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Popular Mechanics

These 4 Untested Weapons Could Be Crucial If Russia Pushes Beyond Ukraine

Kyle Mizokami – February 8, 2022

In its attempt to buttress NATO allies and Ukraine in anticipation of a potential Russian invasion, the Biden Administration announced last week the deployment of 1,700 troops of the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Poland, and the deployment of a squadron of the Germany-based 2nd Cavalry Regiment to Romania. The units, as well as those from the 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized) at Fort Carson, Colorado, still on standby, are full of new weapons and technology.

Here are four untested on the battlefield weapons that could hold the line if Russia pushes beyond Ukraine… or U.S. forces intervene in Kyiv’s behalf.

FGM-148 Javelin Anti-Tank Missile

A lot has been made about the Javelin missile and U.S. shipments of missiles to Ukraine, and for good reason: the 30–year–old medium range anti-tank guided missile was tailor made to confront Soviet, and now Russian, armor formations—exactly the kind massing on Ukraine’s borders.

Here’s a video from the New Zealand Army that breaks down the Javelin missile system and shows an actual launch.https://www.youtube.com/embed/s–9W-4R9aI?v=s–9W-4R9aI&start=0

Javelin was originally deployed in the 1990s, and its 2,187 yard range, infrared targeting, and fire-and-forget launch system were miles ahead of its predecessor, the unfortunate Dragon missile. Javelin was used to destroy bunkers, buildings, and other fortified structures in the post 9/11 era in Afghanistan and Iraq but rarely in the tank-killing role it was originally meant for.

Among troops currently deployed to or deploying to Europe, Javelin will be a key weapon system. Half of the Stryker Infantry Carrier Vehicles used by the 2nd Cavalry are equipped with remote controlled Javelin launchers, and the squadron deployed to Romania might be equipped with as many as 25 Javelins. The unit of the 82nd Airborne Division deploying to reinforce NATO ally Poland is likely a battalion of airborne infantry with attached combat support troops. It would typically be equipped with 18 Javelins missile systems and eight of the heavier, more powerful, longer ranged TOW anti-tank missile systems.

Stryker Infantry Carrier Vehicle – Dragoon (ICV-D)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hVf-AvNnOD4%3Fv%3DhVf-AvNnOD4%26start%3D0

In the mid-2010s the U.S. Army made the decision to augment the Germany-based 2nd Cavalry Regiment’s firepower. One decision was to upgrade half of the unit’s Stryker vehicles with Javelin missiles, to improve the regiment’s anti-armor capability. The other was the addition of an unmanned turret equipped with a 30-millimeter auto-cannon, creating the Infantry Carrier Vehicle-Dragoon (ICV-D), or Stryker Dragoon. Stryker Dragoons make up the other half of the Stryker vehicles assigned to the 2nd Cavalry.

Stryker Dragoon’s XM-813 30-millimeter cannon is designed to engage enemy light armored vehicles, including Russian BMP-2 and BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles and BTR-80 wheeled armored vehicles. In combat against a highly mechanized foe, Strykers fitted with Javelins would engage enemy tanks while Stryker Dragoons would engage accompanying scouts and infantry carriers. The XM-813 auto-cannon can fire Mk. 258 Armor Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding Sabot-Tracer (APFSDS-T) against armored vehicles and the Mk. 238 High Explosive Incendiary–Tracer (HEI-T) round against trucks, other unarmored targets, and dismounted infantry.

Although the XM-813 arms a diverse variety of weapon systems, including the AC-130W gunship and Zumwalt-class destroyer, Stryker Dragoon has never been in combat.

Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV)

One of the Army’s fastest new equipment acquisitions in recent years is the Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV). The ISV is a no-frills vehicle designed to quickly move light infantry troops, particularly airborne infantry, across the battlefield. The ISV is still in testing and is not confirmed to deploy to Eastern Europe, but bringing it along would help the foot-mobile 82nd Airborne quickly deploy across Poland. Poland, a NATO ally that borders Ukraine, is anxious to receive American boots on the ground in case Russian tanks enter its eastern neighbor and just keep going.

The ISV is an unarmored battle truck based on the Chevy Colorado mid–sized truck with the ZR2 off–road package. The ISV is designed to carry nine soldiers, fit inside a CH-47 Chinook helicopter, and be air-droppable along with airborne troops. The vehicle trades armor for light weight and speed, allowing it to get soldiers to their objectives faster. GM Defense could build as many as 2,065 ISVs for the 82nd Airborne and infantry brigade combat teams.

The vehicle is not without controversy. The Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) recently slammed the ISV in its latest report as “not being operationally effective” in military exercises. The DOT&E complained test vehicles failed to complete reliability testing due to issues such as, “steering capability, cracked and bent seat frames, and engine cracks and overheating.” Still, while the ISV undoubtedly has kinks to work out, there is no real alternative, and the 82nd will have trouble getting around Poland without it.

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

Last week’s deployment covers ground forces, but any future air power deployment will almost certainly include Air Force F-35A Joint Strike Fighter. The F-35A is a multi-role fighter that can capably handle air-to-air and air-to-ground mission. Unlike its predecessor, the F-16 Fighting Falcon, the F-35 is built from the ground up as a stealthy, low-observable fighter. Most Air Force F-35 units are based in the continental United States with one squadron, the 495th Fighter Squadron (“Valkyries”), based at RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom.

The F-35 has already seen combat in Afghanistan and against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, but in both cases strikes went unopposed against enemies lacking air defenses. The F-35 has not flown against a peer adversary operating advanced air defense systems and fighter jets like Russia.

Russia’s Tor, Buk, and S-400 surface to air missile systems are some of the most deadly in the world, while Russian Aerospace Forces MiG-29, Su-30, and Su-35 Flanker-E fighters are formidable threats in the air.

USA Today

The ‘but Hillary’s emails’ crowd goes silent about Trump’s document destruction

Kurt Bardella – February 8, 2022

Let’s play a game. When did the following headlines run?

“Documents Improperly Taken from White House to Archives.”

“National Archives had to retrieve White House records” from private property.

If you didn’t know any better, you might think they were from the 2016 presidential campaign.

Remember when, in October 2016, House Republicans launched a series of hearings attacking the then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her emails?

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who now serves as the lead Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, fumed that “Hillary Clinton gets treated different than anybody else.” Another member of the panel stated, “This is the reason for this hearing – the sloppiness, the messiness, and the ability for a secretary of State to do something that shouldn’t have been done.” Another Republican weighed in, “I want to know about the destruction – the hammering of BlackBerrys.” The panel’s chairman at the time, Jason Chaffetz, who can now be seen espousing self-righteous nonsense of Fox News, attacked Clinton, “The secretary had a choice. She chose to not abide by the rules of the State Department.”

Taping Trump’s documents back together

And yet, here we are, in 2022 and we have:

The New York Times: “Trump Gives Documents Improperly Taken from White House to Archives.”

The Washington Post: “National Archives had to retrieve Trump White House records from Mar-a-Lago.”

And just for good measure, we have this gem from 2018 via Politico, “Meet the guys who tape Trump’s papers back together,” and this piece from The Times in 2019: “Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Use Private Accounts for Official Business, Their Lawyer Says.”

That’s right, from the same forces that brought you the chorus of “Hillary’s emails” and the smash hit “Lock Her Up” comes a new spin on an old song, “Do As I Say, Not As I Do.”

As reported by The Post, “The National Archives and Records Administration last month retrieved 15 boxes of documents and other items from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence because the material should have been turned over to the agency when he left the White House, Archives officials said Monday. … The Archives has struggled to cope with a president who flouted document retention requirements and frequently ripped up official documents, leaving hundreds of pages taped back together – or some that arrived at the Archives still in pieces.”

Alexander Vindman: Why I’m seeking accountability from Trump allies in court

The Times reporting added, “More recently, in response to the House select committee investigation into the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, provided hundreds of pages of documents, some of which came from his personal cellphone. The committee said it had questions about why Mr. Meadows had used a personal cellphone, a Signal account and two personal Gmail accounts to conduct official business, and whether he had properly turned over all records from those accounts to the National Archives.”

Bombshell revelations

Given these bombshell revelations, coupled with their concern for federal government record-keeping compliance, you would think Republicans would be foaming at the mouth, chanting “Lock Him Up” and calling for an immediate series of hearings and subpoenas to be issued to anyone who was a part of the Trump White House.

And yet, nothing. Crickets. Silence.

Jim Jordan isn’t grand-standing on Fox News calling Donald Trump incompetent or a liar or “absolutely wrong.”

House Republicans aren’t clamoring for an FBI or Department of Justice investigation into the destruction of official records and use of personal devices.

The very Republicans who led the charge for investigations into Clinton’s emails don’t have a damn thing to say about what Trump and other senior administration officials did in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act (PRA).

The ball now falls into the court of congressional Democrats, specifically, those at the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which has jurisdiction over the PRA. They may be inclined to just sit this one out and allow for the work of the Jan. 6 committee to unfold. But it is worth noting that at one point in time, Republicans in Congress had half a dozen committees investigating Clinton. They flooded the zone and held a tsunami of hearings over the course of five years. All of which was designed to injure the political fortunes of the Democratic front-runner for president.

The future of Texas: It might be red now, but the Lone Star State is turning blue right before our eyes

During the Obama years, Republicans were fond of beginning their oversight hearings by reciting a mission statement: “Our solemn responsibility is to hold government accountable to taxpayers, because taxpayers have a right to know what they get from their government. We will work tirelessly, in partnership with citizen-watchdogs, to deliver the facts to the American people and bring genuine reform to the federal bureaucracy.”

I for one think it’s time Democrats used Republicans’ own words against them and went to work.

Kurt Bardella is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors. He is an adviser to both the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a former senior adviser for Republicans on the House Oversight Committee.

Good Morning America

Ginni and Clarence Thomas draw questions about Supreme Court ethics

Devin Dwyer, Gabriella Abdul-Hakim – February 8, 2022

Clarence Thomas, the U.S. Supreme Court’s most senior justice, long celebrated by conservatives and reviled by liberals, is facing renewed scrutiny for potential conflicts of interest as he helms the court’s newly empowered conservative majority and as public opinion of the court slumps to a historic low.

Independent ethics watchdogs have raised new questions about the activism of Clarence Thomas’ wife of 34 years, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a longtime political consultant who lobbies for some of the same conservative causes — around abortion, gun rights and religious freedom — that are before the high court.

A New Yorker magazine report last month documented a web of associations between Ginni Thomas and “conservative pressure groups that have either been involved in cases before the Court or have had members engaged in such cases.”

Thomas sits on the advisory board of a group opposing affirmative action that filed a Supreme Court amicus brief in cases the justices recently agreed to take up. She has also been highly critical in public of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, whose business has also come before the court.

Recently released emails obtained by the nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight, first reported by Politico, also suggest close ties between the Thomases and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has challenged federal COVID mandates before the high court. In a June 2021 message, not independently verified by ABC News, Ginni Thomas seeks the governor’s participation in a private gathering of activists, noting that Clarence Thomas had been in contact with DeSantis “on various things of late.”

Neither Clarence nor Ginni Thomas responded to ABC News’ request for comment about the reports or claims of potential conflicts.

“Ginni Thomas’ activities are different from any other spouse in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix The Court, a nonpartisan ethics group. “She is more activist in political causes than any other spouse. She has more relationships with organizations that have cases that come before the justices than any spouse before.”

Ginni Thomas’ personal website says she’s “battled for conservative principles” for more than three decades, regularly advising fellow activists through her private firm, Liberty Consulting, ​and at conservative conferences.

“America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,” Ginni Thomas told a gathering of the Council for National Policy, a conservative advocacy group, in 2018, according to video obtained by the investigative site Documented. “May we all have guns and concealed carry to handle what’s coming.”

In a 2010 interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Ginni Thomas spoke about her work to oppose the Affordable Care Act. “I think the clear focus is to stop the Obama agenda,” she said at the time. (The ACA would later face three existential challenges at the Supreme Court. It survived each.)

On Jan. 6, 2021, before violence broke out at the Capitol, Ginni Thomas — who had a direct access to the Trump White House — was cheering the president’s supporters challenging the electoral vote count, writing on Facebook that morning “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING.”

While 733 Americans now face federal charges for their alleged conduct later that day, Ginni Thomas joined an open letter in December calling congressional investigation of the attack by a Democrat-led committee a “political persecution.”

MORE: How the Jan. 6 committee is piecing together the ‘puzzle’ of the Capitol attack

Eight days after publication of the letter, former President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to block the committee’s request for his records. Last month, the court declined over the objection of only one justice: Clarence Thomas.

“There were some eyebrows raised when Justice Thomas was that lone vote,” said Kate Shaw, ABC News Supreme Court analyst and Cardozo Law professor. “But he did not explain himself, so we don’t actually know why he wished to take up the case.”

There are no explicit ethics guidelines that govern the activities of a justice’s spouse, experts say, but there are rules about justices avoiding conflicts of interest. Federal law requires federal judges to recuse from cases whenever their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

Roth notes, however, that there is no independent enforcement mechanism in place; it’s entirely up to the individual justice.

“There’s this, you know, the court of public opinion,” he said. “But the only way to punish a Supreme Court justice is through impeachment and removal, and no justice has ever been impeached and removed.”

While there is precedent of justices recusing due to family members’ involvement or association with a given case, Clarence Thomas has never recused over his wife’s political activities.

With public approval of the Supreme Court sliding to a historic low, scrutiny of the justices’ potential financial or political conflicts in cases has been growing.

MORE: Justice Clarence Thomas rebukes Biden-led confirmation hearings in new film

Ginni Thomas is not named in any case on the court’s docket, nor is any group of which she’s known to be part. The Thomas’ supporters see a double standard in the scrutiny of their relationship.

“There’s always attempts on the left to manufacture grounds to recuse conservative justices from cases. This strikes me as just another round of those attempts,” said Carrie Severino, a former Clarence Thomas clerk and president of the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative legal advocacy group.

In 2011, Federal Appeals Court Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a top liberal jurist, declined to recuse himself from a case involving California’s ban on same-sex marriage despite the fact that his wife was a leader at the ACLU, which had filed an amicus brief challenging the ban.

Reinhardt defended his decision at the time, writing, “her views regarding issues of public significance are her own.”

“I think we live in a world where women are [and] should be able to be strong, be active and be participants in public discourse,” said Severino. “And that shouldn’t be viewed as something that necessarily reflects on exactly what their husband thinks or how he’s going to behave as well.”

For the most part, spouses of the justices have tended to steer clear from the work of the court. “My wife does not give me any advice about cooking, and I do not give her any advice about the law,” Martin Ginsburg, the late husband of former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a longtime tax lawyer, joked in a joint appearance at Wheaton College in 1997.

But when the justices take up a major case on affirmative action later this year, they’ll consider the views of the National Association of Scholars, a conservative nonprofit that opposes the use of race in college admissions. Ginni Thomas sits on its advisory board.

“It’s absolutely OK that Justice Breyer’s wife worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. It’s absolutely OK that Jane Roberts is a legal recruiter during Chief Justice Roberts’ tenure. And it’s totally fine, too, that Ginni Thomas has a political consulting firm,” said Roth. “But we need to look again at those closest to the justices.”

“If you appear to be against someone or something, then you shouldn’t be judging that someone or something,” he said.

ABC News has learned Roth’s group, Fix the Court, has asked the Supreme Court clerk to strike the National Association of Scholars brief from the record because of the apparent conflict with Ginni Thomas.

The clerk has not yet acted on that request.

A new ABC/Ipsos poll finds more Americans, 43%, believe partisan political views rather than the basis of law (38%) are driving the justices’ decisions.

Members of Congress and outside experts say new enforceable ethics rules for the court are needed now more than ever. Even Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged in his 2021 year-end report that “public trust is essential, not incidental” to the court’s function. ​

But Roberts opposes outside efforts to impose a new ethics code.

“I do think it could help the justices regain a little bit of the lost public trust and credibility just to say, look, you know, we ourselves are bound by some ethical guidelines that another body has imposed on us,” said Shaw. “So far, the court as an institution has been unwilling to sign on to that.”

Insider

Sidney Powell asks for sanctions order to be reversed, saying the judge unfairly portrayed her team as ‘dangerous lunatics’

Mia Jankowicz – February 8, 2022

• In August, a judge criticized Powell over abuses of the legal system in failed election-fraud cases.
• Powell asked a court to reverse the punishment against her in a Monday filing.
• She said the judge portrayed her team as “overwrought, dangerous lunatics.”

Sidney Powell, the pro-Trump lawyer who was sanctioned over lawsuits that said the 2020 election was rigged, has asked for her punishments to be reversed, saying the federal judge unfairly painted her team as “overwrought, dangerous lunatics.”

Powell and eight of her cocounsels were sanctioned last August over joint election-rigging claims that the judge called a “historic and profound abuse” of the legal system. The move came with a referral to disciplinary boards, with the potential for disbarment.

Powell, who promised to “release the Kraken” through lawsuits that alleged election fraud, had her claims dismissed in court multiple times.

One central claim — which mobilized an unfounded conspiracy theory about the voting-technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion — landed Powell with a $1.3 billion defamation suit. Powell countersued in September.

In her order, Linda V. Parker, a federal judge in Michigan, said Powell failed in her due diligence, used “speculation, conjecture, and unwarranted suspicion” in place of evidence-backed claims, and continued pursuing the cases long after they failed.

Parker said the case wasn’t about election integrity — it was “about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”

Powell was initially part of former President Donald Trump’s election-litigation team, but he later distanced himself from Powell.

But Powell continues to pursue her allegations. In a 97-page appeal brief filed on Monday, which Insider viewed, she called the punishment “intemperate” and requested the case be reassigned to a different judge.

Parker did “everything possible to make Appellants seem overwrought, dangerous lunatics,” Powell said.

In sanctioning Powell and her cocounsels, the order had “the clear purpose of depriving them of their livelihoods,” Powell said.

In response to Parker’s comment that she had relied on hearsay in her lawsuits, Powell said that cases were routinely processed “all on nothing more than a single person’s sworn say-so.”

The Monday filing also drew on some literary references, quoting Shakespeare and Voltaire.

“The District Court has improved upon Voltaire’s observation that ‘[t]yrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them,'” it said. “It managed to shred the Constitution at the very same time it wrapped itself in the flag.”

Referring to a plot to kill Henry VI, Powell also quoted: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

“Shakespeare knew that lawyers were the primary guardians of individual liberty in democratic England,” she said.

NBC News

FBI arrests Trump supporter who stormed Capitol while on bail on attempted murder charge

By Ryan J. Reilly – February 8, 2022

WASHINGTON — A Jan. 6 rioter who stormed the Capitol while he was out on bail on an attempted first-degree murder charge was arrested by the FBI on Tuesday, more than 10 months after he was first identified by online sleuths.

Matthew Jason Beddingfield, of North Carolina, faces felony charges of assaulting officers, impeding officers during a civil disorder and carrying a deadly or dangerous weapon on restricted Capitol grounds, as well as several misdemeanors, according to court records.

Beddingfield was first publicly identified in a HuffPost story in March after online sleuths investigating the Jan. 6 attack used facial recognition to find his mugshot and then confirmed his identification with the help of his father’s Facebook page. Beddingfield traveled to Washington on Jan. 6 with his father, a fellow Donald Trump supporter who also believed the former president’s lies about a stolen election. The two had attended a November 2020 rally in Washington in support of Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss. Images that Beddingfield’s father posted of that rally showed his son wearing identical Nike sneakers and carrying the same pole attached to an American flag as he did on Jan. 6.

When he stormed the Capitol, Beddingfield was on bail on a first-degree attempted murder charge in connection with the December 2019 shooting of a 17-year-old in a Walmart parking lot, when Beddingfield was 19. He was initially held on $1 million bail, but he secured pretrial release when bail was lowered to $100,000. After he stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, Beddingfield pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in connection with the shooting. He was on probation in the shooting case when he was arrested Tuesday. 

Video compiled with the help of online investigators shows Beddingfield at the front of the mob outside the Capitol, jabbing at the police line with his American flag, throwing a metal object at the police and appearing to give a Nazi salute. By the time Beddingfield emerged from the Capitol, his father, Jason Beddingfield, like thousands of others, was on the restricted exterior grounds of the U.S. Capitol, but he is not facing charges as of Tuesday. The elder Beddingfield, who posted on Facebook on Jan. 6 about taking “the country back,” can be seen hopping over a fence restricting access to the Capitol grounds while carrying a pro-Trump flag.

An affidavit signed by a FBI special agent credits citizen investigators and the HuffPost story with identifying Beddingfield, and uses the nicknames he was given by online sleuths tracking his movements. “Beddingfield was associated with two hashtags: #SoggyKidInsider (possibly because he is pictured emerging from the Capitol covered in what appears to be a liquid), and #NaziGrayHat (possibly because he appeared to make a gesture that is commonly associated with the Nazis),” the statement of facts reads.

The FBI affidavit lays out more of Beddingfield’s actions inside the Capitol: He entered through the upper west terrace door, made his way through the rotunda, attacked an officer with his flag while near the Old Senate Chamber, and eventually left through the north door at the Capitol.

A probation officer with the North Carolina Department of Public Safety/Community Corrections confirmed Beddingfield’s identification, according to the affidavit. Beddingfield is due to make an appearance in federal court in the Eastern District of North Carolina.

The FBI has arrested more than 725 people in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Online sleuths have successfully identified hundreds of people who stormed the Capitol, including dozens of individuals on the FBI’s Capitol Violence webpage who have not yet been arrested. The total number of people who could be arrested either for entering the Capitol on Jan. 6 or for engaging in violence outside the building tops 2,500.

The Washington Post – Opinion:

A victory to secure elections is still possible.

By Jennifer Rubin, Columnist – February 7, 2022

Lets see how far senators can go to prevent election chaos.

Forget what Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) says; watch what he does. And right now, he seems fully invested in the bipartisan negotiations to reform the Electoral Count Act. This is good news for democracy.

Appearing with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Manchin declared: “I think absolutely it’ll pass. Now, there will be some people saying it’s not enough. There will be some people saying it’s more than what we should do or we don’t need it.” He added that “what we’ll do is try to bring them all together and say, ‘Listen, this is what we should do because this is what caused the problem. And it’s what we can do. So let’s do that.’

”The “problem” he references was that the defeated former president and scores of Republican allies — assisted by unscrupulous lawyers such as John Eastman — believed members of Congress and the vice president had the power to interrupt the tabulation of the electoral college vote, throw out votes for the winner (Joe Biden) and toss the election back to the House, which by unit vote (one vote for each state’s delegation) would keep the losing candidate (Donald Trump) in office.

Murkowski has her eye on a broader problem that also afflicted the 2020 election. “We want to make sure that … if you’re going to be an election worker, if you’re going to be there at the polling booth, you don’t feel intimidated or threatened or harassed,” Murkowski said. “We are sitting down, I think, again, as members in good faith to ensure that election integrity across all 50 states moves forward in a positive way.” Now, that sounds promising.

The prospect of any bipartisan election reform that could circumvent efforts to subvert elections should be applauded. Nothing precludes Democrats from coming back for more comprehensive voting reform at a later time if they have the votes, but to forfeit an opportunity to prevent a repeat of the 2020 debacle in 2024 would be foolish in the extreme.

Nevertheless, let’s be clear about the “problem” in 2020. There are no less than six aspects of the attempted coup that Congress can address.

First, Congress can clarify that the vice president has no power to overturn or alter the electoral college result. Former vice president Mike Pence correctly affirmed this on Friday in a rare rebuke of his former boss. Congress should remove any doubt.

Second, Congress can raise the threshold for challenging electoral votes to a higher percentage. Perhaps a three-fifths majority (the same needed in the Senate for cloture) would be appropriate.

Third, Congress must amend the ECA to make clear that state legislatures do not have the power to send an alternative slates of electoral voters. This would essentially repudiate the radical “independent state legislature doctrine,” which postulates state legislatures can choose electors however they want, by clarifying that the language of Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution (″each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors …”) and the 12th Amendment do not allow the state to substitute a new method of selecting electoral votes after an election conducted by popular vote.

Specifically, ECA reform should amend the portion of the ECA that allows a state to submit an alternative slate when the state has “failed” to make a choice of president on Election Day. This can either be eliminated altogether or clarified to apply only when natural disaster has made voting impossible. (It is noteworthy that elections were conducted during every American war, including the Civil War.)

Fourth, as Murkowski notes, Congress must address the epidemic of threats, intimidation and arm-twisting of state officials in an attempt to alter the 2020 outcome (including by the losing presidential candidate). All such actions should be designated as felonies punishable by serious jail time. Moreover, election officials should be protected from criminal charges in instances in which they made a good-faith attempt to assist voters and from removal during an election count except for good cause. This should apply to all federal elections, not merely presidential contests.

Fifth, legislation can specify a speedy process for challenges to election results through the federal courts. For example, reform could specify that the D.C. Circuit would review cases (with clear and convincing evidence). This would avoid a repeat of the plethora of frivolous litigation trying to overturn election results in 2020. Losing parties should also be obligated to pay the states’ costs and legal fees.Finally, Congress can set legislative standards for paper ballots and neutral election audit procedures to stem any more phony audits engineered to undermine confidence in results.

All of these problems were apparent in the 2020 election and its aftermath. We might now have a real opportunity to correct these glaring shortcomings in a bipartisan, noncontroversial manner. Giving senators the space to negotiate the most comprehensive bill possible would be wise. If legislation addressing all or most of these issues emerges, the country should consider itself fortunate to have dodged a bullet aimed at the heart of our democracy.

Jennifer Rubin writes opinion for The Washington Post. She is the author of “Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump.“

The Nation

The Town That QAnon Nearly Swallowed

Right-wing demagogues tried to take over a small town in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s how concerned citizens stopped them.

By Sasha Abramsky – February 7, 2022 – For the Feb. 22-28 issue.

Illustration by Ryan Inzana.

Dr. Allison Berry sits at a table at the Rainshadow Café in downtown Sequim (pronounced “Squim”), a 110-mile drive northwest of Seattle, describing the tsunami of hatred that has come her way during the pandemic. She’s young, smiles a lot, wears woolen sweaters and scarves, and has been the health officer for Clallam and Jefferson counties since 2018; before that, she was a doctor at a local clinic run by the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe.

To be able to sit indoors at the café, customers have to show proof of vaccination. The mandate was pushed by Berry this past September following Washington state’s reopening. A subsequent Covid surge had swamped the two local hospitals, put all elective procedures on hold, and led to a fearsome wave of intubations and deaths. Until the emergence of the vaccine-dodging Omicron variant, the mandate meant that diners in Clallam County, on the northern end of the Olympic Peninsula, could eat and drink in relative safety.

But it also meant that Berry—who had already attracted the ire of anti-shutdown advocates in the summer of 2020 when she asked the county to postpone fully reopening businesses by two weeks—became a lightning rod for anti-maskers, anti-government militias, and QAnon conspiracists. Unfortunately for her, these included Sequim’s QAnon-supporting mayor—a hairdresser and motorcycle aficionado named William Armacost—as well as a majority of the city council, three of whose six members had been appointed during Armacost’s mayorship when sitting councilors died or resigned. This past September, hundreds of demonstrators began showing up outside the county courthouse in downtown Sequim. The council stood on the sidelines, finally passing a nonbinding resolution condemning Berry’s public health mandate.

“People called for my public hanging,” Berry says quietly. This wasn’t, to say the least, what she had signed up for when she joined the department three years earlier. “It was insane.” When Berry implemented the vaccine mandate for indoor dining, right-wing websites started focusing on her and the little town of Sequim. “We started getting calls and threats from way outside the county. We became a rallying cry for anti-government forces. People were threatening to kill me on Facebook, tried to find my address to go to my house.”

Berry was receiving hundreds of threatening phone messages and e-mails every day. One text read: “Sleep with one eye open. I’m coming for you.” Much of the bile aimed at her, she recalls, was “really misogynistic. Think of your most colorful misogynistic language—that’s what came my way.” Young men in souped-up pickup trucks flying American flags would cruise her neighborhood—her address was kept private, but her enemies knew what part of the county she lived in. “My daughter couldn’t go outside, because we didn’t want people to see us,” she remembers. “I was so scared I wasn’t sleeping. I’d keep it together during the day and cry at night.” Eventually, fearing for both her safety and her mental well-being, Berry and her young daughter left the county.

Shortly afterward, though, she returned, defiant. With the additional staff she’d hired earlier that year, she continued her push for mass vaccinations and other pandemic mitigation measures. Dr. Berry’s story was one piece of a complex jigsaw puzzle. Over the past few years, partly because of the pandemic and partly because of underlying political schisms, Sequim had spiraled into crisis.

As with Port Angeles, Port Townsend, and the other picturesque, historic port cities of the northern Olympic Peninsula, Sequim has a cute old downtown and clusters of houses—surprisingly affordable despite the recent appreciation in real estate values—built on the windswept, rainy hills surrounding the center of the city. Its main thoroughfare, Washington Street, is lined with restaurants, high-end cafés, art galleries, and shops. It’s the sort of place where retirees and tourists alike come to find a refuge from high-stress urban living.

CURRENT ISSUE

Sequim seems an unlikely setting for a last stand against a local wannabe strongman. Yet, in fact, it’s bitterly divided politically, as is the rest of the county. The political headline for the region in the aftermath of the last presidential election is that Clallam County holds the distinction of being the longest-running presidential bellwether county in the United States.

Going into the 2020 election, there were 19 counties in the nation that had voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1980, when Ronald Reagan was first elected. Eighteen of those counties, all rural, lost their bellwether status in 2020 by going for Trump. Clallam County became the sole holdout by narrowly supporting Biden. That the mostly rural county would trend blue in 2020 seemed as improbable as the existence of Sasquatch, the legendary creature that lurks in the shadows of the dense rain forests of the peninsula but is somehow never clearly captured in photographs.

The results of the 2020 election hid a profound ideological and cultural divide in the remote, watery region that abuts the 96-mile-long windswept Strait of Juan de Fuca, which divides the US from Canada. In rural areas, signs were hung among the trees with wording like “Trump won the election. Wake up, sheeple.” Pickup trucks could be seen with flags urging fealty to the “Trump Revenge Tour 2024.” What was happening in America as a whole, as the country fissured under, and after, Trump’s presidency, was happening in microcosm in Clallam County.

William Armacost was first appointed to the city council in 2018, was elected unopposed to a four-year term in November 2019, and was finally appointed mayor by his colleagues in January 2020. After he became mayor, he was caught on camera pushing a shopping cart at a Costco wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a Stars and Stripes–painted skull and the words “THIS IS THE USA. We Eat Meat. We Drink Beer. We Own Guns. We Speak English. We Love Freedom. If you do not like that GET THE FUCK OUT.”

Armacost ignored multiple requests to be interviewed for this article. When I caught up with him at his hair salon, Changes, late one afternoon in mid-December, he flatly stated that he had no time and wouldn’t agree to an interview either then or at any other time. All of his allies on the city council and in local conservative organizations either ignored my interview requests or, when reached by phone, declined to comment. All told, upwards of a dozen conservative activists, political figures, and lawyers in Sequim and the surrounding area ignored repeated attempts to get them to tell their side of this story.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, Armacost turned up at official city functions wearing a pin on his lapel featuring the Marvel Comics character the Punisher, a coded shout-out to vigilantism that he claimed simply demonstrated his support for law enforcement. As the pandemic raged, he logged on to Zoom council meetings while sitting under a large cross at his home—inserting religious iconography into what should have been a secular setting. He ended one meeting with the cryptic rhyme “Jesus is the reason for the season.” According to Marsha McGuire, a former Library of Congress researcher now living in Sequim, Armacost reposted and retweeted messages in which hostility to George Soros morphed into anti-Semitic rants. When motorcyclists gathered by the hundreds of thousands in Sturgis, S.D., in the summer of 2020, Armacost made the pilgrimage and refused to self-isolate afterward despite the fact that the event was the source of major Covid outbreaks around the country. When public health officials urged caution in the face of the Delta variant, he appeared at an October 2021 “Coffee with the Mayor” Zoom meeting and stated his opposition to more mandates, claiming to have access to better medical advice than did the county public health officer. At his hair salon, located in a semi-residential area just off Washington Street, a neon-pink sign on the door advertised “sexy” haircuts. Inside, the mayor, whom I saw working without a mask, attended to his equally unmasked clients.

During street protests, the mayor’s supporters weren’t averse to getting into physical tussles with opponents, those opponents allege. His ally on the city council, the aptly named Mike Pence, was caught on a hot mic at the end of an April 2021 Zoom council meeting having a discussion with his wife, in which she referred to a female opponent, the outspoken 72-year old progressive organizer Karen Hogan, as a “cunt.”

But perhaps Armacost’s most egregious act was orchestrating the forced resignation of the popular—and extremely competent—city manager, Charlie Bush, after Bush criticized him for urging the listeners of a local radio show in August 2020 to check out the QAnon conspiracy theory.

What ostensibly sealed Bush’s fate was that he had followed city rules on zoning and permitting, and as a result hadn’t nixed the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s efforts to build a medication-assisted treatment center for opioid addicts—an important intervention in a county that posted some of the highest addiction and overdose rates in the state. Opponents, marshaled by a nurse named Jodie Wilke—who lived not in Sequim but in a nearby town—into a group named Save Our Sequim, or SOS, argued that the treatment center was part of a conspiracy by Seattle and other big cities to dump their homeless and addicted populations into small communities like Sequim. Backed by the mayor and several other councilors, they descended on council meetings to air their views. (Wilke ignored multiple interview requests for this article.)

On SOS’s Facebook page, opposition to the tribe’s plans frequently degenerated into barrages of racial slurs. Vicki Lowe, the executive director of the American Indian Health Commission for Washington State and a recently elected Sequim city councilor, who traces her lineage to tribal ancestors as well as to pioneer stock, recalls hearing phrases such as “Indian idiots” and “playing cowboys and Indians.” She once called out SOS at a council meeting by holding up a series of cardboard signs displaying racist phrases uttered by the group—discarding them one by one à la Bob Dylan in the music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

Community care: Dr. Allison Berry, the public health officer for Clallam and Jefferson counties in Washington state. (Peninsula Daily News)

For two years, Armacost ran Sequim like his personal fiefdom, at one time subjecting people who called his city council phone line to a recorded message advertising herbal remedies (“in a capsule or gummy form”) that he was selling on the side. Armacost’s power was magnified by the Independent Advisory Association, a local group run by two longtime conservative operatives, Donnie Hall and Jim McIntire, with a Roger Stone–style take-no-prisoners approach. The IAA claimed to be nonpartisan, but locals recall that it would turn local political events into spectacles by red-baiting opponents and accusing critics of being outside agitators. When city council seats opened up, as they did three times in the early days of the Armacost mayorship, the IAA reportedly groomed potential appointees to be selected by the mayor and his colleagues. As the pandemic intensified, it tapped into public anger over lockdowns in order to Trumpify government offices along the peninsula.

When I visited Sequim, both members of the IAA team either declined to be interviewed or ignored my attempts to contact them. But I know that they received my messages: Shortly after I reached out to them, they or their allies doxxed me, posting my e-mail address, phone number, and photograph on Facebook, noting when I was in town, and urging their supporters to call and tell me exactly what they thought of me and The Nation.

After I e-mailed Hall for comment, he sent a long message explaining why he would not agree to be interviewed. He argued that the IAA was just “two guys and a website” and that the organization only wanted to promote independent, nonpartisan candidates for office. I suggested in response that there was a power struggle taking place on the peninsula, of which the IAA was a part. “I can’t stop laughing,” Hall wrote back. “Your premises are so out of alignment with reality.”

Yet a power struggle there most assuredly was. Armacost’s ascent to the mayorship was a red flag. All around Sequim, residents—whether they had previously been apolitical or had long been involved in political organizations and protests—reacted in horror to his bullying persona and far-right antics. “It was so raucous, and some of the statements were so ugly,” says Lisa Dekker, a member of the local chapter of Indivisible. “It shocked the progressive community. ”

In the spring of 2021, several concerned residents formed the Sequim Good Governance League (SGGL) with the initial goal of defending City Manager Charlie Bush from Armacost’s plan to force his retirement. Once that ship had sailed, they expanded their focus to fielding qualified candidates and exorcising the QAnon demons from their midst.

“All these conservative people snuck onto the city council when nobody opposed them,” says Ron Richards, a rugged 77-year-old onetime Clallam County commissioner who lives in a ranch house at the base of the Olympic Mountains and regularly hikes miles up into the snows for exercise. “And then they appointed their friends to government. It resulted in the most right-wing people you could imagine running the city of Sequim.” Horrified, Richards got involved in the SGGL.

“It became apparent we had a city council that needed to be replaced,” says Dale Jarvis, a retiree from the Seattle area who relocated to Clallam County three years ago. “We needed to get them out. We started organizing.”

Stars, stripes, and skulls: Then–Sequim Mayor William Armacost shopping at Costco, in a picture taken by a local resident. (Keith Thorpe / Olympic Peninsula News Group)

Clallam County’s fissures were a long time in the making. The region contains some of the most beautiful, dramatic landscapes in the United States. Its mountains—inhabited by bears and cougars—and coastline draw retirees from around the country, as well as a constant stream of day tourists and backcountry hikers looking to explore Olympic National Park. At the same time, it is home to many impoverished families, blue-collar residents who used to work in the Northwest’s thriving timber industry until a combination of overharvesting and stricter environmental protections drove the industry into the ground in the 1990s.

The county’s small cities all have charming old downtowns that draw in tourists from around the country and the world. New arrivals look to set down roots in a place where, behind the cold, misty veneer, there is natural beauty in abundance. There are many huge ranch-style houses, their picture windows offering spectacular views of the Olympic Mountains, snow-covered for half the year. It’s no wonder so many retirees—many bringing with them liberal political priorities from states like California—have moved into the region over the past decade.

But in recent years, Clallam County has gained a reputation for having some of the highest rates of opioid use and overdoses in the state. In 2019, The Washington Post reported that between 2006 and 2012, Clallam County residents popped 37,838,060 pain pills, which averages out to a staggering 76.6 pills per person per year. Between 2012 and 2016, the yearly opioid overdose rate in the county was 16.5 per 100,000 residents.

These catastrophic numbers led the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe to propose building its drug treatment clinic, which was modeled on a similar clinic opened up by a nearby tribe, the Swinomish, in 2017. “It was very successful,” Vicki Lowe says of the Swinomish clinic. “So, of course, Jamestown was like, ‘We want to do that too.’” In 2019 and 2020, the tribe went through all of the correct permitting processes and ended up getting approval for the project from the city manager.

But this triggered the Save Our Sequim–orchestrated backlash led by Wilke, as well as a slew of racist tirades against the tribe at council meetings and protests. “They posted things on Facebook every hour, trying to keep the anger up,” Lowe recalls. “It was very impressive. People who didn’t like that, who wanted to see the facility, we had to figure out how to organize.

”In 2020, Clallam County went for Biden by just over three percentage points. Yet that didn’t put the brakes on the slide into political chaos that had begun after Armacost’s election and the chance series of events that, over the course of a few months, had led to several ultraconservatives being appointed to the city council—and then forming, with Armacost, a 4-2 voting bloc. In early 2021, even as Biden was beginning his presidency, the little city of Sequim—despite nearly 60 percent of its voters having supported Biden—slid toward far-right governance.

Had it happened elsewhere on the peninsula, the capture of a city government by the far right might not have been so surprising. After all, Clallam County counts among its three cities the ultraconservative community of Forks—where a mixed-race family on a camping trip was accused of being antifa at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020 and was trapped for several hours until high school students cut the trees being used to pen them in at their campsite. Residents had been on high alert for the previous several days after BLM demonstrations spread across the country. That same day in the more liberal Sequim, a city of only 8,000, a BLM protest drew hundreds of people. The protesters were met by camo-wearing, gun-toting militias egged on by Seth Larson, a local gun store owner who used Facebook and other social media to spread disinformation about BLM and to sow fears of an antifa-sympathizing mob of looters descending on the peninsula, moving from Sequim on to Forks.

But Sequim had, in recent elections, looked more like the progressive hub of Port Angeles—a fishing and logging town, population 20,000, from which ferries depart daily, their foghorns blaring as they set off to Victoria, British Columbia—than like conservative Forks.

That wasn’t enough, however, to buy immunity from the corrosive politics roiling the country. Both Sequim and Port Angeles experienced political upheavals in the Trump era. And in 2021, even the usually reliably true-blue Port Angeles found itself caught up in many of the same battles around public health and the future of the local economy that were reshaping politics in neighboring Sequim. City Councilor Lindsey Schromen-Warwin, an Oberlin- and Gonzaga-educated attorney and an avid hiker and wilderness camper, had been elected during a local progressive wave in 2017 but found himself in a tough brawl for reelection against an IAA-backed candidate. Schromen-Warwin squeaked to victory with a tiny margin. “In 2017,” he says, “I’d gotten the most votes of any city council member since 2005. In this last race, I won by 104 votes—which is way too close for comfort when your opponent is the person with a bullhorn trying to shut down the county health commissioner’s forum.”

Jefferson County, Clallam’s next-door neighbor, has historically been solidly blue. The brick warehouses and canneries that once lined the waterfront of its one sizable city, the Victorian-era Port Townsend, have recently been converted into bookstores, art galleries, and restaurants, and the city has long been a bohemian refuge for artists escaping the crowds and prices of big West Coast cities like Seattle and San Francisco. But Clallam County’s progressives had not solidified their position in the way their Jefferson counterparts had. The QAnon movement had made inroads into Clallam County during the Trump years, and, despite showing up for national elections, local Democrats were slow off the mark when it came to local politics. They didn’t field comprehensive slates of candidates for city council and other regional offices, apparently not realizing until late in the day just how much of an electoral threat the extremists had become.

“It does have a national ramification,” says Bruce Cowan, a retired elementary school teacher. Cowan lives in Port Townsend and has followed local politics in both Jefferson and Clallam counties since he moved there in 1977; in his retirement, he does volunteer consulting for progressive political campaigns. “Folks who don’t believe in government—populists, people who don’t have faith in the institutions of governance—shouldn’t be in charge of the government. One of the things that happened in Sequim is that people were not engaged enough to see how important it was to find candidates for city council. Now they understand the importance.”

Faced with the very real prospect of QAnoners consolidating power over all tiers of city and county government, the SGGL got busy. Progressive candidates were recruited to run for office; moderate conservatives, such as City Councilor Brandon Janisse, were wooed as voices to counter the IAA; dozens of volunteers were trained to do the on-the-ground grunt work that can make the difference between a painful election loss and a head-turning win.

Showing up: Sequim residents at a Black Lives Matter protest on Sequim Avenue and Washington Street. (Michael Dashiell / Sequim Gazette)

For concerned locals like Lowell Rathbun, an engineer by training, it had become increasingly difficult to sit on the fence in 2020 and 2021. With city councilors waging war on the county’s public health department and targeted protests occurring against individuals in that department, this was, they felt, a fight about civic decency.

This past May, Rathbun filed to run for the city council. Then, throughout the summer and fall, with backing from the SGGL and its growing cadre of canvassers, postcard writers, and other volunteers, he got to work. “We organized. I broke the town down into 54 neighborhoods, and we worked every one of those neighborhoods,” Rathbun recalls over a beer and mozzarella sticks at the local Applebee’s.

Volunteers would get up in the middle of the night to send out e-mail blasts. They’d drive around town putting up scores of signs for SGGL candidates. Above all, they’d talk with people. For months on end, door-knocking was the chief tool that the organization—known to its founders as “the little engine that could”— relied on.

On the night of the election, it became clear that the organizing had paid off. In one race after another—for city council, for the local school board, for hospital commissioners—SGGL candidates swept aside their IAA-backed opponents.

“When it turned out to be two-to-one,” Rathbun remembers, his reaction was visceral: “Holy crap! We kicked butt.”

SOS, the IAA, Armacost, and the other conservatives had, for two years, told everyone who would listen that they represented the silent majority of the county, that their brand of divide-and-conquer politics was the only brand worth selling. But, says McGuire, the former Library of Congress researcher, “At the election we proved it: They are not the majority. ”

When the votes were counted, they showed that the SGGL-backed candidates had ridden a wave of genuine popular fury against the faux populists aligned with Armacost. In Sequim, the five SGGL candidates for city council—Rathbun, Janisse, Vicki Lowe, Kathy Downer, and Rachel Anderson—all got between 65 and 70 percent of the vote. Both hospital commissioners’ positions in the county went to SGGL candidates, as did the fire commission and school district posts up for election last year.

It wasn’t so much that a given ideology triumphed—Iraq War veteran and county jail control-room technician Brandon Janisse’s conservative leanings are, for example, a far cry from the liberal politics of the tattooed, partly head-shaved Rachel Anderson or the longtime tribal health administrator Vicki Lowe—as it was that people’s better angels burst to the surface. The electorate in Sequim finally put the kibosh on Armacost and the Trumpian, QAnonist threat to civic well-being that he and his colleagues embodied.

“Four of the SGGL candidates are left-leaning. I’m right-leaning,” Janisse says. “But they endorsed me because of how I think government should be run at the local level. We’re worried about ‘Are the roads paved? Are the alleys good? Do you have sidewalks? Are the sewers not spraying leaks everywhere?’

”For Dr. Berry, as the tide turned against the vocal right-wingers who had held Sequim hostage through 2020 and 2021, her correspondence from residents shifted from a daily barrage of threats to something rather different. At some point last fall, a contingent of elderly people began writing letters to her and her public health colleagues expressing how much they appreciated the public health staff. Anonymous residents would swing by the office and leave bouquets of flowers. “A good thing happened: There was a counter-response in the community,” Berry recalls with a smile. “It was incredibly heartening.

”On January 11, Armacost was voted out of the mayorship by his fellow city councilors, the majority of whom had been endorsed by the SGGL in the recent elections. The only councilor to vote in favor of Armacost remaining as mayor was Armacost himself. The ousted mayor, his firebrand politics having been firmly rejected by the electorate, was replaced by Tom Ferrell, a somewhat conservative but non-QAnon-supporting longtime member of the council, who had been nominated by both Downer and Rathbun. Janisse was elected as his deputy.

For the SGGL-backed candidates now in the majority, it represents a new beginning, a chance to restore competent, get-things-done local government. “We have issues here,” says Lowe. “Housing issues. We have to work on bringing our community back together.” For Downer, a nurse who served as a city councilor in the little town of Marietta, Ohio, before retiring and moving to Sequim to be near her children, her role in city governance in her new home means that she, too, can focus on affordable housing. “When you can’t find housing for your nurses, policemen, firemen, and teachers—that’s a horrific situation,” she says. Rathbun, who was widowed suddenly during the campaign and has since thrown his heart and soul into his political work, wants to focus on housing as well. But after being the target of death threats, he is at least as desperate to restore faith in the basic workings of the democratic system and to find a way to dial down the fear and invective that saturates the social-media-dominated political discourse. “I would like to see a healing in this town. We can’t have red and blue Sequim. We have to have Sequim Sequim—and somehow start talking to each other about what we have in common.” Janisse, with his blue-collar roots, wants to focus on affordable housing and on changing zoning regulations to encourage the building of more high-density, multifamily units. And 31-year-old Rachel Anderson, a Head Start volunteer who was appointed to the council in early 2021 (Armacost was apparently unaware of her liberal political leanings), wants to focus more on children’s issues, as well as on affordable housing and local health safety measures.

“I think we’ll be more productive and actually make decisions that mean something,” Anderson says of the SGGL’s victory, “instead of saying, ‘We don’t like this.’

“I feel like there’s a lot more middle ground,” she continued. “I can only hope that, with a change in local leadership, there’s a change in the local political climate. I’ve worked with kids a lot, and a lot of the time during council meetings, it felt like children throwing a tantrum. Now, with the change in leadership, it feels like I’m having an adult conversation.”

Sasha Abramsky, who writes regularly for The Nation, is the author of several books, including InsideObama’s Brain, The American Way of Poverty, The House of 20,000 Books, Jumping at Shadows, and, most recently, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar. Subscribe to The Abramsky Report, a weekly, subscription-based political column, here.

The New York Times

Is the Coronavirus in Your Backyard?

White-tailed deer could become a reservoir for the virus, putting people and animals at risk, health experts say.

By Emily Anthes and Sabrina Imbler – February 7, 2022

In late 2020, the coronavirus silently stalked Iowa’s white-tailed deer. The virus infected large bucks and leggy yearlings. It infiltrated a game preserve in the southeastern corner of the state and popped up in free-ranging deer from Sioux City to Dubuque.

When scientists sifted through bits of frozen lymph node tissue — harvested from unlucky deer killed by hunters or cars — they found that more than 60 percent of the deer sampled in December 2020 were infected.

“It was stunning,” said Vivek Kapur, a microbiologist and infectious disease expert at Penn State, who led the research.

Dr. Kapur and his colleagues have now analyzed samples from more than 4,000 dead Iowa deer, diligently marking the location of each infected animal on a map of the state. “It’s completely mad,” he said. “It looks like it’s everywhere.”

From the start of the pandemic, experts were aware that a virus that emerged from animals, as scientists believe SARS-CoV-2 did, could theoretically spread back to animals. Mink have garnered much attention after the virus spread through mink farms in Europe and North America, leading to massive culls of the animals. But white-tailed deer, which may wander into urban and rural backyards, are also easily infected.

Infections in free-ranging deer, which display few signs of illness, are tricky to detect and difficult to contain. Deer also live alongside us in dizzying numbers; about 30 million white-tailed deer roam the continental United States.

If white-tailed deer become a reservoir for the virus, the pathogen could mutate and spread to other animals or back to us. Adaptation in animals is one route by which new variants are likely to emerge.

“This is a top concern right now for the United States,” said Dr. Casey Barton Behravesh, who directs the One Health Office — which focuses on connections between human, animal and environmental health — at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“If deer were to become established as a North American wildlife reservoir, and we do think they’re at risk of that, there are real concerns for the health of other wildlife species, livestock, pets and even people,” she added.

The virus is likely to continue circulating in deer, many experts predicted. But crucial questions remain unanswered: How are deer catching the virus? How might the pathogen mutate inside its cervid hosts? And could the animals pass it back to us?

White-tailed deer are a “black box” for the virus, said Stephanie Seifert, an expert on zoonotic diseases at Washington State University: “We know that the virus has been introduced multiple times, we know that there’s onward transmission. But we don’t know how the virus is adapting or how it will continue to adapt.”

Cervid surge

The coronavirus enters human cells by attaching to what are known as ACE2 receptors. Many mammals have similar versions of these receptors, making them susceptible to infection.

Early in the pandemic, scientists analyzed the genetic sequences for ACE2 receptors in hundreds of species to predict which animals might be at risk. Deer ranked high on the list, and laboratory experiments later confirmed that the animals could become infected with the virus as well as transmit it to other deer.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service began looking for coronavirus antibodies in blood samples from deer in Illinois, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania. In July, the agency reported that 40 percent of the animals in those areas had antibodies, suggesting that they had already been infected by the virus.

Some months later, Dr. Kapur’s team, which partnered with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, reported that active coronavirus infections were common in Iowa deer, and another group announced that more than one-third of the deer they had swabbed in northeastern Ohio were infected. Genomic analysis suggested that in both Iowa and Ohio, humans had passed the virus to deer multiple times and then the deer readily passed it to one another.

“The early detections in companion animals, in mink farms, in zoological collections — those were all different because those were confined populations,” said Dr. Andrew Bowman, a veterinary epidemiologist at Ohio State University, who led the Ohio research. “We didn’t really have a natural setting where the virus could run free.”

Whether the virus makes deer sick remains unknown. There is no evidence that infected deer become seriously ill, but humans might not notice if a wild animal was feeling slightly under the weather.

And these early studies — which have largely relied on pre-existing disease surveillance or population control projects in deer — provided only a snapshot of what could be a sprawling problem. “I wouldn’t be surprised if more sampling uncovers the fact that these are not necessarily sporadic events,” said Dr. Samira Mubareka, a virologist at Sunnybrook Research Institute and the University of Toronto.

In Canada, reports of infected deer are beginning to trickle in from Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan. When Dr. Mubareka’s team sequenced virus recovered from Canadian deer, the researchers found it closely matched sequences in Vermont. “Deer don’t respect borders,” said Arinjay Banerjee, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.

‘No masking, no social distancing’

How humans are transmitting the virus to deer remains an open question. “It’s definitely a mystery to me how they’re getting it,” said Dr. Angela Bosco-Lauth, a zoonotic disease expert at Colorado State University.

There are many theories, none entirely satisfying. An infectious hunter might encounter a deer, Dr. Mubareka noted, but “if they’re good at hunting,” she added, “it’s a terminal event for the deer.”

If an infected hiker “sneezes and the wind is blowing in the right direction, it could cause an unlucky event,” said Dr. Tony Goldberg, a veterinary epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Or if people feed deer from their porch, they could be sharing more than just food.

And white-tailed deer are expert leapers, reaching heights of eight feet. “If you want to fence deer out of a place, you have to be trying very hard,” said Scott Creel, an ecologist at Montana State University. Deer would have no trouble jumping into alfalfa fields to graze alongside cattle, perhaps inviting a close encounter with a farmer, Dr. Creel said.

Transmission could also happen indirectly, through wastewater or discarded food or other human-generated trash. “Deer, like most other animals, will sniff before they eat,” Dr. Kapur said. And deer release their feces as they feed, creating conditions where other deer might forage in areas contaminated with waste, or snuffle around waste that has feed mixed in, experts say.

But it’s not clear how long the virus would remain viable in a polluted water source or on the surface of a half-eaten apple, or whether enough of it would be present to pose a transmission risk.

An intermediate host, such as an itinerant cat, might ferry the virus from humans to deer. Farmed deer, which have frequent contact with humans, might also pass the virus to their wild counterparts through an escapee or their feces, Dr. Seifert said. (More than 94 percent of the deer in one captive site in Texas carried antibodies for the virus, researchers found — more than double the rate found in free-ranging deer in the state.)

It may not require many spillovers for the virus to take off in a herd. Infected deer, which shed virus in nasal secretions and feces and have an infectious period of five to six days, can readily spread the virus to others, said Dr. Diego Diel, a virologist at Cornell University.

Wild deer are social — traveling in herds, frequently nuzzling noses and engaging in polygamy — and swap saliva through shared salt licks.

And unlike humans, deer have no tools for flattening the curve. “They don’t have rapid antigen tests,” Dr. Banerjee said.

Dr. Kapur added, “No masking, no social distancing.”

Dr. Sarah Hamer, a veterinary epidemiologist at Texas A&M University, is seeking funding to start contact tracing of deer to understand how their social interactions influence viral transmission. She hopes to use proximity loggers to record the time and duration of the animals’ interactions with one another. “What deer are hanging out with what deer?” Dr. Hamer said. “Are there deer superspreaders?”

Research is still in early stages, but understanding how the virus is spreading is essential both for slowing transmission in deer and for protecting other vulnerable wildlife. Deer may graze alongside other cervids, such as boreal woodland caribou, which are endangered in Canada and are a traditional food source of First Nations peoples.

And if humans are contaminating the wilderness with the virus, it could threaten other, highly endangered species, such as the black-footed ferret, which experts fear may be vulnerable to the virus. “If it’s in the environment, and we don’t know exactly how it’s in the environment or how it’s spreading, all of a sudden we have these endangered animals that are at even higher risk,” said Kaitlin Sawatzki, a virologist at Tufts University.

Knowing how we are giving the virus to deer is also crucial for assessing the risk that they may pass it back to us. “The metaphorical window is open, and we don’t know where,” Dr. Bowman said.

Herd immunity

The virus is clearly spreading in deer. But what happens next, and how worried should we be?

Many experts said they expected the virus to become established in deer and circulate indefinitely. “If it’s not already established, it’s heading in that direction,” Dr. Mubareka said.

Still, scientists said they needed longer-term data to be sure, and the outcome was not a given. Currently, people appear to be reintroducing the virus to deer frequently; but if human case rates fell substantially, and people stopped spreading the virus, it could disappear from deer populations.

Moreover, deer do develop antibodies to the virus; if the antibodies are strong enough and enough deer develop them, literal herd immunity could squelch the spread. But scientists know very little about deer immunity. “Does exposure to one variant protect the deer population from subsequent variants?” Dr. Banerjee asked.

If the virus does establish itself in deer, it is likely to evolve in ways that help it thrive in its new hosts.

A deer-optimized version of the virus would not necessarily be more dangerous for people; the virus might adapt in ways that make humans less hospitable hosts. “If this became ‘Deervid,’ then that would be great,” Dr. Goldberg said. (“Hopefully it would stay benign in deer,” he added.)

But the virus could retain its ability to easily infect humans while picking up more worrisome mutations, including ones that might allow it to evade our existing immune defenses.

“Even if you got the human population immune and fully vaccinated, if there’s still a reservoir persisting in the animals, then that can allow the virus to continue to evolve,” said Linda Saif, a virologist and immunologist at Ohio State University.

There is not yet any evidence that deer are infecting people, and for the foreseeable future, experts agreed, humans are far more likely to catch the virus from one another than from anything with hooves.

“Even if deer were infecting people, it’s largely inconsequential in the grand scheme, because millions of people are getting infected from human-to-human transmission,” said Dr. Scott Weese, an infectious diseases veterinarian at the University of Guelph in Ontario. “But it becomes more of a risk as we start to control it.”

Hunters, who handle deer carcasses extensively, could be at higher risk for contracting the virus from deer, scientists said. (There is no evidence that people can be infected by eating deer meat cooked to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit.) People who hand-feed their local deer — a practice experts warn against — could also be at risk.

An abundance of ungulates

Dr. Hamer at the deer pen at Texas A&M. Scientists worry that the virus could incubate in deer and morph into a variant capable of spilling back into humans or infect other animals. Credit…Sergio Flores for The New York Times

Other animals, too, may be at risk from infection from deer. Predators such as mountain lions which kill deer by biting into their trachea or over their nose and mouth, could be infected while feasting.

Scientists were relieved when early research suggested that cattle and pigs were minimally susceptible to the virus. But inside the bodies of white-tailed deer, the virus could morph into a pathogen capable of infecting such livestock.

“That could be a big problem for food production stability,” Dr. Seifert said.

Health officials must stay vigilant, experts said.

The U.S.D.A. is now working with state agencies to collect blood samples and nasal swabs from dead deer in more than two dozen states. The work should help experts estimate how many deer have already been infected and whether certain characteristics, from age to habitat type, put some deer at elevated risk.

“As we learn more, we will continue to refine and target our surveillance,” said Dr. Tracey Dutcher, the science and biodefense coordinator for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service at the U.S.D.A.

Long-term genomic surveillance is also needed, experts said. “If we start to see some really divergent viral variants popping up in deer in certain places, that would be a red flag,” Dr. Goldberg said.

Depending on what scientists learn in the near future, officials could consider a variety of potential mitigation measures, including vaccinating captive deer, thinning infected herds or cleaning up whatever environmental viral contamination is giving the deer the virus in the first place.

“I think we’ve got to get our hands around the situation before we really make plans on where to go,” Dr. Bowman said.

For now, scientists also advise keeping a close eye on other wildlife. If the virus is so prevalent in deer, which are relatively easy to sample, it could be silently spreading in other species, too.

After all, the only reason scientists found the virus in deer is because they thought to look. “We hadn’t realized it was spread in deer at all,” Dr. Kapur said. “We had no clue.”

Emily Anthes is a reporter for The New York Times, where she focuses on science and health and covers topics like the coronavirus pandemic, vaccinations, virus testing and Covid in children. 

The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to Know

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The state of the virus in the U.S. The coronavirus has now claimed more than 900,000 lives across the country, and the Covid death rates remain alarmingly high. The number of new infections, however, has fallen by more than half since mid-January, and hospitalizations are also declining.

Staying safe. Follow some basic guidance on when to test, which mask to pick and how to use at-home virus tests. Here is what to do if you test positive for the coronavirus, and if you lose your vaccination card.

Business Insider

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel says January 6 committee is a ‘Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse’

Bryan Metzger – February 4, 2022

• The Republican National Committee is set to censure Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger on Friday.
• RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel co-authored the censure resolution, which targets the January 6 committee.
• She also called the committee a “persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol is a “Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

McDaniel made the remarks about the committee in a joint interview with The Washington Post alongside David Bossie, a fellow RNC official and former Trump campaign aide, with whom she co-authored a resolution to censure Republican Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois over their participation in the congressional committee.

“We’ve had two members engage in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse. This has gone beyond their original intent. They are not sticking up for hard-working Republicans,” McDaniel said.

Her comments mirrored language in the censure resolution itself, which accuses Kinzinger and Cheney of “sabotage” and says the duo are “utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.”

That measure, which says the RNC will “cease any and all support” for the two Republicans, easily passed the party’s resolutions committee on Thursday, and is expected to be approved on Friday at the RNC meeting in Salt Lake City.

“This isn’t a top-down situation. The members have shown tremendous support for this,” McDaniel told the Post. She also said it was the first time she was aware of the party censuring a member of Congress.

Given the violent nature of the January 6 attack on the Capitol — several people, including both rioters and officers, died that day and at least 768 people have been charged for their participation — it was unclear what exactly McDaniel was referring to by “legitimate political discourse,” and an RNC spokesperson did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

However, the Post reported that McDaniel took particular issue after an “elderly, recently widowed friend of hers” received a subpoena from the committee for serving as an alternate, pro-Trump elector in 2020.

‘The leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages’

The censure resolution is the latest turn in the party’s ongoing feud with Cheney, who joined Kinzinger and 8 other House Republicans in voting to impeach former President Donald Trump last year for incitement of an insurrection.

And she’s remained outspoken about her belief that Trump poses a threat to democracy. After House Republicans voted in May to boot Cheney from her caucus leadership position and replace her with Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, Cheney joined the January 6 committee as vice chair. In November, the Wyoming GOP voted to no longer recognize her as a member of their party.

The Post also reported that GOP officials in Wyoming struck a deal with the national party to financially support Harriet Hageman, a former RNC committeewoman who’s been endorsed by Trump, in her primary against Cheney this year.

That letter officially recognizes Hageman as the presumptive nominee Cheney’s seat, even though the primary won’t take place until August.

In response, Cheney slammed GOP leadership, writing on Twitter that they were “hostages” to Trump.

“The leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy,” she said, referring to the former president’s most recent bombshell disclosures.

Kinzinger, who unlike Cheney has opted not to run for re-election, also tweeted that he had “no regrets about my decision to uphold my oath of office and defend the Constitution.”

Rolling Stone

New Emails Suggest Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Was Communicating With Ron DeSantis — For Some Strange Reason

William Vaillancourt – February 4, 2022

Emails obtained by government watchdog group American Oversight suggest that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been in regular contact with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The June 2021 emails, reported by Politico on Friday, were sent by conservative activist Ginni Thomas to someone in the DeSantis administration requesting that the governor join a meeting organized in part by Judicial Watch, a right-wing group that frequently sues public officials.

Thomas, the wife of Clarence Thomas, writes that the governor should be familiar with her because, in addition to seeing him at a state dinner at the White House and having interviewed him for the Daily Caller, her “husband has been in contact with him too on various things of late.”

Ginni Thomas has long been intimately involved with several conservative groups that make no secret about where they stand on Supreme Court decisions. The New Republic noted recently, for example, that in 2000, Thomas, then a staffer at the conservative Heritage Foundation, screened resumes for Bush administration employees while the court had yet to rule on the legality of the Florida recount. (In a 5-4 decision, in which Clarence Thomas participated despite calls to recuse himself, the court put a stop to the recount.)

A more recent example, as noted by The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer, pertains to Ginni Thomas’ role on the advisory board of the conservative group Turning Point USA, which transported busloads of insurrectionists to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6. Last month, the court ruled 8-1 that ex-president Donald Trump must hand over documents to the House Jan. 6 committee. The lone dissenter? Clarence Thomas

These are just two of several instances of Ginni Thomas, who worries that America is danger of falling into the hands of “transsexual fascists,” presenting a conflict of interest to the court. As Stephen Gillers, an NYU law professor and a judicial ethicist, told Mayer, “I think Ginni Thomas is behaving horribly, and she’s hurt the Supreme Court and the administration of justice. It’s reprehensible. If you could take a secret poll of the other eight justices, I have no doubt that they are appalled by Virginia Thomas’ behavior. But what can they do?”

Friday’s report is sure to raise questions about whether DeSantis communicated with Clarence Thomas about, say, vaccine mandate cases that came before the court last month. The Biden administration’s mandate for health care workers was upheld in a 5-4 ruling, with Thomas dissenting, while the mandate for large businesses was overturned 6-3, with Thomas in the majority. DeSantis opposed both mandates.

Helen Aguirre Ferré, the executive director of the Republican Party of Florida, told Politico, “I can’t speak about any private conversations Governor DeSantis may or may not have had with anyone but both he and Justice Thomas believe in the separation of powers and defend individual liberty, the law and the Constitution as written.”

DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone.