Nine Will Get You Thirteen, Supremely

Democrats are pushing for new legislation to raise the number of Supreme Court Justices from nine to thirteen, and while the bill has no chance of getting past the filibuster, it's a big blue marker that the Biden-era Dems are laying down. The real fight comes after the bill.

Four Democratic members of Congress plan to introduce legislation that would add four seats to the Supreme Court, which would, if passed, allow President Biden to immediately name four individuals to fill those seats and give Democrats a 7-6 majority.

The bill, which is being introduced by Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Hank Johnson (D-GA), and Mondaire Jones (D-NY) in the House and by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) in the Senate, is called the Judiciary Act of 2021, and it is very brief. It amends a provision of federal law providing that the Supreme Court consist of a chief justice and eight associate justices to read that the Court shall consist of ‘‘a Chief Justice of the United States and twelve associate justices, any eight of whom shall constitute a quorum.”

Although the Constitution provides that there must be a Supreme Court, it leaves the question of how many justices shall sit on that Court to Congress. Under the Judiciary Act of 1789, the Court originally had six seats, and it briefly had 10 seats under President Lincoln.

Realistically, the bill is unlikely to pass anytime soon. Until recently, adding seats to the Supreme Court was considered a very radical tactic — President Franklin Roosevelt proposed similar legislation in 1937, and it did not end well for him. President Biden has in the past expressed reluctance to add seats to the Court.

But the politics of Supreme Court reform have moved very quickly in recent years, and it’s possible to imagine a critical mass of lawmakers rallying behind Court expansion if a majority of the current justices hand down decisions that are likely to outrage Democrats, such as a decision neutralizing what remains of the Voting Rights Act.

The new court-expansion bill would effectively neutralize a half-decade of work by Republicans to manipulate the Senate confirmation process in order to ensure GOP control of the nation’s highest Court.

 

So-called "moderate" Senate Republicans don't like being powerless. They particularly don't like that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is doing a better and more efficient job of playing the concern troll but voting with our side in the end role than they ever could. But this is something they know they can block.

The question is what happens now?

Most likely, nothing. No Republican is going to allow this to pass when they could stop it. But it does become a hell of a negotiation starting point, doesn't it? 

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con'

In what should come as a surprise to no one, a new inspector general report on the actions of the US Capitol Police on the day of the January 6th terrorist attack on Congress finds that the Trump regime stopped officers from using crowd-control methods on Trump's terrorists.

The Capitol Police had clearer advance warnings about the Jan. 6 attack than were previously known, including the potential for violence in which “Congress itself is the target.” But officers were instructed by their leaders not to use their most aggressive tactics to hold off the mob, according to a scathing new report by the agency’s internal investigator.

In a 104-page document, the inspector general, Michael A. Bolton, criticized the way the Capitol Police prepared for and responded to the mob violence on Jan. 6. The report was reviewed by The New York Times and will be the subject of a Capitol Hill hearing on Thursday.

Mr. Bolton found that the agency’s leaders failed to adequately prepare despite explicit warnings that pro-Trump extremists posed a threat to law enforcement and civilians and that the police used defective protective equipment. He also found that the leaders ordered their Civil Disturbance Unit to refrain from using its most powerful crowd-control tools — like stun grenades — to put down the onslaught.

The report offers the most devastating account to date of the lapses and miscalculations around the most violent attack on the Capitol in two centuries.

Three days before the siege, a Capitol Police intelligence assessment warned of violence from supporters of President Donald J. Trump who believed his false claims that the election had been stolen. Some had even posted a map of the Capitol complex’s tunnel system on pro-Trump message boards.

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“Unlike previous postelection protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counterprotesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th,” the threat assessment said, according to the inspector general’s report. “Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike.”

But on Jan. 5, the agency wrote in a plan for the protest that there were “no specific known threats related to the joint session of Congress.” And the former chief of the Capitol Police has testified that the force had determined that the likelihood of violence was “improbable.”

Mr. Bolton concluded such intelligence breakdowns stemmed from dysfunction within the agency and called for “guidance that clearly documents channels for efficiently and effectively disseminating intelligence information to all of its personnel.”

That failure conspired with other lapses inside the Capitol Police force to create a dangerous situation on Jan. 6, according to his account. The agency’s Civil Disturbance Unit, which specializes in handling large groups of protesters, was not allowed to use some of its most powerful tools and techniques against the crowd, on the orders of supervisors.

“Heavier, less-lethal weapons,” including stun grenades, “were not used that day because of orders from leadership,” Mr. Bolton wrote. Officials on duty on Jan. 6 told him that such equipment could have helped the police to “push back the rioters.”

 

There's no question that Capitol Police were purposely hamstrung by the Trump regime. The question now is whether it was solely out of subservience to Trump, or if it was part of a deliberate attempt to weaken the response to the terrorist coup so that it would succeed.

And at this point, there's no doubt in my mind that it was, in fact, deliberate.

Meathead Matt's #MeToo Moment, Con't

Indicted former Seminole County, Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg is flipping states' evidence on Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz and has been cooperating for months.

A former local official in Florida indicted in the Justice Department investigation that is also focused on Representative Matt Gaetz has been providing investigators with information since last year about an array of topics, including Mr. Gaetz’s activities, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Joel Greenberg, a onetime county tax collector, disclosed to investigators that he and Mr. Gaetz had encounters with women who were given cash or gifts in exchange for sex, the people said. The Justice Department is investigating the involvement of the men with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments and whether the men had sex with a 17-year-old in violation of sex trafficking statutes, people familiar with the inquiry have said.

Mr. Greenberg, who is said to have met the women through websites that connect people who go on dates in exchange for gifts, fine dining, travel and allowances and introduced them to Mr. Gaetz, could provide investigators with firsthand accounts of their activities.

Mr. Greenberg began speaking with investigators once he realized that the government had overwhelming evidence against him and that his only path to leniency lay in cooperation, the people said. He has met several times with investigators to try to establish his trustworthiness, though the range of criminal charges against him — including fraud — could undermine his credibility as a witness.

Mr. Greenberg faces dozens of other counts including sex trafficking of a minor, stalking a political rival and corruption. He was first indicted in June. The Justice Department inquiry drew national attention in recent weeks when investigators’ focus on Mr. Gaetz, a high-profile supporter of President Donald J. Trump who knew Mr. Greenberg through Republican political circles in Florida, came to light.

Speculation about Mr. Greenberg’s cooperation began mounting last week, after his lawyer and a federal prosecutor both said in court that he was likely to plead guilty in the coming weeks. “I’m sure Matt Gaetz is not feeling very comfortable today,” Fritz Scheller, Mr. Greenberg’s lawyer, told reporters afterward.

The United States attorney’s office for the Middle District of Florida is leading the investigation, which is examining not only whether Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Gaetz and others broke sex trafficking laws but also whether Mr. Gaetz paid for women over the age of 18 to travel with him to places like the Bahamas.

A Justice Department spokesman and a lawyer for Mr. Greenberg declined to comment.

A spokesman for Mr. Gaetz said he had done nothing wrong. “Congressman Gaetz has never paid for sex,” said the spokesman, Harlan Hill, who suggested that Mr. Greenberg was “trying to ensnare innocent people in his troubles.”

 

I know indicted Republicans never serve time (see Duncan Hunter, pardoned by Trump) but Gaetz is in real trouble at this point. Greenberg is facing a dozen years in prison so far and he'll spill the tea on Matt in a heartbeat.

The only question is when the indictments come.

And they are coming.

Last Call For These Disunited States, Con't

Rural Oregon wants out of the state and wants to join Idaho, apparently, in a new plan that would turn the Gem State into the third-largest state in the US by area and would include parts of Washington State and Northern California.

 

Idaho lawmakers appeared intrigued but skeptical on Monday when pitched a plan to lop off about three-fourths of Oregon and add it to Idaho to create what would become the nation’s third-largest state geographically.

Representatives of a group called Move Oregon’s Border For a Greater Idaho outlined their plan to a joint meeting of Idaho lawmakers from the House and Senate on Monday.

The Idaho Legislature would have to approve the plan that would expand Idaho’s southwestern border to the Pacific Ocean. The Oregon Legislature and the U.S. Congress would also have to sign off.

Supporters of the idea said rural Oregon voters are dominated by liberal urban areas such as Portland, and would rather join conservative Idaho. Portland would remain with Oregon.

“There’s a longtime cultural divide as big as the Grand Canyon between northwest Oregon and rural Oregon, and it’s getting larger,” Mike McCarter, president of Move Oregon’s Border for a Greater Idaho, told Idaho lawmakers.

If everything falls in line with Oregon, supporters envision also adding adjacent portions of southeastern Washington and northern California to Idaho. Backers said residents in those areas also yearn for less government oversight and long to become part of a red state insulated from the liberal influence of large urban centers that tend to vote Democratic.

“Values of faith, family, independence. That’s what we’re about,” said Mark Simmons, an eastern Oregon rancher and former speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives. “We don’t need the state breathing down our necks all the time, micromanaging our lives and trying to push us into a foreign way of living.”

President Joe Biden easily won Washington, Oregon and California in November, while President Donald Trump carried Idaho with 64%. The Idaho House and Senate each have supermajorities of Republicans.

The group’s strategy has been to get advisory votes in Oregon counties likely to make the switch. But last November the group had mixed success with two counties opting to join Idaho but two wanting to stay a part of Oregon. Supporters blamed the setback on the coronavirus pandemic and an inability to get their message out. Five more Oregon counties are expected to vote on the matter in May.

The county votes carry no weight, but are intended to potentially sway lawmakers to ultimately approve the plan.

 

This is dumb, but the point is Republicans simply want to get rid of liberals in their states.

 

By any means necessary.

That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

Democratic party aligned polling firms are trying to figure out why they've spent the last decade almost being absolutely wrong about Democratic margins, and they still haven't come up with a consensus.

 

A group of top Democratic Party pollsters are set to release a public statement Tuesday acknowledging “major errors” in their 2020 polling — errors that left party officials stunned by election results that failed to come close to expectations in November.

In an unusual move, five of the party’s biggest polling firms have spent the past few months working together to explore what went wrong last year and how it can be fixed. It’s part of an effort to understand why — despite data showing Joe Biden well ahead of former President Donald Trump, and Democrats poised to increase their House majority — the party won the presidency, the Senate and House by extremely narrow margins.

“Twenty-twenty was an ‘Oh, s---' moment for all of us,” said one pollster involved in the effort, who was granted anonymity to discuss the process candidly. “And I think that we all kinda quickly came to the point that we need to set our egos aside. We need to get this right."

That’s about where the answers end. The collaboration’s first public statement acknowledges that their industry “saw major errors and failed to live up to our own expectations.” But the memo also underscores the limits of the polling autopsy, noting that “no consensus on a solution has emerged.”

According to Democrats involved with the internal review, Tuesday’s statement marks the beginning of a years-long process to examine why, since 2012, most major elections have tilted against the party, despite favorable polling data before the vote. Up and down the ballot, Democrats have been, more often than not, shell-shocked by defeats in races they thought to be competitive, or narrower-than-expected, victories in contests they thought they led comfortably.

Democrats are not alone in reviewing what went wrong last year. The polling industry is engaged in multiple reviews of its 2020 performance, including a forthcoming report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s task force that is expected to address the overestimation of Democrats’ performance, from the presidential race down to races for Congress and state offices.

The previously undisclosed Democratic polling review is not being replicated by Republicans, who ultimately lost the presidency and the Senate, and won fewer House seats than Democrats. While some in the GOP were also surprised by the party’s competitiveness last November and are studying their methods, there is no similar, organized effort moving into the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election.

There’s no simple answer for why the polls have missed the mark in recent elections. But one likely culprit for some of the errors is the deteriorating public trust in institutions, like government and the news media — and the correlation between that wariness and voting for Trump. Between his public statements and Twitter account, the former president cast doubt on polling specifically, which the Democratic consultants suggested led to his supporters refusing to participate in surveys.

“Trump went after the polls,” said another Democratic pollster involved in the partnership. “He was really pretty overt to those that were listening about some of his distrust of polls or media.”

The 2020 election shattered turnout records — and since November, pollsters have been eagerly awaiting official information from the states about who voted, and who didn’t. That data is now almost entirely available, and there are clues hidden within.

The Democratic pollsters, who typically compete against each other for business, acknowledge that Trump was able to activate large numbers of voters who had turned out less reliably in the past. Looking at one state where the polls were off — Iowa, where Trump beat Biden handily and what had been seen as a toss-up Senate race went decisively for incumbent GOP Sen. Joni Ernst — Republicans classified as “low-propensity voters” turned out at four times the rate of Democrats in that category, according to the Democratic memo.

“This turnout error was clearly one factor in polling being off across the board, but especially in deeply Republican areas,” the memo reads. “It also meant, at least in some places, we again underestimated relative turnout among rural and white non-college voters, who are overrepresented among low propensity Republicans.”

 

Red state non-college white voters lied to pollsters about Trump. In states like Iowa, Maine, and South Carolina, Democrats didn't have a chance despite the polls saying they did. In all three states, Dems lost by double-digits in Senate races.

Getting suckered into thinking we had a chance is a dangerous game, and it's one we have to stop.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Pretty sure this is one of those "Well, Biden has more information than your second-guessing pundit wannabe self does, so..." situations as President Biden is keeping John Sullivan in place as Ambassador to Russia.

The Biden administration recently decided to keep the Trump-appointed US ambassador on the job in Moscow for the foreseeable future, two senior administration officials told CNN, demonstrating a willingness to nurture areas of stability in the US-Russia relationship after it got off to a tumultuous start. 

John Sullivan has been on the job for almost a year and a half. He is viewed by administration officials as a steady hand as the administration ramps up the pressure on Russia for taking actions to undermine the US and democratic values broadly. President Joe Biden is still deciding on other ambassadorial posts, and the White House said Monday the President had not decided on the "vast majority" of positions. 

The Biden administration has already made it clear that they will break from President Donald Trump's approach to Russia. Trump largely sought to flatter Russian President Vladimir Putin and famously said he believed Putin that Russia did not seek to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election, despite a finding from US intelligence agencies that it did. 

The White House signaled that it would approach Russia on a case-by-case basis early in the administration when they extended a key arms control treaty with Russia, New START, and also ordered an intelligence review of Russian misdeeds. 

Keeping an ambassador in Moscow who already knows the players, as well as inviting Putin to the climate change conference later this month, signals that the administration remains open to diplomacy and working with Russia where is it possible. Biden invited dozens of leaders to the summit, though the Kremlin said when the list was announced it would need some time to confirm Putin's participation. 

The Biden administration "decided the professionalism that John Sullivan has brought to the job is valued at a time of important political transition in the US and US-Russia reactions, in both standing up to Russia's bellicose efforts near Ukraine as well as exploring possible engagement on climate, security and other issues," said John Tefft, the former US ambassador to Russia. "These transitions can often take a long time which works to our detriment in terms of having a consistent foreign policy." 

These moves come as Biden is currently weighing a package of sanctions and other moves in response to a US intelligence review of Russia's malign actions, including election interference and the Solarwinds breach. 

Senior administration officials have met over the last week to discuss the potential response, which the White House has also said would include an "unseen" component. Complicating the deliberations, however, has been Russia's massing of troops along Ukraine's eastern border, ratcheting up tensions with the US. 

Officials now are weighing how the potential new sanctions and other punishments might provoke further escalation.

 

It's that last part that's the key. Right now Russia is massing troops on the Ukrainian border, with clear intent to invade in order to test Biden and Biden doesn't want to go through appointing a new ambassador right now. He doesn't have the time. Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky, our old friend that got his ultimatum from Trump last year, is now dealing with Putin's wrath directly.

For years, the brutal conflict in eastern Ukraine, between government forces and Russian-backed separatists, has been locked in a tense standoff. Major combat, which cost thousands of lives since 2014, has given way to a grinding stalemate. Following the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, fighting erupted in the neighboring Donbas region -- another mainly Russian speaking area of Ukraine with rebels demanding independence from Kiev.

 

But amid growing tensions with the United States and its Western allies, Russian forces have again been spotted on the move across the border sparking concerns the war may be reignited.

 

Cell phone video has emerged of Russian armored columns driving towards the Ukrainian frontier. Tanks and artillery guns have been seen being transported by rail. There's also been a build-up reported in Crimea.

In Moscow, the Kremlin says the troop movements are inside Russia, part of a planned military exercise and pose no threat.

 

But at the front lines, the Ukrainian President told CNN a Russian invasion is a very real possibility his country is bracing for.
 

"Of course. We know it, from 2014 we know it can be each day," he said.
 

"They are ready, but we are also ready because we are on our land and our territory," he told CNN. 

Lt. Gen. Ruslan Khomchak, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, told CNN an estimated 50,000 Russian troops have now gathered across the Russian border and in Crimea. In addition, there are at least 35,000 Russian-backed separatists in rebel-held areas of Ukraine, he said.

 

A Russian invasion of the Crimea region again seems imminent.  Biden has bigger problems than a new ambassador in Moscow right now. Sullivan will have to do.

Last Call For Orange You Glad He's Gone, Con't

Apparently the GOP is now resorting to participation trophies in order to keep Donald Trump from turning on them, because they own the Tangerine Temper Tantrum Tyrant for the rest of his days.

On Saturday night, Donald Trump embarrassed Republican donors by delivering a rambling, grievance-laden speech that attacked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as a “dumb son of a bitch.” This morning, by an odd coincidence, the National Republican Senatorial Committee announced it was creating a new annual prize: the Champion for Freedom Award. And the inaugural winner is … Donald J. Trump!

There are several unusual things about this award. One is that there is no evidence the NRSC had any intention of giving it out before Trump attacked the party’s leader. The second is that Trump, who adores awards so much he sometimes invents them, did not even bother to put on a sport coat to receive this. The third is that the NRSC apparently plans to give it out every single year from now on.

But perhaps most interesting is the basis for the award. The silver bowl seems to have been awarded on the basis of four criteria:

1) Conservative leader
2) Work tirelessly
3) Protect values that make our country great
4) Stop the Democrats’ socialist agenda

Trump’s strongest claims are No. 1 and No. 3. He is definitely a conservative leader (indeed, some would describe him as outright authoritarian bordering on fascistic). And while the “values that make our country great” are highly subjective, the NRSC and Trump clearly share those values, and it couldn’t have hurt Trump’s application that “make our country great” is very close to his campaign slogan.

And yet the other two criteria would seem to be highly problematic for his application. Trump does not work tirelessly. As innumerable staffers have told the media over the years, he barely works at all. As president, he would roll into the office around 11, check out at six, and spend much of the time watching television or ranting on the phone with his buddies. He could barely be bothered to listen to a briefing.

The biggest shortcoming on his résumé is No. 4. If you want to “stop the Democrats’ socialist agenda,” at minimum you need to prevent them from gaining control of at least one of the presidency, the House, or the Senate. Republicans controlled all three when Trump took office. Now, they have none.

This is literally something given to appease Trump because he is a toddler who likes shiny objects. His pathological malignant narcissism demands that he be recognized or he will destroy everyone he can, and both Trump and the GOP know he can do fatal damage to Republicans heading into 2022, particularly in the Senate.

So they gave him a "sorry your coup failed" trophy.

Jesus, what a bunch of losers.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

As the trial of George Floyd's killer, Derek Chauvin, continues, the Twin Cities were rocked Sunday by another police killing of an unarmed Black man, Daunte Wright.

 

A Brooklyn Center police officer fatally shot a man during a traffic stop Sunday afternoon, inflaming already raw tensions between police and community members in the midst of the Derek Chauvin trial.

Relatives of Daunte Wright, 20, who is Black, told a tense crowd gathered at the scene in the northern Minneapolis suburb Sunday afternoon that Wright drove for a short distance after he was shot, crashed his car, and died at the scene.

Protesters later walked to the Brooklyn Center police headquarters near N. 67th Avenue and N. Humboldt Avenue and were locked in a standoff with police in riot gear late Sunday night. Officers repeatedly ordered the crowd of about 500 to disperse as protesters chanted Wright's name and climbed atop the police headquarters sign, by then covered in graffiti. Police used tear gas, flash bangs and rubber bullets on the crowd.

National Guard troops arrived just before midnight as looters targeted the Brooklyn Center Walmart and nearby shopping mall. Several businesses around the Walmart were completely destroyed, including Foot Locker, T Mobile, and a New York men's clothing store.

Looting was widespread late Sunday into early Monday, spilling into north and south Minneapolis. Reports said that stores in Uptown and along Lake Street were also being looted.

Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott issued a curfew order until 6 a.m. Monday. Precautions were being taken into Monday, with Brooklyn Center canceling or closing all school buildings, programs and activities.

Sunday's fresh outrage came as Twin Cities officials and law enforcement are already on edge as Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, stands trial on murder and manslaughter charges in the death of George Floyd.

Another Black man killed by police for no good reason. Another round of rage and looting. The cycle continues.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Meathead Matt's Me Too Moment, Con't

While NY Dem Gov. Andrew Cuomo continues to hold on to power after revelations of multiple women accusing him of sexual assault and now racking up nearly two-thirds of a million in private plane fees, if seems the fortunes of GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, also facing sexual assault accusations, are headed the other way as Florida Republicans are circling his House seat like sharks with blood in the water.

Rep. Matt Gaetz insists he’s not resigning amid an ongoing federal investigation, but Republicans in his deep red Florida district are already eyeing his seat.

Several Republican elected officials and others who live in the sprawling Panhandle district said they received a robo-call over the weekend asking voters if they thought Gaetz would step down due to his legal woes. They were also asked about potential candidates — including Laura Loomer, the provocateur who mounted an unsuccessful campaign for a South Florida congressional seat last year.

“The seat is not open. Congressman Gaetz isn’t resigning,” said State Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican. “If the seat became open at some point I would strongly consider it.”

Andrade won’t be alone. For many Republicans in the area, a spot in Congress may be the pinnacle of their political career. And Florida’s 1st congressional district — one of the safest Republican districts in the country — has only come open three times in the last 40 years.

 

At least a half-dozen Republicans are looking at replacing Gaetz, and the only question is how quickly he goes down to federal charges.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

 We're back on a normal schedule this week with StupidiNews!

• Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says that the White House expects "major action" by Congress on the American Jobs Plan bill by Memorial Day.
• Thousands of low-level prisoners currently under house arrest due to COVID-19 concerns could soon be headed back to prison in states like Texas, Georgia, and Florida.
• Iranian state TV is declaring a power blackout at the Natanz nuclear site to be "nuclear terrorism" and says swift action will be taken against the perpetrators.
• Voters in Ecuador went to the polls Sunday to choose a government with the fate of both an International Monetary Fund relief deal and an alliance with the US at stake.
• A US appeals court has ruled that Florida grocer Winn-Dixie not making their websites accessible to the blind is not an violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
  

Sunday Long Read: Checking Out Fact Checking

In today's Sunday Long Read, Vivienne Fairbanks at The Walrus argues that in order for America to escape the "post-truth" Trumpism era, we'll need more than fact, but truth.

 

OF COURSE, few people outside of journalism know about traditional fact-checking. Even within the industry, the practice has become increasingly rare over the past decade of media layoffs and budget cuts. But it’s the approach I’m most familiar with: behind-the-scenes and meticulous, with a touch of pretentiousness. This standard was established by Time and The New Yorker in the early 1900s, when magazines were most concerned with protecting themselves from public criticism and libel lawsuits. (Back then, fact-checking was a woman’s job. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, writers such as gonzo journalist Tom Wolfe saw The New Yorker’s fact-checking department as “a cabal of women and middling editors all collaborating to henpeck and emasculate the prose of the Great Writer.”)

This kind of fact-checking, however, wasn’t built for the immediacy and viral spread of online news. Amid the growing phenomenon of “fake news,” journalists needed something more reactive. The term fake news became widely used during the 2016 US presidential election, when the internet was flooded with inaccurate information. A BuzzFeed News investigation at the time showed that many of these deliberately false headlines came from an unexpected source: content writers in Macedonia were profiting off the advertising revenue from the increased traffic on their sites.

False content online has only multiplied over the years. But the fake news designation has also been used to serve all kinds of purposes—including, increasingly, to disparage real news reporters—so most experts now avoid the term. Instead, researchers usually talk about disinformation, which is purposefully false, and misinformation, which is unwittingly false (either because the publisher made a mistake or because the person sharing the content did). As false content spreads through social media networks, it can oscillate between the two, and it can manifest in various forms, including memes, tweets, or “imposter” content made to imitate real news stories. Last summer, for example, a list of advice—some accurate, some dangerously inaccurate—about COVID-19 prevention made the rounds on social media, falsely attributed to various health officials including BC’s Bonnie Henry.

We now consider disinformation a defining part of the contemporary experience. In 2016, Oxford Languages chose post-truth as its word of the year. The essential characteristic of our age, the accompanying press release stated, was the loss of a distinction between truth and feeling; we were entering an era in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Governments and social media companies have employed various strategies to address the threat of disinformation, including closer scrutiny of political ads, flagging posts as “inaccurate,” or tweaking algorithms to favour reliable outlets. But these efforts have had little effect on the widespread production and sharing of disinformation.


Journalists and media organizations, on their end, have championed fact-checking as the silver bullet—not the prepublication kind done at Harper’s or The New Yorker but the public-facing kind done by PolitiFact or the Washington Post: instead of verifying stories written by an outlet’s own reporters, fact checkers apply the same filter to public claims, such as politicians’ statements or other outlets’ reporting, then publish the results. According to this interpretation, to fact-check someone’s claim is to find all the relevant primary sources (budget documents, election results) and point out, in a published article, any errors in their declaration. Instead of printing only what one knows to be true by virtue of having fact-checked it, journalists explicitly call a person or organization wrong in order to correct the record after the fact. In this sense, the most famous fact checker of our time is reporter Daniel Dale, who rose to fame via the ambitious goal of itemizing the lies told by Donald Trump throughout his presidency (a total of 30,573 false and misleading claims, according to the Washington Post).

In 2014, there were fewer than sixty initiatives around the world focused exclusively on checking others’ claims, according to the Duke Reporters’ Lab; today, there are more than 300. The growing instinct to fact-check isn’t particular to journalists either: it’s part of a growing cultural movement emphasizing revision and debunking. Popular podcasts such as Revisionist History and You’re Wrong About ask us to change our understanding of well-known stories, while tell-all memoirs promise to give us the “real story” about crime, government misconduct, and our favourite celebrities.

Like many journalists, I used to subscribe to what philosopher Neil Levy calls the naive view of fake news: that today’s problems of political polarization and extremism are caused at least in part by the spread of inaccurate information, and that “careful consumption and fact-checking can eliminate the problem.” According to this view, people who share false content do so because they believe it to be true. Everyone means to share real news—they are simply making a mistake when they don’t. If this were true, then by simply correcting the record, we would make all of our post-truth problems go away. Instead, those concerns have grown, and I now wonder: What if it is precisely our manner of clinging to the idea of “facts” that has aggravated the problem?

I’ve now come to believe there’s another, more salient characteristic of our age, beyond the post-truth designation. It is a relic of the past few centuries of rationalism in the Western world: the idea that there can ever be a definitive distinction between fact, on the one hand, and everything else, on the other. We maintain that journalists—our de facto heroes in the fight against mis and disinformation—are capable of distilling truth from the murky waters of interpretation, opinion, and ambiguity in such a way as to present the only true reality of the world. Implicit in the presentation of 2016 as the year after which facts needed to be differentiated from their “alternatives” is the idea that it is actually always possible to do so—that we can know immediately and with absolute certainty, for example, that homemade cloth masks provide reliable protection against COVID-19. In theory, it may seem easy enough to agree on whether a statement is true: simply check whether all available evidence supports the claim or at least does not refute it. But, in practice, we struggle to agree on what makes a fact and how to present it—even as we agree on the importance of being able to do so. We intuitively maintain that opinion and truth exist in different realms, yet removing interpretation entirely from factual reporting is impossible.

Today, I believe the naive view of facts has only fuelled the rise of disinformation and polarization. Fact check has become a political signal such that journalists’ very attempt at neutrality ruins any chance of communicating with those who don’t already believe them. This is not just a media industry problem; it is a pressing issue with consequences for everyone hoping to engage in productive dialogue. Though journalists have clearly invested in fact-checking, trust in news media has continued to erode, and researchers have found that exposure to contentious media discussions about fake news decreases trust further. According to Gallup’s annual governance poll, by 2020, 60 percent of Americans said they trusted mass media “not very much” or “not at all.” This problem cannot be solved only by fact-checking Trump’s press conferences: those who already believe Trump have no reason to accept our fact checks. Without a trusted forum for conversation, we lose the ability to establish a common ground from which to converse and debate; we lose the ability to understand or negotiate with one another at all.

 

We need a new baseline, a new normal where facts and truth matter again, and the disinformation is stopped. But we're not equipped for either, and this week's Long Read goes a long way as to explaining why.

Egghead Week: All Your Eggs In One Basket

As Steve M. points out, Fox News Chief Racism Officer Tucker Carlson is now openly pushing the "white replacement theory" to tens of millions of viewers.

If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter. So I don't understand why -- everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. You know the white replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting right question. I have less political power because they are importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have as an American guaranteed at birth is one man, one vote. They are diluting it. No, they are not allowed to do it. Why are we putting up with this? 

The Biden administration wants an eight-year path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in America, but Carlson is talking here as if immigrants cross the border unlawfully, establish a toehold in America -- and then begin voting immediately.

If you believe that's happening, it's because you think our elections are riddled with corruption, all of it favoring Democrats. I don't know why Republicans win so many elections in America if that's the case, but Republicans seem to take it as a given that voting here can't be trusted. And why shouldn't they believe that? Since the Bush era, they've been told by the right-wing media, Republican politicians, and conservative advocacy groups that pro-Democratic cheating is widespread.

They think mail ballots are fraudulent and voting machines flip votes to Democrats and, for all I know, they think Biden votes were beamed in from Alpha Centauri last November. But they also believe that undocumented immigrants vote in large numbers -- just after he was inaugurated, Donald Trump reportedly told congressional leaders that 3 to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted against him. Trump's first press secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed that a study demonstrated that 14% of the votes in the 2016 election were cast by non-citizens.

This is what your right-wing relatives believe: that border crossers today will be Democratic voters tomorrow -- literally.

 

We're now at the point where "Democrats can only win by election fraud" is a given among the majority of Republican voters. Republicans aren't bothering apologizing anymore for voter suppression efforts, straight-out saying now that fewer people voting is better for the country. 

 

The next step in that blood-soaked chain is "And Democrats voting must be stopped by any means necessary".

In a leaked video of a recent presentation, a man who identifies himself as a GOP official in Harris County, Tex., says the party needs 10,000 Republicans for an “election integrity brigade” in Houston.

Then he pulls up a map of the area’s voting precincts and points to Houston’s dense, racially diverse urban core, saying the party specifically needed volunteers with “the confidence and courage to come down here,” adding, “this is where the fraud is occurring.”

The official cites widespread vote fraud, which has not been documented in Texas, as driving the need for an “army” of poll watchers to monitor voters at every precinct in the county.

Now the government accountability group Common Cause Texas — which published the footage Thursday — is raising the alarm that such an effort could instead serve to intimidate and suppress voters in metro Houston.

“It’s very clear that we’re talking about recruiting people from the predominantly Anglo parts of town to go to Black and Brown neighborhoods,” Anthony Gutierrez, the group’s executive director, told The Washington Post.

“This is a role that’s supposed to do nothing but stand at a poll site and observe,” he added. So “why is he suggesting someone needs to be ‘courageous’?” Gutierrez asked.

 

Expect armies of angry, white, GOP "poll-watchers" in red states in 2022.

 

Emphasis on army.

Egghead Week: Scrambled Labor

Amazon was able to successfully crush an attempt to unionize employees at a distribution center warehouse in Alabama, with fewer than 30% of workers voting to join the union.

 

Workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala., warehouse have voted not to unionize, a major victory for the e-commerce giant but not the end of the fight for labor organizers.

Out of the 3,215 employees who participated, 1,798 "no" votes and 738 "yes" votes were recorded before voided and challenged ballots were counted. Fifty-percent plus one of the employees would have had to vote “yes” for the union to gain National Labor Relations Board recognition.

Although the initial vote has gone against them, the union plans to challenge the results.

"We won’t let Amazon’s lies, deception and illegal activities go unchallenged, which is why we are formally filing charges against all of the egregious and blatantly illegal actions taken by Amazon during the union vote," RWDSU president Stuart Applebaum said. "Amazon knew full well that unless they did everything they possibly could, even illegal activity, their workers would have continued supporting the union."

The vote count had been going on for over four hours when Amazon reached the threshold needed to guarantee a win, starting Thursday afternoon before wrapping up Friday morning. NLRB staff hand counted each ballot, double checking the count after every hundred votes in each direction.

Amazon and the RWDSU both had in-person representatives watching the vote, which was streamed publicly on Zoom to a small number of outsiders.

The union went public last October, just months after the Bessemer plant opened.

Workers at the facility had raised concerns about intense work quotas, insufficient wages and Amazon’s handling of employee safety during the coronavirus pandemic.

Amazon maintained since the beginning of the unionization push that it provided sufficient wages and worker protections, warning employees against voting yes.

Workers were critical of some of the company's tactics, like petitioning to change traffic lights or installing a mailbox in the parking lot.

That latter tactic is likely to precipitate a challenge from the RWDSU, especially after the union obtained emails between Postal Service employees showing that Amazon pressed the agency to install the box just as voting began.

John Logan, an expert on anti-union strategy at San Francisco State University, told The Hill that the mailbox placement “appears to be a form of ballot harvesting and thus a violation of federal law.”

 

This was always headed for failure, the real test was always going to be the Biden Administration's response to Amazon's union-busting tactics, and willingness to go after a trillion-dollar corporation. Understand that unionizing a company the size of Amazon would have been a sea change nationwide in the fortunes of organized labor. This had to die painfully, publicly, and with gallons of threats. 

The real fight starts now.

Egghead Week: Trump's Dirty Nest Egg

Several countries have accused the US of hoarding vaccine doses, millions of them. It turns out that thanks to Donald Trump and Operation Warp Speed, we're required to do so...even if we had the capacity, and all indications are that we're facing another major surge in new cases.

On the morning of March 31, roughly 25 Biden administration officials gathered at the White House, double-masked, for a meeting called on short notice by a member of the National Security Council. They were there, they believed, to debate how best to broaden the federal government’s COVID-19 response beyond U.S. borders, and reclaim America’s traditional role as the world’s public health leader.

The challenges they planned to address were daunting. The Trump administration had poisoned relations with the rest of the world, first severing ties with the World Health Organization and then politicizing the pandemic, referring to COVID-19 as the Wuhan virus and even “kung flu.” Into the vacuum rushed Russia and China, who began currying favor around the world by distributing their own vaccines—of possibly dubious quality.

Inside the U.S., all eyes have been focused on the chaotic rollout of vaccinations. But if current trends continue, it will be months if not weeks before every adult who wants a shot is able to get one. Very soon, the U.S. will be in possession of a vast COVID vaccine surplus. And that, global-health experts within the government agree, could quickly turn into a P.R. nightmare. “Can you imagine the condemnation of the world if America has vaccines sitting on warehouse shelves expiring with the rest of the world dying?” said one senior government official with knowledge of the meeting.

Unfortunately, sending doses overseas is no simple matter. To even begin planning in earnest how to do so, an essential document entitled The Framework for International Access needed to be greenlit. That was a goal of several officials in attendance at the meeting at the White House last Wednesday.

Instead, those in attendance heard a stark and dismaying message: The pandemic was spiraling out of control here at home. There was no capacity to deal with global donations, meaning that planning would come to a “screeching halt,” said the senior government official.

Two days earlier, CDC director Rochelle Walensky had veered off script in a press briefing to express her feeling of “impending doom” in the face of a deadly uptick in cases. Now, those gathered for the White House meeting discussed the alarming reversal of recent U.S. gains, driven in part by reckless reopenings and spring break travel: a surge of more infectious variants, a rising rate of hospitalizations for patients under 40, and a staggeringly high nationwide positivity rate of more than 13%. Roughly 2.9 million Americans were being vaccinated each day, and deaths had dipped below 900 per day, but every other indicator was bad. “They are going into full hunker-down mode to figure out what’s going wrong,” said the senior official.

The domestic situation was “so severe,” said the official, that every federal entity that might work on overseas donations had instead been tasked with vaccinating more Americans. The rest of the world would have to wait.

That's the bad news. We're reopening too soon, and we're looking at skyrocketing case figures heading into April.

That's the bad news, and it's very bad. Now the worse news.

For all the well-documented failures of its pandemic response, the Trump administration exceeded expectations when it came to developing COVID-19 vaccines. Thanks in part to Operation Warp Speed, a multibillion-dollar joint venture of the Pentagon, the Department of Health and Human Services, and private pharmaceutical companies, a handful of manufacturers were able to gain approval for new vaccines in record time, accomplishing in under a year what might normally have taken a decade.

Still, given the nature of the Trump administration, this signal accomplishment came with some substantial asterisks. Upon taking office, the Biden team discovered that the previous administration’s plans for the distribution of vaccinations to individual citizens were woefully inadequate. And the Trump team’s unwillingness to enact a national testing plan, or even to clearly advocate for basic protective measures, allowed the virus to run rampant, leading the U.S. to suffer more deaths than any other country on earth.

For officials hoping to finally pivot from domestic to international vaccination strategy, there was another major catch, reported here for the first time.

The contracts the Trump administration signed with the vaccine manufacturers prohibit the U.S. from sharing its surplus doses with the rest of the world. According to contract language Vanity Fair has obtained, the agreements with Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Janssen state: “The Government may not use, or authorize the use of, any products or materials provided under this Project Agreement, unless such use occurs in the United States” or U.S. territories.

The clauses in question are designed to ensure that the manufacturers retain liability protection, but they have had the effect of projecting the Trump administration’s America First agenda into the Biden era. “That is what has completely and totally prohibited the U.S. from donating or reselling, because it would be in breach of contract,” said a senior administration official involved in the global planning effort. “It is a complete and total ban. Those legal parameters must change before we do anything to help the rest of the world.”

We're legally not allowed to donate vaccine to any non-US territory or state, thanks to Trump. And we're headed for a fourth wave of cases with a deadly P1 variant of the COVID-19 virus that could put us right back in the hole again.

It was a terrible winter. But we're nowhere near the finish line this spring.

Egghead Week: Yolks On You, Bob

Turns out the "It's not racism, it's economic anxiety!" lie is so durable, it took until now for University of Chicago political researcher Robert Pape to realize that yeah, it's about white folk scared that those people will take their power and it has been for decades.

When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.

But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.

If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”

“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”

One fact stood out in Mr. Pape’s study, conducted with the help of researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.

Law enforcement officials have said 800 to 1,000 people entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, and prosecutors have spent the past three months tracking down many of them in what they have described as one of the largest criminal investigations in U.S. history. In recent court filings, the government has hinted that more than 400 people may ultimately face charges, including illegal entry, assault of police officers and the obstruction of the official business of Congress.

In his study, Mr. Pape determined that only about 10 percent of those charged were members of established far-right organizations like the Oath Keepers militia or the nationalist extremist group the Proud Boys. But unlike other analysts who have made similar findings, Mr. Pape has argued that the remaining 90 percent of the “ordinary” rioters are part of a still congealing mass movement on the right that has shown itself willing to put “violence at its core."

 

So....basically everything I've been telling you guys for a year now.

Where's my grant money?