Month: December 2021

I watched Don’t Look Up alone, and then I watched it again with CabinGirl. That was an interesting experience, because we had similar reactions but on a time delay. Despite being a movie about the end of sentient life on Earth, it’s filled with farce and laughs. In this, it’s a modern day equivalent of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which ends with a nuclear holocaust.

I first saw Dr. Strangelove in the late 1980’s, and by that time the Cuban Missile Crisis was far enough in the rearview mirror that I had no trouble laughing at the jokes. The jokes in Don’t Look Up are damn good, but they hit very close to home. When I finished watching the movie alone, I was a little shaken and I thought maybe the movie didn’t work.  But then I started to realize that the intent of the movie was to startle and so I should consider it a success. The second time I watched it, it was easier for me to laugh, but CabinGirl just grew steadily more concerned.

And, of course, Dr. Strangelove used farce to highlight that the national security establishment at the time was off its collective rocker and likely to get us all killed with their theories of nuclear deterrent and mutually-assured destruction. Don’t Look Up has a broader set of targets which includes our media and the public’s obsession with getting likes and follows. The basic plot is simple. Some astronomers discover a new comet which is cause for celebration, but soon realize that it’s a collision course with Earth and will cause a mass extinction event like the one that did in the dinosaurs. The problem is that they can’t seem to get anyone–including the Trump/Palin hybrid president played by Meryl Streep–to take the threat seriously.

It’s an allegory for our behavior in the face of climate change, but it serves just about as well for our reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. I won’t add any additional spoilers here except to say that Streep’s followers closely resemble Trump’s, and the satirized media outlets are easy to identify as Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, OANN, Alex Jones, The View, etc.

The right definitely comes in for the lion’s share of blame, but not exclusively. Basic human weaknesses are explored without respect to ideology, and there is also a scalding critique of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others who are looking to commercialize space.

Near the end of her viewing of the movie, CabinGirl wondered aloud how the right would react, and we now have an answer from Madeline Fry Schultz of The Washington Examiner. Apparently the movie is bad in part because its received some less than glowing reviews from NPR and the New York Times.

In both of those cases, however, the complaint is basically that the movie is too strident: “a cathartic scream-cry of a movie” that “isn’t doing much more…than yelling at us.”

Again, the problem may be that’s it’s too on the mark. We’re approaching a million dead Americans in the COVID-19 crisis, hundreds of thousands of which died unnecessarily because they would not get vaccinated. Is it surprising that it’s hard to laugh at jokes about mankind going extinct because too few will listen to experts?

Schultz’s movie review would be right at home within the script of Don’t Look Up, as it looks to shift the blame away from MAGA types and onto the scientists.

The film’s ultimate message about “listening to the science” comes off as entirely tone-deaf after nearly two years of people wearing masks outside, masking children, and cheerfully participating in hygiene theater for the sake of appeasing “experts” and political special interests. As children’s mental health has suffered, small businesses have closed, and seniors have died in isolation, “the scientists” have insisted on keeping the country shut down as long as possible no matter what the science says. Just as their judgment is finally being questioned in earnest, Don’t Look Up’s message is that the people (and of course the greedy capitalists) are wrong.

Don’t Look Up might get the Oscar nods it’s clearly aiming for just with its politics, but it’s unlikely to cause any change. Critiquing the “deplorables” who question catastrophic climate rhetoric and embracing the proposition that the world is about to end is always a great way to earn applause in Hollywood. But if [director Adam] McKay had really been interested in good satire, he wouldn’t have passed over the perpetrators of the crisis staring him right in the face.

I suspect that Dr. Strangelove had a modest but not unimportant impact in changing public perceptions about nuclear weapons policy. The next decade saw serious efforts to reduce risk, including most prominently the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I)  treaty with the Soviet Union which was enacted in 1972. If Strangelove worked at all, it worked because it went at the issue indirectly through comedy. That’s the ambition of Don’t Look Up, but I have to say that if it fails as a movie it isn’t because it fails as a wake-up call. I think the main issue is that it doesn’t provide a kernel of hope.

On Wednesday, President Biden tweeted this:

We’re ending 2021 with what one analyst described as the strongest first-year economic track record of any president in the last 50 years.

Let’s keep the progress going.

— President Biden (@POTUS) December 29, 2021

That sent right wingers over the edge. Here’s just one example:

I didn't realize April Fools' Day was in December this year. https://t.co/TI0vznR0xm

— Rep. Tom Tiffany (@RepTiffany) December 30, 2021

The analyst Biden referred to is Matthew Winkler of Bloomberg News, whose most recent article is titled, “Biden’s Economic Performance Has Proved Unbeatable.” The subtitle says it all: “No first-year president going back to Carter comes close to matching the current White House occupant’s No. 1 or No. 2 ranking in each of 10 key measures.”

America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years notwithstanding the contrary media narrative contributing to dour public opinion.

Winkler goes on to document how Biden comes in either first or second on things like GDP, stock market performance, consumer credit, non-farm payroll, and manufacturing jobs. While Winkler acknowledges the problem of inflation, he notes that the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note is fluctuating well below the rate of inflation and ends with this:

The clear message from the market that tells all other markets what to do is that the people with the most at stake are betting on the Biden economy.

With all of that, let’s review what’s happening here. As Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said a few months ago, Republicans have been counting on chaos as their strategy to prevail in 2022. Spreading disinformation about Covid and vaccines has worked for them in prolonging the pandemic. But they’ve also put a lot of effort into suggesting that the economy would be chaotic over the holidays, as Dana Milbank summarized.

For months, the GOP-Fox News axis forecast the bluest of Christmases.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy joined 159 House Republicans in a letter to President Biden saying his policies “will certainly ensure that this Christmas will not be merry” because of a “supply chain crisis” and inflation.

Chairman Jim Banks of the House Republican Study Committee, citing the same reasons, wrote to colleagues: “Our job as Republicans is to explain to the American people what the grinches at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave did to ruin Christmas.”

Fox News told viewers that “Christmas presents for your kids may not arrive on time or even at all” (Sean Hannity), that the president is “the Biden Who Stole Christmas” (Laura Ingraham) and that Biden is “facing a nightmare come Christmastime,” when “gifts are going to cost a fortune, and that’s even if you’re lucky enough to snag anything” (Jesse Watters).

Let’s be clear about one thing: all of those people were wrong. The so-called “Christmas crisis” never materialized. Supply chain issues weren’t a problem, holiday retail sales jumped 8.5 percent from last year (nearly 11 percent from pre-pandemic 2019), and gas prices were 14 cents a gallon lower than in November.

All of that, added to Winkler’s longer-term analysis, explains why the only thing right wingers want to talk about right now is inflation. It’s working. As Philip Bump noted, most people used to assume that unemployment rates were the best measure of the health of the economy. That changed this past year, with three-quarters of Republicans now saying that prices are the key indicator of economic health.

I am reminded of the famous adage from James Carville during the 1992 election: “It’s the economy, stupid.” According to political scientists, he had a point.

Several studies have found that the economy is a major factor that affects how people vote — more specifically, that voters reward the incumbent party when they feel that economic times…are good, and voters are more likely to boot the incumbent out of the White House when they feel economic times are bad.

Republicans desperately need the Biden economy to fail. If they can’t make that happen, they’ll simply use their propaganda network to convince as many people as possible that things are really bad.

So…based on what news source you pay attention to, this country is either in the midst of a “Biden boom” or is headed for 1970s style stagflation. Nevermind that only one option is backed up by facts. Right wingers have managed to politicize everything else. Why not the economy?

Recently Bette Midler, who actively shares her political views on Twitter, said something that she shouldn’t have. In railing about Sen. Joe Manchin’s refusal to support the Build Back Better Act, she referred to West Virginians as “poor, illiterate and strung out.” She has since apologized.

Of course, the MAGA crowd is having a field day suggesting that this is yet another example of liberal elitism. But they fail to notice the facts: West Virginia ranks as the second poorest state in the country (behind only Mississippi), ranks number one for the least educated, and has the highest death rate in the country from opioid overdoses. Midler was pointing out that Manchin was standing in the way of legislation that would address those issues.

What is most interesting about the reaction from the right to Midler’s tweet is that they are actually projecting their own judgementalism into what she said. Samantha Mendoza chronicled some of the most outrageous things GOP politicians have said about people who are living in poverty.

 “You take somebody that has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there,” [Ben] Carson said in an interview. “And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you could give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom.” He went on to say that people living in poverty have “the wrong mindset.”…

“We have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities, in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work; and so there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with,” [Paul] Ryan said…

“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’ there is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves,” [Kansas Republican Roger] Marshall said in March. “I think just morally, spiritually, socially, [some people] just don’t want health care. The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card, as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging, I’m just saying socially that’s where they are.”

Mendoza provided a few more examples. But how about this one from Mike Huckabee:

“It’s basically just a transfer of money from the taxpayer to the government, from the government to people who become beneficiaries of the government, because that way the government can own these people,” Huckabee said on “Fox and Friends.” “It is a trap, and it is like the roach motel. Once you get in, but you never get out.”

I’d also like to add one from Rick Santorum that I find the most egregious. Here’s what he said when running for president in 2012:

During a town hall meeting in Ottumwa, Iowa Friday afternoon, Rick Santorum argued that Americans receive too many government benefits and ought to “suffer” in the Christian tradition. If “you’re lower income, you can qualify for Medicaid, you can qualify for food stamps, you can qualify for housing assistance,” Santorum complained, before adding, “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.”

Then, of course, there is the Democratic Senator from West Virginia that Republicans are courting to join their party.

In recent months, Manchin has told several of his fellow Democrats that he thought parents would waste monthly child tax credit payments on drugs instead of providing for their children, according to two sources familiar with the senator’s comments.

How much more elitist can you be than assuming poor people have the wrong mindset, don’t value the culture of work, don’t take care of themselves physically, are like roaches, use the child tax credit to buy drugs, and – ultimately – deserve to suffer? That is the kind of thing Republicans say all the time!

For the party that wants to claim the mantle of Christianity, I would simply remind them of a couple of things that Jesus said. First of all…there’s this:

Then the king will say to those good people on his right, ‘Come. My Father has given you great blessings. Come and get the kingdom God promised you. That kingdom has been prepared for you since the world was made. You can have this kingdom, because I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was alone and away from home, and you invited me into your home. I was without clothes, and you gave me something to wear. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you came to visit me.’ “Then the good people will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you food? When did we see you thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you alone and away from home and invite you into our home? When did we see you without clothes and give you something to wear? When did we see you sick or in prison and care for you?’ “Then the king will answer, ‘I tell you the truth. Anything you did for one of the least of these my brethren, you also did for me.’

To get there, they’ll have to grapple with this:

Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?

Harry Reid died on Tuesday, and it’s quite predictable that there immediately appeared comparisons of his leadership of the Senate Democrats to the leadership currently on display from Senate top dog Chuck Schumer. We should be careful here, however. The two men are very different, certainly, but so are their circumstances.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that party leaders in Congress, particularly in the Senate, do not have a free hand to do anything they choose. They must hold together a coalition while seeking to gain, maintain or grow a majority. They have to protect their most vulnerable members, and that means they can’t just bully them into submission. Harry Reid had a nice run where he enjoyed a healthy majority–briefly reaching a theoretically filubuster-proof 60 seats. Schumer has only 5o seats under his control, meaning he cannot hope to break a filibuster with a few Republican votes and must have absolute unanimity to pass anything. Reid could tolerate dissension in his ranks, and even encourage it in specific circumstances where it might help a member establish some strategic distance from the party brand. Schumer doesn’t have that luxury.

When Reid used the nuclear option to facilitate the confirmation of President Obama’s nominations, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia opposed him. It didn’t matter because Reid didn’t need his support. Schumer would like Manchin to back him on a similar rules change to facilitate a voting rights bill, but this time Manchin’s support is required. That’s just one example–there are many others–where Schumer faces a more challenging problem than Reid typically faced.

Right now, there’s an article up at HuffPost that credits Donald Trump with making Schumer’s Senate majority. That’s fair enough, since Trump’s delusional insistence that he was robbed of Georgia’s Electoral College votes clearly dissuaded thousands of Republicans from participating in the two Senate runoff elections that resulted in the narrow election of Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, and created a 50-50 split in the upper chamber. But the author, S.V. Date, goes further by arguing that Trump is responsible for Biden’s success in confirming a record-tying 40 federal judges during his first year in office. This is less accurate because it wouldn’t have been possible in a 50-50 Senate without the support of Senator Manchin, and those justices would have been subject to a filibuster if not for Reid’s decision to use the nuclear option back in 2013.

Reid might have gone nuclear earlier but he had to have enough support from his own caucus. He waited until Mitch McConnell’s obstruction had caused enough frustration that there were 50 votes to support the change. Schumer is facing the same constraint with voting rights, but he lacks the wiggle room that Reid enjoyed.

A better way to compare Reid to Schumer than looking at their records is to try to imagine what they would have done in each other’s shoes. Manchin seems to have a better relationship with Schumer than he enjoyed with Reid, but Reid didn’t have to worry that he’d lose his majority if Manchin got angry.

I preferred Reid’s combative style to Schumer’s but I know Schumer isn’t free to use the same strategies. I don’t think the two men are as different as it might seem. They do have the same job description, however, and the same determined adversary in McConnell.

According to a report in Politico, ABC’s show The View, is having trouble finding a conservative host.

Sources close to the show said that the search has stalled as executives struggle to find a conservative cast-member who checks all the right boxes. They will not consider a Republican who is a denier of the 2020 election results, embraced the January 6 riots, or is seen as flirting too heavily with fringe conspiracy theories or the MAGA wing of the GOP. But at the same time, the host must have credibility with mainstream Republicans, many of whom still support Donald Trump.

To be honest, I don’t watch the show myself. But I’ve seen enough of it to know that the point of their political segment has always been to include hosts that argue from both the left and the right. That is an example of bothsiderism that is presenting the executives with a tough call in this era of asymmetrical polarization.

In their search for a host, the executives at The View are looking for a conservative who rejects Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election, the January 6 riots, fringe conspiracy theories, and the MAGA wing of the party. On the other hand, they want someone who has credibility with “mainstream Republicans,” the majority of whom embrace all of those things.

Not only do about 60% of Republicans believe the big lie, they also say that doing so is “an important part of their own partisan identity.” Almost 40% of Republicans think that violent action by citizens might be necessary to protect America. More than half of Republicans (56%) believe the conspiracy theories of QAnon are mostly or partly true. For Republicans, those aren’t fringe beliefs these days. The MAGA folks aren’t a wing of the GOP. They ARE the GOP.

While the executives at The View want a host that doesn’t spout the same fascist themes we hear from someone like Tucker Carlson, they also want a conservative who has credibility with what amounts to the Fox News crowd. No wonder they’re having trouble finding someone to fill that bill.

All you need as proof that a person like that doesn’t exist is to take a look at what happened to Rep. Liz Cheney. She called Trump out for his attempt to overthrow the election. For doing so, she’s been ousted from the Wyoming GOP and stripped of her leadership position in the House.

I’m sure that the executives at The View want to maintain the viewership of any conservatives who watch the show. But finding a rational person who can appeal to an irrational audience is just not going to happen.

When I read The Daily Beast article on Peter Navarro, I immediately thought of a “limited hangout.”

A limited hangout or partial hangout is, according to former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Victor Marchetti, “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering— The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

Navarro, who served in the Trump administration as an Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and national Defense Production Act policy coordinator, has decided to take ownership and co-authorship with Steve Bannon, of the January 6 plot to overthrow our constitutional system of government.

A former Trump White House official says he and right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon were actually behind the last-ditch coordinated effort by rogue Republicans in Congress to halt certification of the 2020 election results and keep President Donald Trump in power earlier this year, in a plan dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep.”

In his recently published memoir, Peter Navarro, then-President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, details how he stayed in close contact with Bannon as they put the Green Bay Sweep in motion with help from members of Congress loyal to the cause.

However, he admits his direct and primary role in the heinous crime in order to exonerate Bannon and himself from any responsibility for the violent breach of the Capitol. You see, their brilliant plan was going to work without any riot, and it was actually the riot that prevented a successful coup.

“We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., [Rep. Paul] Gosar and [Sen. Ted] Cruz did exactly what was expected of them,” Navarro told The Daily Beast. “It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn’t even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”

The idea was simply to force 24 hours of delay in the certification, during which six states that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won would figure out how to send alternate electors to DC to cast votes for Trump and Pence.

This isn’t surprising information, but it’s brazen as a defense strategy. He’s admitted to the big crime but denied the small one. He correctly concludes that we’re all focused on the storming of the capitol rather than the intent behind the insurrection, which was to illegally overturn the results of our 2020 presidential election.

The mob injured dozens of police officers, several of whom subsequently died, caused millions in property damage, and assaulted every member of Congress, the vice-president, and hundreds of congressional staffers. But that was minor compared to the effort to deny Biden and Harris their victory and keep Trump in power.

Navarro and Bannon may not have envisioned an actual breach of the Capitol. After all, I think most people thought the Capitol police would be able to keep the mob at bay. But we don’t need to prove that they orchestrated the riot. We need to prove their intent and involvement in a coup attempt, and Navarro has just confessed.

He thinks, however, that he can defend himself by volunteering some of the facts in the hope that the public is so intrigued by the Capitol breach that it never thinks to pursue the coup attempt itself.

The main problem here is that it’s more of a public relations strategy than a legal defense. However, if the Biden administration and the January 6 committee insist on looking at “obstruction of an official proceeding” at the main statute to charge against Trump and his coup-plotters, then Navarro’s strategy just might work. After all, Navarro’s plot involved using a constitutionally allowable provision whereby members of Congress can challenge a state’s electors and force a debate. There is no requirement that the challenge has any merit.

The advantage of sticking to obstruction of a legal proceeding is that it is easier to prove than a full-on insurrection plot. We know that the counting of the votes was indeed disrupted and delayed, whereas the coup attempt failed. But in both cases, the real challenge is proving intent. Did Trump think the mob would storm the Capitol? Is that what he intended? Is that what Bannon and Navarro intended?

Well, Navarro says that the breach was not part of the plan and actually foiled their plan. We may learn more about whether or not that’s true, but Navarro just offered the intent for a coup on a silver platter. He even implicates Trump.

When asked if Trump himself was involved in the strategy, Navarro said, “I never spoke directly to him about it. But he was certainly on board with the strategy. Just listen to his speech that day. He’d been briefed on the law, and how Mike [Pence] had the authority to it.”

So, this is a flawed limited hangout, but one that could still work if our country doesn’t have the balls to charge the larger crime.

The headline in The Hill made me gasp momentarily: Jan. 6 panel signals interest in whether Trump committed crime.

What kind of country, I asked myself, would treat this as a debatable question? We had an election. The president clearly lost. He refused to concede. He tried to corrupt election officials in several states. He replaced people in key positions in the Pentagon and attempted to do so at the Justice Department in the hope that they would help him stay in power. He lied to the American people about the integrity of the election and encouraged them to come to Washington DC to “Stop the Steal.” And then he told them to go down to the Capitol while Congress was counting the Electoral College votes and “fight like hell” to prevent the official transfer of power. A riot ensued in which dozens of police officers were wounded, several deaths occurred, the Capitol’s defenses were breached, protestors overran the congressional chambers, the vice-president and Speaker of the House were hunted, and millions of dollars in property damage resulted.

Did the president commit a crime, we ask?

If you’re trying to find the right statutes to cite for the prediction of Donald J. Trump, maybe I can sympathize. It’s not like anyone really anticipated something quite like January 6 and wrote laws that would directly apply. We have a system where, like it or not, Richard Nixon’s declaration that it’s “not a crime if the president commits it” is truer than it should be.

But we’re talking about a crime every bit as serious as the secession of the Southern states from the Union in 1860. Abraham Lincoln could have thrown his hands up and said that there was no specific statute that spelled out what to do, or giving him authority to fight to bring the South back into the fold. But he treated it as treason because that’s what it was.

All we have to do to make this plain is to imagine what would have happened if Trump’s wishes had been fulfilled and he were still occupying the White House with no authority to be there. This is a crime bigger than any mere statute, but we’re talking about charging him with “obstruction of an official proceeding.”

It was a fucking coup attempt–the most serious offense against the Constitution since the Civil War. We can argue about what to do about it, but we should be resolved that it was a crime!

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of a scene near New Paltz, New York in the Hudson Valley. 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.

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 concentrated upon the building. Note the shadowed and lit areas. I have also added some paint to the rear green area as well as that out front.

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.

In our family, everyone who was eligible got their COVID-19 vaccine shots at the earliest possible moment. We moved from cloth masks to KN95s very early on. My 10-11 year-old son did remote school. We avoided crowds, had food delivered, and hunkered down. As far as I know, none of has been infected or infected anyone else. There was a brief period after I’d received my second vaccine shot and before the Delta variant took over that I let my guard down a bit and did some unmasked shopping. It felt liberating, like maybe things could soon return to normal, but also kind of stupid because I knew that was naive. The biggest risk we took was sending my son back to school in late-August when he wasn’t yet vaccinated. All throughout, we also let him play outdoor sports, assessing I think correctly, that it was fairly safe. Now everyone is vaccinated and all the adults are boosted.

I still wear a KN95 mask whenever I leave the house and go inside, but in truth I know my greatest risk is at home. That’s because Omicron is so infectious that it’s probably just a matter of time before my son gets a breakthrough case at school. What this means is that I no longer believe there’s a possibility that we’ll avoid infection, because we’re not masking up in our own house. We’re going to have to rely on the protection the vaccines and boosters provide, as well as emerging therapeutics that show promise. There’s only so much we can sacrifice and still live a life worth living.

It is recommended that everyone wear a KN95 or N95 mask to prevent Omicron infection, and that seems like a no-brainer to me. If health care workers rely on them, I think I can rely on them too. Omicron may get us all in the end, but there’s no reason to make its job easy.

My hope is that Omicron is truly less lethal and that it will lead to other even less dangerous variants. Somewhere down the line, I may determine that the risk of getting or spreading COVID-19 is roughly the same as typical influenza viruses. At that point, I’ll put the masks away and take my chances.

Until then, nothing will change even though I am boosted for the next six months.

As we speak, Republicans are engaging in a massive attempt to “cancel culture.” They are trying to re-write the history of this country by banning both books and words. For example, this is what is happening in Texas:

Matt Krause, a Republican in the Texas House of Representatives, has gone hunting in public-school libraries for any books that might generate “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of [a student’s] race or sex.” In October, he distributed a watch list of 850 books…What we’re witnessing is plainly a shakedown. And this week, a San Antonio school district pulled 414 books from its libraries in response to the ongoing pressure from Texas lawmakers and a vocal segment of angry parents to limit what children can choose to read.

On a party-line vote, Republicans in Wisconsin voted to ban a long list of words from use in classrooms.

In testimony before an Assembly committee last month, Wichgers said the bill would ban the teaching of concepts including “Social Emotional Learning,” “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” culturally responsive teaching, anti-racism, conscious and unconscious bias, culturally responsive practices, diversity training, equity, microaggressions, multiculturalism, patriarchy, restorative justice, social justice, systemic racism, white privilege, white supremacy and “woke,” among others.

That’s just a sampling of what is happening all over the country where Republicans are in control of state governments.

In case you’re wondering where this is all headed, Helen Andrews gave us some indication with a piece published in The American Conservative titled, “Reconstruction Revisionism.”

The wholesale reinterpretation of history around a left-wing narrative about race, which the 1619 Project is trying to accomplish for the rest of the American story, was first trialed on the history of Reconstruction. For most of the 20th century, Reconstruction was seen as a squalid and shameful coda to the Civil War when Northern Radicals and carpetbaggers enacted their wildest fantasies of humiliation and spoliation on a prostrate South. Starting in the 1960s, a group of revisionist historians began arguing that Reconstruction had actually been a noble experiment in interracial democracy, too quickly abandoned.

The point of Andrews’ piece is that we should return to the view of Reconstruction that prevailed for most of the 20th century when the era was “seen as a squalid and shameful coda to the Civil War.” She particularly goes after W.E.B. Du Bois for revising that view with his publication of “Black Reconstruction” in 1935.

There is no point beating around the bush: The version of Reconstruction history that Du Bois presents is based on motivated reasoning and tendentious distortions of the evidence.

Shortly before his death, Rev. Martin Luther King spoke at an event honoring Du Bois. Here’s how he described the book:

To understand why his study of the Reconstruction was a monumental achievement it is necessary to see it in context. White historians had for a century crudely distorted the Negro’s role in the Reconstruction years. It was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history and the stakes were high. The Reconstruction was a period in which black men had a small measure of freedom of action. If, as white historians tell it, Negroes wallowed in corruption, opportunism, displayed spectacular stupidity, were wanton, evil, and ignorant, their case was made. They would have proved that freedom was dangerous in the hands of inferior beings. One generation after another of Americans were assiduously taught these falsehoods and the collective mind of America became poisoned with racism and stunted with myths.

Dr Du Bois confronted this powerful structure of historical distortion and dismantled it. He virtually, before anyone else and more than anyone else, demolished the lies about Negroes in their most important and creative period of history. The truths he revealed are not yet the property of all Americans but they have been recorded and arm us for our contemporary battles.

Andrews is clearly advocating for a return to the propaganda that was spread by Confederates to end Reconstruction. Here is how Black legislators that were elected during Reconstruction were portrayed in the film, “The Birth of a Nation” in order to make the point that “freedom was dangerous in the hands of inferior beings:”

It is a bit hard to believe that we are revisiting battles that most of us thought were won decades ago. But as Charles Blow wrote, “The Lost Cause Is Back.”

This is not a debate about facts, this is a debate about narratives. This is a “Lost Cause” redux. When the South lost the Civil War, revisionists there invented the propaganda narrative of the “Lost Cause,” positing that the fight had been honorable and righteous and not about maintaining slavery but maintaining a superior way of life. In this narrative, slavery had been good and the enslaved treated relatively well, with many of the enslaved happy workers.

As Ty Seidule, a professor emeritus of history at West Point and the Chamberlain fellow and a professor of history at Hamilton College, wrote in “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause,” “The Lost Cause created a flawed memory of the Civil War, a lie that formed the ideological foundation for white supremacy and Jim Crow laws, which used violent terror and de jure segregation to enforce racial control.”

The whole Lost Cause movement was a way for Confederates to deal with the fact that they lost the Civil War. But it was also part of a huge backlash to the gains made by African Americans in the South during Reconstruction. In noting that the Lost Cause built Jim Crow, Henry Louis Gates documented what made Southern Democrats so nervous.

In our post-Great Migration America, it’s easy to forget that 90 percent of all African-American people lived in the South as late as 1910, and their presence represented a formidable threat to the former Confederates. This was especially so in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, which had majority-black populations, as well as in nearby Florida, Alabama and Georgia…Overall, more than 2,000 black officeholders would be elected during Reconstruction throughout the South, including, by 1901, a total of 20 black congressmen and two United States senators, both from Mississippi.

Via terror campaigns and threats, that era came to a halt after 1901.

The year 1901 denoted a mournful milestone in black history. By that year, Southern efforts to disenfranchise black men had been brutally effective, and no African-American would represent a Southern state in Congress again for more than 70 years.

Blow’s point is that “we are in the midst of another Lost Cause moment.” As our history suggests, it comes as a backlash to African American empowerment. The two most important moments that highlight the current threat to white supremacy are the election of this country’s first African American President and the events that followed the murder of George Floyd. No one captured the impact of the former better than Johnathan Chait in his review of the film “12 Years a Slave.”

Notably, the most horrific torture depicted in 12 Years a Slave is set in motion when the protagonist, Solomon Northup, offers up to his master engineering knowledge he acquired as a free man, thereby showing up his enraged white overseer. It was precisely Northup’s calm, dignified competence in the scene that so enraged his oppressor. The social system embedded within slavery as depicted in the film is one that survived long past the Emancipation Proclamation – the one that resulted in the murder of Emmett Till a century after Northup published his autobiography. It’s a system in which the most unforgivable crime was for an African-American to presume himself an equal to — or, heaven forbid, better than — a white person.

We all watched as Obama’s “calm, dignified competence” sent white supremacists into fits of rage.

The murder of George Floyd came on the heels of outrage over police killing unarmed Black men and boys without even a modicum of accountability. Captured on video tape for the whole world to witness, it sparked protests all over the country – and spread across the globe. Right wing revisionist history paints all of those protests as violent. They want us to forget that 93% of them were peaceful…like this one in Washington, D.C.

The protests were so powerful that even a cynic like Ta-Nehisi Coates talked about being hopeful. Perhaps that should have been a clue that a backlash was coming. By early September, Chris Rufo made an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show to light everyone’s hair on fire about Critical Race Theory – something most of us had never heard of before. The former president joined the bandwagon with an executive order banning CRT from use by federal contractors and soon we were off to the races with a re-writing of American history that is basically a resurgence of the Lost Cause.

As we witnessed with the end of Reconstruction, there is power in the ability to write the story of history. In the summer of 2020, a lot of Americans seemed willing to, as Blow writes, “adjust the narrative about the country. But to many, that was the greatest of threats.”

We are now engaged in a battle over who gets to write the history of both our past and present. The stakes couldn’t be higher.