WaPo Almost Gets it

The billionaires - the owner class elites - have been waging an effective psychological war against us for a long time.

They need us to believe government can't do anything for us because they want to reduce government to the point where it does only two things:

1. defend corporate interests with a powerful military and militarized domestic police forces
2. enforce contracts and adjudicate disputes 

And that's it.

The überkonservativs - the radical libertarians - hate this country's traditions of democratic self-government. Their project is to tear it all down in order to replace it with a corporate plutocracy.

They are - in a word - fascists.

Here's a look at some "hard-hitting journalism" that sounds more like bending-over-backwards to soften the whole thing with some passive language, and make it seem less threatening.

Today in Press Poodling:

Koch-backed group fuels opposition to school mask mandates, leaked letter shows

A template letter circulated by Independent Women’s Forum offers a glimpse into a well-resourced campaign against public health regulations

The letter sounds passionate and personal.

It is motivated, the author explains, by a desire to “speak up for what is best for my kids.” And it fervently conveys the author’s feelings to school leaders: “I do not believe little kids should be forced to wear masks, and I urge you to adopt a policy that allows parental choice on this matter for the upcoming school year.”

But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.

That makes the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post, the latest salvo in an inflamed debate over mask requirements in schools, which have become the epicenter of partisan battles over everything from gender identity to critical race theory. The political melee engulfing educators has complicated efforts to reopen schools safely during a new wave of the virus brought on by the highly transmissible delta variant.

The document offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a well-financed conservative campaign to undermine regulations that health authorities say are necessary to contain the coronavirus. The frustration of many parents who want a greater say is deeply felt, school superintendents say. But their anger is also being fueled by organized activists whose influence is ordinarily veiled.

The letter was made available on Tuesday to paying members of the Independent Women’s Network, a project of the Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice that markets itself as a “members-only platform that is free from censorship and cancellation.” Both are nonprofits once touted by their board chairman and CEO, Heather Higgins, as part of a unique tool in the “Republican conservative arsenal” because, “Being branded as neutral but actually having the people who know, know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position.”

Higgins, an heiress to the Vicks VapoRub fortune, did not respond to a request for comment. Carrie Lukas, president of Independent Women’s Forum, said in an interview the letter was originally authored by the group’s policy director and sent to her child’s Denver preschool. The policy director did not consult experts for the letter, Lukas said, because, “She wrote it as a mom. She didn’t call anyone on the phone, but you can see she looked at a lot of data.”

The group decided to circulate the letter, Lukas said, to “empower people to have a kind, civil conversation.”

Lukas is a co-author of a Sept. 28 post in the network’s “Resource Center” explaining the purpose of the letter, according to documents reviewed by The Post. “Is your school considering mask mandates, or has it already made a decision that kids must wear masks in class?” the appeal begins. “Push back! Here is a draft letter you can use to write your own school superintendents and administrators, principals, and teachers!”

The letter “contains a respectful tone, helpful data, and supporting articles that illustrate the harms of masking kids,” the appeal promises. “This letter can also easily be turned into a letter to the editor for your local paper.” It is unclear how widely the letter has been used so far by members of the network, where membership costs between $5 and $25 per month.

The document flies in the face of recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose positions stress the need to account for more dangerous strains of the virus and to protect people too young to receive shots still only authorized for those 12 and older.

A pair of CDC studies published last month found that schools with mask requirements saw fewer outbreaks than those without them, and that pediatric cases rose faster in counties where schools had made masking a matter of personal choice.

In contrast with evidence provided by government scientists, the Independent Women’s Forum letter offers an inventory of inaccuracies, said pediatric infectious-disease specialists. David Kimberlin, a physician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was particularly troubled by the letter’s argument that “young kids do not significantly spread covid.” That notion is undercut, he said, by “data clearly showing that children can transmit the virus, perhaps to a lesser extent than older adolescents and adults, but that second part is still not clear.”

Claims guided by “political ideology, instead of data, will cause more deaths, more funerals and more white flags on the National Mall,” Kimberlin said.

As a nonprofit, Independent Women’s Forum is exempt from disclosing its donors and paying federal income taxes. But the group, which reported revenue of nearly $3.8 million in 2019, has drawn financial and institutional support from organizations endowed by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his late brother, David, according to private promotional materials as well as tax records and other public statements.

Tributes to sponsors prepared for recent galas — and reviewed by The Post — recognize the Charles Koch Institute as a major benefactor. Other backers include Facebook; Dick DeVos, heir to the Amway fortune and the husband of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; and the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropy controlled by the family that founded Walmart.

Bill Riggs, a spokesman for the Charles Koch Institute and other philanthropic and advocacy organizations endowed by the billionaire, said the group’s financial support for Independent Women’s Forum was steered toward a program opposing occupational and labor regulations. Representatives for other benefactors did not respond to requests for comment.

The institutional ties binding Independent Women’s Forum to the Koch network go even deeper.

In 2003, Independent Women’s Forum announced that it was formally affiliating with Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s main political arm, and that the two organizations would share office space. “The affiliation agreement provides for staff and resource sharing between Americans for Prosperity and the Independent Women’s Forum,” an archived news release stated, explaining that Nancy Pfotenhauer, then-president of Independent Women’s Forum, would also serve as president of Americans for Prosperity.

The affiliation ended in 2005, said Lukas, a former policy analyst for the Cato Institute, which was first founded as the Charles Koch Foundation. She said her organization’s relationship to the Koch network was “relatively minor.”

Most parents of school-age children support requiring masks, polling suggests. More than six in 10 parents say their child’s school should make masks obligatory, at least for unvaccinated students and staff, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey released in August.

Views vary along partisan lines, according to the poll, with more than two-thirds of Republican parents opposing such mandates, and racial differences are stark, as well. Overwhelming majorities of Black and Hispanic parents — 83 percent and 76 percent, respectively — support school mask requirements, compared with a slim majority of White parents, at 54 percent.

Despite the picture of public opinion conveyed by such polling, masking in schools has become an explosive local issue. School board meetings have seen violence and arrests. Outside Austin, one parent ripped a mask from a teacher’s face, the superintendent reported.

The letter drafted by Independent Women’s Forum illustrates how national groups are “inflaming the political fight over broadly popular mask protections,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, a liberal watchdog group, and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy. “The effect is really to distort public debate.”

The letter tries to distance itself from the political maelstrom, noting, “It’s my view that emotion and politics (from both sides!) have driven a lot of policy choices during the pandemic at nearly every level of government … that’s too bad.”

Meanwhile, the letter traffics in “nonsense and extremism,” said Julia Raifman, an assistant professor of health policy at Boston University and the creator of a database tracking state policy responses to the pandemic.

The letter warns of possible downsides for children wearing masks, ranging from communication difficulties to tooth decay. But such claims lack credible evidence, she said, compared with a wealth of data showing face coverings blunt the risk from the coronavirus.

The letter also emphasizes moves by some peer countries not to mandate masks in schools. But other places have maintained indoor mask requirements for adults that have suppressed community transmission sufficiently to protect children and allow schools to proceed normally, Raifman said.

“Mask-wearing can be temporary until transmission is reduced, but the children, parents and all people who die if we do not control surges will be gone forever,” she said.

COVID-19 Update

For fuck's sake, get your shit together, America.

How is this not a spectacularly obvious result of the years Republicans have spent dismantling the institutions vital to our little experiment in democratic self-government?

DIVIDE & CONQUER WORKS

WaPo:

Messy, incomplete U.S. data hobbles pandemic response

The nation’s decentralized, underfunded reporting system hampers efforts to combat the coronavirus.

The contentious and confusing debate in recent weeks over coronavirus booster shots has exposed a fundamental weakness in the United States’ ability to respond to a public health crisis: The data is a mess.

How many people have been infected at this point? No one knows for sure, in part because of insufficient testing and incomplete reporting. How many fully vaccinated people have had breakthrough infections? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to track only a fraction of them. When do inoculated people need booster shots? American officials trying to answer that have had to rely heavily on data from abroad.

Critically important data on vaccinations, infections, hospitalizations and deaths is scattered among local health departments, is often out of date and hard to aggregate at the national level, and it is simply inadequate for the job of battling a highly transmissible and stealthy pathogen.

“We are flying blind,” said Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation who spent two decades working for the CDC. “With all our money, with all our know-how, we have dropped the ball. … We don’t have the data. We don’t have the good surveillance system to keep us informed.”

The dearth of timely, comprehensive data impaired the ability of the nation’s top public health officials and infectious-disease experts to reach a consensus on the need for booster shots. The experts looked at conflicting data from Israel, Britain and the United States and came up with a bewildering set of recommendations. The debate seemed to confuse more than clarify arguments for the necessity of an additional shot.

“We are pulling data in from all different sources,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. “We’re trying to put it all together to see … what is the vaccine efficacy? And there’s this wide divergence. It’s not reconcilable.”

Data is key to an effective pandemic response — and the lack of proper data has hobbled the U.S. response again and again. The lack of testing and then of standardized reporting of cases and deaths left U.S. officials slow to grasp the scale of the crisis when the virus began to spread. Insufficient data also meant supplies to fight the pandemic arrived too late in hard-hit cities. State and federal officials made decisions about travel restrictions and policies on reopening with an incomplete picture of what was happening.

Many places were forced to shut down before they had substantial outbreaks, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb told The Washington Post, and when the virus finally arrived in various communities, some resisted a return to restrictions.

“Early on, CDC couldn’t even tell us how many people were being hospitalized for covid,” Gottlieb said.

Multiple factors underlie this data deficit. First and foremost: The United States does not have a national health system such as Israel’s or Britain’s, and in a pandemic, U.S. authorities must rely on a vast and decentralized public health infrastructure that is notoriously underfunded and full of holes. As a result, there is no simple way to track infections or outcomes across the population.

Another obstacle to data aggregation may be the siloed computer systems and the self-interest of medical institutions. Some hospital systems want to hang onto their data, said Michael Kurilla, director of the division of clinical innovation at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

“They don’t necessarily want to give up all that data because they see that as a potential future revenue stream,” Kurilla said.

‘A largely 19th-century system’

The CDC compiles national statistics by collecting data from every state and locality, but these jurisdictions often have different ways of counting tests, infections and even deaths. The data may not be submitted to the CDC for days or weeks. Many smaller jurisdictions still share that data via fax, an outdated technology.

“We’re still operating on a largely 19th-century system,” Kurilla said. “Who exactly is to blame is really hard to point a finger at. There are systems where things are done on paper, some information is being faxed, so it’s being transcribed. There isn’t any way to seamlessly upload information.”

The Biden administration recently unveiled a pandemic preparedness plan to “fundamentally transform our capabilities to protect the nation.” One element would be the modernization of digital health data, with standardized software that would enable jurisdictions to share and analyze data.

The data problem has been recognized by federal officials and outside experts for many years, Biden’s science adviser, Eric Lander, said in an interview Wednesday.

“It’s a question that pertains to the whole health care and public health system. In the United States our data systems are not interoperable. They don’t talk to one another,” Lander said.

The task of gathering and analyzing data is currently too laborious, and lowers situational awareness in a crisis, he said.

“If it takes weeks to clean the data … it means you’re going to be running weeks behind the war that you’re fighting. That’s just no way to take on a pandemic,” Lander said.

Solving this won’t happen overnight, but should not take more than two or three years, he estimated. The underfunding of public health departments is at the core of the problem, he said. Giving them access to affordable, standardized software for handling data “is going to be useful not just in the next pandemic — it’s going to be useful in the next flu season, it’s going to be useful in the next measles outbreak.”

Empirical rigor over speed

The CDC is charged with making sense of the patchwork of state data, and regularly issues reports on outbreaks. But critics say the CDC operates at too slow a pace, as if it were an academic institution and not a first responder in a crisis. The long-standing rap is that the agency focuses heavily on retrospective studies, and does not share those results quickly — even with other health agencies. The CDC traditionally has emphasized empirical rigor over speed, an aspiration in conflict with the demands of a rapidly evolving health emergency.

How CDC data problems put the U.S. behind on the delta variant

“They’re out there putting reports from three months ago, and you can’t do that in a pandemic when things move so fast,” said Walid Gellad, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who criticized as premature the administration’s initial push for boosters for all adults.

“In a span of three months, we had super high cases, then the lowest cases we’ve ever seen, and now we’re back up again. You can’t use old data in a health emergency that is changing as quickly as covid,” he said.

In response to questions from The Post, the CDC said it has shared the results from numerous vaccine effectiveness studies over the last two months that helped shape the discussion on the need for booster shots. CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said in a statement those studies showed that vaccines are effective at reducing the risk of severe disease, hospitalization and death, but that protection may decrease over time and may be less able to protect against the delta variant. She added the agency is publishing all of its data on vaccine effectiveness in one place on Thursday.

“Even highly effective vaccines often become less effective over time and tracking this can take time,” Nordlund said. “We relied on the data from colleagues in Israel and the UK because the epidemiology of their outbreaks, experience with the delta variant, and use of boosters preceded what happened in the United States.”

Many at the CDC recognize the agency needs to move faster. In August, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced plans to develop a new forecasting and outbreak analytics center to analyze data in real time to better predict disease threats, which is expected to be up and running early next year.

CDC data played only a small part in the booster decision, senior administration officials said in interviews, in part because Israel vaccinated its population faster than the United States and began experiencing a delta wave several weeks sooner, giving it a data set that extended over a longer period.

But administration officials and outside experts said the CDC should have shared its own findings on vaccine effectiveness more quickly, rather than waiting until its results were publication ready in the late summer and early fall.

The CDC also drew criticism for its decision in the spring to stop tracking all breakthrough infections, and instead follow only those that resulted in hospitalization. The agency has said it could compile more accurate and complete data from its studies tracking thousands of people who are regularly tested and monitored to see if they develop breakthrough infections. Critics of the decision say policymakers need as much real-time information as possible about new variants that may cause even minor breakthrough infections, but some experts contend these more focused studies offer clearer and more reliable results, and are a better use of the agency’s resources.

But even the results of those focused studies were often hard to come by. As administration officials debated in July and August about whether the U.S. would need to administer boosters, they repeatedly implored the CDC to share what it was learning, said several people familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversations. As a result, officials initially relied on data from Israel, as well as studies conducted at the Mayo Clinic, in New York state and by Kaiser Permanente.

“There is no way nationally in this giant country to connect who’s been vaccinated and what their outcomes are, and that’s the underlying problem,” said Gellad. “Whenever you have to piece lots of data together, a lot of which is contradictory, it can be confusing.”

‘No right answer’

Better data by itself would not have resolved all the disagreements among disease experts and policymakers. Experts on infectious diseases will look at identical data sets and reach different conclusions about who needs an additional shot.

Some scientists — including several in the administration — believe data from Israel, the United Kingdom and elsewhere showing waning immunity against infection over time strongly support the need for millions of people to get booster shots.

They argue that these breakthrough cases, even if they are not classified as “severe,” translate into shuttered classrooms, lost income, and continued widespread transmission of the virus. As long as infections are still circulating in large numbers, several administration officials and scientists argue, the country cannot crush the pandemic.

Many of these scientists also believe that waning immunity is an early warning sign that will inevitably lead to increased hospitalizations, an outcome they hoped to avoid by administering boosters early.

But many members of the FDA and CDC advisory committees, who are also scientists and public health experts, took a starkly different approach. They focused on the risk of hospitalization among vaccinated individuals, which has not increased significantly in the U.S.

Some of these scientists believe the public has unrealistic expectations of vaccines. The fact that hospitalizations are not dramatically increasing among the vaccinated — especially those under 65 — indicates the vaccines are functioning as designed.

They also questioned whether new data from Israel, which showed a rise in “severe” disease, was fully applicable to the U.S. Israel uses a different definition of “severe,” basing it on such measurements as oxygen saturation and elevated respiration rate, rather than on hospitalization. And Israel isn’t America: It’s a much smaller country, less diverse demographically, and it doesn’t have as great a burden of chronic health problems, such as obesity and diabetes.

The data shortfall is not simply an issue for the crafters of national vaccine policy. It’s also a conundrum for individuals trying to figure out their own risk calculus.

Even Mokdad, the IHME epidemiologist who studies the data for a living, is uncertain about his continuing level of protection from vaccines.

“I’m a healthy 59-year-old person,” he said. “I’m not obese, I’m very healthy, I don’t have any chronic condition. The only thing I have against me is age.”

It has been more than six months since he got his second shot.

“Do we know how much immunity I have against hospitalization in the U. S.? No,” he said. “Do we know how much immunity I have against death? We don’t.”

Confirmed

What we think we've always known - we now know.

And BTW, something else we've "known" without acknowledging - or more accurately, refused to admit because "she just rubbed us the wrong way" or whatever - Hillary was right about that "vast right wing conspiracy" thing way back in the 90s, and we should suck it up and tell the truth about ourselves.

Billionaire vulture Paul Singer

WaPo: (pay wall)

Conservative website first paid Fusion GPS for Trump research

A conservative publication said Friday it paid a Washington research firm to start probing Donald Trump’s background — a move that set in motion a chain of events leading to the explosive dossier alleging ties between Trump associates and Russia.

In a statement, the Washington Free Beacon said it retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential election. Two people familiar with billionaire GOP donor Paul Singer said he provides financial support to the publication. A spokesman for Singer’s firm, Elliott Management, did not respond to requests seeking comment.

The Free Beacon said its research ended before Fusion GPS hired a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, to produce a series of reports alleging links between Russia and those close to Trump. That occurred after the firm was retained by a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

“None of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier,’’ said the statement from Free Beacon editor in chief Matthew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb. “We stand by our reporting and we do not apologize for our methods.’’

The Free Beacon’s lawyers notified the House Intelligence Committee of its role in the matter Friday.

The website published a statement on Friday that said it paid Fusion GPS to research “multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton.” Since its inception in 2012, the website “has retained third-party firms to conduct research on many individuals and institutions of interest to us and our readers.’’

Opposition research is nothing new in political races, or the corporate world, but it is not a common practice for a news website to hire out such work, which is often expensive. Firms like Fusion GPS can charge tens of thousands of dollars for research on a single subject.

After the Free Beacon stopped paying Fusion GPS, the research firm offered in April 2016 to continue researching Trump for the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The Free Beacon said it did not know at the time that the Clinton campaign and the DNC hired Fusion GPS later to continue the work.

Intelligence chiefs briefed Trump and Obama on unconfirmed claims Russia has compromising information on president-elect

The dossier — a collection of reports compiled by Steele that began in mid-2016 and continued after the election — cited sources familiar with the inner workings of the Kremlin, who said Russia had obtained compromising information about Trump, including lurid alleged details of his 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe Pageant. The Steele reports also alleged Russia had been working with Trump associates to help him with the election.

Trump has denied those claims, and called subsequent probes by the FBI and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III a witch hunt. Officials have said that the FBI has confirmed some of the information in the dossier. Other details, including the most sensational accusations, have not been verified and may never be.

U.S. intelligence agencies later released a public assessment, which concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to aid Trump. The FBI has been investigating whether any Trump associates helped the Russians.

For months, House Republicans have been pressuring Fusion GPS to identify who paid for the dossier.

Last week, Fusion GPS executives invoked their constitutional right not to answer questions put to them by the House Intelligence Committee. Previously, the firm’s founder, Glenn Simpson, had spent 10 hours answering questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

While questions about the mystery clients have now been answered, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are still pressing to find out how much Fusion GPS was paid, and how much, in turn, that firm paid Steele.

There's a high probability that the big dollar guys weren't particularly interested in sinking Trump, they just wanted to find out what they'd have to be ready to compensate for - ie: what dirt they could expect the Dems to come up with and how they could countervail it. Which I think is exactly how it played out. I think the Repubs knew about Trump's weird proclivities, but they decided not to fight Trump, thinking they could use the dirt to control him, and they did all that for reasons I think we need to stop denying and start screaming about.

1. Trump did not remake the GOP in his own image - he's the perfect refection of what that party has become
2. They chose not to take action against Trump because Republicans hate this country's traditions of democratic self-government - their project is to tear it all down and replace it with a corporate plutocracy

 

It's Our Fault

Pro Forma: Fuck you, Google

It's always and only your fault. That's a tactic USAmerica Inc has employed for a very long time, with great success. 

• Air pollution and Climate Change? That's your fault - you demand bigger and faster cars, and cheap energy sources.
• Trash flooding the landscape, and plastics poisoning the oceans? That's your fault - you're not recycling like we told you.
• Going broke because of your healthcare bills? That's your fault - you should watch your diet and get more exercise.
• Your job sucks and you can't make the rent? That's your fault - you need to work more, manage your money better, and give up all those luxury items.
• And And And 

It's the Big Scam.

And the kicker: this fits perfectly with "conservative" articles of faith - ie:

1. The government is always bad (unless it's GOP - then it's not really government, it's Republicans protecting you from evil socialist bureaucrats)
2. As with all problems stemming from the hands-off, government-should-do-nothing approach, the marketplace dictates a corrective remedy instead of any effective prevention.
3. When #2 proves to be disastrous, start again at #1

Repeat as needed.

Eventually everyone will be sufficiently confused or enough people will be dead so as to shut everybody else up, and you can go ahead and do whatever you want.

Because Republicans hate this country and its traditions of democratic self-government.

Their project is to tear it all down and replace it with a corporate plutocracy - blaming us for everything the whole time.

Keeping Up The Fight

Between 15 million and 28 million Americans believe Biden is not a duly-elected legitimate POTUS, and that Trump should be "reinstated" by violent means.

CPOST, University of Chicago:

We need a clearer picture of the type of person who attacked the Capitol and what led them to action. Moreover, we need to know how many Americans today support the use of violence to preserve the Trump presidency—the cause most associated with the insurrectionist movement, and who or what most influences this group.

For the past six months, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) every two to three weeks has been updating its demographic studies of the nearly 600 Americans arrested for the January 6 attack to build as complete and current a picture as possible of this mass political movement with violence at its core.

One might have expected fires to fade, the FBI arrests to have a chilling impact on violence to support Trump, or the de-platforming of Trump himself from Facebook and Twitter to lower the temperature. But our most recent nationally representative survey of 1,070 American adults fielded by the NORC at the University of Chicago in June, paints a different, if not alarming, picture. We found, most strikingly, that nine percent of Americans—believe the “Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency. More than a fourth of adults agree, in varying degrees, that, “The 2020 election was stolen, and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.”

We also learned that 8.1 percent — that equates to 21 million American adults — share both these radical beliefs. From a statistical point of view, this number is extrapolated from a range between 6% (15 million) to 11% (28 million), where we have 95% confidence that the true number falls within.

There is remarkable consistency in the responses. Specifically, of the roughly one tenth of those who think force is justified to restore Trump, 90% also see Biden as illegitimate, and 68% also think force may be needed to preserve America’s traditional way of life.

Today’s 21 million adamant supporters of insurrection also have the dangerous potential for violent mobilization. Our survey also asked pointed questions about membership and support for militia groups, such as the Oath Keepers, or extremist groups, such as the Proud boys, to which approximately, one million of the 21 million insurrectionists are themselves or personally know a member of a militia or extremist group. Six million showed support for militias and extremist groups. At least seven million of this number own a gun, and three million have prior US military service.

What’s driving people in the insurrectionist movement? Our survey looked closely at the beliefs, news sources, and party affiliations associated with the 21 million adamant insurrectionists.

The research shows, two central beliefs occur among adamant insurrectionists statistically significantly than more commonly found in the general population:

• 63% believe in the Great Replacement: “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”
• 54% believe in the QAnon cabal: “A secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the US government.”

These two fundamental beliefs do not fully overlap, suggesting complex, multiple pathways into the movement.

This reinforces our previous findings, already showing that we are dealing with a mass movement with violence at its core that does not fit earlier patterns of right-wing extremism. For example, we are not dealing with disaffected and unemployed young men, but mainly highly competent, middle-aged American professionals.

Concerning political affiliation, the adamant insurrectionists are not only Republicans.

While 51% self-identify as members of the Republican Party, 34% see themselves as Independents and 10% as Democrats.

All this tells us is that the insurrectionist movement is more mainstream, cross-party, and more complex than many people might like to think, which does not bode well for the 2022 mid-term elections, or for that matter, the 2024 Presidential election.

Ironically, the solution may be more local than national. Of the ardent insurrectionists, 47 percent see the Federal Government as an “enemy”, 56 percent feel the same way about state governments, but 73 percent see local governments as non-enemy actors. With the latter being the most trusted sources, mayors could have potentially out-sized influence over the future of the movement.

Without a sound risk analysis of the drivers of American political violence, it is hard to see how developing policies, far less strategies to mitigate the risk of future election-related violence, could be genuinely possible.

As the 2022 election season fast approaches — along with the potential for distorting election outcomes — understanding American political violence must surely be a national priority if democracy is to hold the line.

What We're Up Against

At the risk of inadvertently helping the freakazoids spread their shit, I want to be sure we're at least a little mindful of the kinda thing these assholes are up to.

Mike Lindell - the My Pillow guy - recently put up a whole podcast or some such, during which he referred to his "evidence board":

Maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong, but when everything points to one guy - isn't that when the cops bust down his door and haul him away in handcuffs and shit?

Moving along ... then, my Reddit feed planted this one on me, via r/QAnonCasualties:

Science.News

New report stuns the world: The vast majority of those now dying with covid are people who were VACCINATED against it

07/01/2021 / By Ethan Huff

I won't put the link up and I won't bother you with the bullshit they're putting out.

Here's the take from Media Bias Fact Check:

Daily KOS on "Ethan Huff":

Ethan Huff is a Prolific (Fake News) Reporter. But Does He Actually Exist?

By the looks of it, Ethan A Huff is a very busy reporter. Or, rather, a very busy poster. Content under his byline appears across various conspiracy, climate denial and anti-vaxx blogs like the Epoch Times, Natural News, NewsTarget, Climate.News, Science Clowns, Propaganda.News and elsewhere.

In just the past week Huff published stories about how climate alarmists are working with the LGBT community to depopulate the planet, how vaccines are causing polio and YouTube and other online giants are covering up this vaccine-caused polio outbreak, how 600,000 Mexicans were protesting abortion and “LGBT indoctrination,” as well as stories on Greta Thunberg, white people not being allowed to speak anymore, Hillary Clinton threatening Ronan Farrow, a Chinese bitcoin farm catching fire, Blizzard appeasing China, Johnson and Johnson facing lawsuits, vaping, Trump claiming Big Pharma is behind the impeachment hoax, climate scientists lying, and real scientists declaring there’s no climate emergency.

Aside from his prolific posting, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that he actually exists. Unlike most reporters, including others at some of his outlets, we couldn’t find a Twitter account associated with his name. There’s also no LinkedIn accounts or Facebook profiles that fit the bill.

What’s more, only one of the many sites he posts to list any contact info, such as an email address or phone number for readers to send tip. CriticalStudies.org, where he posted two stories in 2015, has a profile for him with both his picture and a contact email (ethan@huff.com). We found a picture associated with his name, and a reverse image search comes up empty, so maybe he is real.

But Huff.com is a real estate website, and an email sent to that address asking if he is indeed a real person bounced back, indicating the account doesn’t exist.

- more -

So there's today's little shit scramble. 

Remember - "The Big Lie" is not just one thing. It's a whole metric fuck ton of distortions and deflections and straight up lies, and the desired effect is to make us doubt everything except what the Daddy State tells us in the moment.

Wealth To Scale

Standard issue currency - a single bill - as produced by the US Bureau Of Engraving, is .0043 inches thick (1 mm), and weighs .00220462 pounds (1 gram).

• A stack of 100-dollar bills equaling a million dollars is about 3½ feet tall and weighs about 22 pounds.
• A stack of 100-dollar bills equaling a billion dollars is over 3,000 feet tall and weighs over 20,000 pounds.
• Jeff Bezos owns a stack of 100-dollar bills that stands better than 120 miles high, and weighs well over 2,000 tons.

Jeff Bezos may be insanely rich, but it is a drop in the ocean compared with the combined wealth of his peers. 

The 400 richest Americans own about $3.2 trillion, which is more than the bottom 60% of Americans.

Now try to imagine a stack of 100-dollar bills equaling 3.2 trillion dollars that reaches almost to the moon.

To the fucking moon, motherfucker.

There's no way to get the whole concept of that level of wealth to fit in my little brain all at once, so here's a website that illustrates it:

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

The State Of Disrepair

Five trillion dollars, and something is not quite right.

Of course, not all of the money has actually been spent yet, and we won't know how well these Keynesian efforts have worked.

We do know (also "of course") that the Republicans will be doing their level best to fuck it up so we never quite get a real chance to see how well we can make it all work, because that's the "conservative" project - to go on tearing away at our flagging experiment in democratic self-government in order to replace it with plutocracy.

Here's something of a progress report from WaPo: (pay wall)

In early March, with the weather warming and her day of reckoning with the power company fast approaching, Shawna Brewer slid her bill from the envelope and tried not to cry. She owed $4,242.44.

It was the beginning of another month for Shawna, 38, in which her main goal was survival.

Like millions of Americans, she was not just poor, she was poor in ways that often rendered her unaccounted for by many of the government aid programs and charitable groups that could offer help. Her blighted Zip code had become the sort of place where hundreds of families could lose their electricity; few would complain and no one in a position of power or influence would even notice.

Illinois law prohibited winter cutoffs for nonpayment, but Shawna knew that the disconnections would start again soon, and she knew that she would likely be at the top of the power company’s list. “I’ve got a $4,000 light bill that I have no flipping idea how I’m going to pay,” she said. “As soon as it gets warm, we’re going to get shut off.”

Today, the federal government is in the midst of one of the biggest expansions of the social safety net in U.S. history, committing $5 trillion over the last year to keeping American families afloat. President Biden predicted the flood of aid could cut child poverty in half.

And yet for all its successes, the trillions in aid have often failed to reach the poorest Americans in places like the south end of Peoria. Because many in Shawna’s neighborhood have jobs that paid them in cash and because they didn’t report their income to the government, they were unable to qualify for unemployment insurance. Because they moved frequently, failed to file taxes or owed fines for back child support or past criminal activity, they often didn’t receive their full stimulus checks.

As the pandemic dragged on month after month, hundreds struggled simply to keep the lights on. Last fall, 5.4 percent of all residences in Shawna’s 61605 Zip code — about 300 houses — were cut off for failing to pay their power bill. Another 250 houses in a neighboring Zip code — or about 4 percent of all residences — also lost power.

The disconnections, which were reported to the state government by private utilities, should have been a flashing red light that the social safety net was missing Peoria’s poorest.

And yet the cutoffs throughout Peoria’s south end went largely unnoticed. Local charities with money to help with power bills reported no surge in requests for assistance. City officials speculated that the disconnection statistics must be wrong. “They don’t seem real,” said Ross Black, Peoria’s community development director. “We get calls any time someone loses power. … Our phones would have been ringing off the hook.”

One of those unseen people who lost power last fall was Shawna. After four or five days without electricity or gas, she said she switched the bill to her fiance’s name, leading the power company to believe that she, her 11-year-old son and her fiance were new tenants. Her power was still on when the state’s winter moratorium on disconnections kicked in on Nov. 18.

Now it was spring. Shawna couldn’t remember how much she and Theo Friedrich, her fiance, owed when the power went off; she guessed it was about $2,000. She knew they hadn’t made a payment since October. Still, the $4,242.44 they owed seemed unfathomably large — especially when set against her $300 a week salary washing dishes at a nearby diner.

She and Theo sat together at their dining room table and tried to figure out what had happened.

“They are trying to raise up prices to compensate for their losses during the pandemic,” Theo said. A roach scampered across the dining room table and Shawna flicked it away.

“Ain’t we on some kind of payment plan with them?” she asked.

But Theo ignored her. He was too immersed in the bill. “Distribution delivery charge, customer charge, qualifying infrastructure plant surcharge,” he read.

“They hate it when you call and question them,” Shawna said. “They just hang up on you.”

Overwhelmed by the decay that afflicted Peoria’s south end, government officials often struggled to see the suffering or dreams of people living there. Residents assumed that their problems were a low priority or a product of their own failings and didn’t seek help even when it was available.

The dynamic rendered them essentially invisible.

The cutoffs, however, did catch the eye of Steve Cicala, an economist at Tufts University, who was searching for a real-time indicator of how the poorest families in America were weathering the pandemic recession. Cicala knew that the recession’s pain wasn’t being shared equally. Wealthier Americans who could work from home and owned stocks were getting richer. Even many poorer Americans saw their savings grow last year thanks to generous unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, according to banking and credit card data.

Cicala knew such financial data often missed the country’s most impoverished citizens who don’t have credit cards or bank accounts. Electricity captured everyone.

“If you want to know where the holes in the safety net are — if people are falling through the cracks and being pushed to the limits of poverty — [electricity] data are more valuable,” Cicala said. In Illinois, the state regulatory commission required utilities to report monthly numbers on arrearages, late fees and disconnections for every Zip code, making it a perfect test case.

Cicala was stunned at what he found. Close to 1 percent of all residences in Illinois were cut off for nonpayment in October 2020. “That 1 percent comes from a whole bunch of zeros, and a really severe shock in concentrated areas,” Cicala said. “There are some places where the pain is really extraordinary.”

Before resuming disconnections, the Illinois Commerce Commission had struck a deal with the power companies that was supposed to protect the most vulnerable customers from disconnection. Those who had lost income because of the pandemic simply had to call the power company and ask for more time to pay their bill. “No written proof is necessary, but you must make the phone call,” the commission wrote in a news release.

Still, about 72,000 families in Illinois, including Shawna’s, lost power last fall. Some said they didn’t call because they didn’t believe that the electricity company would give them more time. Others called but didn’t say the right words or were connected to customer service representatives who didn’t understand the new policy.

Customers in majority Black and Hispanic Zip codes were about four times more likely to be disconnected for nonpayment, according to Cicala. “These results highlight that people who were already in poverty are suffering tremendously,” Cicala said.

They also suggest a broader problem. “The regulator’s goal was zero disconnections. The local safety net [in Peoria] didn’t register a crisis,” he continued. “That would suggest that our social safety net is in grave need of repair.”

Cicala was working temporarily in Zurich and teaching remotely when he published his research. He’d never actually been to Peoria. His paper — “The Incidence of Extreme Economic Stress: Evidence from Utility Disconnections” — offered one view of the recession.

Life on the south end of Peoria provided a more visceral and human view. Shawna was drinking her morning coffee last fall before work when the power company came for her. She spotted the white truck through her glass storm door. By the time she reached the front yard, one of the power company workers was climbing the wood pole on her corner, across the street from a house that had been boarded up for at least a decade.

“You have some f---ing nerve shutting us off during a pandemic!” she screamed.

Inside, Seth was playing video games. “Why are they turning off the power?” he asked Theo, who Seth had come to think of as his father.

“Because we don’t have the money to pay the bill,” Seth remembered him saying.

Soon Shawna’s neighbors were gathering and asking if she was going to be okay. “Another day in the life of Shawna Brewer,” she recalled thinking.

The same scene was playing out all across the south end. A cabdriver returned from her 12-hour overnight shift to find that there was no electricity. She owed $535.17. An out-of-work truck driver woke up and noticed that his bathroom light was off. “That’s weird,” he recalled thinking. “I know I left it on.” It took him three weeks to raise the $513 he needed to get his power back.

Some turned to neighborhood Facebook groups for assistance. “REACHING OUT FOR HELP! IT IS URGENT!” a 40-year-old former nurse who was rebuilding her life after opioid addiction and a divorce wrote on a community page. She owed $1,038 and had tried unsuccessfully to apply for federal low-income heating assistance aid. “Since I do not have my 14-month-old’s social security card they cannot help me,” she continued. “I can afford a hotel room for tonight, but that’s it. Please please please! Any resources would be greatly appreciated!” After about a week with no lights, she got help from a local charity.

A few miles away, a laid-off teacher’s aide called the power company, which wanted a partial payment of at least $170 to restore services to his house. “Lady, you’re not listening,” he recalled telling the power company representative. “I do not have any money right now. I can’t pay my car note or my rent.”

Most of those who were cut off scrambled to get the power back on in a week or two. They opened accounts in a relative’s or partner’s name, like Shawna, or borrowed from friends or family. A few received funds from aid programs.

Others tried to ride out the outages in the cold and the dark. Deion Lutz, 24, a cook earning $10 an hour, made it until January. “I’d cuddle up with my dogs under three blankets,” he said. Then the temperatures plunged below zero and Lutz, worried that he might freeze to death, moved into his sister’s basement. “It was kind of embarrassing,” he said. “I was down on my ass and I’ve never been that way before.” Shortly after he left, someone broke out the front windows and ransacked his home. Today, the floor in the front room is covered with trash, feces and what’s left of Lutz’s possessions.

“I don’t even want my s--- now,” Lutz said. “It’s beyond disgusting.” He’s planning to move to Florida. In all likelihood his former home will have to be boarded up. Another little piece of Peoria will die.

The last few months have been difficult for Shawna too. At a time when the government was offering trillions in aid to those struggling through the pandemic recession and billions to those behind on their power bills, Shawna and the federal government often failed to connect.

In November the governor halted indoor dining, and Shawna was furloughed from the restaurant for two months. She didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits of as much as $440 a week because her job paid cash and she didn’t report her modest income to the federal government. As far as the state and federal government were concerned, she hadn’t been working.

Her fiance, who works at a junkyard towing wrecked cars and stripping parts, lost income as well. Stay-at-home orders and shuttered offices had cut into the number of cars on the road, and he said his pay had slipped from about $1,500 a month to as little as $500 a month. He didn’t receive most of his stimulus money because he owed back child support.

The money Shawna and Theo did get went to pay the water bill, which was costing them about $190 a month because of a leak that they couldn’t seem to find. They spent another $600-$700 in February to replace their home’s broken furnace. The owner let them stay for free in the crumbling two-bedroom house, which had gaping holes in the living room walls, in exchange for a promise that they would help fix it up.

The hardest blow for Shawna came this winter when a gunfight broke out on Shawna’s block and someone fired three bullets that lodged into her home’s siding.

Seth was playing inside just feet from where the bullets struck the house’s facade. He took a painting of a snow-covered mountain cabin that he had fished from the garbage and hung it over the spot in the interior wall where police had dug to dislodge one of the rounds. Two weeks later he moved in with his 20-year-old sister, 10 miles away in Pekin, telling his mother that he was too afraid to stay in the house. Losing her son left her depressed and made it hard to sleep or think about anything else. “I just can’t look forward to the future right now because my son isn’t living with me,” Shawna said.

About a week after she opened the massive power bill, Shawna was getting ready for her dishwashing job. She was determined to feel better about herself despite another sleepless night, the headache that radiated down the back of her skull, and the fear that she was failing the person who meant the most to her in the world: her 11-year-old son.

So before she headed off to work, she decided to put on some of the makeup that she had bought a few days earlier at the dollar store. She dabbed her cheeks with concealer and drew the eyeliner pencil above her lashes.

“I don’t know,” she said, exhaling. “I’m not really feeling it.”

As they did almost every morning, Shawna and Theo stopped on the way to work to buy cigarettes and lottery scratch-offs, which they played together at the end of the day.

“It’s kind of our original thing,” she said of the $10-$20 a day habit.

“Maybe one of these days we’ll win enough to take a day off,” Theo said as he pulled up in front of the restaurant where Shawna had worked since September. She kissed him goodbye and rushed inside.

The Garden Street Cafe traced the history of Peoria and so many other struggling Rust Belt cities. Peoria began as a whiskey town, and the cafe’s founder had worked at the Hiram Walker distillery, once the largest in the world, before it closed in 1981. He opened the diner down the street one year later.

In its early days the restaurant drew a steady stream of shoppers from Szold’s department store — now the City of Refuge Worship Center — across the street. Bankers in suits and ties came in for lunch. So too did workers from Caterpillar Inc., which was based in Peoria and sold mining and manufacturing equipment worldwide. When the wind was right, the smell of fresh loaves from the Butternut Bread Company, a half-mile away, filled the air.

The Butternut factory closed in 2012, a loss of 130 jobs. Six years later, Caterpillar moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago, complaining that it couldn’t lure top-flight executives to Peoria. In the early 1990s, nearly 1 in 4 jobs in Peoria was in manufacturing. Today, it’s 1 in 8.

Shawna’s father, who worked as a mechanic and in machine shops, battled alcoholism. Her mother found a job at a now-shuttered hot dog stand. One of Shawna’s most vivid childhood memories is being evicted from their house when her parents couldn’t come up with the rent.

The sheriff deputies left their possessions piled up on the sidewalk. Shawna and her brother moved into a room in her aunt’s house, while her parents dragged a mattress into the garage and nailed insulation to the walls to keep out the winter cold. By 13, Shawna had stopped going to school. By 18, she had given birth to two daughters and was struggling with an addiction to methamphetamines.

“My childhood wasn’t very nice, but it is what it is,” she said.

Today, the 61605 Zip code is among the poorest in the country. The area is home to four liquor stores and zero supermarkets. A Kroger and a Save A Lot both shut down in the last three years, leaving behind only corner stores that sell milk for $4 a gallon, twice the price of a grocery store. The Garden Street Cafe is the only restaurant on the south end — fast food or otherwise — with tables.

For Shawna, landing the six-day-a-week dishwashing job was a bright spot in an otherwise bleak year. Rick Burr, the cafe's owner, recently encouraged Shawna to get her food handling license so she could help with cooking and serving. Shawna took it as an exciting sign. “I think it shows he likes my work,” she said.

A television propped on a cardboard box in the restaurant’s kitchen was playing daytime talk shows that revolved around promiscuous teens and paternity tests. “That ain’t my baby. She’s a ho!” someone was screaming on “Maury.” Shawna kept one ear on the action as she washed dishes.

Most of the cafe’s customers were regulars. “How you doing Kenny?” she asked as she cleared a table. He came in every day for a to-go box of fried shrimp that he washed down with a bucket of five beers at the bar next door.

“Still breathing,” Kenny replied.

“Well, that’s a good thing,” Shawna said.

A woman with a poof of white hair, whom Shawna had known since childhood and referred to as her “aunt,” occupied a corner table. Shawna’s favorite customers were Delores and her daughter Chris, who had spent 41 years working at Caterpillar before taking early retirement in 2009. Her last job was as a personal assistant to the company’s chief operating officer. The women lingered over bowls of oatmeal.

“They talk to you because they want to,” Shawna said, “not because you work here.”

Shawna had set up informed delivery on her phone, which gave her a daily, digital preview of the letters bound for her mailbox. She checked her account every few hours, hoping for her latest stimulus check, due to arrive any day. At $2,800, the March check was going to be the biggest one yet. A little after noon, she spotted a letter that looked like it was from the federal government.

Around 2:30 p.m. she raced home to check her mailbox. Empty. Either the mail was late or, she worried, someone had stolen her check. “It’s like the universe is against me,” she groaned.

She spotted a little girl playing in her front yard. “Kai Kai!” she called. “Can you ask your mom if the mail has come yet?” The puzzled girl didn’t answer.

“Hey, Frog!” she yelled to a neighbor up the street. But he couldn’t hear her over the rap music blaring from his car.

She stopped three girls in matching school uniforms strolling up the sidewalk. One was carrying an envelope. “Letter from school,” the girl told her without breaking stride.

When the postal worker finally arrived, Shawna raced to the front door and flung it open, startling him. “Oh, for the love of God!” he exclaimed.

Shawna tore open the letter from the IRS. No check, just blocks of bureaucratic prose: “The U.S. Department of the Treasury issued you a second economic impact payment (EIP2) as provided by the COVID-related Tax Relief Act of 2020.”

Shawna had received only half of the $1,200 she was entitled to in January because she had filed her taxes incorrectly. The form letter seemed to be saying that the rest of her money was on its way.

Wouldn’t it be crazy if you got all your checks on the same day?” one of Shawna’s co-workers at the cafe asked her. Her $600 check was set to arrive in a matter of days. As part of the American Rescue Plan, she was due the $2,800 stimulus as well as a $250-a-month child tax credit that would start in July and net her about $3,000 over the next 12 months.

The prospect of all that money was enough to spur her dreams.

Sometimes she talked about using the money to pay off $825 in fines so that she could get her driver’s license back and land a better job. A Caterpillar subcontractor was paying $12-$15 an hour plus overtime, but the warehouse wasn’t on a bus line.

Sometimes she and Theo talked about trying to fix up the house. Black mold climbed the wall in the kitchen where the wallpaper had peeled away. There were holes in the linoleum floor and in the walls in the living room.

More than anything Shawna wanted to bring home her son, who had been living with his 20-year-old sister, Haylee Creamer, since February.

In mid-March, Haylee took him on a week-long trip to visit family in Georgia. Shawna tried to call him at least once a day. “Once we get this stimulus check, what do you think about Mommy and you going back to Georgia to visit?” she asked on one of her calls. “We’ll take care of the bills and see what’s left.”

Then there was the $4,242.44 power bill.

The stimulus package passed in March included $4.5 billion in funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helped with utility bills. But the pandemic, which forced families to navigate the application process online, was making it harder for people to get the aid. When Shawna was cut off last fall, the bill was in her eldest daughter Samantha Creamer’s name, further complicating matters.

Even as arrearages and late fees soared in 2020, the number of low-income families in Illinois taking part in the utility assistance program fell to 221,000 households, 30,000 fewer than in 2019, according to state officials. Only about 18 percent of eligible families received the aid in Illinois last year.

Cuts over the last decade to the number of social workers made connecting even harder. A decade ago, the Peoria County Health Administrator received a list each month of households that lost power and could dispatch a case manager to help them apply for assistance. But the health department stopped requesting the monthly list when it eliminated many of its case workers.

The cuts left Shawna largely unknown to the agencies that might have been able to help her.

The pressure also weighed heavily on Shawna’s daughter Haylee, who had committed to raising her 11-year-old brother.

Shawna was 18 and struggling with a drug addiction when Haylee, who was raised by her grandparents, was born. In high school, Haylee had posted her grades each semester on her Facebook page and insisted that she was going to attend Harvard University. In 2018, she graduated 10th in her high school class and, instead of Harvard, headed off to community college.

Today she works 12-hour shifts as a certified nursing assistant and was recently accepted into Illinois Central College’s nursing school. She and her fiance were determined to raise Seth, who struggled with learning disabilities and had missed stretches of classes during the pandemic.

“Trying to do [online] school with him is a struggle,” Haylee said. “It’s rough but it’s worth it.”

Sometimes she, too, felt unseen. She was doing all the right things — going to school, working long hours, paying her bills — but no one was rushing to help her. “I am out here busting my ass at work,” she said. “Sometimes, I feel like I’m barely making it. It seems like no one cares when you are doing something.”

In late March, Shawna was still waiting for her stimulus check to come in the mail; still hoping she could find a home that would be fit for Seth; still wondering where she and Theo would go if their power was disconnected again.

On a warm spring day, she finished her shift at the restaurant and started walking home past shuttered businesses and recently abandoned homes, satellite TV dishes hanging forlornly off their worn siding. She had been looking online at a small house for sale in Yates City, Ill., even though she knew the $13,000 down payment was well beyond her means.

“Right now, Seth is going to stay at his sister’s house until a miracle happens,” she said, “because that’s what we need.”

She pushed open the door to her home. Family pictures hung crooked on walls coated with a brown film from thousands of cigarettes. There were holes in the drywall. Old circuit boards that she and Theo recycled to pick up extra cash littered the floor. The television cast a dim blue glow.

In January, Shawna had used part of her stimulus check to sign up for cable but had to let it go after only a few weeks to pay other bills. She half-jokingly told Theo that she left the TV on hoping that it would motivate him to find some way to restore the service — to provide a flicker of entertainment in their lives. For now, though, there was no picture. No sound. All that remained was a message from the cable company in white, block letters: “Something is not quite right.”

An Unsurprising Surprise

I suspect a lot of us are thinking that having gotten rid of Trump, we avoided sliding ass-first into a fascist catastrophe, and that means we can relax a little.

But it seems the party that wants to drown government in the bathtub in order to put us all under the control of corporations &/or private holdings (ie: plutocrats) has decided to go ahead with their attempts to kill democracy outright and in the open.

Vox:

In late March, Georgia passed a restrictive new voting law that, in effect, permits the Republican state legislature to put partisan operatives in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning precincts. The law is one of at least eight proposals from GOP lawmakers in state legislatures around the country for increasing partisan influence over electoral administration — and one of more than 360 state bills that would curtail voting rights in one way or another.

New political science research suggests this wave of attempts to restrict the franchise is not an anomaly: Republican control over state government is correlated with large and measurable declines in the health of a state’s democracy.

The paper, by University of Washington professor Jake Grumbach, constructs a quantitative measure of democratic health at the state level in the US. He looked at all 50 states between 2000 and 2018 to figure out why some states got more democratic over this period and others less. The conclusions were clear: The GOP is the problem.

“Results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period,” he writes.

While many researchers have attempted to quantify the health of democracy in different countries around the world, Grumbach’s paper is the first effort to develop some kind of ranking system for US states. It’s still in working paper form, which means it has not been peer-reviewed. But Grumbach’s work has been widely praised by other political scientists who had read a draft or seen him present it at a conference.

“This is one of those papers that makes me proud to be an empirical political scientist. It’s important, carefully done, and just plain smart,” writes Vin Arceneaux, a professor at Temple University. “It helps us not only understand American politics but democratic backsliding in general.”

And it’s yet another piece of evidence that the Republican Party has become an anti-democratic political faction.

What the paper found

When I spoke to Grumbach on the phone about his work, he explained that his approach was inspired by V-Dem, the political science gold standard for quantitatively measuring democracy in countries around the world.

V-Dem breaks down democracy into individual component parts, like whether the press is free or the people can assemble peacefully, which can be measured and added together to produce an overall “democracy” score for any one country. You can’t just apply this to American states directly; no place in the United States is violently repressive in the way that China or Russia is, so the measurements might not be precise enough to clearly illustrate differences between states.

Grumbach’s State Democracy Index (SDI) is the first attempt to use a V-Dem-style approach to measure the more subtle ailments afflicting democracy in the United States. Metrics include the extent to which a state is gerrymandered at the federal level, whether it permits same-day voter registration, and whether felons are permitted to vote. He also includes criminal justice indicators, like a state’s Black incarceration rate, that are designed to measure state coercion.

To turn these metrics into an actual score, Grumbach uses a process that’s part subjective and part algorithmic.

The subjective part strives to determine whether an individual practice, like voter ID laws, is helpful or harmful to democracy. Grumbach then uses an algorithm to determine how much each of these practices should count toward a state’s overall score, either negatively or positively. This automated process ended up downplaying the criminal justice metrics, which barely factor into a state’s ultimate score. By contrast, the algorithm gave significant weight to electoral practices like gerrymandering (negative) and same-day registration (positive).

With a system in hand, Grumbach then proceeded to score all 50 states in every year between 2000 and 2018, from -3 (worst) to 2 (best). The following maps show the changes in state scores; the lighter the color, the worse the score is.

Just eyeballing the map, you can pick up on the clear pattern of states with Republican governments scoring lower in 2018 than they did in 2000. That year, the average GOP-controlled state was slightly more small-d democratic than its average Democratic-controlled peer. Over the next two decades, the average Republican score declined dramatically.

There could be all sorts of reasons why this is happening. Maybe Republican states had high levels of demographic change, causing white voters to embrace voter suppression in response. Maybe Republicans won power in states in which the parties were highly polarized, which raised the stakes of political conflict and caused incumbents to try to secure their hold on power.

To test these theories, Grumbach ran a series of regression analyses designed to isolate correlations between a state’s democracy score and variables like percentage of nonwhite voters and measures of state-level polarization. Strikingly, these things either barely mattered or didn’t matter at all.

Only two things really did: whether a state was controlled by Republicans and whether Republicans had gained that control recently. Republican-controlled states in general were far more likely to perform worse in the State Democracy Index over time; Republican states with a recent history of close elections, like Wisconsin and North Carolina, were especially likely to decline from 2000 to 2018.

“Among Republican controlled states ... those whose recent elections have been especially competitive are the states to take steps to reduce their democratic performance,” he writes.

The paper’s findings suggest a consistent national Republican policy on democracy being enacted at the state level to make it harder for voters to take away their power.

“Regardless of the particular circumstances or geography, state governments controlled by same party behave similarly when they take power,” Grumbach writes. “The Republican controlled governments of states as distinct as Alabama, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina have taken similar actions with respect to democratic institutions.”
The GOP’s anti-democratic agenda is real

To be sure, this is just one study and not yet peer-reviewed, to boot, so it shouldn’t be taken as definitive. And skeptics can certainly poke holes in some of Grumbach’s choices.

For instance, one could question just how bad the anti-democratic infractions Grumbach cites really are. Voter ID laws, to take one example, counted against many Republican states — but the evidence on whether they actually reduce voter turnout is surprisingly mixed. A conservative might object that Grumbach is making a mountain out of a molehill: creating a metric that makes Republican states look worse than Democratic ones when, in reality, the differences just aren’t that big.

But methodological quibbles aside, the paper does seem to capture something real. One of its most valuable contributions is the way it treats gerrymandering.

Drawing lines to give your party a leg up disproportionate to its numbers is one of those practices that no one can really defend in democratic terms. Elected authoritarians abroad, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, have abused gerrymanders to ensure that they maintain a hammerlock on national power despite winning less than a majority of national votes.

The SDI shows that, in the United States, gerrymandering is not a “both sides” problem. It uses 16 different measurements of gerrymandering to assess how prevalent the tactic is in different states; 10 of these measures are the most heavily weighted factors in a state’s ultimate democracy score. These metrics show that Republican legislators abuse gerrymandering in a way that Democrats simply do not.

Some of this abuse has happened quite recently. Take a look at North Carolina’s SDI score over time — it starts to plunge shortly after Republicans drew new maps in 2011, ones that allowed them to win 77 percent of the state’s House seats in 2018 with just under 50 percent of the state vote:

(It’s worth noting that one of the worst abuses by North Carolina’s Republican legislature — stripping Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper of key powers after his 2016 victory — doesn’t factor into the state’s score, as Grumbach hasn’t decided on a satisfactory way to quantify it. A similar maneuver performed by the Wisconsin state legislature after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s victory in 2018 also doesn’t count against the state’s already dismal SDI score.)

Offering empirical ballast for a phenomenon we’ve observed in real time these past few years, Grumbach’s paper is another passage in the dominant political story of our time: the Republican Party’s drift against democracy. And, crucially, it’s a drift that began before Trump and his allegations of fraud in 2020. Republicans didn’t need Trump to enact extreme gerrymandering after the 2010 census; his anti-democratic instincts helped bring out something that was already there.

We have every reason to expect things will get worse, not better.

Georgia’s law, for example, is more worrying than even voter ID laws. It gives Republicans more direct control over election administration, allowing them to bend the rules in their favor: enforcing strict standards for ballot disqualification in Democratic-leaning precincts and lax ones in Republican-leaning ones, for example.

Once 2020 census data is available, states will do another round of redistricting. This time, those who want to tilt the field in their favor will have a freer hand due to a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that partisan gerrymanders can’t be stopped by courts.

There’s a reason that Grumbach calls states, in the paper’s title, “Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding.” Republicans have been engaging in a series of grand experiments in rigging a political system one state at a time — one that is, slowly but surely, undermining the foundations of America’s free political system.