’t lie with its literal accuracy. School districts aren’t actually teaching the theory, but there is a movement to kind of recalibrate who we honor from our past. We’re a settler nation with a history of slavery and racial segregation, and a lot of that history is now looked at with new eyes in part because the country is more diverse. The San Francisco example is extreme, but there’s an understandable discomfort with the general trend toward dishonoring the traditional heroic narrative of the Founders and our history of developing and promoting democracy and human rights.

Now the message that’s resonating is the idea that a white kid going to elementary school is getting a steady diet of information about how nonwhites have been mistreated in this country, and you know maybe that’s not the most “patriotic” message. Maybe it makes those kids feel guilty or as if there’s something inherently wrong with them. Even liberal-minded white suburban mothers can worry that their precious snowflakes are going to be damaged in this process.

I have to give the right some credit for coming up with this strategy. It’s working like a charm by riling up their racist base while also sounding reasonable to a lot of suburban parents. It’s effectiveness is confounding, but the response has been far too literal. It doesn’t matter that Critical Race Theory isn’t actually being taught in schools. What matters is that they’ve put a word on something real that people feel.

Still, the election results from Tuesday show a uniform movement away from the Democrats, so it’s not accurate to say that “woke” culture is the only, or even the primary explanation. A better explanation is that a backlash against Trump artificially inflated the Democrats’ numbers, especially by driving an unnatural and easily undermined urban/suburban cultural alliance that masked the disaster of collapsing rural support. Without Trump at the forefront of voters’ minds, a lot more people were willing to cast a vote for a Republican candidate, and that’s true everywhere and among every group, including core Democratic demographics.

Now, we might have expected this to be offset somewhat by less engagement from Trump supporters who’d be less motivated to turn out without him on the ticket, but this didn’t really manifest itself because the Republicans are the out-party, and the out-party is always more angry and more inclined to vote.

So, the basic explanation for the Tuesday results is that the Republicans had an engagement advantage and they were able to do two things. First, the continued the trend of solidifying the rural/small town vote, and second they found a message that made inroads in the suburbs. These factors combined with less of a Trump backlash against generic Republican candidates to make for a strong swing.

The Democrats could have done a better job of riling up their supporters, and passing some of Biden’s agenda might have helped in a variety of ways. The literal response to the Critical Race Theory attacks were tone-deaf and counterproductive. But, overall, the problem is that two many people do not see the Democrats as on their side. This is most acutely apparent in rural areas, and the worse this gets the more reliant the Dems are on maintaining a very difficult to sustain urban/suburban alliance.

It’s pretty much everything I’ve warned against, and I take no pleasure in saying that.

 

I saw this joke on Reddit, and it not only made me laugh, it focused my thinking.

The President invites the Pope to lunch on a boat. The Pope accepted and during lunch, a puff of wind blew the pontiff’s hat off, right into the water. It floated off about 50 feet, then the wind died down and it just floated in place.

The crew and the Secret Service were scrambling to launch a boat to go get it, when Biden waved them off, saying, “Never mind boys, I’ll get it.”

Then Joe climbed over the side of the yacht, walked on the water to the hat, picked it up, walked back on the water, climbed into the yacht, and handed the Pope his hat.

The crew was speechless. The security team and the Pope’s entourage were speechless. No one knew what to say, not even the Pope.

But that afternoon, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS reported:

“BIDEN CAN’T SWIM”

Like a lot of us, I suspect, I made a conscious choice not to watch the news and what passes for “analysis” after the November 2 off-year elections, and the loss in Virginia. I saw a few headlines—”DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY!” “BIDEN AGENDA SINKING!!!” “COLLAPSE OF BIDEN PRESIDENCY IMMINENT!!1!”—and muttered to myself, “not today, Satan.”

I don’t want to be some kind of Pollyanna, and I’m sure Martin or Nancy will drop by later with some sobering exploration of what happened/what’s happening, but as for me, I’m sick of the knee-jerk, boneheaded hot takes that have prematurely declared Biden’s presidency a failure ever since he announced his candidacy in 2016. As I remember it, Biden was NEVER going to beat Bernie Sanders, according to the loudest voices with the biggest platforms. And then I remember he was NEVER going to beat Trump, according to those same people. He was going to disappoint progressives by siding with centrists: oops (don’t get me started on the media blaming progressives for the impasse on Biden’s Build Back Better plan—it’s TWO assholes holding it up, and it ain’t progressives). And so on and so forth.

Look, I get it. Even our better legacy media outlets—and that’s using the word “better” VERY loosely—are center-right. They’ve been stuck in the “Democrats are weak” narrative since 1980. From what I read on the daily, very few of the people reporting and analyzing have any apprehension of how our government works, or even basic knowledge and understanding of history and political science, lending credence to the advice Tucker Carlson’s dad once gave him: “You should consider journalism, they’ll take anybody.” I wonder if Chris Cillizza, Chuck Todd, Kasie Hunt, and the rest of the babbling cadavers received the same suggestion from their exasperated parents.

Speaking of exasperation, I received several emails and texts yesterday which expressed exactly that frustration with what passes as reporting. “So the Dems held onto the NJ gov in an off year for the first time since 1977 and didn’t exactly get crushed in VA. So why is the media hysterical?” wrote my friend Paul, a blue collar guy who works at my hometown’s water department. “Such a bullshit double standard. It seems the exact opposite narrative is true. The GOP should be fucking shitting their depends.”

“Can I just say the Washington Post can fuck right off with its breathless, ever-panicked horse race analysis? Their landing page is a disgrace,” added my friend Tim, a former journalist at Thompson-Reuters. “I know Youngkin beat McCauliffe, and the Blue firing squad is going at it full charge, but Virginia is an awful, awful place and we still hung onto New Jersey.”

My friend went on, “It’s like Jerry Springer or the ghost of Morton Downey Jr. is running the WaPo news thrust, bottomless barrels of proverbial gasoline at the ready. Dan Sinker nailed it today with this tweet: ‘I like that Trump got four years to wreak absolute havoc every single day but Biden’s cooked after 11 months because a governor lost in Virginia.'”

So while I’m not blind to the perils Democrats face, I know I’m not the only one simultaneously bored and yet deeply annoyed by the poor quality of coverage in the small sample I read yesterday. Same old predictions of failure. Same old stereotypes. Same old obfuscation. Same old shallow horse-race reporting. Same old conventional wisdom. “This is great news for John McCain.” YAWN.

John Prine really nailed it when he sang about blowing up the TV and throwing away your paper—which is probably owned by Gannett anyway, and thus not serving its community as anything more than an envelope for the grocery store’s weekly circular.

If I hadn’t been so swamped that I really barely paid much attention to the election outcomes (my take – it’s a bit of a mixed bag), and am still feeling like I am running behind. So it goes. I’ll manage. Always have. In the meantime, here’s REM covering a song by Wire:

I love the original by Wire (it has a very art-school vibe to it, as far as punk songs go), but this one is a fun listen. REM decide to be more up-tempo and add something of a post-Byrds vibe to the song. Unlike the original, REM’s cover is one I can easily imagine dancing to. And like some other acts I’d been following as the 1970s ended and the 1980s progressed (e.g., B-52s, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers), REM were representatives of a “New South” that has never really quite taken off the way I would have hoped. As someone with strong Southern ties, no matter where I live, I also want to see a South that is no longer regressive. We all have dreams, I guess.

Anyway, it’s still Wednesday in my time zone, so I just barely make the deadline for posting. Cheers, everyone.

Karen Attiah is wondering why state Rep. Matt Krause (R-Fort Worth), who chairs the House General Investigating Committee, has sent a letter to Texas’s school districts with “a list of more than 800 books.” She knows the letter includes a request that each district count how many copies of each book they have in their classrooms and libraries, and also an estimate of how much they paid for them. She knows that the list of books is clearly the result of someone doing a basic google search of keywords like: racism, puberty, LGBT, Black, gender and transgender. And she’s aware that the letter also includes an instruction to search for additional works that have “content dealing with human sexuality, HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and graphic depictions of sex” or that might make some students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”

Attiah offers up two hypotheses for why this letter was disseminated. The first is that it’s one man’s raw ambition.

On one hand, the whole thing reeks of a political stunt that will waste valuable educational time and resources. Krause is challenging Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a Republican primary next year. In today’s Texas politics, there is no penalty for going to extremes on the right.

The second is that it’s the Republican Party’s latest iteration of the age-old Southern Strategy.

It’s not hard to read between the lines. These attacks on books come as a response to the growing power that marginalized people have demonstrated recently in our public discourse. Book-banning, like the Southern Strategy of old, is an effort to harness White fears of a new, more racially equal America.

These are good and accurate explanations but a bit sloppily applied. For example, if this were all explained by race, the heavy emphasis on sexual content would be unnecessary. The binding force is not anti-minority but anti-woke.

Progressives have talked for a long time about the importance of people not feeling “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex” or sexual orientation. What we’re seeing here is straight white people trying to apply the same standard to themselves.

When “normal” is defined as white, heterosexual and Christian, those who aren’t in those categories are often marginalized and disadvantaged, and that’s assuming they can even get equal protection and treatment under the law, which too often is not the case. We can talk about this as “privilege” and “lack of privilege” but that doesn’t mean that every white person is living the good life, getting the best jobs and sending their kids to the best schools. A lot of white folks don’t feel like they’re at the top of the pyramid. They feel like victims themselves. The traditional jobs that fueled their communities are gone. A drug epidemic is crushing them. And when they look for some basic moral grounding, like going to church, getting married, being a good father who provides, they find that those values aren’t necessarily respected.

Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that they seek comfort in the past. They want to fall back on the things they can be proud of, as this can provide some sense of dignity and inspiration. But they find that the past is now reinterpreted as mainly a period of brutal imperialism, slavey and genocide for which whites are almost solely responsible.

It’s easy to see why a white parent might be concerned about how their child perceives this. It should be easy to understand why it has so much political salience and power.

This doesn’t mean books should be banned or history whitewashed, but those aren’t the issues that should be our primary concern. They’re more symptoms of a much more general backlash that is now threatening our entire system of government. We’re losing the consent of the governed. A third of the country doesn’t believe Joe Biden rightfully won the 2020 presidential election, and more effort is now being made on the right to rig elections than to win them. We’re witnessing the rise of an anti-democratic ethno/religious nationalism that is synonymous with fascism. These folks are working to take over our school boards, our offices of elections, and our town councils, and it’s a mortal threat.

It’s hard to say people should be more focused on managing the hurt feelings of people who hate and resent them. But, as a political matter, and a concern for the well-being of our society, it could be suicidal to ignore the power of the anti-Critical Race Theory movement, as well as the broader backlash against woke culture. I’ve been arguing for years that when poor white communities don’t get left-wing populism on the menu, they will opt for fascism. That’s what is happening right now. That’s why books are being banned.

I don’t believe the solution is to stop teaching history or pursuing justice for historically disadvantaged groups. What the left needs to do is recognize that it can’t leave whole communities out or define them as the enemy. I’ve talked about an anti-monopoly movement at the most promising inroad, and I still believe that’s the best option.

The current trajectory isn’t promising, that’s for sure.

It took me a couple of hours and several breaks to finish reading the Washington Post write-up of the January 6 coup attempt. I’m surprised at how many emotions it stirred. On the other hand, I’m almost ashamed that I’d let my anger subside somewhat over the last ten months. Most of all, I’m furious that Donald Trump remains a free man. What he did was not just unforgivable, it was and continues to be a lethal threat to our entire system of government and the security of our county.

He must be held accountable for his actions.

To understand the consequences of letting Trump float away from the insurrection unscathed, consider that an early October Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll showed him more popular than ever in Iowa with 54 percent favorable numbers. FiveThirtyEight has been tracking Trump’s favorability ratings, and it’s like the insurrection never happened.

Overall, Trump’s unfavorability — now that he’s out of office we’re tracking his favorability numbers rather than his approval rating, both of which capture popularity — has remained steady just as his low approval numbers mostly did during his presidency. His popularity took a dip following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which meant that his overall favorability was quite low when we began tracking those numbers in February. But as you can see in the chart above, Trump’s favorability numbers have more or less returned to where his approval rating was before the insurrection.

This is an outrage. It’s completely unacceptable.

Obviously, the American people are chiefly to blame. After all, if Republicans voters didn’t overwhelmingly support Trump, then Republican lawmakers would be willing to stand up to him. Still, is it really worth being an elected official if you’re nothing but a hostage?

The Democrats have a country to run and the Biden administration has campaign promises to keep. I understand that they can’t remain stuck on January 6, 2021. I also know that investigations take time. But things need to change soon. The hammer has to come down on Trump.

There’s a narrative growing that Trump will run for president again. The Senate could have prevented this by convicting Trump in the Second Impeachment Trial, but the Republicans were to cowardly to act. Now even a prison cell might not be able to prevent Trump from running again, but it would presumably be an impediment to actually winning.

To be clear, Trump tried to remain in office after losing a presidential election. He demanded that his vice-president help him orchestrate a coup, and when Pence refused, he set a violent mob on Congress in a desperate effort to remain in power by force. People died, dozens were severely injured, and there was massive property damage. Throughout it all, Trump refused to put a stop to it because it was his last chance to remain in the Oval Office.

He is the biggest criminal the country has seen since the onset of the Civil War.

And we’re all just sitting around wondering if his his new social media platform with be a success or not.

We’re in a dreamworld.

Yes, I care whether or not Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema ultimately help Biden pass his agenda. But I care more that they act like it’s vital that the Democrats not do anything too divisive. As things stand, the Democrats are going to lose power in Congress after the 2022 midterms, and a Trumpian Death Cult will take over. Perhaps that possibility should foremost in people’s minds.

Preventing that starts with holding Trump accountable. The House investigation can play a part in that, but it’s really up to the Department of Justice to get off their ass and press some charges.

Think my headline sounds hysterical? If only…

Hundreds of Staten Island residents holding anti-vaccine signs and waving American flags gathered on Sunday across the street from where New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) was scheduled to speak at a campaign event for local Democrats. The crowd was angry about New York City’s vaccine mandate for municipal workers, which takes full effect on Monday.

But one attendee had another worry — that the city, like the state of California, will force children to get the coronavirus vaccine. So he offered an unnerving warning.

“If they’re going to push this on the kids … I can guarantee you one thing: Town halls and schools will be f—ing burned to the ground,” the man said in a video posted by freelance journalist Oliya Scootercaster.

The crowd clapped, cheered, banged on drums and raised their American flags.

The anti-vaxxers love children so much, they’re threatening to light schools on fire! Brings a whole new dimension to “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” eh? But it gets even better more dangerously insane.

More than 300 people attended Sunday’s rally, according to SILive. Many held signs that disparaged President Biden, and some attendees wore yellow Stars of David, an antisemitic symbol co-opted by anti-vaccine advocates who equate getting the shot to tragedies inflicted on Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Always with the Holocaust cosplaying—although these unstable, violent idiots are indeed wiping themselves out at an alarmingly efficient rate. But I digress—let’s see and hear what the anti-vaccin e crowd is all about!

Scootercaster’s video from Sunday’s rally, which had over 126,000 views on Twitter as of early Monday, shows a man wearing a blue shirt, a black vest, sunglasses and a red, white and blue hat that said “I pee in pools” surrounded by the crowd of demonstrators.

That’s an ADULT wearing that hat, by the way—and in public. I’m sure he’s popular with the ladies. It’s almost enough to make you laugh derisively, but then Peepee-Boy says

“In 1776 … nobody went to court. Anyone grabbed a gun, and they f—ing shot at each other!” he yelled.

“Yeah!” people in the crowd shouted back.

“And again, I do not condone violence and hope we don’t get there. I hope we don’t get there,” he continued. “But just understand that there are plenty of people that are ready to go there.”

“I do not condone violence, but I’m ready to get violent,” says the man who proudly (and presumably deliberately) wets his own pants as he imagines reliving the Rwandan Genocide here in the United States.

I’m making fun of these morons, but let’s face it: they are sick in the head and likely in the body, as they’ve refused to get vaccinated against deadly and highly contagious illness that can kill people. But the fact is, it’s not funny. These are dangerous lunatics—domestic terrorists, if we’re being honest—who have announced their intent to resort to violence. They will eventually have to be dealt with, hopefully before one of them murders a bunch of children by burning down a school. Sadly, I think it’s only a matter of time—especially when so many police and firefighters are on their side.

Then when it happens, the police—and the media—will collectively cry “Who could have predicted?”