Sunday Long Read: Blacking Out Social Media

Today's Sunday Long Read comes to us from Wired's Jason Parnham, who gives us the oral, written, and tweeted history of Black Twitter, Part I, the early years, 2008-2012, with the people who were there.

NEAR THE END of 2009, during the twilight months of a decade that saw the first Black man elected to the US presidency, Ashley Weatherspoon was chasing virality on a young app called Twitter. As the personal assistant for the singer Adrienne Bailon, a former member of the pop groups 3LW and the Cheetah Girls, Weatherspoon often worked on social media strategy. For weeks, she and Bailon had been testing out hashtags on both their feeds to see what would connect with fans. A mild success came with variations on #UKnowUrBoyfriendsCheatingWhen. Later, on a car ride around Manhattan, they began playing with #UKnowUrFromNewYorkWhen. “We started going ham on it,” Weatherspoon told me when we spoke over the phone in June. As the two women were laughing and joking, an even better idea popped into Weatherspoon’s head. “Then I said, oh, ‘You know you’re Black when …’”

It was the first Sunday in September, at exactly 4:25 pm, when Weatherspoon logged on to Twitter and wrote, “#uknowurblackwhen u cancel plans when its raining.” The hashtag spread like wildfire. Within two hours, 1.2 percent of all Twitter correspondence revolved around Weatherspoon’s hashtag, as Black users riffed on everything from car rims to tall tees. It was the viral hit she was after—and confirmation of a rich fabric being threaded together across the platform. Here, in all its melanated glory, was Black Twitter.

More than a decade later, Black Twitter has become the most dynamic subset not only of Twitter but of the wider social internet. Capable of creating, shaping, and remixing popular culture at light speed, it remains the incubator of nearly every meme (Crying Jordan, This you?), hashtag (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown, #OscarsSoWhite, #YouOKSis), and social justice cause (Me Too, Black Lives Matter) worth knowing about. It is both news and analysis, call and response, judge and jury—a comedy showcase, therapy session, and family cookout all in one. Black Twitter is a multiverse, simultaneously an archive and an all-seeing lens into the future. As Weatherspoon puts it: “Our experience is universal. Our experience is big. Our experience is relevant.”

Though Twitter launched exactly 15 years ago today, with the goal of changing how—and how quickly—people communicate online, the ingenious use of the platform by Black users can be traced, in a way, much further back in time. In 1970, when the computer revolution was in its infancy, Amiri Baraka, the founder of the Black Arts Movement, published an essay called “Technology & Ethos.” “How do you communicate with the great masses of Black people?” he asked. “What is our spirit, what will it project? What machines will it produce? What will they achieve?”

For Black users today, Twitter is Baraka’s prophetic machine: voice and community, power and empowerment. To use his words, it has become a space “to imagine—to think—to construct—to energize!!!” What follows is the first official chronicling of how it all came fantastically together. Like all histories, it is incomplete. But it is a beginning. An outline. Think of it as a kind of record of Blackness—how it moves and thrives online, how it creates, how it communes—told through the eyes of those who lived it.

Afrofuturism has always been part of the Black experience. Imagining a better world, and how we get there as a society, and what that society has to do? Black folk have been making that journey inside our heads and through oral history and song and on paper and now online for a very, very long time. Carving out our own niche and making it ours, defending it, leveraging it, and guiding it as a shared reality across vast distances, there is nothing more quintessential to our culture in America. We used it to define the events in our recent history on our own terms, and the world paid attention.

What follows is a fascinating discussion among multiple Black voices involving Twitter's biggest events in the late 2000's and early 2010's, one worth chronicling, and more of this series will be coming in the weeks ahead.

Last Call For I Want A New Trump

When it comes to Republican "Never Trumpers" in Iowa, it's best to remember that there is no such thing as a Never Trumper. They want 100% of Trump's racist policies, they just want a better figurehead, and that's what they are after in 2024.  To paraphrase Huey Lewis and the News:

I want a new Trump, one that won't make me sick
One that won't make me crash my car
Or make me feel three-feet thick
I want a new Trump, one that won't hurt my head
One that won't make my mouth too dry
Or make my eyes too red
One that won't make me nervous
Wonderin' what to do
One that makes me feel like I feel when I'm with you
When I'm alone with you...

 

If ever there was a political bloc that could be counted on to hold a candle for Donald Trump, it would seem to be white evangelical Christians, who maintained a near-uniform front for the Republican throughout his presidency and beyond.

Yet, as some 1,200 evangelicals gathered here for the Family Leadership Summit, widely seen as the first political event on the long road to the 2024 Republican primary, there was a feeling among some that it was time to move on.

“I agree with pretty much everything Trump did on policy as president, but I don’t think it would be good for him or good for the country if he ran again,” said Ken Hayes, a retired nonprofit worker from rural Fort Dodge, who said he prayed for Trump every day the man was in office.

Held in the Des Moines convention center, the daylong event is considered a key preview of how would-be candidates resonate among social conservatives, who dominate the Republican caucuses here. It featured appearances from former vice president Mike Pence, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.

To be sure, there was plenty of praise for Trump, and more than a few attendees said they have his back as he continues to make baseless claims about the 2020 election.

But in interviews with 15 people at the conference, all of whom voted for Trump, none said they hoped the former president would run again.

“I am interested in who comes next,” said 58-year-old Cheryl Prall.

Trump himself has remained largely focused on bogus audits in states he lost to President Biden. Denied access to major social media platforms, most days he churns out press releases complaining about the election and those he feels have slighted him. On Friday alone, he released at least four press statements on the topic through his political action committee.

But for Mary Bloom, a 55-year-old homeschooling parent who attended Friday’s event and believes some of Trump’s claims about the 2020 election, “It is what it is and we all need to move on to the next election.”

Indeed, while Iowa traditionally grants winners of the first-in-the-nation contest momentum in the presidential race, in 2024 it could do something else: show that the party is moving on. That subtext was apparent in speeches on Friday.

Pence talked repeatedly about “our administration” with Trump and said being his vice president was “the greatest honor of my life.” Yet he also bashed the Biden administration, setting up a possible 2024 battle cry.

“After 177 days of open borders, higher taxes, runaway spending, defunding the police, abortion on demand, censoring free speech, canceling our most cherished liberties, I’ve had enough,” said Pence to applause.

Pompeo brought up how Trump called him in January after a major news outlet said he was Trump’s most loyal Cabinet member. But he mainly focused on his own story and time as secretary of state. Noem didn’t mention Trump at all, and instead focused on her time as governor and her refusal to lock down her state during the pandemic.

“A lot of the people I’m talking to sort of realize that 2020 happened and we need to focus on 2024 if we’re going to get anything done, because worrying about the past isn’t going to help,” said Ronald Forsell, the Republican Party chair in Dallas County, a fast-growing suburban county.

Despite his popularity with evangelicals, Trump initially did not win over the voting bloc here in 2016. Instead, this network of pastors and homeschooling parents helped give Iowa Caucus victories to Texas Senator Ted Cruz over Trump in 2016, and before that to former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in 2008 and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum in 2012.

But the adulation for Trump here is not in doubt. A Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll last month found that 84 percent of Iowa Republicans said they would vote for Trump again for president.

And when Iowa Republican Party Chair Jeff Kaufmann was asked in an interview if Trump would win the next Iowa Caucuses, he said, “I believe he would, yes.”

 

The hate junkies don't get the same rage high off Trump the Loser anymore, but they're still addicted to him. They want Trump 2.0, someone who enables them to be just as hateful and terrible to anyone who isn't a white evangelical, but if they can't chase that dragon, they'll gladly go with the same poison in their veins as last time.

 

I've seen enough junkie behavior in my life to immediately recognize Trump voters as what they are.  Anyone who remains in the party is a hate addict, period.

And strung-out addicts who make no effort to get better eventually will do anything to get their next fix.

Anything.

Keep that in mind.

The End Of American History

Of course the "debate over Critical Race Theory" was never about systemic racism, it was about removing Black history (and women's history) from America's schools to make white men feel better.

The Texas Senate on Friday passed legislation that would end requirements that public schools include writings on women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement in social studies classes.

Among the figures whose works would be dropped: Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, and Martin Luther King Jr., whose “I Have a Dream"speech and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” would no longer make the curriculum cut.

The bill (S.B. 3), which was passed on a vote of 18 to 4, now is stalled because the House can’t achieve a quorum while a breakaway group of Democrats is out of the state. The special session is set to end on Aug. 6.

It would remove more than two dozen teaching requirements from a new law (H.B 3979) that bars the teaching of critical race theory, an academic framework exploring racism’s shaping of the country.

That law included a list of historic figures, events and documents required for inclusion in social studies classes. The Senate-passed bill would remove most mentions of people of color and women from those requirements, along with a requirement that students be taught about the history of white supremacy and “the ways in which it is morally wrong.”

The measure also would bar the teaching of the 1619 Project— a New York Times initiative exploring U.S. history starting at the date enslaved people arrived in the English colonies.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), who presides over the Senate, said in a statement after the vote that “Senate Bill 3 will make certain that critical race philosophies including the debunked 1619 founding myth, are removed from our school curriculums statewide.”

“Parents want their students to learn how to think critically, not be indoctrinated by the ridiculous leftist narrative that America and our Constitution are rooted in racism,” Patrick said.

 

The endpoint of the CRT fight was always going to be the removal of civil rights education from American history in red states. In Texas schools, it just won't happen. A purposefully ignorant population who never sees the rhyming stanzas of America's complicated history is easier to control, you see. They don't ask questions.

All done in the name of "fighting indoctrination" and "critical thinking".

And fascism.

Missouri Goes Viral

The anti-vaccine campaign by Republicans is now openly killing hundreds per week, and that number will soon rise back into the thousands as the delta variant of COVID-19 takes over unvaccinated red states, like Bon's neck of the woods in Springfield, Missouri.

The worst of the pandemic seemed behind Mercy Hospital, those weeks last winter when the coronavirus wards were full of people struggling to breathe.

But after months of reprieve, the virus has come roaring back, sending unvaccinated young adults and middle-aged patients from across southwest Missouri there in droves as the highly transmissible delta variant tears through the region. The hospital has been treating more than 130 covid-19 patients each day since Sunday — more than the winter surge — and had to open a sixth ward. It came close to running out of ventilators earlier this month.

“We’re just very disheartened. This was all pretty avoidable,” said Wanda Brown, a nurse unit manager. “Last year, we were looking forward to the vaccine coming out because we really thought that that was going to be helpful for our community. We feel like we’ve taken giant leaps backward.”

Springfield, a city of 170,000 nestled in the Ozarks, has become a cautionary tale for how the more transmissible delta variant, now estimated to account for half of all new cases nationwide, can ravage poorly vaccinated communities and return them to the darkest days of the pandemic.

Missouri has reported one of the nation’s highest per capita increases in new coronavirus cases in recent weeks. Freeman Health System in Joplin, about 70 miles west of Springfield, announced the full reopening of its covid-19 ward in late June after downsizing in the spring because of a lack of patients. The delta variant has been linked to a broader regional outbreak spilling into Arkansas and Oklahoma, as well as emerging hot spots in Louisiana, Florida, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. Cases and hospitalizations are strongly correlated with low vaccination rates, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Nationally, the coronavirus case rate has more than doubled since late June. The national vaccination rate has settled at close to 500,000 doses per day, one-sixth of the more than 3 million per day in mid-April.

Experts fear that the surge in Springfield, known as the birthplace of Bass Pro Shops and Andy’s Frozen Custard, is a harbinger of tensions to come as people play down the pandemic and refuse to get vaccinated even in the face of overwhelmed hospitals and preventable death. Instead of unifying the community, the surge has hardened divisions, unleashing anger from health-care workers fed up with vaccine misinformation and exposing deep antipathy toward the public health establishment.

New infections are rapidly rising to levels not seen since early January, prompting the school system to reinstate a mask mandate for summer school. Almost every virus sample sequenced in June turned out to be the delta variant, which is significantly more transmissible than the strain that first arrived in the United States. Local health officials are trying to create an alternate care site for stable covid-19 patients as Wednesday’s 231 hospitalizations are on the verge of an all-time peak and are projected to surge beyond available capacity.

Coronavirus deaths in Greene County, where Springfield is located, had plunged this spring, but 23 people have succumbed since June 21. The fire chief described the outbreak as a “mass-casualty event, happening in slow-motion.”

The Springfield-Greene County Health Department has prioritized vaccination in a county where only 35 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rates are even lower for people in their 20s and 30s. But new daily vaccinations have largely stayed flat through June despite the outbreak’s toll, and health officials are battling false theories that the vaccines are somehow responsible for a surge in hospitalizations almost exclusively affecting the unvaccinated.

“It’s a sad reality that we are facing,” said Katie Towns, the acting health director. “I don’t think we are coming out of it anytime soon. We are going to see more people get really sick. We are going to see a lot of people die.”

 

The risks for getting the vaccine are miniscule compared to the much greater risk of the delta variant killing you, by orders of magnitude. That is the hard truth. If you're putting off the vaccine because you're worried about the effects of the vaccine, understand the effects of the virus are "lifelong chronic heart issues if you survive and death otherwise, plus you infect others around you."

 

Get the vaccine.

 

Now.

Last Call For Trump's Taxing Explanation, Con't

As I keep saying, they got Al Capone on tax fraud, too.

 

A witness in the New York investigation against the Trump Organization has told prosecutors that Donald Trump personally guaranteed he would cover school costs for the family members of two employees in lieu of a raise—directly implicating the former president in an ongoing criminal tax fraud case.

The explosive claims come from Jennifer Weisselberg, the ex-wife of a longtime company employee, during a teleconference call with investigators on Friday, June 25, according to two sources who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity.

On that afternoon's Zoom call, those sources said, investigators with the Manhattan district attorney and New York state attorney general asked Jennifer Weisselberg whether Trump himself was involved in the company’s alleged tax-dodging scheme of making corporate gifts instead of increasing salary that would be taxed.

He was, she answered.

Weisselberg then provided key details for investigators. In January 2012, inside Trump’s office at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, Jennifer Weisselberg watched as Trump discussed compensation with her husband and her father-in-law, both company employees. Her husband wouldn’t be getting a raise, but their children would get their tuition paid for at a top-rated private academy instead.

Weisselberg allegedly relayed to prosecutors that Trump turned to her and said: "Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered.”

Prosecutors were astonished, according to one source.

The Daily Beast received descriptions of the call from two people familiar with the details of the call.

According to two sources, among the prosecutors on the call were Carey Dunne, the Manhattan DA’s general counsel; Mark F. Pomerantz, a white collar crime specialist brought on for this investigation; and Gary Fishman, an assistant attorney general deputized to work on this joint investigation.

If true, Jennifer Weisselberg’s claims would directly tie Trump to what a New York criminal indictment described as a corporate scheme to pay executives “in a matter that was ‘off the books.’”

“The scheme allowed the Trump Organization to evade the payment of payroll taxes that [it] was required to pay,” an indictment for the Trump Organization claims. On the flip side, it also alleges that executives avoided having to pay income taxes on a huge chunk of their pay.

Neither the Manhattan DA nor the state AG would comment on this story. Jennifer Weisselberg declined as well.

 

The question remains if Trump himself will be indicted.

My fear remains that the moment he is, the country burns.

The Big Lie, Con't

Trump cultists are running on The Big Lie openly now in Georgia, and they will in contests across the country in 2021 and beyond. Every journalist needs to ask every Republican candidate or elected if they acknowledge Biden's win. Increasingly, the answer is "no."

The organizers at the door handed out soft-pink “Trump Won” signs to each attendee. An out-of-state radio host spouted far-right conspiracies. Speaker after speaker insisted that Joe Biden couldn’t have won the November election and that Georgia couldn’t be a blue state.

The gathering this week in Rome might seem like a pro-Donald Trump fantasy convention. But this was no fringe group. Some of the biggest stars in the Georgia GOP were in attendance.

State Sen. Burt Jones, a wealthy executive who is expected to run for lieutenant governor, was given a hero’s welcome. A fellow Republican, state Sen. Brandon Beach, regaled the group with stories about standing up to the party establishment. Two other congressional candidates worked the room.

And U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene opened by telling the crowd, “I do not think Joe Biden won the election.”

Across the state, candidates for public office are repeating Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged and the contest was stolen from him. Many are running for local office and state legislative seats, while some are seeking the most powerful posts in the state.

The conspiracy theories are already complicating GOP primaries in Georgia, as Republicans try to fend off ascendant Democrats fresh off a string of victories in November’s presidential election and January’s U.S. Senate runoffs.

The leading candidates competing to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock have raised questions about the election results and echoed the phony narrative of widespread voting fraud in Georgia.

And the early maneuvering in races for statewide posts, including governor and secretary of state, have focused on debunked claims that voter fraud was rampant in Georgia last year.

The evidence is clear. Three separate tallies of the roughly 5 million ballots upheld Biden’s narrow victory, court challenges by Trump allies were squashed, and state and federal election officials have vouched for the results.

An audit of absentee ballot signatures in Cobb County found no cases of fraud. While investigators are still probing more than 100 complaints from November, they would not change the election result even if every allegation is substantiated. Neither would a lawsuit pushing for a deeper review of Fulton County ballots.

But Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of a “rigged” election have seeped deeply into the Georgia GOP and left his critics marginalized.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll showed a broad majority of conservatives support a Republican-backed election overhaul that includes new restrictions on voting. A spate of national polls, including from CNN, indicate most Republicans don’t believe Biden won.

The few Georgia Republicans who have spoken in defense of the results have faced ridicule from their own.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who oversaw the election and rejected Trump’s demand that he overturn its results, is the underdog in his race against a formidable GOP challenger endorsed by Trump. Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan opted against a reelection bid to focus on his vision for a post-Trump era.

In an interview, Duncan said every time Republicans falsely assert the election was stolen it “makes the pathway for Democrats even easier.”

“Our job, as Republicans, is to walk into every GOP meeting whether it’s comfortable or uncomfortable and convince them there’s no fraud,” he said.

 

The apostates like Raffensperger and Duncan will be purged from the ranks entirely in a few years. Understand that the purpose of The Big Lie is for it to be used as justification for everything the cult does for the rest of the decade, and longer.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

To be clear, it's not moronic cowards like this clown like this who I'm afraid of.

 

A Kentucky man charged with threatening Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Marty Pollio over the district’s mask mandate told WAVE-TV his comments were taken out of context.

Bradley Linzy went inside the district’s central office in Louisville on Monday and began arguing with staff about the mask requirement for unvaccinated students and staff, according to court documents. After leaving the building, school security officers found Linzy outside in his car, where he admitted to having a gun.

Linzy is accused of confronting Pollio as the superintendent was leaving the building, telling him, “Your life is f(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk) over and career as you know it," and, “You don’t know what I’m capable of doing.”

He told the television station that he was not threatening Pollio's life.

"I said, ‘Your life is over as it pertains to your career, sir.’ I said, ‘I have enough of a following that I could make this very difficult for you,’ etc. etc. kinda thing. I didn’t, I wasn’t threatening the man’s life or anything like that.”

Linzy has a YouTube channel with videos about guitars and other instruments, with more than 120,000 followers.

As for his other comment, “You don’t know what I am capable of," Linzy said he made it to the security officer when he was asked if he had any weapons.

“I was agreeing with him,” Linzy said. “He was like, ‘I have to ask. I’m just doing my job.’ And I was like, ‘I understand that.’ I said, ‘You don’t know what I’m capable of. I get it.’ That’s what that was about.”

Linzy said he went to the district office after calling multiple times to try to speak to someone about the schools' mask mandate. He said he is concerned for his 10-year-old daughter who is on the autism spectrum.

“With these mask mandates, and her being in a mask, and all of her peers being in a mask, it makes it doubly hard for her to understand people’s emotions,” he said.

 

Using his own child's autism as an excuse for this behavior and hiding behind it makes Brad Linzy a coward and a fool. He's not the person I'm worried about.

 

I'm worried about one of his 120,000 YouTube followers who decides that the next Jefferson County school board meeting or Louisville City Council meeting needs to be "disrupted" by an AR-15. Odds a really good the security at those meetings will deal with anything like that.

 

But if it's, say, a dozen "like-minded" individuals?  Well, that gets dicey, fast.

 

Maybe nothing even approaching that happens here in Kentucky.

 

But maybe it does. And frankly, it wouldn't be difficult at all to start.

 

Where, when, and how it ends, well...

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

It was only a matter of time before the Russian leaks about Trump's assistance from Vlad and the boys in 2016 started coming out in the wake of Trump's loss, and The Guardian apparently has a big ol' pile of documents to prove it.

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.

The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.

They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.

Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.

By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory.

Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.

The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.

The Kremlin responded dismissively. Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the idea that Russian leaders had met and agreed to support Trump in at the meeting in early 2016 was “a great pulp fiction” when contacted by the Guardian on Thursday morning.

The report – “No 32-04 \ vd” – is classified as secret. It says Trump is the “most promising candidate” from the Kremlin’s point of view. The word in Russian is perspektivny.

There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.

There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.

The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.

“It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US president,” the paper says.

 

Yes, we've heard this all before.  Yes, the Trump regime, the GOP, and press on both the left and the right treated it as everything from planted Chinese intel to help Hillary to CIA "Deep State" disinformation (also to help Hillary) and everything in between. 

Here's the thing though, if we keep getting multiple credible stories about it from multiple credible sources over several years, and not believe the deranged missives of delusional Trump cultists and their fellow travelers instead, the stories just might be true in this case. 

 

Just saying. With all this naugahyde, there's got to be a live nauga here.

Of course, the most likely possibility is that Kremlin leaked these docs on purpose, because it's the destabilizing chaos that keeps on giving. Keep that in mind too.

These Disunited States, Con't

 No, I don't think the United States as we know it is going to survive my lifetime. Call me a pessimist, but number like these and the trend upwards into succession.

A new YouGov survey conducted on behalf of a democracy watchdog group finds that 66 percent of Republicans living in the South say they’d support seceding from the United States to join a union with other Southern states.

Secession is actually gaining support among Southern Republicans: back in January and February, 50 percent said they’d support such a proposal.

It sure is a good thing there aren’t any troubling historic precedents for what happens when large numbers of Southern conservatives, motivated in large part by a sense of grievance and victimhood, want to break away from the Union.

Oh, wait.

Those findings come from Bright Line Watch, a group that conducts regular polls of political scientists and the American public to monitor attitudes toward democracy. They’ve started polling this question because “it taps into respondents’ commitments to the American political system at the highest level and with reference to a concrete alternative (regional unions).”

While Southern Republicans are the group most in favor of succession, they’re not the only ones. Across the country, Bright Line Watch finds, people have more favorable views toward secession when their political party is dominant in their region.

 

 

 

I don't think we can stay together much longer without a fight. 

Yeah, maybe I'm screaming into the abyss, but then again, we goddamn elected Trump.

 

In the waning weeks of Donald Trump’s term, the country’s top military leader repeatedly worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing reelection, comparing his rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during the rise of Nazi Germany and asking confidants whether a coup was forthcoming, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.

As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes may attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”

Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. “The gospel of the Führer.”

A spokesman for Milley did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Portions of the book related to Milley — first reported Wednesday night by CNN ahead of the book’s July 20 release — offer a remarkable window into the thinking of America’s highest-ranking military officer, who saw himself as one of the last empowered defenders of democracy during some of the darkest days in the country’s recent history.

The episodes in the book are based on interviews with more than 140 people, including senior Trump administration officials, friends and advisers, Leonnig and Rucker write in an author’s note. Most agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity and the scenes reported were reconstructed based on firsthand accounts and multiple other sources whenever possible.

Milley — who was widely criticized last year for appearing alongside Trump in Lafayette Square after protesters were forcibly cleared from the area — had pledged to use his office to ensure a free and fair election with no military involvement. But he became increasingly concerned in the days following the November contest, making multiple references to the onset of 20th century fascism.

After attending a Nov. 10 security briefing about the “Million MAGA March,” a pro-Trump rally protesting the election, Milley said he feared an American equivalent of “brownshirts in the streets,” alluding to the paramilitary forces that protected Nazi rallies and enabled Hitler’s ascent.

Late that same evening, according to the book, an old friend called Milley to express concerns that those close to Trump were attempting to “overturn the government.”

“You are one of the few guys who are standing between us and some really bad stuff,” the friend told Milley, according to an account relayed to his aides. Milley was shaken, Leonnig and Rucker write, and he called former national security adviser H.R. McMaster to ask whether a coup was actually imminent.

“What the f--- am I dealing with?” Milley asked him.

The conversations put Milley on edge, and he began informally planning with other military leaders, strategizing how they would block Trump’s order to use the military in a way they deemed dangerous or illegal.

 

This is stuff we needed to know 12 months ago, but Milley was covering his ass.  So yeah, don't tell me it can't happen here, because we were one election away from it happening right now.

The Good Package, Con't

 Democrats are getting together the Good Package.

It looks like final negotiations on the reconciliation-powered massive Biden bill are now underway.

Senate Democratic leaders announced an agreement Tuesday evening to advance a $3.5 trillion spending plan to finance a major expansion of the economic safety net.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the $3.5 trillion would be in addition to the $579 billion in new spending in the bipartisan infrastructure agreement.

He said the deal would include a "robust expansion of Medicare" that would include new benefits like dental, vision and hearing coverage, along with major funding for clean energy. "If we pass this, this is the most profound change to help American families in generations," he said.

"Joe Biden is coming to our lunch tomorrow to lead us on to getting this wonderful plan that affects American families in a so profound way, more than anything that's happened to generations," Schumer told reporters. "We are very proud of this plan. We know we have a long road to go. We're going to get this done for the sake of making average Americans' lives a whole lot better."

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., a member of the Budget and Finance committees, said the plan would be "fully paid for."

The agreement would prohibit tax increases on small businesses and people making under $400,000, a Democratic aide familiar with the deal said.

The announcement points to a challenge for Democrats, who will have to agree on a massive bill that is financed with new tax revenue to pass it through razor-thin congressional majorities, with no realistic hope of winning Republican support.

Democrats have no margin for error in the 50-50 Senate, and they can lose just four votes in the House before the legislation would be in danger of failing.

"This is, in our view, a pivotal moment in American history," Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the Budget Committee chairman, told reporters.

"What this legislation says among many, many other things is that those days are gone. The wealthy and large corporations are going to start paying their fair share of taxes, so that we can protect the working families in this country," he said.

The agreement, a significant decrease from Sanders' $6 trillion proposal, is an attempt to achieve consensus in an ideologically diverse Democratic Party with a host of competing interests. The legislation has yet to be written.

Senate Democratic leaders hope to advance both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the party-line budget reconciliation bill this month, before Congress leaves for the August recess.

 

A lot of things can still go wrong here, and even if the bill passes and signed into law, I expect Republicans to tie up in court for years, and for the legislation to be all but dismantled by the Roberts Court. But that's a battle for 2025 or so.

We still have to get through 2021. And Mitch McConnell could still derail everything by pushing for a bipartisan deal that stalls the $3.5 Good Package, and one that he ultimately kills in the end.

Something strange is happening in Washington: Mitch McConnell might go along with a central piece of Joe Biden’s agenda.

The self-appointed “Grim Reaper” of the Senate, a minority leader who said just two months ago that “100% of my focus is on standing up to this administration,” has been remarkably circumspect about the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure deal. He’s privately telling his members to separate that effort from Democrats’ party-line $3.5 trillion spending plan and publicly observed there’s a “decent” chance for its success.

Other than questioning its financing, McConnell has aired little criticism of the bipartisan agreement to fund roads, bridges and other physical infrastructure, even as he panned Democrats’ separate spending plans on Wednesday as “wildly out of proportion” given the nation's inflation rate.

His cautious approach to a top Biden priority reflects the divide among Senate Republicans over whether to collaborate with Democrats on part of the president’s spending plans while fighting tooth and nail on the rest. Many Democrats predict McConnell will kill the agreement after stringing talks out for weeks, but the current infrastructure talks are particularly sensitive for the GOP leader because one of his close allies, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, is the senior Republican negotiator.

McConnell is aware of the conventional wisdom that he will ultimately knife the deal and is taking pains not to become the face of its opposition.

“He usually is the brunt of the demonization of the other side,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), another McConnell confidant. “I don’t think he is Dr. No when it comes to all legislation.”

For the moment at least, McConnell’s approach marks a shift from his past strategy of blocking Democratic priorities to portray the governing party as chaotic and inefficient. Advisers say he understands the bipartisan appeal of infrastructure and views it as less ideological than other Democratic priorities.

No guarantees on anything. But McConnell really wants the bipartisan deal now because he realizes that "President Biden and the Democrats passed legislation to fix roads, bridges, and water pipes and Senator/Representative X voted against it, and now they want credit for it" is wildly effective.

Democrats should move on without him, or the GOP.

Give us the Good Package.

Last Call For Af-Gone-Istan, Con't

Finally coming to his senses, President Biden won't be leaving thousands of Afghan translators and interpreters and their families to be butchered by Taliban forces as the US finally slinks away from the mother of all Unfinished Bush Business.

The Biden administration is set to begin evacuations of Afghan interpreters and translators who aided the U.S. military effort in the nearly 20-year war, an administration official said.

The Operation Allies Refuge flights out of Afghanistan during the last week of July will be available first for special immigrant visa applicants already in the process of applying for U.S. residency, according to the senior administration official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

President Joe Biden has faced pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to come up with a plan to help evacuate Afghan military helpers ahead of next month’s U.S. military withdrawal. The White House began briefing lawmakers on the outlines of their plans last month.

The evacuation planning could potentially affect tens of thousands of Afghans. Several thousand Afghans who worked for the U.S. — plus their family members — are already in the application pipeline for special immigrant visas. 

The Biden administration has also been working on identifying a third country or U.S. territory that could host Afghans while their visa applications are processed.

The administration is weighing using State Department-chartered commercial aircraft, not military aircraft, according to a second administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. But if the State Department requests military aircraft, the U.S. military would be ready to assist, the official said.

Tracey Jacobson, a three-time chief of mission in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kosovo, is leading the State Department coordination unit that will deliver on the president’s commitment under Operation Allies Refuge. That unit also includes representatives from the defense and homeland security departments.

Russ Travers, deputy homeland security adviser and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, is coordinating the interagency policy process on Operation Allies Refuge, officials said.

Separately, the White House announced that Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the White House homeland security adviser, would lead a U.S. delegation to a security conference in Uzbekistan this week to discuss Afghanistan’s security issues with leaders from the Central 5 — Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia — and other regional players.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. special envoy on Afghanistan reconciliation, are also expected to take part in the conference.

U.S. officials have said that one possibility under discussion is to relocate the Afghan visa applicants to neighboring countries in Central Asia, where they could be protected from possible retaliation by the Taliban or other groups.

 

Frankly, we should be giving these folks a tickertape parade and full US citizenship for their lives, not to mention 20 years of military back pay for risking their lives along with our troops in the Sandbox for two decades, but getting them out of Dodge is literally the least we could do for them and their families.

I'm glad Biden is doing this, but it's not like he had any choice.

Here's hoping they all get out safely.

Tennessee Goes Viral

As the number of new COVID-19 cases have doubled this month from last month due to the dangerous Delta Variant spreading among the unvaccinated in red states like Missouri and Louisiana, and 4th of July holiday celebrations turning into super-spreader events, the problem remains that red states are doing everything they can to downplay the pandemic's rise. In Tennessee, the state's top vaccine official was fired this week over outreach efforts to vaccinate kids against COVID.

Tennessee’s former top vaccinations official said Tuesday that she couldn’t stay silent after she was fired this week amid scrutiny from Republican state lawmakers over her department’s outreach efforts to vaccinate teenagers against COVID-19.

Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who was the medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health, said the state’s elected leaders put politics over the health of children by firing her for her efforts to get more Tennesseans vaccinated.

She said the agency presented her with a letter of resignation and a letter of termination Monday, but no reason for why she was being let go.

After choosing the termination letter, Fiscus penned a blistering 1,200-word response in which she said she is ashamed of Tennessee’s leaders, afraid for her state, and “angry for the amazing people of the Tennessee Department of Health who have been mistreated by an uneducated public and leaders who have only their own interests in mind.”

She also revealed that the Tennessee Department of Health has halted all outreach efforts around any kind of vaccines for children, not just COVID-19 ones, which The Tennessean confirmed through department documents. All of it, she warned, comes as only 38% of Tennesseans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, lagging behind much of the nation.

“I don’t think they realized how much of an advocate I am for public health and how intolerant of injustice I am,” Fiscus told The Associated Press on Tuesday in one of several interviews with numerous news outlets.

So far, Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s administration has been silent on the firing. His office and the Health Department declined to comment, citing personnel matters. After an event Tuesday, Lee did not answer questions from reporters.

Democrats blasted the firing, with Sen. Raumesh Akbari saying Fiscus was “sacrificed in favor of anti-vaccine ideology.” House Speaker Cameron Sexton was one of few Republicans to weigh in, saying through a spokesperson that health officials made the decision internally.

“While members have expressed concerns about the department’s recent vaccine marketing strategy, Speaker Sexton will not speculate on the factors that went into this decision,” said Sexton’s spokesperson, Doug Kufner. “However, Speaker Sexton does believe that those who have voiced their dissent agree with yesterday’s outcome.”

Republican Sen. Richard Briggs, a physician, said he’s also unsure why Fiscus got fired, but said “it would be wrong if the reason for her firing was because she had a campaign to try to get our children vaccinated.” He said he doesn’t want to second-guess the department, but “because of the way it at least looks superficially without the details being known, there probably needs to be some clarification.”

During a June committee meeting, angry Republican lawmakers invoked Fiscus’ name over a letter she sent to medical providers who administer vaccines explaining the state’s legal mechanism letting them vaccinate minors as young as 14 without parental consent, called the “Mature Minor Doctrine.” The letter was in response to providers’ questions and didn’t contain new information.

Fiscus said the health department’s attorney provided the letter. The attorney, she said, had said the letter had been “blessed by the governor’s office.” She said the doctrine was based on a 1987 Tennessee Supreme Court ruling and her job was to explain what is allowable.

Republican lawmakers also admonished the agency for its communications about the vaccine, including online posts. One graphic, featuring a photo of a smiling child with a Band-Aid on his arm, said, “Tennesseans 12+ are eligible for vaccines. Give COVID-19 vaccines a shot.”

During the hearing, Republican Rep. Scott Cepicky held a printout of a Facebook ad saying teens were eligible, calling the agency’s advocacy “reprehensible” and likening it to peer pressure.

Asked about the hearing, the governor last month said generally that the state will “continue to encourage folks to seek access – adults for their children, and adults for themselves to make the personal choice for vaccine.”

 

Again, many of us live in states where a majority of our neighbors are not vaccinated and never will be. The disinformation campaign against the vaccine might be the single greatest evil act perpetrated against the US in my lifetime, one that will end up killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions in the months and years ahead.

We're going to have to deal with the fallout of unvaccinated states, and it's going to be clear by Labor Day I think that the pandemic is far from over. The real test is how states respond to the coming Delta surge in cases, and in most of the states where this will happen, the answer will be, by law, absolutely nothing.

This fall and winter will be a nightmare.

Texas Two-Steppin' Out, Con't

My prediction yesterday that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the state GOP would move to arrest Texas Democratic lawmakers for leaving town was one of the easiest calls I think I've ever made, as Republicans in the state legislature voted swiftly to issue arrest warrants.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said that Democratic lawmakers who have left the state can and "will be arrested" upon their return as he pushes ahead with changes in voting laws.

Abbott, a Republican, gave an interview to KVUE on Monday about the Democrats' decision to leave the state and whether the special session of the Texas legislature the governor called can go ahead.

The Democratic legislators flew out of Texas to Washington, D.C. on Monday in order to deny the legislature the two-thirds quorum needed in order to conduct business and to pass legislation.

KVUE asked Abbott if the Democratic walkout meant the voting bills - Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3 - could not be passed and if he could do anything as governor to compel the lawmakers to return to the state.

Abbott said there "still remains plenty of time to pass not just the bills you mentioned but there's a lot of other bills on there."

He highlighted some of the measures other than voting reforms. He then addressed the issue of the quorum.

"Answering your second question, yes, there is something the governor can do," Abbott said.

"First of all, I'll tell you what the House of Representatives can do. What the speaker can do is issue a call to have these members arrested.

"In addition to that, however, I can and I will continue to call a special session after special session after special session all the way up until election next year. And so if these people want to be hanging out wherever they're hanging out on this taxpayer-paid junket, they're going to have to be prepared to do it for well over a year," the governor said.

 

I fully expect this situation to get far worse. Don't be surprised if nutjobs decide to make citizens' arrests of these lawmakers, too. Abbott wants blood, he wants to see Democrats in chains, and thrown in jail. So do his voters, and my guess is they're going to get it.

It will be a bloody spectacle, and it won't be the last we see involving the arrest of Democratic party politicians, I think.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Democratic strategist Max Burns notes that The Former Guy™ trying to turn January 6th terrorist Ashli Babbitt into a martyr for his cause is no accident.

When Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, 35, was shot dead by police while trying to force her way through a barricaded door protecting members of the House of Representatives from a mob of rioters inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, she was energized in part by then-President Donald Trump's big lie that Democrats were hard at work stealing the White House from its rightful Republican owners.

Far from dampening support for the big lie, Babbitt's death is being amplified by Trump loyalists into a powerful rallying symbol for far-right anti-government extremists the FBI calls terrorists, who now find aid and comfort within a Trumpified GOP.

Babbitt's canonization as a right-wing martyr is a dangerous development for a Republican Party with members increasingly comfortable pressing for and defending political violence. Trump himself seems to want to use outrage over Babbitt's death as a blast furnace to heat up his 2024 political comeback — but cheerleading extremism is more likely to send the country up in smoke.

"Who was the person who shot an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman?" Trump asked Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, before interrupting himself to offer an answer: "I will tell you, they know who shot Ashley Babbitt. They're protecting that person. I've heard also that it was the head of security for a certain high official — a Democrat."

Trump's rumors have been firmly rejected by law enforcement, according to reporting by NBC News. A senior law enforcement official briefed on the matter said the officer involved was not a member of a security detail provided to a specific member of Congress.

Trump's speculation is also refuted by the video evidence freely available to the public, which clearly shows that Babbitt was not "innocent." She was shot while trying to force entry into a restricted area and disregarding multiple police orders to stop. We also know Babbitt arrived at the Capitol fired up by Trump's conspiracy theories, which she spelled out on her social media profiles alongside threats to Democratic elected officials, such as the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, and Rep. Maxine Waters of California.

In any case, it is doubtful that anyone in the GOP is actually interested in uncovering the truth about what happened on Jan. 6. Back in May, Republicans loudly and proudly refused to support a bipartisan investigation into the riot. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona went so far as to accuse the FBI of secretly having organized the attack itself — a conspiracy theory amplified by his GOP colleagues Louie Gohmert of Texas, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Matt Gaetz of Florida.

But the danger is greater than the now-typical muddying of the waters about what really happened during a day that threatened U.S. democracy. It represents a new tactic to further the spread of propaganda and distortion that courts — rather than denounces — the most dangerous elements of American society. The open embrace of the Jan. 6 rioters as "peaceful patriots" by parts of the GOP signals a grim reality: Republicans simply cannot afford to lose the votes of far-right domestic terrorists.

Trump creating a martyr is Autocracy 101 a symbol to kill for, and a symbol to die for, and that's where we are headed with these white supremacist terrorists. They will use her as justification for whatever deadly violence comes next. 

I can't stress how awful this is going to be.

Texas Two-Steppin' Out

Texas state Democrats are heading for the hills to prevent a quorum in the state legislature for Texas Republicans to ram through the worst, most draconian voter suppression bills yet, but it's only delaying the inevitable.

With Republican-backed voting bills moving rapidly through a special session of the state Legislature, Texas Democrats bolted — again.

At least 51 Democratic members of the state House of Representatives fled the state Monday afternoon in two charter jets bound for Washington, D.C., in an effort to block the measures from advancing, a source familiar with the plans told NBC News. At least seven others are en route, as well.

The unusual move, akin to what Democrats did in 2003, will paralyze the chamber, stopping business until the lawmakers return to town or the session ends.

The lawmakers plan to spend more than three weeks in Washington, running out the clock on the session, which began Thursday, and advocating for federal voting legislation. The Democrats say the For the People Act, an amended version of which Republicans filibustered in the U.S. Senate last month, is the only way they can permanently fend off election limits Republicans are advancing at the state level.

"Our democracy is on the line," state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer told NBC News. "It became very clear to us that this weekend that any attempts to negotiate some Democratic concessions were cut off, making it very clear that Republicans were hellbent on having it their way."

ON BOARD: Texas Democrats on their way to D.C., where they plan to stay for more than three weeks to deny the state House a quorum pic.twitter.com/hTE0mfxveZ— Jane C. Timm (@janestreet) July 12, 2021

The legislators risk arrest by taking flight. Under the Texas Constitution, the Legislature requires a quorum of two-thirds of lawmakers to be present to conduct state business in either chamber. Absent lawmakers can be legally compelled to return to the Capitol; the source said Democrats expect state Republicans to ask the Department of Public Safety to track them down.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who has made tightening election rules a priority, slammed the move as a dereliction of duty.

"Texas Democrats’ decision to break a quorum of the Texas Legislature and abandon the Texas State Capitol inflicts harm on the very Texans who elected them to serve," Abbott said in statement. "As they fly across the country on cushy private planes, they leave undone issues that can help their districts and our state."

Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan vowed in a statement on Monday afternoon to "use every available resource under the Texas Constitution and the unanimously-passed House Rules to secure a quorum."

"The special session clock is ticking," Phelan said.

 

This didn't work for Oregon Republicans when they tried the same to stop climate change legislation in 2019 and again in 2020.

The difference of course is that Oregon Republicans aligned themselves with armed terrorists and dared Oregon Democrats to send cops after them. And in the end, Oregon Dems dropped the bill and gave in to the GOP terrorists.

 

In 2021, Oregon Republicans repeated the same nonsense several times over Gov. Kate Brown's COVID regulations.

Meanwhile, I fully expect Texas Republicans will do what Oregon Democrats didn't do: send armed law enforcement after the legislators and bring them back in cuffs.

Watch.