California man gets 3 years over threats to lawmakers, journalists who said Trump lost
Phil Helsel December 22, 2021
A California man who threatened dozens of people, including politicians, journalists and their families, who said that then-President Donald Trump lost the November election has been sentenced to three years, prosecutors said.
Robert Lemke, 36, of Bay Point in the San Francisco Bay Area, was sentenced Monday by a federal judge, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said.
The targets included U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., whose brother was sent a text on Jan. 6 that read: “Your brother is putting your entire family at risk with his lies and other words. We are armed and nearby your house,” according to court documents.
When Lemke was arrested, a criminal complaint did not name Jeffries, but the congressman has said he was targeted.
Two journalists for CNN were also threatened. The network’s Brian Stelter said he spoke at Lemke’s sentencing and wrote about the experience Monday.
Stelter said that anchor Don Lemon told the judge, “I am tired of looking over my shoulder” and “I am tired of being called ‘fake news’ and even more horrendous names,” including racial and anti-gay slurs.
Stelter said Lemon also rejected arguments that Lemke was misled by social media after Trump’s loss. “For people like him, it is never their fault,” Lemon said, according to Stelter.
Lemke sent threats to about 50 people from November through early January, prosecutors said. Some said “Stop telling lies; Biden did not win, he will not be president,” according to court documents.
Prosecutors called it “a concerted campaign, sustained over more than two months, to terrify and intimidate dozens of journalists, members of Congress and their families in the wake of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.”
The threats contained personal information, including addresses and in some cases, photos of homes interiors, according to court documents. Text messages were sent Jan. 6 during the riot at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
One threat sent Jan. 9 read: “You do understand not only your life, but your families” are at risk. “We know everything.”
Lemke, who was arrested in late January, pleaded guilty to making threatening interstate communications in October.
His federal public defender did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday night.
Lemke’s attorney wrote ahead of sentencing that Lemke was isolated and fell down a social media rabbit hole, where he’d been convinced the election was fraudulent and he lost sense of himself. Lemke in a letter to the judge wrote that he was ashamed of his conduct.
Prosecutors wrote Lemke had shown a lack of remorse. They wrote in a sentencing memorandum that he wrote his mother on Dec. 1 that “I’m the victim here,” and that in November, he described himself as a “political prisoner.”
5 Ice Age Mammoths Discovered Near Busy Road in England
Cristen Hemingway Jaynes December 21, 2021
An illustration of a family of woolly mammoths grazing on what is left of the grasses as winter approaches in an Ice Age scene. Aunt_Spray / iStock / Getty Images PlusNear a busy road in Britain’s Cotswolds, Sally and Neville Hollingworth, a couple who spends part of their time hunting fossils, made an extraordinary find: The skeletons of five prehistoric mammoths that are about 220,000 years old.
The mammoths are in a remarkable state of preservation, with Neanderthal tools — including an axe — and the remains of elk, beetles and snails nearby. Some of the pollen and plant fossils found at the site are extinct.
Once the enormity of the discovery was realized, DigVentures, a team of archeologists who lead crowdfunded archeological excavations, were called in to dig the site.
“Exciting doesn’t cover it,” Lisa Westcott Wilkins of DigVentures told The Observer, as The Guardian reported. “Other mammoths have been found in the UK but not in this state of preservation. They’re in near-pristine condition. You can’t take it in.”ADVERTISING
“Archaeological sites from this period are rare, and critical for understanding Neanderthal behaviour across Britain and Europe. Why did so many mammoths die here? Could Neanderthals have killed them? What can they tell us about life in ice-age Britain? The range of evidence at this site gives us a unique chance to address these questions,” Wilkins added.
The mammoth fossils are thought to be from a time when the region was between two glacial periods and experiencing mild weather. Neanderthals traveled south to the area seeking warmer temperatures, The Guardian reported.
The type of extinct prehistoric elephant discovered by the Nevilles, the Steppe mammoth, is the largest of its species, and originated in Africa around five million years earlier. This type of mammoth weighed two or three times as much as an African elephant. Not much is known about how the Neanderthals existed in ice-age Britain, but clues are hoped to be gained from the well-preserved site.
“We have evidence of what the landscape was like. We know what plants were growing there. The little things are really revealing the context of these big, iconic giants. It’s a glimpse back in time. That’s incredibly important in terms of us understanding how climate change especially impacts environments, ecosystems and species,” Ben Garrod, an evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of East Anglia, told The Observer, The Guardian reported. Garrod will join Sir David Attenborough and archeologists from DigVentures in a BBC One documentary, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, airing on December 30.
Garrod hypothesized that the Neanderthals could have made camp at the site and may have actually chased the mammoths into the mud, or perhaps just happened upon them. “Maybe they found them there already and got a free meal,” he said to the Telegraph, as reported by the Daily Mail.
Garrod told The Observer that finding such intact skeletons is a rare find in England, The Guardian reported. DigVentures, who raised funds for the digging, analysis and research of the artifacts, hopes to raise more funds for further excavations at the site. Natural flooding is currently keeping the site safe from fossil hunters.
The ‘Cowboy Cocktail’: How Wyoming became one of the world’s top tax havens
Debbie Cenziper and Will Fitzgibbon December 20, 2021
JACKSON, Wyo. – The honky-tonk bar under neon lights on the town square serves Grand Teton Amber Ale and Yellowstone Lemonade. The Cowboy Coffee Co. offers bison chili, and the Five & Dime General Store sells Stetson hats and souvenirs made from bullets.
In this tourist-friendly Western town, home to four celebrated arches fashioned from elk antlers, lawyers and estate planners draw customers with something far more exclusive.
It’s called the “Cowboy Cocktail,” and in recent years the coveted financial arrangement has attracted a new set of outsiders to the least populated state in America.
The cocktail and variations of it – consisting of a Wyoming trust and layers of private companies with concealed ownership – allow the world’s wealthy to move and spend money in extraordinary secrecy, protected by some of the strongest privacy laws in the country and, in some cases, without even the cursory oversight performed by regulators in other states.
Millionaires and billionaires around the world have taken note. In recent years, families from India to Italy to Venezuela have abandoned international financial centers for law firms in Wyoming’s ski resorts and mining towns, helping to turn the state into one of the world’s top tax havens.
A dozen international clients who created Wyoming trusts were identified in the Pandora Papers, a trove of more than 11.9 million records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with The Washington Post that expose the movement of wealth around the world. The documents offer a rare look at Wyoming’s discreet financial sector and the people who rely on its services.
One was Moscow billionaire Igor Makarov, named under a 2017 law requiring the U.S. Treasury Department to list oligarchs and political figures close to the Russian government. Makarov’s company faced questions in the past about controversial transactions with Russia’s state-owned gas giant and about possible influence peddling involving the daughter of a U.S. congressman.
The matriarch of Argentina’s Baggio family, whose beverage company was accused by local officials of dumping industrial waste and whose son is embroiled in an investigation into money laundering, also moved the management of its wealth to Wyoming.
So did the late Kalil Haché Malkún of the Dominican Republic. The polo player and army officer managed the private estates of reviled Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ordered the deaths of political enemies and thousands of Haitians.
For years, anti-money-laundering experts and law enforcement have warned federal and state lawmakers that suspect money was flowing into U.S. tax havens, eluding taxing authorities, creditors and criminal investigators. In Wyoming, with the support of state lawmakers, the industry charged ahead, promoting a suite of financial arrangements to potential customers around the world.
At the heart of those arrangements are trusts, legal agreements that allow people to stash away money and other assets so they are protected from creditors and incur few or no tax obligations for themselves or their heirs. In exchange for these benefits, trust owners appoint an independent manager – typically a relative, friend or financial adviser – to determine when and how money is invested and spent.
Wyoming is one of a small number of states that allow customers to place a private company – often controlled by family members – at the helm of their trust, ensuring complete control of the assets and an additional layer of financial secrecy.
Some of the companies are unregulated, exempt from periodic examinations and other state scrutiny.
Customers can also establish a second company inside their trusts to hold the assets, such as property and bank accounts, concealing wealth behind yet another corporate layer.
Using this approach – the Cowboy Cocktail – wealthy people can move money into the United States and invest and spend it with a level of anonymity found in few other tax havens.
“Wyoming is advertising itself as the new onshore offshore [financial center] – it’s going to get the clientele,” said University of Richmond law professor Allison Tait, a trust and estate expert who has studied the state’s layered financial instruments, including the cocktail.
“It’s like a wrapped gift inside a wrapped gift,” she said. “The more wrapping you put on, the harder it is to figure out if there has been tax avoidance or evasion or even financial crime. Very few people know what you’re doing, basically.”
The Haché family did not respond to requests for comment. Through his attorney, Makarov said the Treasury Department list was copied from a public source and “widely discredited,” that he has no personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that he has never been charged with criminal wrongdoing. The attorney said Makarov’s Wyoming trust was properly disclosed.
A representative for the Baggio family declined to comment. The family has previously said it reported the Wyoming trust to officials in Argentina.
There is no evidence in the Pandora Papers documents that the trusts in Wyoming sheltered criminal proceeds.
In a competitive global market, Wyoming’s financial incentives have stood out. One trust company 8,700 miles away in Singapore recommended Wyoming on its website as a go-to tax haven that would “completely shield” clients’ names and assets. “Offshore Wyoming, USA,” noted another firm, this one in Ukraine’s bustling capital, Kyiv.
Trust companies in Wyoming now manage at least $31.5 billion in assets, according to the state.
Time and again, Wyoming lawmakers suggested the industry would bring jobs and other economic benefits to a state that has long depended on special taxes imposed on coal, oil and other natural resources.
“It’s friendly for business is the bottom line,” said former Republican House member Bunky Loucks, who spent 10 years in the state legislature. “We were hopeful . . . just to be on the cutting edge.”
Hoped-for tax revenue, however, did not materialize. The Republican-controlled legislature rebuffed sporadic calls for even a small tax on the profits of companies that create trusts.
Former Republican lawmaker Michael Von Flatern, who unsuccessfully pushed to tax the industry, said lawmakers did not consider all the possible sources of money that could flow into the state.
“We never thought about the oligarchs or the dictator’s friends,” he said.
In 1977, lawyers and accountants for an out-of-state oil company helped persuade Wyoming to authorize a financial arrangement found nowhere else in America.
State lawmakers approved the formation of limited liability companies, now widely used across the country to help conceal the identities of owners and protect their assets from creditors.
The idea had failed twice in Alaska, but supporters found a willing home in Wyoming, which in the 1960s skirted bankruptcy and by the ’70s was heavily dependent on tax revenue generated by fossil fuels.
“We’re sort of at the whim of what happens with market prices worldwide,” said Phil Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wyoming. “There was a good deal of consensus in those days that we have to diversify our economy. . . . [Lawmakers] would try every angle.”
Over the next three decades, lawmakers modified the groundbreaking law, including changes that made it easier for company owners to obscure their identities. “Wyoming home cooking,” industry representatives, lawmakers and legislative advisers called the changes.
Lawmakers also encouraged the growth of the trust industry, adopting more than 100 changes to the state’s trust laws by 2011. Around the same time, the Cowboy Cocktail and its variations took off.
“It’s not the latest trendy cocktail on the club scene,” one trust and estate planner from Georgia noted on his website. “A Cowboy Cocktail is a double-barreled approach to asset protection that may be the best thing since sliced bread.”
“ALAKAZAM! Ultimate Cowboy Cocktail!” wrote two attorneys, one from Wyoming and the other from Tennessee, in a presentation about the novel setup to tax planners.
The addition of private trust companies, a critical component of the cocktail, was particularly appealing to customers seeking higher levels of control and privacy.
“Keep it in the family,” Frontier Administrative Services in Jackson posted on its website, which noted that it serves dozens of private trust companies.
Wyoming offers two types of private trust companies, both generally recommended for those with trust assets of $100 million or more. One is reported to the state; regulators with the Division of Banking review company operations. Attorneys say that the regulated option can help families avoid unexpected tax bills and other inquiries.
The other option is an unregulated company, allowed under Wyoming law. Unregulated private trust companies operate outside the supervision of the state and provide an even higher degree of secrecy.
Wyoming has seven regulated private trust companies. Officials say they do not know how many unregulated companies exist. A committee of lawmakers in 2018 estimated that lawyers were creating as many as 100 unregulated companies a year.
The financial tools found broad support among state lawmakers, who over nearly two decades backed almost 20 laws to bolster the industry, with few dissenting votes, state records show.
Wyoming is now among the 10 least restrictive, most customer-friendly trust jurisdictions in the world, according to a study last year by Adam Hofri-Winogradow, a law professor and trust expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The study ranked Wyoming ahead of South Dakota, an international tax haven featured in the Pandora Papers investigation published by The Post and the ICIJ in October.
Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, Delaware and Nevada were named in October by the European Parliament as hubs of “financial and corporate secrecy.”
Citing the Pandora Papers, the group urged the United States to better police the industry and join a coalition of more than 100 countries that automatically share information about the financial transactions of noncitizens.
“For some time now, the U.S. has been the weak link in the international anti-money-laundering regime,” said Josh Rudolph, a member of the National Security Council staff in the Obama and Trump administrations. “The European Parliament is absolutely right – we are the enablers.”
The Pandora Papers records, while not comprehensive, reveal a series of Wyoming transactions mostly between 2016 and 2019 as well as the clients behind them. Some moved the management of their wealth from traditional tax havens in Europe and the Caribbean, capitalizing on key ingredients of the Cowboy Cocktail.
Makarov, the Russian billionaire, turned to Wyoming in late 2016, setting up a Wyoming trust and an unregulated private trust company to manage it, Pandora Papers documents show. Makarov put a twist on the cocktail: placing into the trust three companies established in the tight-lipped British Virgin Islands, including one that owned a 13-seat private jet.
“Like a ‘Cowboy on the Beach Cocktail’ or something,” Tait, the Virginia professor, said of the arrangement.
Makarov and the oil-and-gas company he founded, Itera, faced scrutiny in Europe and the United States. In the early 2000s, media reports raised questions about whether the company had improperly received loan guarantees and other aid from Russia’s state-controlled gas company, Gazprom. Shortly after, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency suspended a $868,000 grant to Itera.
In 2006, the FBI searched Itera’s Florida office in connection with an influence-peddling investigation involving a U.S. congressman. In 2009, Italian media reported that Makarov was investigated for potential ties to Mafia figures and that the investigation was at risk of being closed because of a lack of cooperation by foreign authorities.
In an unclassified report in 2018, the Treasury Department included Makarov on a list of dozens of Russian oligarchs.
Through his lawyer, Makarov said he has no ties to organized crime and called the Italian media report “completely false.” The U.S. influence-peddling investigation did not result in arrests or charges against Makarov or anyone associated with the company, said his lawyer, Brian Wolf. Gazprom never provided resources or clients to Itera and together they operated in accordance with Russian law, Wolf said.
Makarov established the trust in Wyoming based on professional advice, the attorney said. “All required disclosures have been made and transparency laws have been followed,” he said.
Celia María Agueda Munilla, the 83-year-old matriarch of the Baggio family in Argentina, also set up a trust overseen by an unregulated private trust company in Wyoming. The trust, established in 2018, held a company in the British Virgin Islands with a $7 million account at a bank in Miami, the Pandora Papers show.
Munilla and her late husband founded RPB, one of Argentina’s largest producers of boxed fruit juice and wine. Munilla remains a director of the company, according to the family company website.
For years, media reports show, government officials and local residents have accused the company of polluting land and waterways. The company agreed to stop dumping waste in 2016, according to a public statement by local authorities.
Last year, Argentine authorities filed a criminal complaint against a number of businessmen, including one of Munilla’s sons, a majority shareholder, accusing them of burning grasslands for economic gain. The Pandora Papers do not list him as a beneficiary of the Wyoming trust.
The Financial Intelligence Unit in Argentina stepped in as a plaintiff in the ongoing case, which it called the “Baggio file,” alleging possible money laundering.
A representative for the family previously said that it declared the Wyoming trust and its assets to Argentina’s revenue authority. Neither the family nor its company responded to questions about the criminal investigation.
One of the more recent transactions described in the Pandora Papers was made by the late Haché, who once served as estate manager to brutal Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo.
The regime ordered the murders of tens of thousands of Haitians, along with three prominent sisters who had protested Trujillo, according to historical accounts.
The regime is also believed to have abducted a Columbia University graduate student and lecturer in New York City before transporting him to the Dominican Republic in a case described by the U.S. Justice Department as a “political murder.” One prominent Trujillo historian suggested the body could have been fed to sharks.
After Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, his son Ramfis took control of the country and rounded up the assassins, most of whom were killed.
Haché allegedly witnessed torture in a notorious Dominican prison but refused to join and fainted, according to two public accounts, one by a foundation that commemorates the men who killed Trujillo and the other by one of the men’s sons. Ramfis Trujillo, living in exile, was convicted of murder.
Haché later described himself as a businessman; family interests included an oil and lubricant company, records show. In 2019, Haché, his wife and two daughters set up a Wyoming trust and an unregulated private trust company to own two British Virgin Islands companies with bank accounts in Miami, the Pandora Papers records show.
Haché and his wife died of covid-19 last year. His family did not respond to a request for comment.
In a 2013 interview with a Dominican Republic journalist, Haché described his connection to the Trujillo regime. “How could I be disloyal to a family that distinguished me with all their affection?” he said.
He added that his loyalty was “to the person who distinguished me, not to . . . the dictatorship.”
Current and former state lawmakers said they always intended to build a clean industry that protected the privacy of reputable clients.
“There are countries out there that want to protect the criminals because they believe it’s of economic benefit to have bad actors fund their state,” said state Sen. Chris Rothfuss, the Democratic minority leader. “We don’t have that interest. We will throw them under the bus as quickly as we can.”
However, Rothfuss acknowledged that regulators are often kept in the dark by the state’s own privacy laws, left dependent on occasional tips or media accounts for information about trust industry clients.
In October, U.S. lawmakers called for the most significant overhaul of anti-money-laundering regulations since 9/11. If approved, the changes would require lawyers and trust companies to investigate their clients and sources of wealth to ensure that suspicious money does not breach the U.S. financial system.
Even with more transparency, Rothfuss said, the state banking division doesn’t have enough staff to monitor industry compliance. “We don’t necessarily have the resources to be proactive,” he said.
The Division of Banking has three employees who examine the state’s regulated trust companies. “We are probably slightly overstaffed in this area, but we are anticipating continued growth in this area and want to ensure appropriate resources,” said Albert Forkner, the state’s banking commissioner.
In a statement, the Wyoming Trust Association said it “supports effective and meaningful regulatory oversight of the trust industry.” The association also said the industry would support increases in the fees paid to the state by regulated trust companies.
Von Flatern, the former lawmaker, said in an interview at his home in Gillette that the scant financial contributions by the trust sector over the years have contributed to Wyoming’s fragile economy, undercut by the coal industry’s years-long decline.
In the eastern Wyoming mining town, a rotary drill, an oversize coal shovel and a 411,580-pound engine are displayed in a local park. Coal mines rumble with the sound of earthmovers. Trains with dozens of cars haul coal through the city, winding past Lula Belle’s Cafe, where miners gather for coffee before their shifts start.
“If you come in as a trust company or a banker, you don’t pay your way,” Von Flatern said. “We didn’t gain anything.”
About this story:
Will Fitzgibbon is with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Design and development by Jake Crump and Frank Hulley-Jones.
Brenda Medina and Delphine Reuter at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Mika Velikovskiy at iStories (Russia), Alicia Ortega Hasbún at Noticias SIN (Dominican Republic), Paolo Biondani at L’Espresso (Italy), and Sandra Crucianelli and Mariel Fitz Patrick at Infobae (Argentina) contributed to this report.
The Pandora Papers is an investigation based on more than 11.9 million documents revealing the flows of money, property and other assets concealed in the offshore financial system. The Washington Post and other news organizations exposed the involvement of political leaders, examined the growth of the industry within the United States and demonstrated how secrecy shields assets from governments, creditors and those abused or exploited by the wealthy and powerful. The trove of confidential information, the largest of its kind, was obtained by the ICIJ, which organized the investigation. Read more about this project.
On Dec. 19, 2021, the West Virginia Democrat said in an interview that he couldn’t support the bill in its current form because of the impact he says it would have on increasing consumer prices and the national debt. The decision effectively killed one of Biden’s top economic priorities.
The most recent statistics show inflation, as measured by the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index, was 6.8% in November 2021. This is the highest level since 1982 – yet still a long way from the double-digit inflation experienced back then.
The question, then, is: Could an additional large spending increase cause inflation to accelerate further?
To answer this, it’s useful to put the numbers in some context.
The price tag of the Build Back Better plan passed by the House of Representatives is about $2 trillion, to be spent over a 10-year period. If the spending is spread out evenly, that would amount to about $200 billion a year. That’s only about 3% of how much the government planned to spend in 2021.
Another comparison is to gross domestic product, which is the value of all goods and services produced in a country. U.S. GDP is projected to be $22.3 trillion in 2022. This means that the first year of the bill’s spending would be about 0.8% of the GDP.
While that doesn’t sound like much either, it’s not insignificant. Goldman Sachs had estimated U.S. economic growth at 3.8% in 2022. If the increased spending translated into economic activity on a dollar-for-dollar basis, that could lift growth by over one-fifth.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would increase the deficit by $150.7 billion over a decade, or about $15 billion a year. Again assuming this is spread evenly over the 10 years, it would amount to less than one-tenth of 1% of GDP. Even if elements of the bill are front-loaded, it does not seem that this increase in the government debt would contribute much to inflation.
Some proponents of the bill – including the White House and some economists – have gone further. They have argued that the proposed spending package would actually reduce inflation by increasing the productive capacity of the economy – or its maximum potential output.
This seems implausible to me, at least given the current level of inflation. Historical evidence shows a more productive economy can grow more quickly with relatively little upward pressure on prices. That’s what happened in the U.S. in the 1990s, when the economy grew strongly with little inflation. But it takes time for investments like those in the bill to translate into gains in productivity and economic growth – meaning many of these impacts will be slow to materialize.
And current inflation is likely an acute problem reflecting supply chain disruptions and pent-up demand, challenges that won’t be resolved by expanding the economy’s productive capacity five or more years down the road.
While the $2 trillion in spending would be unlikely to worsen inflation if it were to become law, I believe it could do a lot to materially address these challenges America faces.
I Joined A Far-Right Group Of Moms. What I Witnessed Was Frightening.
Phoebe Cohen December 21, 2021
“Look out for the trigger words,” the woman says. She’s perched on a chair in front of the room. She’s well-dressed yet funky with elegant boots, a demure sweater and some colorful jewelry. “‘Equality,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion,’ ‘marginalization,’… These words are CRT. If you see these words in your kids’ homework, you need to speak out.”
I am in a meeting held by a local right-wing mom’s group. It’s an organization catering to mothers who are bent on protesting at school board meetings to stop the supposedly evil critical race theory agenda from being taught in public schools and address other typically conservative concerns.
There are about 20 of us. We are all maskless, all (apparently) white, mostly women and all on the younger side. I’m in my early 40s and I seem to be the oldest person in the room. A group of children, including my son, the only one in a mask, are scampering merrily in a play area down the hall while a young woman with a baby in her front carrier keeps an eye on them. On the wall by the door of our seminar room is a sign. It says: “Children should be: Heard. Respected. Encouraged. Loved. Appreciated. Guided with Compassion. Given Freedom to Learn Without Coercion.”
What exactly that last phrase means is ominously vague.
For several years now I have been worried about the increasing right-wing views that I have noticed in my demographic (white suburban women). Before 2016, I always thought of Nazis as mainly historical villains that belonged in Indiana Jones movies or old news reels or the sad stories my grandfather told me. Now, however, as the last Holocaust survivors are dying, I am aware that fascism is creeping back into the world at large in terrifying ways.
I wanted to know how I could fight against the appallingly stupid yet dangerously widespread disinformation that is entrancing many of my friends and neighbors. Basic facts about COVID-19 are being dismissed by whole states as part of the “liberal mainstream corporate media.” Bodies from COVID victims were stacking up in ICUs and filling the morgues back in 2020, yet I was still called a “child abuser” by people on the street because I made my son wear a mask. Why are people going nuts? Why are people dismissing science and history in favor of conspiracy theories? And, most importantly, how could we nudge the nation in a saner direction?
I was especially curious about activist groups that specifically target suburban women. These groups seemed intent on making life more dangerous for my child. According to my local right-wing women’s group, masks should not be allowed in school. They told us to stop worrying about kids dying of COVID. They were also vocal about not wanting racism and its deep, formative history in the United States to be taught. Some of these people literally do not believe white privilege exists because, according to them, the Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War were overwhelmingly white. (No, I don’t understand that argument either.) Others feel parts of our country’s history shouldn’t be included in curriculums if it makes people ― namely white people ― uncomfortable.
Every teacher I knew was struggling with COVID restrictions and dealing with students venting their post-pandemic trauma through increasingly disruptive behavior. School districts across the country were dealing with staffing shortages due to teachers burning out from stress. Why add to teachers’ difficulties by threatening school instructors who dared to teach topics like Jim Crow laws, the civil rights movement and the repercussions of slavery in America?
Some of these people literally do not believe white privilege exists because, according to them, the Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War were overwhelmingly white. (No, I don’t understand that argument either.)
To learn more, I joined a local right-wing Facebook group for moms. It’s a private group that requires aspiring members to answer some questions before they’re granted entry. One question was “Why do you want to join?” I replied, “I want to be more involved with my kids’ school.” A week passed and then a moderator for the group contacted me privately. “Can you be more specific about what issue most concerns you?”
Yikes. Security was apparently very tight with this group. They weren’t going to let just any mom glide in using a few generic answers.
“I’m mostly interested in issues that involve keeping kids physically in school,” I messaged back. “Zoom school was devastating for my kid and I don’t want that to happen again.” I wasn’t lying about any of that. It’s one of the few opinions I share with many conservative parents.
The moderator sent me a thumbs-up emoji and let me into the group.
Once inside, I found the members were all stripes of Republican and I was pleasantly surprised to see opinion was not monolithic in the group. Several moms argued against the more far-right posters. One woman posted an objection to children reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” in class. “Divisive Concepts,” she wrote with a broken heart emoji. Underneath was a screenshot of a direct message from someone who appeared to be a student that read, “I’m in English right now. We’re currently reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ There’s a part where Calpurnia brings the kids to church with her and another black woman is being extremely racist towards Scout and Jem. My teacher was saying it was not racism because white people have a higher power over black people in society and that black people can’t be racist.”
There were several indignant emoji reactions in response to this post. One mom, however, pushed back. “Well,” she commented, “the woman at the church complained that Calpurnia had brought white children to the Black church, possibly one of the few places Black people felt any sense of freedom and safety. It’s a little absurd to call the woman racist, given the context.” This comment got a couple “likes” and no pushback.
Another surprise I found in the Facebook group was that some huge media outlets were giving them a platform. One of the founders of the group posted that she had done an interview with The New York Times as part of a story on parental rights.
The New York Times! I was dumbfounded. None of the women who ran the pro-Democrat “Indivisible” groups in my town had even managed to get an interview with the local paper!
I scanned the comments and my eyes nearly popped out of my head.
“It’ll be fine,” another mom wrote after the initial poster expressed concern about The New York Times possibly misquoting her. “It’s a lesson I learned the hard way after the BBC screwed me.”
The BBC! The BBC was talking to these women?
I had to know more.
Unfortunately a few of the moms may have become suspicious of me. Perhaps I had “liked” too many comments by moms pushing back against the anti-CRT posts. Perhaps some moderators had found the very liberal comments that I had posted on other public news articles. In any case, when I expressed interest in joining an in-person roundtable discussion event, I saw that the location of the event suddenly disappeared. I messaged the group moderator about the event location.
“Just a heads up,” she messaged back, “I think most people will not be masking. Is that something you’ll be comfortable with?”
I wondered if she was trying to frighten me off. “Yes, that’s fine,” I replied.
I never received the location, but luckily I had written it down before it disappeared from the event post.
I drove to the meeting with my son. The group moderator had been right. When I joined the meeting, I saw that nobody in the packed room was masked. I gritted my teeth and sat down anyway. I was fully vaccinated and my son wore a mask. He was the only one.
I listened to the speakers at the meeting while they discussed how to run for, campaign and pressure school boards. Many parents bemoaned how they had to pull their kids from public schools over mask mandates and instead enroll them in private schools. It was a common story. I got the impression that most of these families had income levels that allowed them to pay thousands in private school fees because they wanted to take a stand on masks. I was probably the poorest person there.
There was a lot of anger directed at teachers. “Rat out these teachers,” one mother instructed. “Find a lawyer who can challenge these teachers.” Another woman disdainfully noted that teachers “don’t even know what they’re doing half the time. They just pull it off the internet.” A third woman said, “There is no discipline for teachers outside of taking away their credentials.” The battle lines were clearly drawn.
I could see several women visibly flinch at the word “bounty.” One woman said she disliked the term “bounty” but she could see the need for “monetary compensation” for those who turn in teachers that were doing things parents found unacceptable. “There are no repercussions for teachers who break the law,” she said. “If we have to offer monetary compensation for people to report teachers, I see no problem with that. It’s an incentive for people to wake up.”
It wasn’t clear what laws these teachers were supposedly breaking. As far as I could tell, teachers ― like everyone else ― got punished if they broke laws.
Another woman raised her hand. “Look, I know we want to change school boards,” she said, “but elections aren’t until 2023. What do we do until then? We just can’t sit around and let them attack our kids. We have to do SOMETHING.”
I caught a gleam in the woman’s eye I didn’t like. Was there some flirtation with insurrection being suggested here? What, exactly, was she saying?
Another woman nodded. “Listen, we’ve tried playing nice. But they just dig in their heels and dig in their heels. We have to start being not so nice.”
One woman said she disliked the term ‘bounty’ but she could see the need for ‘monetary compensation’ for those who turn in teachers that were doing things parents found unacceptable. … ‘If we have to offer monetary compensation for people to report teachers, I see no problem with that. It’s an incentive for people to wake up.’
I didn’t like where the discussion was going. The moderator guided the topic back to safer ground. “Be pleasantly persistent,” she smiled. “Be annoying. Be the woman at the school board meetings who always shows up. Be the person who, when the meeting organizers see you, say, ‘Oh, God, her again.’ Be that person. And please try to get people to vote in municipal elections.”
Fair enough. A lot of the roundtable debate felt like a Republican version of a Run for Something meeting. Run for Something was a movement started after Donald Trump won the presidency that was meant to encourage young progressives to start their own campaigns for local political office. This right-wing women’s group seemed to be following the same model, but there was an undercurrent of rage among the group members that I had never seen in a Run for Something meeting.
Despite my uneasiness, I couldn’t help but find myself liking the women in the room. They were charismatic. They were energetic. They had no problem letting my low-functioning autistic son play with their children, which is unfortunately rare among a lot of the other mothers I’ve encountered. But this made me even more uneasy. I realized these women were dangerous precisely because they were so friendly. Their condemnation of history lessons about Ruby Bridges and Jim Crow laws and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was repulsive. They were trying to suppress the truth by labeling the unassailable facts of racism in the U.S. as “divisive.” “Equality,” “diversity” and “inclusion” were not virtues to be celebrated but “trigger words” with a poisonous intent. This nefariously clever bit of relabeling disgusted me. There was a very clear far-right agenda at work here.
Groups like the one I joined often appeal to mothers. The pandemic has hit moms especially hard. Lack of child care has resulted in a “she-cession” with thousands of women leaving the workforce to take care of their children. Lonely, frustrated, financially stressed people tend to be prime targets for radical groups. These right-wing women’s groups offer a sense of community and friendship to women who are isolated at home with their kids. It can be frighteningly easy for some people to start nodding along with all the rhetoric about the evils of critical race theory and COVID conspiracy theories if the women espousing them are also offering you coffee and friendship and child care ― and making you feel seen and heard.
I am currently still a member of this local right-wing women’s Facebook group. It has helped me to understand where these people are coming from ― and just how motivated they are. My membership could end up being rescinded, however, as I plan to attend a few upcoming school board meetings to defend the accurate and honest teaching of all parts of American history, especially in regard to racism and what it has meant and means to be Black in this country.
I can’t stop thinking about the gleam in that woman’s eye as she said, “We just can’t sit around and let them attack our kids. We have to do something.” Though some people think merely tweeting our outrage or frustration is productive (it’s not), those of us fighting against the far right need to be more aware of how energetic and organized they’re becoming and the lengths they’re willing to go to in order to get their way. Right-wing activists are attending school board meetings in hopes of transforming our children’s education, and, ultimately, their lives and the future of the United States. It’s time for us to be just as active to ensure this doesn’t happen. We must fight for our children’s safety and their right to learn our nation’s history ― even the ugly parts. Especially the ugly parts.
After all, when ugly history gets ignored, it tends to get repeated.
Phoebe Cohen has walked many paths in life, including living in the Gobi Desert as a Peace Corps volunteer and working as a paramedic in several states. Cohen’s work has been featured in Graphic Medicine, Mutha Magazine and BorderX. She regularly posts on her website Merry Misandrist. Cohen is a part-time cartoonist, writer and nursing student. She has been known to go up to five hours without coffee.
Manchin killing Build Back Better is ‘devastating’ to climate change action, experts say
Ben Adler, Senior Climate Editor December 20, 2021
When Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., announced on Fox News on Sunday that he won’t vote for the current version of Build Back Better, experts predicted he may have single-handedly killed the world’s best hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change.
In order to avoid breaching the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold that will trigger a cascade of devastating effects, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that global emissions of the greenhouse gasses that cause climate change must be cut in half by 2030, with emissions reaching net zero by 2050.
President Biden committed the United States — the world’s second-largest emitting country currently, and the largest historically — to reaching those goals and laid out a plan to achieve it. It was centered around Build Back Better’s unprecedented $555 billion in spending to subsidize transitioning the country to clean sources of energy and electric vehicles.
Without those actions, according to modeling by experts, the U.S. likely won’t hit its targets. And if the U.S. isn’t on pace to hit its targets, that will undermine the whole global push to switch to clean energy and cut emissions.
“We won’t be acting on the climate crisis if we don’t pass this bill, and there’s not a decade left to waste,” Leah Stokes, a climate policy professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Vox.
Princeton engineering professor Jesse Jenkins, who studies electricity policy, tweeted a one-word response to Manchin’s comments: “devastating.”
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., speaking to the media in September. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
“It’s in everyone’s interest for the U.S. to slash emissions. As the second-largest polluter of greenhouse gasses in the world, that’s fundamental to solving the problem,” Pete Ogden, vice president for energy, climate, and the environment at the U.N. Foundation, told Yahoo News. “And because we have an amazing ability to shape the markets in such a way as to drive innovation, and with our market locked in, as the Biden administration has been trying to do to this clean energy future, that’s going to have a global impact on clean energy markets.”
Environmental activists and experts such as Ogden have not given up on the prospect that the U.S. could still meet its emissions targets, however. Some hold out hope that Manchin, the conservative Democrat from a coal- and gas-heavy state, can still be persuaded to vote for a revised version of the bill.
“This is not the end of the road,” said League of Conservation Voters senior vice president Tiernan Sittenfeld in a statement. “We are more determined than ever, and we will keep fighting like hell to ensure the Build Back Better Act becomes law — for the people of West Virginia and for all people in this country who care deeply about climate, jobs, and justice.”
Green groups are also trying to figure out alternative ways of getting sufficiently ambitious climate policies in place through separate legislation or regulations adopted by federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.
Manchin is followed by reporters as he leaves a caucus meeting with Senate Democrats at the Capitol on Friday. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“This is a clear signal that the administration must pursue big and bold efforts across the federal government to achieve as much as possible on climate & clean energy action, clean air and clean water by utilizing its robust executive branch authority,” Sierra Club legislative director Melinda Pierce told Yahoo News in an emailed statement. “In tandem, we are confident that the Biden Administration will work on a legislative path forward on climate and clean energy, because we must deliver on our international commitments.”
Given the evenly divided Senate, whether the U.S. could live up to its international commitments is an unanswered question. Throughout the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, last month, Biden administration officials and Democratic leaders in Congress repeated three words as if it were an almost magical mantra: Build Back Better. Nearly every U.S.-sponsored event amounted to a primer on what the bill would deliver. Based in part on its climate change provisions, special envoy for climate John Kerry negotiated joint climate actions with a number of other large nations, including China, the No. 1 emitter.
While the national commitments made at the Glasgow conference, also known as COP26, fell short of what is needed to stay below 1.5C, climate scientists and activists hope that next year’s conference, COP27, will see nations return with more ambitious pledges. That’s a lot less likely to happen if the country most responsible for climate change fails to pass the bill it touted at COP26 and isn’t clearly on a path to fulfilling its pledges.
President Biden addresses a press conference at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in November. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
“This is a huge lost opportunity, not to get this thing passed right now, before the holidays and before the end of the year, so that the administration would have a full year of running room [before COP27],” Ogden said.
Ogden argued, however, that Biden can find a way to show the U.S. is on the way to slashing its emissions.
“There are still multiple paths ahead and time to get things moving in the right direction before the next COP,” Ogden said.
For example, Ogden noted that the U.S.’s pledge to reduce emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, by 30 percent by 2030 is not solely contingent on the methane-focused components of Build Back Better, which are subsidies for oil and gas well operators to adopt advanced methane-control technologies and fees for those who continue to leak excessive methane. The EPA is also writing regulations that would clamp down on methane emissions.
“One of the major initiatives that the administration has been driving globally is a methane reduction pledge,” Ogden said. “That’s something that the administration has already set in motion, with a domestic regulatory framework to achieve that. So I think that’s going forward.”
On Monday, the EPA announced that it had finalized new rules raising the average fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks. As long as the U.S. finds a way of getting the cuts it promised, the administration can keep leading the charge on global climate diplomacy, Ogden argued.
“I think that the rest of the world isn’t ultimately concerned about whether the climate action the United States takes is via Build Back Better or some other suite of actions, legislative and regulatory,” he said.
‘America’s dirty secret’ is a public health nightmare for Alabama residents
Kylie Mar, Host & Producer, Yahoo Entertainment
December 20, 2021
Catherine Coleman Flowers US environmental activist
On CBS’s 60 Minuteson Sunday, correspondent Bill Whitaker took a deep dive into the lack of sewage treatment affecting residents of Lowndes County, Ala.
According to Whitaker, Lowndes County is one of the most neglected corners of the country and the poverty rate is double the national average, which makes sanitary sewage disposal financially unattainable for the county’s residents.
“I have seen things like this in Haiti, and parts of Southeast Asia. I have never seen anything like this in the United States,” said a shocked Whitaker as he scanned one resident’s backyard.
Environmental health researcher and White House advisor Catherine Coleman Flowers has been battling this longstanding, and overlooked, public health failure in Lowndes County for 20 years. It is what she calls “America’s dirty secret.”
“If this was a community of more affluent people, this would’ve made headlines 20 years ago when I first started doing the work,” said Flowers. She added, “The reason that the situation has continued for so long is because of the type of benign neglect that has happened to Black communities, poor communities, and rural communities across the United States.”
Whitaker shared that the state of Alabama could not identify how many homes had this problem, so Flowers went door-to-door to find out. After surveying 3,000 homes, Flowers found that two-thirds had failing systems or no systems at all. Even worse, the unsanitary conditions have even had an effect on the residents’ health, according to a tropical disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Rojelio Mejia, who tested the stool and soil from residents’ properties.
“Using a PCR test, like those used to detect COVID-19, they found small amounts of DNA from hookworms, a parasite that can cause stomach problems, anemia and developmental delays in children,” Whitaker reported of Mejia’s team’s findings.
“Our study in Alabama was a small study, about 55 patients, and the results were, we found over 30 percent of people in at-risk situations with poor sanitation had hookworm,” said Mejia, who was surprised by their results. “We were very shocked, and we actually had to run the sample several times to prove to ourselves that we found these numbers.”
So why has nothing been done? Lowndes County officials have claimed they don’t have the money, and the governor and the head of the State Department of Public Health declined to speak with 60 Minutes. However, according to Sherry Bradley at the State Department of Public Health, the agency is not responsible. Nevertheless, she has taken it upon herself to start a pilot project on her own.
“I have begged money from a whole lot of people,” admitted Bradley, who also said she does not know why the state hasn’t stepped in to solve the problem.
In the end, Whitaker concluded, “Last month, just days after we spoke with Bradley, the DOJ launched an unprecedented civil rights investigation into whether the Alabama Department of Public Health is discriminating against Black residents in Lowndes, denying them access to proper sanitation.”
However, Whitaker also shared, “the department says it’s cooperating. We couldn’t find a single state program devoted to remedying the sewage problem in rural areas.”
Don’t care about the Build Back Better Act? Hearing people’s personal stories might change that
Angela Bradbery, Frank Karel Endowed Chair in Public Interest Communications, University of Florida December 20, 2021
Reporters waiting outside a private meeting between advisers to President Biden and Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema about the Build Back Better Act on Capitol Hill, Sept. 30, 2021. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
When U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said that he wouldn’t support President Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better Act, he set off a wave of breaking news alerts.
It was fitting. For months, media coverage has breathlessly focused on the behind-the-scenes wrangling and hour-by-hour negotiations around the legislation. How much has been slashed from the bill today? What does it mean for the future of the Democratic and Republican parties?
The roughly US $2 trillion proposal is designed to bolster what is widely seen as a frayed social safety net. But most Americans don’t think it will benefit people like them, a recent NPR/Marist poll shows. And a quarter of Americans can’t even say whether they like or dislike the legislation.
It’s no wonder the nation is so indifferent about the sweeping bill, which would change the country’s tax system, increase social services and ramp up efforts to combat climate change.
Largely omitted from news coverage – and consequently, from the national conversation – are the voices and stories of individuals who would be affected by the legislation.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, masked, leaving an office in the Senate, surrounded by people.
Focusing outside D.C.
What if daily media coverage instead featured those voices? What if reporters and talk show hosts ditched the pundits and issue experts and instead explored the problems that led to the proposed policies – through the eyes and voices of those living with those problems?
That means we would hear from parents who need help paying for child care and elderly people who can’t afford medicines or hearing aids.
We would hear from people who can’t afford health care, people living in their cars or on the streets, and yes, those who earn more than $400,000 a year. Multimillionaires, billionaires and corporations would pay more under the new tax plan.
What if news stories shined a spotlight on these voices, rather than just throwing in an occasional anecdote? Would people tune in? Would they engage in conversations or take action around the legislation?
Research shows that they likely would. And that would be good for democracy.
Real stories can spark real engagement
It’s well documented that horse-race journalism – which treats politics as a sport, focusing on who’s ahead or behind, rather than the substance of issues – is associated with an uninformed electorate and elevates public cynicism about politics. Such coverage doesn’t help people understand what proposals could mean to them.
Policy overviews filled with large numbers don’t engage people, either. When discussing the Build Back Better Act, proponents understandably focus on the scope of the problem: 2.2 million low-income Americans couldn’t get health insurance subsidies in 2019 but also weren’t eligible for Medicaid.
But science tells us that discussing large-scale suffering makes people turn away. The phenomenon is called psychic numbing. It means the problem is so big that people disengage, because they feel powerless to help. And individuals find it hard to understand the scale of large numbers.
The way to combat this? Journalists can tell stories about real people. Personal stories quickly bring big issues into focus and make them relatable. They make people care.
In 2015, for example, the Syrian refugee crisis had been raging for four years. But it took a picture of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose corpse washed up on a Turkish beach after his family fled Syria by boat, to generate international horror.
After the photo of the young Syrian boy went viral, donations to refugee organizations skyrocketed. The story and photo engaged people who had not yet paid attention to the crisis.
Research backs up the notion that including real people in news stories can spark reader engagement.
A 2012 study compared people’s reactions after they read two versions of a news story detailing how the lack of health care affected one of three groups: immigrants, prisoners or the elderly.
One version presented the issue using quotes from experts. The other version included a story about a specific person’s experiences dealing with that health care issue.
The news pieces that featured people’s stories elicited emotions in readers that the policy pieces did not. That led the participants to be more willing to help the people they read about.
Including real people in news stories doesn’t mean that engaged readers will only feel sympathy for the characters profiled. Engagement could produce support or opposition to proposed policies.
Joe Biden speaks at a lectern in front of large Building Back Better posters. American flags flank him on the podium.
Looking beyond the political play-by-play
The Build Back Better Act – which the U.S. House of Representatives passed in November – comes as civic engagement in the U.S. is low.
Considering the scope and potential impact of this bill, it’s a disservice to the country for news coverage to focus on the play-by-play in Washington, D.C.
If the press eases up on the machinations occurring in the marble halls of Washington, D.C., and instead focuses on real people, the U.S. could perhaps build back something else: civic engagement, a necessary part of our democratic system.
At the same time, three retired generals wrote in the Post that they were “increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military”.
Such concerns are growing around jagged political divisions deepened by former president Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election.
Trump’s lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was caused by electoral fraud stoked the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, over which Trump was impeached and acquitted a second time, leaving him free to run for office.
The “big lie” is also fueling moves among Republicans to restrict voting by groups that lean Democratic and to make it easier to overturn elections.
Such moves remain without counter from Democrats stymied by the filibuster, the Senate rule that demands supermajorities for most legislation.
In addition, though Republican presidential nominees have won the popular vote only once since 1988, the GOP has by playing political hardball stocked the supreme court with conservatives, who outnumber liberals 6-3.
All such factors and more, including a pandemic which has stoked resistance to government, have contributed to Walter’s analysis.
Last month, she tweeted: “The CIA actually has a taskforce designed to try to predict where and when political instability and conflict is likely to break out around the world. It’s just not legally allowed to look at the US. That means we are blind to the risk factors that are rapidly emerging here.”
The book in which Walter looks at those risk factors in the US, How Civil Wars Start, will be published in January. According to the Post, she writes: “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war.
But “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America – the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or Ivory Coast or Venezuela – you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely”.
“And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Walter, the Post said, concludes that the US has passed through stages of “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” and may now be in “open conflict”, beginning with the Capitol riot.
Citing analytics used by the Center for Systemic Peace, Walter also says the US has become an “anocracy” – “somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state”.
The US has fought a civil war, from 1861 to 1865 and against states which seceded in an attempt to maintain slavery.
Estimates of the death toll vary. The American Battlefield Trust puts it at 620,000 and says: “Taken as a percentage of today’s population, the toll would have risen as high as 6 million souls.”
Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton adviser turned biographer of Abraham Lincoln and Guardian contributor, said: “The secessionists in 1861 accepted Lincoln’s election as fair and legitimate.”
The current situation, he said, “is the opposite. Trump’s questioning of the election … has led to a genuine crisis of legitimacy.”
With Republicans’ hold on the levers of power while in the electoral minority a contributing factor, Blumenthal said, “This crisis metastasises, throughout the system over time, so that it’s possible any close election will be claimed to be false and fraudulent.”
Blumenthal said he did not expect the US to pitch into outright civil war, “section against section” and involving the fielding of armies.
If rightwing militia groups were to seek to mimic the secessionists of the 1860s and attempt to “seize federal forts and offices by force”, he said, “I think you’d have quite a confidence it would be over very, very quickly [given] a very strong and firm sense at the top of the US military of its constitutional, non-political role.
“… But given the proliferation of guns, there could be any number of seemingly random acts of violence that come from these organised militias, which are really vigilantes and with partisan agendas, and we haven’t entered that phase.
“The real nightmare would be that kind of low-intensity conflict.”
Members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right group, on the East Front of the US Capitol on 6 January. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
The retired generals who warned of conflict around the next election – Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba and Steven Anderson – were less sanguine about the army.
“As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol,” they wrote, “we … are increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk.
“In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.”
Citing the presence at the Capitol riot of “a disturbing number of veterans and active-duty members of the military”, they pointed out that “more than one in 10 of those charged in the attacks had a service record”.
Polling has revealed similar worries – and warnings. In November, the Public Religion Research Institute asked voters if they agreed with a statement: “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
The poll found that 18% of respondents agreed. Among Republicans, however, the figure was 30%.
On Twitter, Walter thanked the Post for covering her book. She also said: “I wish I had better news for the world but I couldn’t stay silent knowing what I know.”
Washington is a state like Arizona – only with 13,000 fewer COVID-19 deaths
EJ Montini, Arizona Republic December 20, 2021
A COVID-19 patient in an ICU.
At some point in the future there will be an accounting, and only one number will matter:
The number of lives lost to COVID-19.
For much of the pandemic that number has not seemed to matter much, if at all, to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. Spouting platitudes about the economy has mattered. Acquiescing to the conspiracy theorists and the anti-vaccine kooks in the Republican party has mattered.
But talking about COVID-19 and the terrible toll it has taken on Arizona, and actually doing something to stop it … those things have not mattered.
And so there will be an accounting.
Is making comparisons fair?
There will be arguments that making comparisons between Arizona and other jurisdictions, other communities, other states, is unfair. Apples to oranges. Night and day. As different as chalk and cheese.
That kind of thing.
But then there are the numbers. And the numbers are what matters.
In terms of population, for example, Arizona and the state of Washington are fairly similar.
One difference between us is that Washington’s Gov. Jay Inslee hasn’t been as timid as Ducey when it comes to trying to protect his citizens.
He’s taken a lot of heat for some of his policies. Making people do things they’d prefer not to do – even if it might save their lives – doesn’t always go well for a politician. At least in the short term.
Unlike Arizona, which long ago abandoned its citizens to their own devices, Washington still has a number of restrictions aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Mask requirements. Proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 test requirements. It’s a fairly long list and not everyone is happy about it.
Ask yourself a few questions and answer them honestly.
Would you have accepted a few more restrictions, a few more government imposed attempts at mitigating the spread of the virus, if it might have saved 13,000 Arizonans?
That’s roughly the difference between us and Washington. No comparison between states is perfect, of course. There are differences in city sizes and environment and demographics an all that.
What will matter in the long run
But the bottom line is that their population is slightly more numerous than ours, yet they have lost 13,000 fewer of their brothers and sisters than we have in Arizona.
Thirteen thousand.
Not one or two or even five thousand.
Thirteen.
And the reason, simply, is that their leadership worked harder at saving lives than ours did. They understood, better than our leaders did, that saving lives should have started, and remained, and continue to be, priority number one.
